MK CHAVEZ
RLU: You curate poetry spaces and write poetry. You organize the Berkeley Poetry Festival and have performed at numerous Bay Area poetry venues. Instead of just talking about what makes the Bay’s poetry scene formative or foundational to your practice, can you talk a bit about what making or doing poetry-in-place offers your poetics?
MKC: I recently began embracing being a multidisciplinary artist. Writing is central to my practice and everything else has branched out from that. I started writing later in life, and cannot remember why, but from the very beginning it was important to me to connect with other people. What was available were many non-diverse spaces, where I could not see or hear my work. I heard a lot of work I loved, but I wanted something a little bit more. Through writing, I built the community that I wanted to be in. Similar to “If the book you want to read doesn't exist, then you write it.” I was just making space in the literary world where I could hear my own voice more clearly.
At the Berkeley Poetry Festival, we recognize that there are all these different writers on different tracks. When they read together, they're all equally important. Some of them have been writing for a long time, some have been writing less. For some it’s important to have certain milestones in their writing journey, and for others there’s little concern about getting published. I don’t think being published means anything, but somewhere along the line it was assigned a certain meaning. It took a friend of mine ten years to write her first book. She would say to me, “I don't feel like a real writer.” I said, “What's gonna convince you?” And she replied, "Well, when I get published.” And when she got published it didn't make a difference. She still didn't feel like a real writer. And I said, "So, what is it?” And she said, "I don't know, some recognition.” Then she became a New York Times bestseller, she got lots of accolades, she got a great Kirkus review. I'm like, “How about now?” Maybe the problem is the concept itself. Maybe you just get to be a writer and that's it.
RLU: The question that I hear in this story is, what makes someone feel real to themselves? That has to be a question where the answer is native to one's own body, it can't come from without. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot as an “emerging poet”—a term that I don’t quite know the meaning of. I continue to ask these questions of publication: if I want to be published, why I want to be published, and how much power should I give a publisher or an institution to dictating back to me how legitimate I am or how good my art is? Inevitably, the question evolves to: why do I write?
MKC: Last year I launched this “100 rejections” group. The goal is to get rejected 100 times: actively getting rejected means you’re actively submitting. It shifts the emphasis from acceptance to putting oneself out there. It doesn't feel great, but we can remove some of the energy that's connected to it by recognizing that if that's the route that you've decided to go, it's inevitable that you'll get rejected. We can't make people want to publish our work, but what we can do is to make the attempt to connect with other people.
RLU: What brought you or compelled you to poetry ‘later in life’?
MKC: It was the compactness of poetry. There’s this tiny little poem, but the impact is huge. I was fascinated by that. A poem can open your mind and your heart, and gives you the ability to see something more clearly or with more complexity.
RLU: Last year I expressed to local poet Trinh Le that one of the reasons I gravitate to poetry is because poems are a statement of want or desire—and the more that I'm able to articulate that desire on the page, the more that I'm able to approach that in my material, lived life off the page. The paper in front of me becomes a mirror and a guide for how I can enter the rest of my life. I’m wondering if something opened up within you at the point when you did start to explore yourself as a poet, given what you said about a poem allowing us to experience different cavities of ourselves.
MKC: Oh, absolutely. With poetry, I was able to occupy my skin better. It almost feels like there was part of myself that was living exiled somewhere. Poetry, for me, is the freedom of being able to be who you are and to say who you are. It’s a reclamation of all the things that are taken away from us when we go into the world. It’s about removing all those layers that get put on us.
That’s really tied to the ‘queer aesthetic’ in poetry. In thinking about my book, Dear Animal, I read a lot of those poems to predominantly straight groups. The reception was really different than when I was reading to a predominantly queer audience. I read at a literary speakeasy to an audience of gay men, who were the most enthusiastic about my poems, which mentioned vaginas and vulvas and genitalia. They really understood the poems. That reclamation of something that's beyond the body part, that something intertwined with misogyny and the way that we're taught to make ourselves small—that's really what those poems are about.
