$20.00 | Get Fresh Books | 99 pp. | ISBN: 979-8-218-12010-8 | 2023
Alfredo Aguilar (AA): In talking about poetry and its relation to other arts, one type of art that often comes up in poems, at least in the West, is painting and visual art. Some examples of these kinds of ekphrastic poems range from something like Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” to W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” to Nicole Sealy’s “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’.” I think the most successful types of these poems take up a singular engagement with a visual work of art and manage through the course of the poem to meditate on that piece of art, reflect the speaker’s position to it, as well as touch on what they are seeing and feeling when meeting the art’s gaze.
However, as a reader, what do you make of a poem(s) that in its construction, length, and scope seek in some way to approximate the qualities found in a painting? In reading C. Olivares’s Future Botanic and its series of long poem sequences, a word that kept coming to mind for me was the word “mural.” These longer poems functioned for me as a reader as large canvases that seek to encompass a variety of times, moments, and experiences. Various events are happening at once, left of the middle, in a corner, in the foreground, each their own center of the universe. Even the first section title (“Inheritance Triptych”) uses the word “triptych,” which is often associated with paintings/visual art. What was your experience reading the book overall, and what stood out for you in this first section of the book?
Laura Villareal (LV): Before I answer your questions, I want to speak about why I insisted that we read this book together. I’ve been waiting for C. Olivares’ second book ever since I first read No Map of the Earth Includes Stars as a graduate student. I remember so clearly reading it in Poets House after a fellow poet urged me to read it. I finished it and knew with certainty that this was a poet I’d long admire. I had high expectations for the book, so it was an exceptional delight that Future Botanic was an astonishing work of craft, care, and futurism.
I did not read the book and think of visual art immediately so for me there was no approximation in my mind. I do see what you mean about the way the poems sprawl across the pages like a mural. Reading the note about the cover at the end, of course, made me consider visual art briefly, but it also amplified what resonated for me the most –the ecological braced, frayed, and damaged by colonialism. The climate crisis we’re witnessing at this moment is directly tied to colonialism. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even named it as a driving factor in one of their recent reports. Of course, this means decolonization is necessary in action and not just theory or a word thrown around.
Permanent scars from colonialism exist in nature as they do in diasporic people. Some lines that illustrate this for me are found in the first poem, “Girl,” “We exploded / green from soil flush with rubber, shredded plastics, / concrete, metal, glass.” This litany of manmade materials, some that will never truly breakdown are here, but even so the speaker says “we exploded / green” as if they're bursting through like plants through sidewalks. The tension between growth and degradation of manmade materials is poignant.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning, but all the books we’ve read this season have the miraculous language of hope. We’re so fortunate to be witnessing these poets imagine radical futures.
We all approach a work with our own base knowledge and affinities, so it’s natural that our reading experiences were quite different. Though I didn’t engage with the book as you did, I’d love to hear you talk more about what you saw as artistic moves in the book. Poetry is uniquely positioned to combine the visual and sonic. What qualities stood out?
AA: I think for me the correlation I was drawing to visual art had largely to do with scale (the number of pages a poem takes up as well as the temporal spaces it occupies across the poem) and dynamic shifts that I felt happened in form, syntax, and tone. These sequenced poems for me took on a mural-like quality in their scale and how much was touched on.
I was definitely picking up the theme of the wounds inflicted by colonialism among a diasporic group that you talked about; it's a strong through line in the book and it's a place from which a reimagining of relationality starts. I got a sense of that even before the first poem with the quotation by Syliva Wynter that serves as an epigraph: “We must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it.” In many ways I felt this is what the poems were reaching towards, to challenge received knowledge and create a new one collectively. This too ties into colonialism and its wounds. We are still very much dealing in the aftermath of ideas and attitudes about others and the world that stem from colonialist thought and are at times unquestioned as “truths” or “knowledge.” I think then what the poems in Future Botanic attempt to do is trouble those concepts and their consequences, while imagining alternatives that challenge received knowledge.
The first sequence “Inheritance Triptych” is made of three poems, which read like three set pieces. In the first poem, “Girl,” Olivares writes “After the burnings, / the lots were our inheritance.” which is then followed by the lines you quoted earlier. Here there is a collective inheritance from the fallout of ecological disaster from which a “we” bursts forth despite its cast aside state and its origin in the detritus of man made materials. The line “A kick against extinction, to imagine / closeness where there is only other” reinforces this sentiment of fighting against a foreclosed-on existence and the necessary imagining that hopes to make those who are unfamiliar familiar. I got the sense that the speaker wanted to expand their circle, expand the idea of who “we” could be and contain.
