Michael Torres on Revising “Pockets”
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- Apr 1
- 9 min read
The Process
Before it was “Pockets,” Michael Torres’s poem was a draft called “Bodega Martin.”
Bodega Martin (August 6, 2019)
But in Southern California. 1997. Market Spot. On the corner of Philadelphia Street and Towne Avenue. Pomona. Eastside of the store is where I looked for fresh tags on Sundays on the way to church with my mom and sister. Gangs crossing each other out, writing names like Stretch, Smokey, Shyboy, in tall, lanky letters. Silver, black. Me and whoever I was walking home with from 5th grade stopped at the Market.
Not that Martin Rodriguez had finally got caught jacking a whole bunch of shit, but the fact of the extra pockets sewn into his jacket and on the insides of his pants. Places for everything you want but can’t have. Child genius we all thought then. I imagined how big those pockets must’ve been, how to capacity. Pockets so deep you could slip bags of green apple-ring gummies. Crunch bars. Snack bags of Funyuns. A can of Cactus Cooler. A roll of Oreos. Those Styrofoam airplanes I’d ask Mom to buy me all the time. The ones I’d assemble in the car. The plastic propellers that eventually, after enough crash landings, bent the nose. Packs of Doublemint gum in those pockets. Enough to make friends with. Knockoff WWF figurines. Yo-yos. Sticky hands we stretched at recess like slingshots to smack a kid in the face. A pack of shredded cheese. Kidney beans his mother was sure wasn’t there in the cupboard just yesterday. A Spiderman comic book. 4-sheet pack of temporary tattoos to distribute in class while Mrs. Hawkins talked about the Gold Rush. Ice cream, half-melted by the time he was already a block away. Bomb pops, SuperPops, ice cream sandwiches. Those expensive bars rendered as cartoon characters. Gumballs for eyes. A Pepsi 2-liter beside his leg.
With the help of some borrowed words from Rick Barot and Vievee Francis—
September 25, 2019: Word Banks
From Chord by Rick Barot:
Suitcase. Fortune. Stopped. Dying. Paint. Twigs. Birthday. Everything. Explosive. Glacier.
Temptation. Sidewalk. Particle. Wire. Magnolia. Sweet. Hole. Green. Whispered. Villa. Jewels.
Soft. Alaska. Burned. Milky. Flies. Civilization. Calling. Stones. Indigo. Beginning. Glass. Grim.
Circles. Lifted. Another. Paper. Sorted. Pomegranate.
Collapse. Thumbnail. Past. Fairy tale. Temptation. Stem. Delivery. Wolf. Needles. Enough.
Tempting. Anchor. Speaking. Eaten. Lonely. Monsters. Bent. Attention. Corset. Spliced. Fish.
Beasts. Carried. Dignity.
—Torres revisited and revised this draft until it became “Pockets,” which was published by the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.
We see point A and point B, but I had an email interview with Michael Torres, author of An Incomplete List of Names, to talk about everything that occurred in between.
Interview
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): “Gangs crossing each other out” appears much earlier on in the first draft than the “crews . . . drawing exes over each other” does in the final; the final leads instead with Martin’s intelligence and relatively harmless troublemaking. How does the first impression of each draft change the reading?
Michael Torres (MT): The poem was written after an invitation to read a Bodega-inspired poem for the launch of Bodega, my friend Su Hwang’s collection. The original draft of this poem, then, began as a freewrite session answering “What is the West Coast version of a Bodega?” Noting “Southern California. 1997” was a way to ground myself first, which is something I try to do at the start of anything I write. Almost immediately, I thought of Market Spot and then all its associations: gang graffiti, passing by on the way to church, the candy they sold. Finally, a sharper, more interesting memory came up: the time Martin got caught stealing. Once he was named on the page, my poetry mind was spinning.
The most interesting thing to me in that original draft is this adamancy about not wanting the poem of him stealing to be a cautionary tale or to have a moral-of-the-story ending. That’s the complete opposite of the stuff of poetry. This is why the final draft begins, “Let us, instead, consider the pockets.” From the start, I’m persuading myself to look at the pockets for their invention and imagination, as it would have been easy to gaze at Martin, assess, and think, yes, bad, yes, criminal.
The further I got into this poem (twenty-odd drafts), the more I was drawn to the energy or essence of Martin’s story inside this poem. It was less about right or wrong and more about detail and description. I leaned on the fantastical in what was stolen. It was imagistic and thrilling to figure how I would get myself out of the poem once it got as ridiculous as it did with the list of items (though, when I was in the flow of writing those drafts, it was not ridiculousness I saw in my list of things he stole, but sheer imagination: healthy exaggeration and language for the sake of energy and excitement). That energy took over and helped me get to a place where I could discover what the poem actually wanted to do.
BTR: The shredded cheese and kidney beans of the first draft fell out by the final. These lines seem to imply that Martin acted at least in part out of need. Did you intend to reframe his motivation? To leave it unsaid?
MT: Originally, that’s exactly what happened—I was trying to frame his motivation. But after a few revisions, I was 1. Much more interested in the fun, selfish venture of stealing candy and snacks, and how I could exaggerate it while still making it feel true. And 2. Becoming aware of the self-righteous tone I would be striking if I made the poem say Look, he was a sort of Robin Hood of the hood, which wasn’t true, anyway. (Besides, if you’re making the poem say anything, you know you're going the wrong direction.) The beauty of Martin’s story is in how his childhood imagination motivated him, the stuff of poems.
