AN INTERVIEW WITH JON PINEDA

Craig Beaven: This is Craig Beaven. It's June 17, 2004, and I'm on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University talking with poet and fiction writer Jon Pineda for Blackbird.

Thanks for meeting with me, Jon.

Jon Pineda: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

CB: I've had the opportunity to read your work in a way that many people never have in that I read your book, Birthmark, and then walked over to the library [at VCU] and read your thesis, which is also called Birthmark. And I was wondering if you could show us a little of the process of how that thesis, which is very similar to and very different from the book, became the finished product. Can you talk about the revision techniques that you used?

JP: One of the things when I was going through and revising for the thesis, I realized that initial drafts of the manuscript were kind of collections of what I thought were poems that had worked for me in workshops and had been polished and things like that. Then I actually left the program and was gone for a while—my wife talked me into going back and finishing the degree—and in that span of time, I was generating new work, which became part of the thesis that you read. Part of that process that, I guess growing process, is kind of what dictated the revision. I went back into the thesis, took a look at it, and realized that some of the poems in the earlier draft just weren't doing anything other than just kind of announcing themselves as poems. And as far as having some type of cohesion to the book, I realized that I had to kind of go in there with the cutter and start taking out pieces that weren't working towards a kind of narrative arc that I think ultimately the published work does. So really the thesis was kind of an opener for the true revision process.

CB: When I read the thesis, I thought, "Wow, this is really strong." I don't know that I would have had the diligence to go back and revise. It seemed like a lot of the changes that you made were with what poets call "music," in that a lot of the line breaks changed, there's some compression. And I didn't know if you had an ear that maybe you weren't hearing them right, or maybe you were going for a specific sound, but it seemed like between the two versions the music was so different, and it's so elegant. In the final version there's a calmness and a more rhythmic . . . there's a lot more rhythms, I think.

JP: Thanks. Yeah, when I went back into seriously revising the collection that became the book, one of the mantras in my head that kind of just played itself over and over again was something that Ellen Bryant Voigt had impressed on us when she came here as a visiting professor, and that was that, you know, the line is a breath, and the line should basically encompass the breath. There's this sense that you almost make the reader more active in approaching the poem from that standpoint. And I attempted in the collection—I won't say I'm successful all the time—but really that was probably what allowed for the music of the line to open up a little bit more so that it became a kind of breathing, or an exercise in calming and breathing. And I found the line breaks just became easier as the process went on. I have a tendency to write out very long, long lines, extended, expansive lines, and then work my way back. For instance, the original version of "Matamis," which opens the collection in the book, had been shortened tremendously, which creates kind of a momentum.

CB: It felt sculpted. It felt like you had gone and really sculpted out the poems out of these rougher versions. It is a really interesting process to be able to view your thesis and see the book. It was an enlightening window into revision, I thought. I was like, "Oh, wow."

JP: Well, you know, a friend of mine, Oliver de la Paz [Names above Houses, Southern Illinois University Press, 2001]; he had come to Norfolk to read at Old Dominion University, and Oliver stayed with us for a few days. And I couldn't take any time off of work, so what I told Oliver was that you have blocks of time you can write. And my wife was taking our son at the time, who was only, I think Luke was probably maybe less than a year old or something, and so she was kind of going off for the day, doing things and running errands, so Oliver had a lot of time to grade his papers. He teaches. And my manuscript was just sitting out there. And I hadn't sent it out to Crab Orchard at this point. I came home for lunch, and here's my manuscript all over the place, and Oliver had labored through that and opened my eyes to new sequences that I hadn't even thought of, and so it gave me an incredible spot to begin again. Because I was getting a little down and had been a finalist in a number of prizes, but just didn't hit it yet. And so, you know how that goes. I mean, you just suck it up. You write the check. You put it back in the envelope. You send it off. You cross your fingers. And so I was kind of getting to a point where I was thinking about just shelving this collection, and I've already been working on my second one for the past couple of years, and, so anyway, I think I just was very fortunate that Oliver had taken it upon himself to do that.

CB: You just mentioned the structure, you know, some sequencing when you were talking about Oliver. One of the most compelling things about Birthmark is the structure of some of the poems. You have these really longish pieces comprised of smaller, untitled, unnumbered sections. I was wondering if you could talk about how you conceive of those. They don't seem to be sequences, or sequences the way we traditionally think of them.

JP: Whenever I'd heard poets talk about sequencing or things of that nature, it always seemed like it brought with it some type of sense of mechanism, of some type of mechanics, like there's something involved here that's going to allow you to move from one passage into the next passage and interlock. And I think that that's just part of it. We're going to look for places that bind together with the next. One thing that I wanted to do was to put my faith in the image and in what I was trying to write about and understand that my perception of that moment isn't necessarily the right, or the only way, to look at it, that there's a flawed sense in my perception, and I have to embrace that. And in doing that I allow myself to move on to the next thing, and the moment will reveal itself. And you have to give yourself over to that. So I think some of the fragmented poems that are in the book are that way because I've wholeheartedly just said, "Okay, I'm allowing this moment to kind of speak through me." Not to fall into Shamanism here or anything like that, but there is a sense of that. I mean, too much control over a poem will just, you know, squeeze the life out of it. I think a lot of writers, as they're working on pieces, especially the longer pieces where you're spending time with an enormous body of work, you start seeing where the pressure points are. Which ones do I need to touch? Which ones do I need to allow to just be what they're going to be and become what they're going to become? It's a hard thing to wrestle with. And I've made that attempt in this book to let the poem in these fragmented pieces basically just existed on their own without me messing with them too much.

