The Blog Tour: My Writing Process
I recently came back from a 2-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center where I completed my second book-length manuscript of poems. Since then, I’ve been meaning to write some reflections about my work and it’s nice to have the structure of a blog tour to do so. Thank you to both artists who invited me to participate – fiction writer Glendaliz Camacho and essayist/poet Seema Reza, both of whom I met through the Voices of Our Nations Writing Workshop. Check out their blogs – they really invite you to think deeply about what it means to pursue creativity and goodness in your life; they’re also often funny as hell.
OK, so as it goes, I’ll answer the four questions posed by the tour, and then tag two other writers to continue the thread.
1. What are you working on?
My second collection of poems is in many ways a response to the journeys initiated by my first book, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water. The muse of that project was a fierce, shape-shifting wanderer and myth-maker; she was tough, irreverent, elemental. She gave me the strength to make huge changes that paralleled the writing of the book – moving to the States, leaving my family/job/community behind, getting married, and beginning a life that was centered around my craft. I don’t think I was particularly deluded about what it meant to start over – I had been an immigrant before after all – but I really had no idea that poetically, Nomad had led me to the edge of a very deep and turbulent sea.
And it was not for a crossing. There was another muse beneath the waves, and for almost a year I wrote these super whack poems trying to get to her without straying too far from land. One lead that I did have was that I was (am!) extremely troubled by US drone attacks in Pakistan and would spend a few hours each day trolling the news, learning about the missiles and procedures behind the strikes, noting the names of dead and surviving, while trying to adjust to life in a small town in South Jersey, and to marriage, both of which were demanding me – at the risk of deportation if I quit! – to confront everything I was terrified of: loss of independence, intimacy, being truly seen.
What the hell was the connection? It wasn’t until I dove in that I could understand that what this new muse was asking me to do. I was unemployed, I couldn’t go anywhere, I was too broke to do anything but read and research – raw feeling that I couldn’t divert elsewhere and scattered facts were all I had to work with. So I started to mine, with poems, the wrecks in my history and the national/global histories that I am a part of. To understand how the debris implied and echoed each other across the borders of generations and communities, shaping what can and cannot be felt, much less articulated.
So I think the best way to describe the new collection is that it is an act of salvage. Of gathering the broken, rusted things allows us to glimpse where we come from, where we tried to go, the storms we could not weather. They sit at the bottom of us and form our foundation; in those swaying depths untouched by sunlight, they are our crumbling inheritance, evidence that even damage is a testament to life, to the possibility of recovery.
2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?
Hmmm…this question sounds like a veiled invitation to self-promote. I think the best way for me to answer is to define what I try to do relative to my imagined readers.
I ask questions and raise concerns that I really hope will resonate with others, that instead of creating a “niche” will foster self-questioning and conversations about certain realms of the human experience. In my second book, that means specifically war, displacement and violence against women – which have become so normalized in our economic and social landscape that it seems all we can do about them is have opinions (which we then post on various social media platforms to generate little fiefdoms of agreement. “To like or to not like, that is the question.”).
I would like to see these issues returned to the arena of human (both collective and personal) responsibility, and also, creativity. I think we need more creative, not rhetorical, ways of acknowledging these issues and how profoundly they have shaped us as a nation, an idea of humanity, how they inform what we can and cannot do with(in) our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. There is so much trauma all around us – it is in the anti-depressant commercials that run every ten minutes when Suits is on (a show ironically all about individual ambition, tenacity and self-sufficiency); it is in people’s obsession with Game of Thrones – a show so unapologetic about violence no wonder it’s cathartic for a society that otherwise operates on total denial about its own foundations of war, sexual violence and genocide; it is in Facebook memes that offer platitudes about joy, gratitude, cats, etc. and give us an excuse to look away from the homeless guy on the train who stinks with his own shit and is holding out his hand to anyone for change, a cigarette, mercy.
Rather than try “to get over” trauma, I think we need to converse with it. I think the key to the spiritual resilience and emotional creativity resides in that place where we are most afraid to breathe.
3. Why do you write what you do?
I write the specific poems that I do because the combination of my life experiences, the places I’ve gone, the books I’ve read, the ideas I’ve come across, the questions I’ve grappled with, and the craft I’ve studied have given me the tools to write these poems. I think of poets as vessels, and poetry chooses us to write this or that, based on what we can hold. I think of what Raul Zurita said at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2013, “Things happen just for the poem to be.” Maybe that’s a mystical interpretation of my vocation, but it makes sense to me.