I also knew early on that his story wasn’t going to end positively. So if I’d had him get caught while taking food for his hungry siblings, it would make him an obvious recipient for our sympathies. Too easily, a reader would be led to agree: of course, we see clearly who the bad guy is; of course the kid who’s stealing needs to help feed his family; we should admire him for that. And though I know there exists in this world a multitude of Martins going about things in this way, my Martin didn’t. My Martin was real and complicated. He did these things because, I want to believe, he thought it would bring him notoriety or popularity. That’s all moving beneath the surface of the poem. It’s more interesting to me.
Another aspect of complication: even though he shouldn’t have stolen, we still feel it isn’t right when he gets snatched up. And that image, “The sharp kick of a boy’s legs,” asks the reader to wrestle with the justification of violence; despite what he did, it reminds us of his humanity. It puts his boyishness right there, before an adult world that is quick to react, and asks the reader to consider a moment longer.
BTR: “Pomegranate when pulled apart”: such a beautiful, vivid image, and an example of a word from your bank entering the final. Do you often look to words from other poems to push your drafts further? How do you select words for the bank?
MT: Thank you. Never before had I done this!
I’d been introduced to this word bank exercise at a generative workshop with Kaveh Akbar at a writing conference in 2019. We were to page through a book for two minutes and write down the words that stood out before moving on to another book. Pomegranate was one of the selections. When I look at that list now, I see words that would stand out to me normally (dying, wolf, for example) but also some, like pomegranate, were words I wanted to try and play with because they seemed like they would give me trouble. Trouble and complication is exactly what the poem needed to shake up my process so that I wouldn’t find my way to the easy ending I would normally write.
“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself.” That’s Phillip Levine quoting his mentor John Berryman in an essay from The Bread of Time. I would see it on my professor’s door each time I went to talk with him, and I still think a lot about it, obviously. When I went back to the word bank to revise the poem, I had removed pomegranate from whatever function and context it may have had. Or, as Richard Hugo puts it, my relation to the word strengthened and the relation of the word to the subject weakened. My relation to pomegranate became imagistic. I viewed it as a verb (maybe I was thinking grenade). It became a vehicle for action. “Pomegranate when pulled apart.” I saw seed and carpel but thought “burst.”
BTR: The final draft follows the speaker and Martin beyond their boyhood into their fatherhood, while the first ends on the list of items. How important is narrative to you within a poem? Do you strive to “complete the story” by the final draft?
MT: Narrative is where I get grounded in the making of my poems, even if the narrative changes. After several drafts spinning this fantastical memory of what Martin did, I started thinking, Okay, what happens next in his life in this poem? And the sequence came naturally, I suppose: he was the talk of the playground until someone else was, and then he grew up like most of us, doing graffiti as a rite of passage. Finally, that last image of passing him on the street was something a friend told me had actually happened to him:
“You know who I saw the other day?—Martin.”
“No shit. From elementary? How’s he doing?”
“I saw him crossing the street but I don’t think he saw me. He had a kid with him.”
“Oh damn, he has a kid? That’s crazy.”
I was hearing that story in my head the rest of the day, imagining myself in my friend’s place, wondering, what would happen if I broke away from the main narrative of my poem, of Martin as a kid, and threw myself into a future where I see Martin years later? How would he change? How would his older self complicate what my speaker thinks of him? What would that do to Martin when I returned to him in childhood, for the last time at the end of the poem? That break away into present time turned these questions to me, the speaker, and I was confronted with some truths that enter the poem: that I am often thinking about collapse; that Martin and I grew up to be—perhaps in the eyes of our childhood selves—nothing special. Just men.
BTR: The only difference between the final draft you sent me (from August 13, 2020) and the one published online is that the last line is indented in the latter. Did something specific motivate this last edit?
MT: For some choices, I have the most detailed reasons, and for others—like this one—it just came down to seeing the indented last line published online and not liking the look as much as I thought I was going to. Maybe it wasn’t as flush as I had imagined. We are subject to the whims of the moment and our poems, on top of everything else, are records of those whims—and isn’t that, also, beautiful?
Michael Torres is a VONA distinguished alum and CantoMundo fellow. In 2016 he received his MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato, was a winner of the Loft Mentor Series, received an Individual Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and was awarded a Jerome Foundation Research and Travel Grant to visit the pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico where his father grew up. In 2019 he received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and The Loft Literary Center for the Mirrors & Windows Program. Torres was a former Artist-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, a McKnight Writing Fellow, and a 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
His first collection of poems, AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF NAMES, (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series, named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020, and was featured on the podcast Code Switch.
His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, The New Yorker, POETRY, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Georgia Review, The Sun, Water~Stone Review, Southern Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The McNeese Review, MIRAMAR, Green Mountains Review, Forklift, Ohio, Hot Metal Bridge, The Boiler Journal, Paper Darts, River Teeth, The Acentos Review, Okey-Panky, Sycamore Review, SALT, Huizache, online as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, on The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith.
Michael was born and brought up in Pomona, CA, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. Currently, he teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
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.