Brent Ameneyro talks family as mythology, food as memory, and language as reality with associate editor Josephine Gawtry.
Brent Ameneyro is the author of the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). His poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA at San Diego State University, where he was awarded the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. He was the 2022–23 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as the poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.
JG: I recently read A Face Out of Clay and absolutely loved it… the playfulness with image and language hit on some beautiful themes. In the book, there’s a consistent movement towards ancestral communication and knowledge. How does this tether to ancestry inform your poetry?
BA: To answer fully, I feel like I should start with what that means to me personally, because I’m the conduit through which the poetry is being created. So, whatever gets filtered through me is naturally going to be affected by who I am as a person. I’m very family oriented, I’m close with my parents and my brothers, and I value family—it’s something that’s important to me and that’s a big part of my life. I never knew my grandfathers, but my grandmothers were very dear to me and played a special role in my childhood. You’ll see Mayté in my collection quite a bit, that’s my dad’s mother. She was the true matriarch of the family, someone that cared for everyone and that everyone looked to for guidance. She was this beacon of light and hope. Not all of my poetry is about family, or is a kind of quasi-memoir, but that happened to be what this collection became and what I was writing during this period.
I started writing for this initially as a way to explore my memories of living in Mexico as a child. That was the initial impetus, and from there it expanded. I thought I was going to write a whole collection about this—all of the sudden there seemed to be this mad obsession—but that got boiled down to my chapbook, which was at first 30 pages and then became a 10-page micro-chapbook in the Ghost City Press summer Microchap series. Wow, I’m pretty good at going on tangents!
JG: Don’t worry! I’m so happy to listen!
BA: I guess what I’m trying to say is I started writing toward this particular packet of memories from this time period in Mexico, and from there, it just expanded into more of an exploration of several things: of identity, of self, of cultural identity, too, not even Mexican American identity but just American identity. There’s a complex, love-hate relationship with both America and Mexico. I don’t think it’s right to glorify any one space, because every group of people, whether we identify them as a country or a smaller group, has its problems. Within that, when you look at the family lineage and think about ancestry, or when I think about ancestry, it’s always interwoven between those complicated, larger identities.
I think about my dad’s side, and there’s this crazy lore of our ancestors. Like, “there was a photographer that was kidnapped during the Mexican Revolution,” or “there were two families, he had one family over here and another over here, so there’s a whole family no one really knows.” There are all these wild stories, and that’s true of every family to a certain degree. When I think about that—not just my closeness with my immediate family and how much I value family, but my lineage—it feels inherently literary, because it is a kind of mythology. The family story always feels like a form of myth, you know? I could almost picture some distant grandfather riding on horseback and fighting a dragon or something! Things get so grand when they’re passed down as stories, so when you hear them from family members, they seem surreal.
JG: And I love thinking that that’s where a lot of mythology comes from—attempts to grapple with where we come from, and the past. To pivot a bit, I absolutely loved the denseness of image in lines such as “my mustache is a feathered snake,” and “Houses like parakeets/perched on a dirt road”. What is your relationship to image in poetry? How do you conjure these moments of image while writing?
BA: I think that my early years of writing were mostly lyric poetry, and less image. It was inspired by music, and the crossing trajectories of my work in music and writing. I was later inspired by poets like Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, who are, again, more lyric, more passion, less of that distilled, concrete image. Then there was a period of time when I turned towards William Carlos Williams, towards that compression and that simplified, dense image. That became a kind of beacon for me, where I could play off of and kind of get lost in a chaotic lyric exploration, but then feel grounded by a single line of an image that makes me feel like I’m there, I can see that, I can taste that. I can feel comforted by it, and then I can go off again, exploring my feelings, my daydreams, the abstract, and then back to this distilled, single-line image. And there are two parts of that question I wanted to answer: one, where did that come from and how did I develop that in my writing, and two, thinking about image in terms of craft and approach. I think it’s about developing that balance between chaos and order. The image represents a kind of clarity, it’s very grounding to me.
JG: I suppose this third question also has to do with concrete image, especially how it shows up in your work. I’m very interested in the speaker’s experience with food and consumption in this book. A few lines from Tectonics stand out to me: “Pan dulches / salchicas picante / grocery store / the panadería y la tortillería / so small under the shadow of / the first american / food…” How do you feel like food is representational of journey and lineage in your work? What interests you about writing towards these areas?