RLU: One of the aims of queer life—and I mean life at the club, life at the protest, life in relationship and life in the interstitial moments between those—is to substantiate and affirm that queer people are not too much or too loud or too big or too emotional or too flamboyant. At the same time I think most queer people have the experience throughout their lives–if not certainly in the early part of their lives, when they are under the control of potentially homophobic, transphobic parents—of being told that they're not enough. I wonder if a queer approach in poetry is the total rejection of this dichotomy, or of this binary, that one is either not enough or one is too much. I certainly see that in Dear Animal; the poems are so maximalist in their visuals and so ferocious and unabashed. To take it back to this dichotomy: by being too much, queer people become not enough. There’s a tension of existing on this wire between those two poles: if a queer person veers into one, they become the other. Queerness in lived experience is a way of rebuking and setting aside all of that bullshit.
MKC: You know, I’ve been asked, “Why don't you write queer poetry?” And I’m like, “What exactly would make my writing queer?” That question closes everything in. It's saying that queerness—or writing—has to look a particular way, whether that’s flamboyant or ferocious. Once you've created something that gets any positive attention, people say, “I love that, come and read the same thing.” Some have asked, “Why is your second book so weird.” It’s a question of what exactly are we allowed to do?
Think about the difference between Brontez Purnell and DA Powell, who are both queer writers, though very different in approach. There has to be room for all of it, and one is not more queer than the other. All of the work is interacting with life.
RLU: Ultimately I think it says more about the person who is suggesting what your poetry should be or dictating to you what your poetry should contain.
MKC: I definitely have gotten, “Why don't you write more Latinx poetry?” I wonder, why in the world would you ask that of anyone? Maybe that person wants to support poetry or support Black and brown communities. But if you actually want to be supportive, those words should never leave your mouth.
It's painful when you're dissected in that way and when there's an implied criticism in the question that's being asked. It’s like you’re not gay enough, queer enough, brown enough, Latinx enough, Black enough, woman enough, or ally enough. I’m really surprised by the expectations that are placed on us. I have to work at releasing those expectations, especially when I'm actually writing.
RLU: Yours is a poetics that languages in the bestiary, experiments with horror, and bends genre. You have said that “Horror is a language of reckoning,” which I understand to mean it’s a language of the past or a means of bringing the past into the present so that we may struggle with, so that we may struggle against. Horror is a means of making truth—or history—undeniable. What are the histories that you hope to bear into this moment? What do you want readers to struggle with?
MKC: That’s such a great question. Thank you. For a long time, I did not understand my love of horror. What I love about the genre is that it’s the action that goes along with unforgetting. Until you've dealt with it, it will keep coming back like a ghost. America is one big gothic nightmare, and it won't go away until it has dealt with itself; the ghosts will continue to haunt this country.
What I'm asking people to struggle alongside me with is what it means to be mixed race, what it means to not fit into any group, and what it means to be dismissed? I want people to grapple with the question of how we treat our children, and if we celebrate them or shun parts of our community.
RLU: You’ve said previously that imagination is a muscle of liberation. I want to tie this back to what poetry is able to make possible. Earlier you mentioned that poetry enabled you to occupy your skin more fully and explore yourself more deeply. This element of self exploration, I believe, is deeply tied to how we world build. We must learn ourselves so that we can learn others. I’m wondering how this lands for you. You’re writing poetry, you're building physical spaces for people to gather in, and, if I can make a theoretical leap, you’re facilitating a way for poetry to bring the future into where we are together, which is what I think imagination is.
MKC: Imagination is one part of a whole magical infrastructure. I don't think it's accidental that our minds cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an imagined experience. It’s a survival tool. I think if we couldn't imagine into a different future outside of the moment that we find ourselves in, things would begin to look pretty desperate.
The imagination of poetics and writing has so much potential. It’s akin to, I was going to say hope, but hope doesn't feel quite right. It’s a kind of practical hope. Poetry is powerful because the poem can say what other forms of communication might fail at. I think of poetics as love and queerness as love. Not just romantic love or sexual love. It's about a bigger love. It is about being able to accept other human beings, and just as much, being able to accept myself. It’s about honoring all of my ways of loving and all of my desires. It’s about seeing my desires as healthy and good, not as aberrations. I'd like to think that if we were all in that same place of being able to accept ourselves, we might not be where we are now. I think that denial and othering on that level is really damaging to human beings. It makes us a little less human to deny ourselves in that way.