On that note, I was struck by the use of “we” in this poem, especially because it is the first poem. Early on as a reader I am asked to think or imagine a collective experience, but given where the “we” is rising out of (in a marginal, neglected place) it also is specifying the “we.” I think often the use of “we” can be a little nebulous and undefined, risking overgeneralization of a large group of people, but here it feels focused and though the collective group isn’t named I trust the speaker in who they are talking about and to whom. That feels like an achievement in itself.
I feel like I could spend way more time talking about this triptych, but I wanted to ask were there any other parts of this first section that stood out to you? Or would you maybe want to touch on another poem that stayed with you and why?
LV: Yes, I agree about the confidence and strength in the use of “we” in “Girl.” If we look even closer there is a shift in POV. The pronouns shift towards the middle of the poem, where it says
I wanted labor,
fruit and excess. To know, to know. To rear the self
taken root–a queer, livid coiling that couldn’t be
bludgeoned or picked apart.
The “I” of the poem feels rooted in the “we” so on my first two readings I didn’t even notice.
It calls me to think about the notes section where Olivares writes,
‘It must be difficult in your liberation struggle [in norteamérica / the US] to imagine you are not part of las américas.’ Her phrasing gifted me the possibility of imagining the US, and those of us now within the US, as part of las américas. Her concern–for our peoples’ feeling of being separated by the geography of empire, for internalizing this separation even as multiple liberation struggles take flight throughout our hemisphere–moved me.
In high school, my beloved Spanish teacher once troubled the term “American” in class. I can’t remember why, perhaps it was because we were using American to only speak about people in the United States. She said, it really should include Central and South America as well, todos las américas. It’s something I think of often–that Americanness is not isolated to the United States though our belief in exceptionalism would have us believe otherwise– something about the disambiguation fraught and rift-making. I couldn’t quite articulate why it bothered me or why this stuck with me, but I feel as though I understand now (too many years later) as I read Olivares’ story about the woman in Havana. In the notes section, Olivares recounts the woman’s words and articulates my discomfort so well.
The necessity of thinking as a collective is essential to liberation. Our solidarity with other oppressed people is necessary. All our fights against injustice are connected. Even now as we speak and stand in solidarity with Palestinians, we are being reminded of how connected our fights for liberation are as we witness the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. We are being reminded of the ways settler-colonies align and organize their atrocities globally. The technology used to surveil the United States-Mexico border is made by an Israeli company called Elbit Systems. The weapons used to murder Palestians are American made and the bombs dropped were first tested in Puerto Rico. Our taxes are used to fund genocide. We are all complicit in violence. The questions Olivares asks in the notes are a sort of guide:
What can it mean to exist in a violently-invented set of nations? How am I complicit in this violence even as I am subject to it? If our species is bent on dreaming and invention, how might one make a different dream?
These are timely and timeless questions. There is a long lineage of poets, especially our Boricua poets, whose work I think grapples with these questions in explicit ways. With Oliveres' book, I'm reminded of mónica teresa ortiz's poetry because of the intersecting connections between climate crisis and colonialism. The final question Olivares asks is something I’m seeing answered in many recent books, including the ones we’ve covered for this season of Warp & Weft such as Raina J. Leon and Rio Cortez’s books. It’s a trend I hope poets continue, because those poems are votes of confidence in the possibility for a liberated future, they’re fuel and anthems as we resist and struggle together. As I read the book a second and third time, these questions guided me through the poems. For me the main strands of this book were: decolonization, feminism, queerness, climate crisis, and radical imaginings of liberation. Of course, these are all connected to one another. What themes or topics stood out for you?
Also, if it’s okay, I want to shift gears to look at the queerness and feminism that arises in the triptych, particularly in the third poem in the triptych “Plot.” The following quotes stayed with me: “Nobody ever said, direct like that, You can’t love girls / like you. But I knew. Overspilled and luscious, how disgraceful.” and “I know to be embodied in any américa / is to be ruined by violence, and wow how many forms does its violence // take.” The knowing of what is and isn’t allowed even without having it said really conveys how deeply normalized and ingrained homophobia is in our society. It also made me think of the moment in Raina J. León’s book where she knows how a woman should act and be without being told. Additionally, the recognition of America’s ongoing violence, but still feeling a sort of horrible awe when reckoning with all the forms the violence takes feels important. I think it’s difficult to hold and recognize all the ways the violence plays out and all the forms it takes at once, because we’re so grief-riddled. We’re unable to hold more than a few types of grief at once for a long time before our brains reset to protect us. Does any of that make sense? If I didn’t touch on some of your other thoughts about the triptych, please share more before we look at more parts of the book.
AA: Yes, that totally makes sense and I think that the part you quoted was a moment early on in the book where I thought about queer ecology as it relates to the self. The struggle in being oneself in a world that tries to at times subtlety, at times violently, change that self so that it conforms to some idea of “normal.” Ideas of normalcy (here heteronormativity) are sometimes so ingrained they don’t even have to be spoken to be understood. There is also a sense in this poem of understanding how one’s self and desire, without being spoken, might transgress those norms and points to both the danger and potential freedom in that.
