Spilled Interviews: Angela Peñaredondo
Dare Williams, Séamus Fey, and Angela Peñaredondo discuss drafting, nostalgia, and Flora and fauna
Séamus Fey: I felt the lush landscape crafted in the world of these pieces. If you were to draw me a map of the flora and fauna in the world these poems live in, what would it look like? What species of plants live there?
Angela Peñaredondo: Thanks for noticing that, Séamus! That’s also a great and pretty layered question. In my book, maps appear in “nights you go trembling” and “survivor’s topography.” In “nights you go trembling” there are “dream maps full of x's” like x marks the spot or at times, an x indicating a warning or a stop. In “survivor’s topography, which was partially inspired by topographical maps, there is an “excavated map made and unmade.” Maybe this is a kind of a roundabout response to your question. But if I could add more to the kinds of maps of flora and fauna that I could draw to represent the worlds these poems live in, I would say that there would be more than one version of map.
I think it’s also important to consider that the drawing hands are from a nonwhite, anti-capitalist, queer, diasporic feminist of color mapmaker with one part of their body in our current apocalyptic-like reality, another one in a pre-conquest land, another bumping around in the realm of the dead and another part cruising through dystopian futures were so many of the survivors are similar to the mapmaker. The maps themselves could speak back and tell a story about what’s been hidden or deeply buried.
Your question on what kind of flora or fauna would be represented in these maps is a delicious one. I can go on for hours about that but for the sake of getting straight to the point, the flora and fauna would be both the endangered and invasive kind. The kind clinging to what water or soil left to survive a little bit longer. The ones that are crazy resilient and spiny, the tropical and carnivorous kind. There would be the kind of flora and fauna that have thousands of spores meant for long distance travel and so can live in the harshest and unlikeliest of landscapes.
Dare Williams: One of the qualities of your work I find I’m drawn to is a sense of nostalgia permeating the work. I’m curious how you engage memory or post-memory and how you manage all that?
Angela Peñaredondo: I’m part of a culture and family where there’s consistent engagement with memory, especially in the form of oral storytelling. I say this with awareness that some of those memories are selected and curated. I also say this knowing that memory is equivalent to history and for many formerly colonized people like myself there are also parts of memory/history that has been erased or whitewashed over. For all those reasons that is one of significant ways I engage with memory, which is embodying the knowledge of those things but also valuing memory with all my many, messy parts. In terms of post memory, that all depends on my ability for (re)imagination on any given day, as well as my own strange curiosity and capacity to enter many dreams or imagined worlds. I feel my multiple identities allow me to tap into post memory stuff especially when I allow myself to feel all the feels unapologetically and with creative ownership.
Séamus Fey: I’m speaking particularly about “trace”-- (though you have many pieces I believe adhere to this) there is a script-like element to this poem. As a playwright, I immediately found myself seeing a dialogue created from the use of the left and right margins. Do you have experience in scriptwriting, and/or, do you have the poems operating as script in mind when you’re drafting?
Angela Peñaredondo: I have had the opportunity to read some interesting scripts. I also have immense respect and appreciation for playwriting. In grad school, I did have some experience in writing short plays. Actually, many years ago, one of them came to fruition on the stage. It was fun but also a humbling and painful experience. The art and skill of telling a story dominated by dialogue is incredibly fascinating to me as well as very challenging for me to do. I wasn't thinking about playwriting when I wrote and rewrote “trace” many times over, but I think it’s revealing that you see a script-like quality. Looking back, I was reading plays at the time of revision.
At my university, I teach an introductory course on poetry and drama, so I was reading an anthology of one act plays written by women of color. I try my best not to mix my teaching time and my creative writing time, however, it seems some of that dramatic writing influence crawled its way in.
Dare Williams: I’m very interested in the biblical illusions in “studies in becoming prayer” as well as the caesuras acting as both spaces for breath in the vessel and possible erasures in the text. Wondering if you could talk about that device more?
Angela Peñaredondo: “Studies in becoming prayer” is made-up of individual short poems and a conglomeration of fragmented journal entries. There's really a kind of collage working in there. Before the final iterations of “studies in becoming prayers,” I really had to sit down with the mixture of these texts, intuitively knowing there was a connection between all of the fractured scribblings. I wanted to create a title that wasn't obvious at first glance but emotionally rang true for work as well as also be part of a discourse.
I feel the act of prayer itself although can be an everyday spiritual ritual is also performed when a supplicant is experiencing extreme difficulty, pain, anger, grief, or the kind of change that can feel mentally excruciating. Well, “studies in becoming prayer” personally explores these pressure points. In terms of my use of cesuras, you're quite right in saying that I intended them to act as spaces for breath and pause. Caesuras are such useful and visual literary tools to create a visual spaciousness or clearance both for the writer and the reader when navigating zones of provocation and oppression. I also think in “studies in becoming prayer,” I also use the caesura as well as the column like form of the poem to herd and confine the volatile nature of the stories within this poem.