Kaveh Akbar Interviews R.A. Villanueva

Kaveh Akbar interviews R.A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and a founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. They discuss teaching high school, the "interplay between childhood and the sacred," languages of science and biology and chemistry (or "straight-up sorcery," as Villanueva calls them), sonnet-making, son-making, and more. From Divedapper:

[Villanueva:] ...When I was teaching high school, I always began in September with Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 18" and "Sonnet 130." Writing sonnets with students who are so intimidated by them at first, and watching them finding a way, building a muscle memory—not that it was automatic or formulaic, but learning the shapes the way we learn to play instruments. The hands start to know where the chords are.

Totally, totally.

And those rhythms and cadences become second nature. I started writing sonnets with Twitter in mind, thinking about how character constraints might influence syllable counts, how a linked thread of seven couplets demands a concentration on/of images. Like, each of the couplets would need to have a fidelity and—because of the constant scroll of our timelines—burst into the stream. I was really preoccupied by that.

Yeah, I love that. That’s so cool.

So for the last two or so years, I was fixated on those feed sonnets. It feels as if I’m pulling free from it now because I’m writing a lot more about—or at least I'm trying to process—what it feels like to be a father.

There are many more rough drafts and much less sitting down to revise, manipulate, or graft things together. It’s more about getting to the page in the hopes that language is going to churn toward something fit to finish later. I’m thinking about my son, and how so much has happened in just a few months.

I’m thinking about him a lot, and I’ve only met him a couple of times.

He definitely has that power over people.

It seems that way.

It's a life-changing event, but it doesn't make the poems and it doesn’t alter my obsessions, for sure. I’m still incessantly and inescapably obsessed with ventricles and skulls and mortality and the life of the world to come, except now there’s someone who depends on me in a way that no one else has.

And you made his mortality. You wrought his mortality from nothing.

Thanks for reminding me! So you know the last two poems I wrote were ostensibly about him, but not entirely about him. I’d written a poem called “Tenebrae” that started at his sonogram.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because at that ultrasound appointment, the doctor was trying to explain what the read out was, and she phrased it like this, "We’re looking for all the dark places. All the dark places are proof that he’s okay, that he’s healthy. That’s his blood. These are his body’s vital fluids, so we’re looking for the darkness."

I remember thinking, "Oh, that’s going to be a hell of a poem someday."

Read the full interview at Divedapper.