MKC: I recently began embracing being a multidisciplinary artist. Writing is central to my practice and everything else has branched out from that. I started writing later in life, and cannot remember why, but from the very beginning it was important to me to connect with other people. What was available were many non-diverse spaces, where I could not see or hear my work. I heard a lot of work I loved, but I wanted something a little bit more. Through writing, I built the community that I wanted to be in. Similar to “If the book you want to read doesn't exist, then you write it.” I was just making space in the literary world where I could hear my own voice more clearly.
At the Berkeley Poetry Festival, we recognize that there are all these different writers on different tracks. When they read together, they're all equally important. Some of them have been writing for a long time, some have been writing less. For some it’s important to have certain milestones in their writing journey, and for others there’s little concern about getting published. I don’t think being published means anything, but somewhere along the line it was assigned a certain meaning. It took a friend of mine ten years to write her first book. She would say to me, “I don't feel like a real writer.” I said, “What's gonna convince you?” And she replied, "Well, when I get published.” And when she got published it didn't make a difference. She still didn't feel like a real writer. And I said, "So, what is it?” And she said, "I don't know, some recognition.” Then she became a New York Times bestseller, she got lots of accolades, she got a great Kirkus review. I'm like, “How about now?” Maybe the problem is the concept itself. Maybe you just get to be a writer and that's it.
RLU: The question that I hear in this story is, what makes someone feel real to themselves? That has to be a question where the answer is native to one's own body, it can't come from without. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot as an “emerging poet”—a term that I don’t quite know the meaning of. I continue to ask these questions of publication: if I want to be published, why I want to be published, and how much power should I give a publisher or an institution to dictating back to me how legitimate I am or how good my art is? Inevitably, the question evolves to: why do I write?
MKC: Last year I launched this “100 rejections” group. The goal is to get rejected 100 times: actively getting rejected means you’re actively submitting. It shifts the emphasis from acceptance to putting oneself out there. It doesn't feel great, but we can remove some of the energy that's connected to it by recognizing that if that's the route that you've decided to go, it's inevitable that you'll get rejected. We can't make people want to publish our work, but what we can do is to make the attempt to connect with other people.
RLU: What brought you or compelled you to poetry ‘later in life’?
MKC: It was the compactness of poetry. There’s this tiny little poem, but the impact is huge. I was fascinated by that. A poem can open your mind and your heart, and gives you the ability to see something more clearly or with more complexity.
RLU: Last year I expressed to local poet Trinh Le that one of the reasons I gravitate to poetry is because poems are a statement of want or desire—and the more that I'm able to articulate that desire on the page, the more that I'm able to approach that in my material, lived life off the page. The paper in front of me becomes a mirror and a guide for how I can enter the rest of my life. I’m wondering if something opened up within you at the point when you did start to explore yourself as a poet, given what you said about a poem allowing us to experience different cavities of ourselves.
MKC: Oh, absolutely. With poetry, I was able to occupy my skin better. It almost feels like there was part of myself that was living exiled somewhere. Poetry, for me, is the freedom of being able to be who you are and to say who you are. It’s a reclamation of all the things that are taken away from us when we go into the world. It’s about removing all those layers that get put on us.
That’s really tied to the ‘queer aesthetic’ in poetry. In thinking about my book, Dear Animal, I read a lot of those poems to predominantly straight groups. The reception was really different than when I was reading to a predominantly queer audience. I read at a literary speakeasy to an audience of gay men, who were the most enthusiastic about my poems, which mentioned vaginas and vulvas and genitalia. They really understood the poems. That reclamation of something that's beyond the body part, that something intertwined with misogyny and the way that we're taught to make ourselves small—that's really what those poems are about.