Beyond that, I write because I know what it is to feel powerless. And to write is to propose a particular version of reality, to claim its possibility – which is all power really is. So I write to teach myself that I have power, to make my power visible to me. I write because it is the condition of my freedom.
4. How does your writing process work?
Process for me is that which happens at the juncture of a specific project’s unique potential and one’s life circumstances. I find it difficult to boil it down to a series of steps. Instead I’ll mention the components that have been crucial for me.
The first is study. When I was writing my first book, I devoured collections. I wanted to understand what made a body of poems work – the sort of mechanics of it, but more importantly, the emotional and aesthetic composition, the possible routes it can take. With the recent project, I’ve been a lot more interested in collected works, in witnessing a poet’s experimentation with their craft over a lifetime, and how certain kinds of projects allow them to flex certain muscles – sound, form, metaphor, (il)logic – and the clarifying of their voice over time. All of this though, is to figure out what kind of poet I am and want to grow into, what kind of poems I really aspire to write. I find that good poems are those that make you want to be a better poet, and great poems are those that make you forget you are a poet, because they throw you back into the heart and madness and music that is humanity.
Second is discipline. This means at a basic level some sort of routine – because I’m a working mom, the thing that works for me is to wake up at 5 in the morning and write for a few hours before everyone else is up. At a more fundamental level though, discipline means a true submission to see the poem through – no matter how deep it asks you to go. Everyone does this differently, but for me it usually means many revisions and many overhauls, but also a practice of taking risks and feeling deeply in the rest of my life. If I stagnate, so will the poem. I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t have enough time, to write, to revise, etc. Bullshit. If it’s important to you, you’ll make the time.
Third is self-ownership. In addition to the books I read, I think of my life as a kind of library. Each new experience allows it to grow. I think sometimes it’s possible to get stuck in one section (as a kid all I wanted to read was comic books, and only certain series at that) and forget that there are like eight floors still left to explore. I was in denial for a long time, for instance, about my Evangelical upbringing. I felt ashamed of it, not only because it was a culture of shame, but because I was hanging out with all these lefties and commies who were oh-so-disdainful of anything that even remotely smelled of God. But I grew up on the Psalms. They were the first words I learned to speak, quite literally. In addition to this, my original artistic endeavors were painting, singing, piano and dance. And whether or not I’m conscious of it, I draw on those original trades to write my poems. I think in images (what are the colors, what is the relationships between this and that object, where is the source of light, etc.) and movement (how fast, how curved, etc.), and in voice (what is the tone of the line, how does it move across the tongue, etc.). And yes, I think in God – not Jehovah-God, but in that mystery (or abyss) that stares back at the individual from the brink and fractures what we think we know.
Lastly, solitude. I don’t have my own office. I have a corner of the kitchen table during the wee hours of the morning. While a physical set-up can do wonders (e.g. while in Vermont I had my own studio overlooking a river), I can’t stress enough how critical it is to nourish an inner world that only I have access to. As much as possible I use my commute for solitary practice – though it’s crowded, I get to be an anonymous atom and really nobody gives a shit who I am or what I can do for them in that 30-45 minute period, twice a day. I can get lost in my thoughts and daydreams, in poems I’m reading, I can ask dangerous questions of myself in that envelope of time. Being a poet is a lonely road, but I don’t think that’s necessarily because the practice requires solitude. I think the loneliness comes from a heightened state of self-consciousness that results from being told (and believing) that we are different, “special,” misunderstood, etc. If anything solitude is where I feel most connected to the planet and the lives of others, because it is in solitude that I can give them the attention they deserve.
The Tour Continues!
Vicente Lozano is a writer based in Austin, Texas. He is the recipient of a post graduate fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers and he’s also participated in Macondo, Sandra Cisneros’ socially engaged writing community. In 2007 he received a Dobie-Paisano Fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters and he’s also received several artist grants from the Vermont Studio Center, which is where I met him! He is an amazing human, super sharp but so grounded and thoughtful – I can’t wait to hear how he will answer these questions. He is also probably my favorite Tweeter – you can follow him @vtlozano.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of the chapbooks na bad-eye me (Pudding House Press, 2010) and na mash me bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011). In addition to being a VONA (which is where I met him) and Kundiman fellow, he received his MFA in creative writing and literary translation from Queens College, CUNY. He has been published in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Great River Review, Assacarus, Anti-, small axe, Lantern Review, Four Way Review, and Saw Palm, and in 2010 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He’s currently a PhD candidate at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. I’m a serious fan of Rajiv’s poetry and existence in the world.

