"If there’s a god who is writing the book of my life, they would probably have a pretty good sense of humor": Interview with David Villaverde
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
David Villaverde’s “Gnomon” is a multimodal, layered poem that began with a “two truths and one lie” conceit about the environment and ended up as a meditation on the human capacity for horror, both causing and grappling with it. The PDF below gathers some of the drafts that resulted in the final poem, published in The Adroit Journal. I spoke with Villaverde over Zoom about the function of poetry and how the personal becomes the universal.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): The first draft of the poem is in a “two truths and a lie” format, but that conceit falls away within two drafts. Was that a prompt? How did you arrive at that initial thinking, and what wasn’t working about the form that made you move away from it?
David Villaverde (DV): Oh, that’s an interesting question. I was at the Bear River Writers’ Conference with Jaswinder Bolina. And there was a prompt, maybe something vaguely environmental, and I sort of pulled that conceit out of thin air. I had read a poem by Arthur Sze called “Chrysalis.” In it, Arthur talks about how the ginkgo tree was thought to be extinct for centuries until it was rediscovered at these Tibetan or Chinese Buddhist monasteries. It’s a really bleak poem about ecological destruction, and it was presented as this moment that felt like hope that, in a symbiotic way, species can depend on each other, that caretaking for the environment can usher something like the ginkgo tree—which has been around since the dinosaurs and is really weird and incredibly beautiful—into the present day. I wanted to write about the ginkgo, but it’s impossible to write about things without accessing one’s own emotional truth. The more I read about the ginkgo, the more it became connected to everything. And that kept me returning to the page. The form wasn’t working, but what was really not working was the poem itself, and by extension my ability to listen and feel.
BTR: The initial inspiration for the poem was that environmental idea, but early in your drafts, the “I” enters the poem and becomes central to the narrative. And the later drafts become increasingly confessional. Were you thinking about the balance of confession and commentary as you revised and rewrote? Do you feel like confession and commentary exist on a continuum, or is there another type of relationship between the internal and the external for you?
DV: Ultimately, all I ever want to do is write about the exterior, things as they exist in the world phenomenologically. And when I try to do that, it’s not interesting, it’s boring. It’s bad, it’s really the hallmark of bad poetry: pretention. What happens is that I am forced to look inward. And in doing that, I find there’s always more and there’s always the connection between the internal world and the external. The further you go, the more you can plumb the depths of the infinite connections between all forms of life. If you go into the exterior long enough, you’re going to find yourself. And if you go into the interior long enough—well it’s this Mobius strip where you keep popping back out on the other side. But too often my writing process is dictated by my own avoidance and laziness. I don’t want to talk about the actual things that make me uncomfortable; that requires work and likely some form of growth which I’d rather avoid. I think that’s what you are getting at with “confessional.” I think this work can be framed in a confessional way because I brought those things to the surface, but I don’t think of it that way. I see that usually employed as a threadbare gesture of self-pity, like “look at me, how much I’ve suffered.” I don’t have much interest in that. What was at the heart of this poem was “look at how my suffering connects me to the suffering of others and the suffering of the world.” My problem is that I want the writing of a poem to be as painless as possible. I have to go to places that make me uncomfortable in order to produce something that I feel has any merit or that I would want to read again. And most days I just don’t want to do that.
BTR: That fluctuation between the internal and external appears in your drafts, like the hint of accusation in one of these intermediate drafts. In the lines “anytime someone’s view is blocked a belt of chained teeth whir and the last of something or other becomes a pile of sawdust” and “I am not here to feel sorry for myself, to form myself into a spectacle of difference, a product to be consumed with blank stares and mute applause by the mostly [white] audience who lust after the juicy bits,” there’s a clear assignment of a perpetrator. But the final poem notably is less direct about the cause of harm. Was it your intention to remove those designations from the poem? And do you have a broader perspective on how blame and perpetrator-versus-victim dynamics exist within poetry?
DV: When I wrote those things, they were very knee-jerk because I felt stuck. I needed to just say all these things that I felt. But it’s very easy to point fingers. I don’t like the certainty or the didacticism of that gesture. It’s an easy dunk to be like, “the white audience loves the consumption of this grief.” For me, it’s an obvious two-way street: wanting to say something like that, but then wanting the accolades for performing that to said audience. I don’t think that’s particularly useful. If anything, that creates a cycle of reification that upholds the truisms that one is projecting. And the truth is more complicated. I find that those moments where I was angry or frustrated don’t have much to do with the important questions of life that should be in art. They don’t fully express how I feel about the world, but rather how I felt in that one moment.
BTR: The poem itself seems to argue that poetry is an insufficient abstraction of real life, that poems flatten reality or become instruments of generalization. But I found some irony in the fact that the final poem is really complex, and has a form that draws attention to itself and the lengths to which the speaker goes to clarify themself. How do you reconcile this simultaneous criticism and elevation of poetry as a medium?
DV: If you ask any artist who really loves the medium they traffic in if they feel that medium is up to the task, most often what you will hear is their frustration at coming up against the limitations of oneself and of one’s tools. Every artist worth their salt has to find new ways to make their medium work for them. You always have to find new ways in which to break language in order to make meaning. There are a lot of deep-seated ironies hard coded into the poem, one of them being that poetry itself is often the handmaiden of empire, and that’s not new—the court bard’s songs of war for the king are some of the oldest examples of poetry we have in English. There’s a way in which beauty is often employed for the most barbaric things. I don’t necessarily agree with Keats that in beauty there’s some form of greater truth or absolution or salvation. And yet, like any artist, I have an obsession with what I think of as beauty and I have to address that in poetry. Life is layered often with these deep ironies that are either comedic or tragic. If there’s a god who is writing the book of my life, they would probably have a pretty good sense of humor, considering how these coincidences occur when it’s either least inconvenient or most. That’s how life happens, or at least how it feels. So, when I was writing and making this more and more complicated, I didn’t see it as incoherent or mutually exclusive. I think that most of life is structured by these grand paradoxes and I wanted something that felt true to that representation, as weird as that might look.
BTR: I think it’s human nature to think that these grand coincidences must all be connected and have some greater purpose.
DV: Yeah, I think part of being human is what Viktor Frankl talked about in Man’s Search for Meaning, that part of our nature is to try to make sense of the senselessness that exists around us. Growing up being sort of sensitive and in environments that are sort of violent, trying to find meaning in that and then looking at the absolute horror that exists in the world is an experience I think most of us understand firsthand. I think most people have been seeing videos of civilians being killed every day on social media for the last couple years. I was just trying write a poem about the ginkgo when I learned about the hibakujumoku, and it brought me to the horror we live in, where this nation used a nuclear bomb against a civilian population. Twice. I don’t know if anyone who feels can see any of this and reckon with what any of it means. There were shadows burned into the sidewalks. The horror embodied in that image is ineffable. There is nothing that I could ever say to make sense of it. But how can I live if I don’t try?
David Joez Villaverde received an MFA from the University of Michigan where he was a Helen Zell Fellow. His poems have been published in Kenyon Review, Adroit, New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Quarterly West, The Hopkins Review and Prairie Schooner. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has been recognized by The American Academy of Poets, Best New Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in New York.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.
