In Retrospect: An Interview with Julia Alvarez, Author of Visitations
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Julia Alvarez, who has returned to her “first love”—poetry—with her new collection, Visitations. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Alvarez’s body of work, from her early poetry to her most recent compositions. “Julia Alvarez conjures the spirits that haunt our histories with luminous precision,” says Carmen Giménez. Here, Alvarez walks us through her life in poetry thus far, from early poems featuring the vocabulary and rhythms of housekeeping to a current obsession with the songs of old age.
Frontier Poetry: What inclinations or desires brought you to writing poetry earlier in your life? What forms or elements of your earlier poems do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Julia Alvarez: I came from a background where poetry was performative, it was shared in community, it was musical. Wonderful poets like, you know, our Spanish equivalents of Wordsworth or Keats, and I loved it. I loved the rhythmic musical language. I wasn’t writing. I hated books. I flunked every grade through fifth grade. I was not a good student. But I loved stories. It was a storytelling culture of poetry recitation, oral culture. That was my love.
When I came into English, I think I gravitated towards poetry because poetry in English had that musical quality that I was missing in the language of English, but which I was used to in Spanish. I sometimes say that it was my way of speaking Spanish in English, to fall in love with poetry, especially [the] cadence [and] rhyme. I remember those were my first loves, and every poem in English that I would learn, that I would fall in love with, I learned by heart. I was a walking anthology. But I wasn’t writing until high school because of English teachers that encouraged me. A good teacher sees in you what you don’t yet see in yourself. They encouraged me, and I thought, “Oh, you know, I would love to join the circle of the people that I love and carry inside my head already and be a writer.”
I think finding my voice… was [through] being at Yaddo, getting a residency for—I think it was six weeks—and [experiencing] writer’s block. Because I was trying to write like the big white guys from England, and that wasn’t my voice. And then [I was] discovering the women who were down in the kitchen and cleaning the mansion of Yaddo, and recalling my childhood, and the musical language of my aunts and my mother teaching me my first arts, which were the household arts. I remember starting to jot down that musical language of that first childhood, and by just copying things from the cookbook that I was looking at, as the cleaning staff and the cook at Yaddo [were] talking about what they did at the mansion. I started writing down all the vocabulary and words of their instruments… I wrote a lot of the housekeeping poems which formed the first part of Homecoming, my first collection, at Yaddo.
F.P.: What lesson(s) did writing and collecting your poems in past bodies of work teach you that you applied to writing Visitations?
J.A: I think in that first book it really helped that I had an editor, and my editor was my former poetry teacher from Middlebury College. He was the poetry editor of Grove Press—connections do help. He was eager to [publish] women from different ethnicities and voices. He approached me, and I worked with him closely. I just had a bunch of poems. The housekeeping poems came because I had found a landscape I wanted to explore… One poem led to another, and then I had them all together, and he looked at those and he said, “Yes, I hear there’s a group here.There’s a collection there.”
I went on to write the “33” poems, which just began as what I call free verse sonnets. I wanted them to sound like a woman talking to another woman in a kitchen drinking coffee. So I wanted to use the traditional form that I talk about in [“Housekeeping Cages”]. I wanted to infuse it with a woman’s concern and voices. So what began as one sonnet, as a birthday poem to myself when I turned 33, ended up being over 50 sonnets. I think that [it] helped me, too, having an editor.
I had an editor for Visitations, because I’ve been working in fiction and prose for so many years, but I always came back to poetry. I had these poems that were written all along the way, and having an editor that could look at it and say, “You know, these poems are talking to each other, and I see these poems.” And [editors] help you, especially with a collection like that, because with the housekeeping poems, and also with “33,” and also with The Woman I Kept to Myself, I was on a roll.
In The Woman I Kept to Myself, I discovered this three-stanza form of iambic pentameter: 10 lines each, loose iambic pentameter. I didn’t want it to be like the tight forms I had been trained in with Milton and Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was a form that I found was a very useful form for exploring different aspects, different territories of my life. There I did have a collection. I think that’s my most sort of elegant book in the sense that it very much has a form.
Whereas The Other Side / El Otro Lado, is a messy book. A book that has childhood poems. It has a long love sequence, the Joe poems. Then it has the other side, which I think of as my epic journey going back—instead of the Odyssey—mine was going back to the homeland.
F.P.: In terms of the evolution of your collection, Visitations, could you briefly map out, generally, the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
J.A.: Many of the poems are narrative poems. I find that each of these collections have been exploring different [forms], from free verse sonnets of “33” or the different forms in the housekeeping poems. When I was writing, for instance, “Of Sweeping,” I wanted it to be couplets, because, when you’re sweeping with a broom, you and the broom are partners. So each one would reflect the activity I was writing about.