RLU: One of the aims of queer life—and I mean life at the club, life at the protest, life in relationship and life in the interstitial moments between those—is to substantiate and affirm that queer people are not too much or too loud or too big or too emotional or too flamboyant. At the same time I think most queer people have the experience throughout their lives–if not certainly in the early part of their lives, when they are under the control of potentially homophobic, transphobic parents—of being told that they're not enough. I wonder if a queer approach in poetry is the total rejection of this dichotomy, or of this binary, that one is either not enough or one is too much. I certainly see that in Dear Animal; the poems are so maximalist in their visuals and so ferocious and unabashed. To take it back to this dichotomy: by being too much, queer people become not enough. There’s a tension of existing on this wire between those two poles: if a queer person veers into one, they become the other. Queerness in lived experience is a way of rebuking and setting aside all of that bullshit.
MKC: You know, I’ve been asked, “Why don't you write queer poetry?” And I’m like, “What exactly would make my writing queer?” That question closes everything in. It's saying that queerness—or writing—has to look a particular way, whether that’s flamboyant or ferocious. Once you've created something that gets any positive attention, people say, “I love that, come and read the same thing.” Some have asked, “Why is your second book so weird.” It’s a question of what exactly are we allowed to do?
Think about the difference between Brontez Purnell and DA Powell, who are both queer writers, though very different in approach. There has to be room for all of it, and one is not more queer than the other. All of the work is interacting with life.
RLU: Ultimately I think it says more about the person who is suggesting what your poetry should be or dictating to you what your poetry should contain.
MKC: I definitely have gotten, “Why don't you write more Latinx poetry?” I wonder, why in the world would you ask that of anyone? Maybe that person wants to support poetry or support Black and brown communities. But if you actually want to be supportive, those words should never leave your mouth.
It's painful when you're dissected in that way and when there's an implied criticism in the question that's being asked. It’s like you’re not gay enough, queer enough, brown enough, Latinx enough, Black enough, woman enough, or ally enough. I’m really surprised by the expectations that are placed on us. I have to work at releasing those expectations, especially when I'm actually writing.
RLU: Yours is a poetics that languages in the bestiary, experiments with horror, and bends genre. You have said that “Horror is a language of reckoning,” which I understand to mean it’s a language of the past or a means of bringing the past into the present so that we may struggle with, so that we may struggle against. Horror is a means of making truth—or history—undeniable. What are the histories that you hope to bear into this moment? What do you want readers to struggle with?
MKC: That’s such a great question. Thank you. For a long time, I did not understand my love of horror. What I love about the genre is that it’s the action that goes along with unforgetting. Until you've dealt with it, it will keep coming back like a ghost. America is one big gothic nightmare, and it won't go away until it has dealt with itself; the ghosts will continue to haunt this country.
What I'm asking people to struggle alongside me with is what it means to be mixed race, what it means to not fit into any group, and what it means to be dismissed? I want people to grapple with the question of how we treat our children, and if we celebrate them or shun parts of our community.
RLU: You’ve said previously that imagination is a muscle of liberation. I want to tie this back to what poetry is able to make possible. Earlier you mentioned that poetry enabled you to occupy your skin more fully and explore yourself more deeply. This element of self exploration, I believe, is deeply tied to how we world build. We must learn ourselves so that we can learn others. I’m wondering how this lands for you. You’re writing poetry, you're building physical spaces for people to gather in, and, if I can make a theoretical leap, you’re facilitating a way for poetry to bring the future into where we are together, which is what I think imagination is.
MKC: Imagination is one part of a whole magical infrastructure. I don't think it's accidental that our minds cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an imagined experience. It’s a survival tool. I think if we couldn't imagine into a different future outside of the moment that we find ourselves in, things would begin to look pretty desperate.
The imagination of poetics and writing has so much potential. It’s akin to, I was going to say hope, but hope doesn't feel quite right. It’s a kind of practical hope. Poetry is powerful because the poem can say what other forms of communication might fail at. I think of poetics as love and queerness as love. Not just romantic love or sexual love. It's about a bigger love. It is about being able to accept other human beings, and just as much, being able to accept myself. It’s about honoring all of my ways of loving and all of my desires. It’s about seeing my desires as healthy and good, not as aberrations. I'd like to think that if we were all in that same place of being able to accept ourselves, we might not be where we are now. I think that denial and othering on that level is really damaging to human beings. It makes us a little less human to deny ourselves in that way.