Your mentioning the interconnected struggle for liberation and dignity of oppressed peoples, in the américas, in Palestine, and across the world has me thinking a lot about the sections in which the speaker visits Cuba and the sections that follow. The sections in some sense read as an encounter with a more expansive understanding of the américas and then imagining and thinking through what a different version of those américas might look like. In essence working through the questions you quoted earlier. Some themes that I was picking up on were decolonial reimagining of the américas, the dream of the future as a seed within us, and queer ecology. In talking about this I’m thinking particularly of this section in “Radical Imagining Is Our Evolutionary Project” where the speaker defines the word hijx:
Everyone breathing or once-breathing on the earth called the américas, which is all of the earth between the two poles in this hemisphere. Messed with by the dreams of these américas. Who participate and don’t participate in its dreamings. Who reckon with our individual becomings and not-becomings within these américas. Who involuntarily blossom out from the dreamings that our ancestors–of or not of this–put hiddenaway in us…All our built-up dissonances, resonances, generational, aggregating in us like spells, like cells. Who will be ingested by this earth and/or who have ingested this earth. Who are seeds and archives. Some parts of us irrecoverably erased. Some parts of us not yet evolved into being.
There is a capaciousness and wide range encompassing of who exactly might be the hijxs of the américas. It stands to include a swath of people and beings (both living, dead, and somewhere in between), which I think is the point. If we are in the américas we are implicated in what is happening here even if we didn’t imagine it or put whatever might have happened/be happening into motion. I think here too it's important to emphasize that the imagination is not a neutral space. It is a place that with some can be benevolent in its imaging, and by others a place of calculated cruelty. I think then what the speaker is in some way trying to account for is the capacity for violence that the imagination has and to insist on imagining something against it, and acknowledging that this counter imagining has been happening long before any of us arrived. I think what the poems in this book seek to do on some level is to take up that imagining, to move past binaries to a more in-between space where our contradictions, and our imaginings, as well as the imaginings of those before us, can be held. This poem and others like it make an expansiveness that is generous enough to include as many people as possible, which I think is correlated to the strong, clear sense of the “we” talked about in the earlier part of this book.
I’m also particularly taken with the idea that the dream of the future is likened to a seed planted inside of the self. Take for example this line: “Some parts of us not yet evolved into being.” What I find so compelling in this gesture is that it suggests that any radical re-imaging of the world already exists on some level as a small thing (a seed) inside us. That vision or a part of that vision of a different world is already with us. I think then the task must be to nurture it and expand it. This gesture also suggests the crucial role of the past. I get the sense that at times when talking about radical ideas/imaginings that there might be some pressure to be largely original in one’s thinking. However in this configuration, there is a reliance and conversation happening with the past, in imagining and building the world that we want, the world that is to come. Whatever progressive future we imagine has roots in previous people’s thinking and has existed before we arrived. It's then our choice what ideas/imaginings we choose to carry forward and bring into fruition while in this world. Did any ideas about how the past informs the future (and vice versa) or more general ideas about the future stand out to you in reading this book?
LV: Oh, I love that summation, “the world already exists on some level as a small thing (a seed) inside us. That vision or a part of that vision of a different world is already with us.” The word “seed” is ever-present in Future Botanic. Olivares scattered “seeds”–the word and the idea– throughout the book. Olivares’ ideas, imaginings, and language absolutely flourish from section to section. To answer your question, I think the book does a good job of reinforcing how bound together the past, present, and future are to one another. I think of these “seeds” sown in the book as connected to that idea of “how the past informs the future (and vice versa).” Seeds are often thought to be things to be sown, but they have a long history of being something to be saved as well. The folk practice of seed saving was essential to farmers before commercial GMO seeds were readily available. It was necessary to preserve the past crop (for those who don’t know: plants going to seed is the final stage of the life cycle and seed germination is the first) in the present (seed saving) to prepare for the future. I have a perhaps more exciting, almost mythic example of time’s relationship to seeds. In Svalbard, Norway, there’s an enormous vault full of seeds called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault; it’s nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault” so you might guess what its purpose is. While modern consumers often only interact with the final product– plants are not free from time. The process, the growth, and the preservation are vital to sustaining the future. I wonder if Olivares is a gardener. There’s a sort of intuition or wisdom about time and growth in the book that feels rare outside of people who grow plants.
