Brooklyn Poet of the Week: Camilo Roldán

Brooklyn Poets' Poet of the Week is translator, poet, teacher, and publisher Camilo Roldán! "Why Brooklyn?" they ask. His response: "There can be a brick / In a brick wall / The eye picks." More from this fine read, which includes the text and audio from Roldán's poem, “Verrazano Narrows” (forthcoming in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology):

Tell us about the making of this poem.

When I was living in Sunset Park, I would ride my bike down the Bay Parkway promenade to sit in the small park under the bridge where I could smoke and read and watch the various container ships entering and exiting the upper bay. This was a meditative place for me, and a time in my life when I got a lot out of riding my bike across the borough to different hidden and not-so-hidden little spots, sometimes riding for hours on end. I guess I had a lot of thinking to do, or I didn’t want to think and needed to focus on something else. Sitting underneath the bridge, the bowing curve of the deck feels like an optical assault, a warping of space into an impossible perspective. The modernist architectural austerity of the bridge’s vertical suspenders dwarfs the townhouses nearby, suggesting a sci-fi contrast between the impersonal monolith and the brick and mortar homes below. I almost wish that this were the poem I had written. But instead of the bridge, I kept thinking romantically about the ships, about traveling and escaping into something else. Of course, that’s a fantasy. Mariners often work long hours for comparatively low wages and spend months away from their families and friends. I suppose the poem could be about the illusory nature of that desire—the desire to drop everything and jump aboard and disappear into immense container ships and suspension bridges, to disappear into form, into movement. Cycling through Brooklyn, watching the ships, I thought about Ian Hamilton Finlay’s piece Sea Poppy I (1968). It’s a small print, about one foot by one foot, composed of fishing boat registration numbers written in concentric circles that recall a target, or a celestial map. The word “all” appears in the center.

What are you working on right now?

A couple of things: a pseudo-translation of a fifteenth-century Spanish poem, and a long poem about a Colombian poet. I’m also translating a book by a poet named Amílcar Osorio.

What’s a good day for you?

I get up at a decent hour, eat a large breakfast, leave my home, go to work or run some errands, come back to my home, drop things off, pick things up, go back out, eat something along the way, see someone I care about, engage in a pleasurable activity, return to my home, go to sleep.

Sounds lovely. Find the full interview here.