BA: Food and family are one and the same, almost. Food is what everyone gathers around, what brings everyone together. Saying come over for a barbecue, or Grandma’s making tamales—it’s a reason to get all the family together. In my life, when we talk about ancestry, family, and lineage, food is inevitably correlated to that. There’s a poem in the collection talking about Mayté and her constantly bringing something out of the kitchen; as soon as the plates are cleared, something else comes out, and it goes like that all day. That’s how I remember Mayté, as this person who brought people together, and one of the tools to do that was food.
I think of my memories of living in Mexico, and a lot of those moments are grounded by food; by the unique experience of the little tiendita you go to and drinking soda out of a plastic bag with a straw in it. It’s still soda, there’s not anything different in it—except instead of high fructose corn syrup, it’s sugar—but the experience of having it in a plastic bag with a straw in it, that stood out to me. When I go into the space of memory, and think of what is actually there, what is concrete and not abstract, a lot of things come back to food. I have these flashes of different restaurants, or dinner tables, or people’s homes. A big part of both family and memory for me is food.
JG: And I think there’s something so natural about that—food as community, food as love, food as comfort. I appreciate that in your work, and I think it brings up a lot for the reader as well.
BA: Don’t quote me on this, but there’s something about smell being one of the strongest ways to remember things. I don’t know the science of it, but you can think of certain smells, or smell a certain food, and it transports you immediately.
JG: You’ll smell a certain flower, and it will remind you of summer camp in fourth grade, or something so distant and random like that.
BA: Right!
JG: I hate to move away from this, but this is something I’m so curious to hear about: your work often acts as an intermediary between past, present, and future, with the speaker experiencing multiple timelines, often within the same poem or even stanza. What led you to writing about temporality in this way? How do you feel that poetry bends or altogether rejects the linearities of time and space?
BA: I love that question! I love thinking about time and its relationship to poetry. I find ways to get excited about poetry because of its limitlessness. It’s not a contained vessel… it can be a neat narrative, it can be a loose lyric, it can be something in between; it can be present, it can be present looking into the past and then simultaneously weave in the future somehow. That’s what I appreciate about poetry—it doesn’t feel the need to be contained in any way.
In terms of time, like I mentioned before, not everything I write is memoir-esque. This collection happened to be an extended meditation on memory. I think using poetry as the vessel to explore memory allowed me to do it in a way that felt very liberating. There are so many different ways you can write towards memory; you can do journal writing or therapeutic writing, you can do something aiming towards a greater sense of accuracy, like memoir… poetry allows you to do all of it. You can address certain things that you really want to unpack for yourself, and you can archive things you view as important that you want a sense of permanence for. Like you said, you can do all of that, even within the line. It feels very powerful to not only preserve this thing but to also explore the concept of time and the concept of memory.
I feel like time, in general, is an endless meditation. You can go down this rabbit hole of reading philosophers and their perceptions of time, or science, too, can give you these wild thoughts on time. Just the way that we perceive light, in a way, makes me feel like we’re always looking at the past. Like nothing that we see is actually present, and maybe the present is nonexistent. I think a lot of that came from my original early, early influence of the Romantic poets, and writing about the ever-present here and now. The Romantics talked about how the here and now was essentially like God, like this stream of life, the constant flow. That always stuck with me because I feel that the ever-present here and now is both here and not here. Those kinds of abstract meditations on time, and sitting with what it means to be present at any given moment… once I kind of dissolve the present reality in that way, it feels very fluid to be able to move between the past and future. It no longer feels linear, it feels like I can move through time effortlessly.
Tying that back to the perspectives of the Romantics and their perspectives of time and God, those little pockets of poetry and poetic lineage; that’s what’s magical about poetry. The fact that I can even pull a single hair out of that and borrow something—maybe not even close to what others have done, but just to pull that one strand out, feels like a kind of magic.
JG: I love the way you answered that. Just poetry as this magic space where you can bend all of these parts of being, even time and space, and also be thinking about the spiritual. To me, that’s really special.
This is the last question, but we’ve definitely touched on this a bit. Your poetry works within and through linguistic borders of Spanish and English—in the poem Making a Face out of Clay, the eponymous poem, this duality is illustrated: “Always start with the tongue—/give it a fold down the middle/so the viewer will know/it must carry the weight/of language.” How do you feel like you represent this weight in your work? Has poetry been a medium where you’ve been able to find a balance between these two linguistic traditions?