With Visitations, the poems have a narrative form, a storytelling form. They’re telling a story about an activity or time in life…. Some are very old poems, as I say in the “Sobre Mesa” at the back. Some are poems I started, that I wrote 40 years ago. Some are more recent poems, like the last poem in the collection, “I Go Through The House Turning Off Lights.” In a way, as I say in the “Sobre Mesa,” they’re visitations from different selves that still have something to say to me.
My agent has been sending them out here and there, [and] they’ve won a prize or they’ve been in Best American Poetry. But they were like scattered tribes, and he said, “Why don’t you think of putting them together?” So Stuart [Bernstein] was my first reader, my agent, and he’s a wonderful reader. And [John Olivarez] helped me. Instead of a huge collection, because there were a lot of them, he said, “Let’s keep them trimmed because they’re big poems, you know, and they take up a lot of space.” And that was difficult, but he helped me sort through that.
F.P.: How did the running theme or fascination with visitors of various forms—from your mother’s friends to family members to yourself as a visitor—evolve over the course of writing the collection?
J.A.: I’m going to say that I think of them not as visitors, but visitations. Which is these moments—they can be moments or figures—whether it’s the mother that comes back, not literally, when the speaker visits a nursing home. Her mother’s dead, but keeps seeing her mother in especially in this one woman. Or the visitation of thinking of my father dropping me off at the library while he went looking for work. The visitation of that memory. Or the visitation of the memory of my sister, who ended up being a chef, of something she used to do in childhood, and I thought, “Wow, it was there from the beginning.” The visitation of that connection.
The older you get, these memories, these figures—many of them no longer alive or close by—come back out of nowhere in a dream, maybe. Or when you’re sitting down to write, and they come with a sort of a luminosity, and you go, “Oh, oh, so what is this about?” And you can’t try to catch them and grab them. You just have to sit very still and wait to see what comes of them.
When a friend of mine read the collection, she asked me an interesting question. She said—[about] the one about waiting for my father to pick me up at the public library, [and] she’s a Dominican friend—she said, “Julia, could you have written that poem 10 years ago?” I said, “No.” I call them visitations because they have deep root systems. It’s not just the sudden visit of a stranger at the door. They’re ghostly. They’re figures that come with a whole root system of connections and past that enriches them, and helps you see them more fully in a way, through the lens of the particular thing you’re describing in the poem or visiting in the poem. You’re visiting that moment.
And as I say in the end, Visitations is also a reference to the Virgin Mary going to see her cousin Elizabeth. I was raised in, as a Catholic girl in a Catholic family in a Catholic country, so I got it in great quantities, my catechism. And that was the moment when the two women visit each other, and the babes in each of their wombs leap in their womb, and Mary utters this beautiful poem, the Magnificat. And I want poetry to do that to a reader, to do that to me. And that moment is referred to in catechism as the visitation. So I’m also referencing that visitation, you know, that moment in memory that something stirred in you.
F.P.: I’m often fascinated by the process of revision, and how similar yet different it can look from poet to poet—I’m sure our audience is, too. How much revision did the poems in Visitations go through, and what is your process for getting poems to a place where you feel ready to publish them?
J.A.: I think I have to thank, for their forbearance, my editors, copy editors, people that I tell, “This is the final proof. Only change maybe a comma or a period.” I come back. I can’t not revise, and it used to make me feel bad. I don’t even like to read from old books in public anymore because I go, “What could I have been thinking? Oh my God, the overuse of ellipsis in this series is just… please! Cringe. Get me out of here.” And I used to think, “Oh my gosh, how could I have put this book out there?”And then I think, “You know, that’s a good sign. It’s a sign that you’ve grown as a writer. You couldn’t have seen that back then.” Now, a good editor helps you see it even before you’re willing or able to see it. John Freeman was just so patient with me, and he understood.
Emily Dickinson said that there are no approximate words in a poem. I think that’s a very high bar. Each word, you see so much of it, because it’s not crowded in with so many other words. The thing too, with revising poems, is I have to hear them. I can revise and revise a poem, but it’s only the first time that I read it to someone else, so I’m hearing it with other ears, that I hear where it has a bump I don’t want, where it catches, where there’s a knot. [There’s] nothing like reading it out loud, number one, to yourself, but also to someone else.
And I tell you, one of the things with reading it out loud is that it dovetails in [with] what I used to tell my students in writing workshop. Revision is reading your work as if it had been written by someone else. And sometimes you need distance, which is why often it’s only years after you write a poem that you can see where you were stuck and it didn’t work. But you didn’t have that kind of insight yet. You weren’t there yet.
F.P.: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with? Something that keeps visiting you over and over again?
J.A.: I’m mapping a different landscape now: what are the stories, what are the poems of old age? Old age is the great equalizer. We have our ethnicities, we have our races, we have our genders, however we define them. In those we have our identity. But if we’re lucky enough to grow old, we’re all going to share that. What are the places that we have silences around aging? What are the erasures that are happening? What are the songs of this time of life?