I’d like to maybe reorient our conversation. We’ve looked closely at the language system, but perhaps we could look at the overall sequencing of the book? At the beginning of our conversation you said the word “mural” kept coming up for you based on the structure of the poems in the book. I believe out of the 6 sections, only the first and last are composed of linked poems. The others are long, sprawling poems like “Radical Imagining is Our Evolutionary Project” which sprawls across pages 59-79. I love the way the poems shapeshift from page to page. There’s a good mix of prose blocks, traditional right aligned poems, and poems in short lines with lots of blank space around them like parachute seeds floating on the wind. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the book structurally. You’ve been taking a class on ordering poetry manuscripts. Have you come across any books in that class that have a comparable structure? What did you think of the way the poems/sections were ordered within Future Botanic?
AA: The idea of seed as a metaphor that runs through the book is something I hadn’t thought of until you mentioned it and it's an interesting way to think about the book as a whole, as well as the sequences and ideas. This has me thinking that any idea that comes to fruition (especially radical re-imaginings as this book explores), has only come that far because it's been safe kept and tended to. We often only see the articulation of a vision, but not the thinking, dormancy, and conversations with others and ways of thinking that were necessary to keep that vision alive. It's fascinating to think about seeds, seeding, and the life cycle of a plant as they relate to time. They certainly exist in and create their own sense of time.
As far as other books that I’ve come across in the ordering class you mentioned that seem to have a comparable structure, a book that comes to mind is Danielle Vogel’s Edges and Fray. It's admittedly a very different book in terms of how it unfolds, as its structure is largely elliptical and spiral-like, recursive in its imagery and fragments even as it progresses forward, but there is something about the scale of the book (it is divided into two large sections) that brought it to mind. A poem that comes to mind as well is Charles Wright’s Homage to Cezanne which not only has a similar quality of scale, but in its accumulation feels painterly and mural-like. Though in that poem its subject matter is more abstract than the one Olivares takes up in her work. Did any works or books come to mind for you when reading and thinking through this collection?
The sequencing of this book unfolds in a great way I think. It begins in an origin of self and a historical/colonial inheritance (which we touched on earlier), comes to know the world around the self and how the self exists in that world, travels outside that known world where it comes into contact with ideas that expand a sense of self and world, followed by a radical re-imagining of that self’s world, and ends in a elegy for a beloved. It's a dynamic unfolding that moves from and between witnessing, imagining, and addressing. Deciding to end on a kind of address felt deeply moving. Almost as if to say “What good is our radical re-imagining of the world if that doesn't also include being able to re-imagine our relations and how we speak to each other?” It takes broader imaginings of the world and puts them into a smaller, but no less important scale of one self addressing another. In this sense the radical re-imagining is also internal. Here is a snippet from the end of the last poem that I think touches on this:
us traveling
alongside and within you, far
from any dirt I know as home.
Not mine, none of it mine. Not even my body is mine,
a visitation. A cosmos. Imagining next to another,
her also a cosmos. You a cosmos. The river twisting
and washing below. How anchoring,
our sounding together,
bouncing along, imagaining
life after life. Cosmos, seeds, species
inventando. We’re
sound. Sing it
forward, backward, all time, no time at all.
There is a sense of closeness and togetherness even here where the adresse is no longer alive in the way the speaker is alive; they exist in a “cosmos” that the speaker is also a part of. In that sense the speaker and adresse are always bonded. There is also language that suggests the bond is in some way facilitated and bolstered by sound, that they exist together as song, and that when singing, time (what separates the speaker and addressee on some level) is suspended and collapsed for that brief moment of music. It's through each other's sound and voice in which these two people are more firmly bonded.
Did you have any additional thoughts on the overall structure and sequencing of the poems throughout the book?
LV: Yeah, one of my final thoughts was about how the book ends. To end with an elegy, “2. An Elegy for T., Who I Saw with Us as We Traveled Back from Manang above the River” heightens the urgency for radical imagining to come into fruition. Death often reminds us that our lives are too brief and we must live in service of one another and the planet we inhabit. Before the lines you quote, there’s a necessarily straightforward moment where Olivares writes,
T., I’m learning that I can avoid
what I love until one of us is gone,
swept and taken, made adrift, or worn
into a new shape. I love you
here too: I love
you here. You are all the lifting rushing, each of the rivers.
Love is so queer, so unreasonably permanent.
I imagine the mist drew you
as it drew us, like a dream quivering
just out of frame.
We’re often told as poets to avoid sentimentality, but here it works. The push and pull between the lyric and transparent (“I love you”) create a sort of ache. The way the poem moves from the specific addressee T. to a transformation of person into river, mist, memory, and then arrives at the cosmos which you quoted is indicative of Olivares’ dexterity to hold multiple imaginings at once. In Future Botanic, Olivares shows us there is no way to see our world other than in all its multiplicities, how time collapses into singularity, and how we owe each other a better future.
Alfredo Aguilar is the author of On This Side of the Desert (Kent State University Press, 2020), selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North County San Diego, he now resides in Central Texas where he is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She earned her MFA at Rutgers University—Newark and has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.