BA: I’m going to actually look at the question this time—there’s a lot to that question! Addressing the line you pulled from that poem, the original line was, “give it a fold down the middle/so the viewer will know/it must carry the weight/of two languages.” I think it was Sandra Alcosser, one of my writing mentors at SDSU, that said I didn’t need to say two languages, I just needed to say of language. Folks will automatically interpret through the context of the collection that I’m talking about two languages, like you had. Or, even if they don’t, that image of a tongue carrying the weight of language is powerful on its own. I did want to talk about that, because sometimes you write a line and feel that it has to be that way, it has to say two languages, because that’s what you intended to say in that line. I think that sometimes what you’re intending to say isn’t as relevant. That lesson was right in a period of time where I was deeply understanding how to not write toward ideas, and how to ‘let go’ in my writing. So this poem—maybe it’s not the best poem in the collection, I don’t know—it was meaningful to me because it was written in a period of time where I felt I was going through this transformation of being able to escape anything that felt close to being didactic, or writing toward an idea, or clever, or anything like that. It felt pretty organic producing this, and that small nuance in the diction was representative of that larger idea that I was digesting. Sorry if that’s a bit of a tangent, I know there’s a lot more to your question. I’m not very good at answering questions directly.
JG: This is also just one of the biggest questions ever… sorry about that.
BA: Let me try to talk around it, and maybe you can nudge me if I don’t go in the right direction. I’ve always felt—and maybe this is true for anyone who grows up with two languages—that I was never a master of either language. I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in both of them. As I grew and studied writing and literature, I began to feel more in the know on the English side and more on the outside of Spanish. More and more, as the years go on, the less I use Spanish, the more I feel like I’m definitely on the outside looking in. And that relationship to language, as you grow up, depending on what type of education you have, it impacts the way that you perceive the world. When I think about language, I think about how my dad dreams in Spanish, though I’ve only ever known him to primarily speak to me in English. To go through all these years of him speaking to me in English, and to think of him going to sleep and having dreams that are in Spanish, it almost makes me feel like he has a version of reality that he gets to himself, that he hasn’t shared with me. Over the years, I think I’ve poked and prodded him enough to get a glimpse of that reality, but language is funny in that way.
All language is a form of translation, isn’t it? Without language, we’re not able to translate our abstract internal happenings, so language is a way for us to translate our thoughts and feelings. Even if you have one language, you’re still, in a way, constantly translating, because you’re taking the abstract internal cosmic energy and containing it into language. That’s my perspective on it, I think there’s two ways I think about language: one is that larger or deeper understanding of what language means in relation to being human, and then, I think more specifically about these two languages, English and Spanish, and their relationship to humanity, and the history of those languages.
It’s funny, maybe it was a social media argument or something, but I’m remembering this back and forth between two people where someone said something prideful about Spanish, like oh, you don’t know your Spanish… There’s always this thing, often in Mexican and Chicano spaces, where the people that are in Mexico criticize the Chicanos in the United States for their inability to speak Spanish. In that argument, in that moment, whatever it was that I’m taking out of context, someone said: “It’s strange that you would have this perspective on Spanish being this special thing, when both English and Spanish are colonizer languages.” If anyone really wanted to hold some powerful stance like, you’re the traitor and I have the powerful language, it would be Nahuatl, the native language of the indigenous peoples of Central America and Mexico.
I think now I’m going to zoom back out on these two things I’ve talked about. On the one hand, you have language in relation to humanity, as a powerful tool we have, and then on the other hand you have the more tangible lineage of language, and the relationship to certain groups of people, and where the language came from. And then language has this complicated power dynamic, too, thinking about writing in English, and the significance of that in the current globalization of our economy and our species. Can you tell me if I touched on anything that was helpful?
JG: No, I’m so interested in everything you touched on! I loved how earlier you talked about languages as realities—I took a literary theory class this past semester, and thinking about language as a translation of reality, and having two languages as two methods to translate, or two different realities period, is just fascinating. Reading your book and thinking about the intersections of dual realities is really helpful.
Josephine Gawtry is a poet from Southern Virginia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Colorado State University, where she is an associate editor for Colorado Review. Her work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. She has a three-legged rabbit named Cabbage.