Marcelo Hernandez Castillo Tells The Rumpus About His New Memoir

For The Rumpus, Jessica Wilbanks interviews poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, whose debut memoir, Children of the Land, will be out soon from HarperCollins. "Castillo is the author of the award-winning book of poetry Cenzontle and one of the founders of Undocupoets," writes Wilbanks. An excerpt from their conversation:

Rumpus: One thing I admired so much about Children of the Land is the way you toggled between a meditative, discursive mode and extended scenes in which you are fully immersed in the physical world.

For instance, the book begins with that short section in which ICE agents raid your home when you’re fifteen years old. That scene establishes such critical thematic points—the split between body and mind, your longing to remove yourself from various situations, the continual state of surveillance you and your family lived under… but at the same time you are firmly situated in scene, totally embedded in place and time. That scene is immediately followed by a more reflective, wide-ranging section in which you’re meditating on your family history and your feelings about returning to Mexico after a twenty-year absence. The counterbalance between these moments of high tension and that more meditative narrative voice ends up working beautifully.

Castillo: Thank you. That was the biggest challenge. I didn’t want to write a very abstract, lyrical book.

Rumpus: Why not?

Castillo: I guess I was afraid of only being able to write only that. I didn’t simply want to wax poetic. The lyrical mode has been the way I’ve written for so long. My poetry is absent of an actual “I,” located in a time and place. When I write poems, I think about objects in relation to other objects in the poem, images in relation to other images. I think in these fractured, lyrical ways.

But in Children of the Land, I wanted to write what I wasn’t able to say in a book of poems—what I fell short of saying. I wanted to try doing a more traditional, narrative style of storytelling. I wanted to try to find some canonical balance between poetry and prose. But at first I was terrified of narrative. What was I going to say? How was I going to say it? 

Read the full interview at The Rumpus.