CB: I want to back up. If I said fragmentary I want to correct that, because I don't think they're fragmentary at all. I think that they're remarkable cohesive, when at times they don't appear to be. I felt like that form of some of these longer poems seemed to be almost the key to the book in that the memories that are being recalled stretch and include so many disparate themes, so many scenes. The form seemed to allow for all the ephemera of experience. I was wondering if the form seemed like something of a breakthrough, because it seems like such a crucial element of the book are these longish pieces that just feel free to drift and do a lot of different things. It seemed to me to be one of the most profound elements of the book is how the form and memory are working together. Can you talk about that at all?

JP: Sure. I think my childhood, or at least the way that I remember my childhood, there was a lot of chaos, and certain parts—I don't know of many people that could sit back and say, "I had a childhood that had no chaos"—there is a sense of embracing the chaos that I think this book attempts to do. And so when I'm working in a form like these types of poems I feel very comfortable working in that, almost as if the more disparate these images are, the better. It raises the bar on where is this poem going to form as I'm working on drafts. For instance, you know I was raised Catholic, just completely inundated with stories of the saints, and there are a lot of writers that bring all that imagery into their work and things like that. I think I try to resist that. For instance, you know my wife and I were sitting outside this library one time, actually a library that I had gone to as a child and that we now take our son to. We had just had Luke, and we were sitting there on a bench. And it's right near the Elizabeth River, and so you see all kinds of wildlife coming through there. And this enormous blue heron just took off from the cordgrass and just hovered there. With its wings spread out, it looks like a cross. You can't help but to get away from that. And it wasn't so much that, you know, I thought of this kind of spiritual moment. It wasn't that at all. What it said to me was that here's a portion of my life that was suddenly brought to the forefront, my past in this one subtle moment. And so I think I look for that when I'm working on drafts, allowing myself to kind of be surprised, and allowing myself to first generate the work and then see what happens from that standpoint. So there's a large degree of freedom. I mean, there's a large degree of freedom that has to just exist on its own. You know, as writers, we're creating, we're recreating worlds. We're developing moments. We're witnessing moments. I mean there's so many factors going on. For me, I'm most comfortable just bringing that moment to the forefront, not to pass judgment on it, but to see what will illuminate that one spot. You can sit there, and you can throw a net out on the water and, you know, pull in all these fish, and that's fine, you know, and beautiful and all this stuff, but it's that one fish that moves, that startles you. And it's not the fact that it moved or that it startled you, but that the light on its scale becomes something else. I don't know what it becomes, but it becomes something. It always amazes me.

CB: Just now you were talking a lot about your past and yourself and your life. I was wondering if there was a point in your process where you decided or discovered that your personal life would figure so prominently in your work. I guess the question is, how did you come by your aesthetic?

JP: Sometimes I cringe when I write "I," and start out that poem. I refuse to get bogged down right now in the politics of what that means, and some people would say that's a cop out and I really should address that. And you know, I'm just one person. There are other poets that people can read. Go read someone else, then. I will say this. In the third-person poems—and there are quite a few of them in the book—I remember reading "The Lover," by I guess Marguerite Duras, I guess that's how you say her name. I remember being taken by the fact that as she's recounting her life, she switches into third person to discuss her childhood, especially in a moment that is supposed to be the hub of the book, when they're on the ferry and they're crossing the Mekong Delta. I was astounded by that, that someone would need to distance themselves even further through language in order to look at who they were. And so I thought that was something that I wanted to do. You hear from teachers all the time about "borrow this," or "you read such and such, see what they're doing here," and stuff like that. This was something that just was perfect for me because I was already moving in that direction. I just needed to be nudged a little bit further, especially the final poem of the book. You know, “This Poetry,” I mean, I wanted to have that be a poem that I could be a narrator and then also be a character in that work and address the reader the way I do at the very end.

CB: In that last poem of the book, when you write of the "he" character, you write that he is "someone who spends too much time remembering." In that poem, remembering almost becomes a trap, or a way to be lost to the present life we're living. And there's the idea in the book that the past must be remembered in order to, in some way, understand it or be free of it.

JP: I remember writing that line, wondering what my friends would think if this poem ever made it into print, later, after I was revising it, them knowing me and things like that, and that line is a central part of the book. It's something that is a statement on myself. I've basically created a book of stories, fragmented or otherwise, of my life, and then extensions beyond that only to come to a point where I realize that at least trying to bring the reader to a point that again, you know, I'm just one person. This is one person's moment in time, and your life is just as important as this. It's a statement to myself, too. Get away from this, these moments that haunt you. But at the same time, you have to face these moments. It is a book about the flaw of memory. It makes you who you are, and at the same time, it can delude you. So there's a fine line there.

CB: With all the autobiography, I was wondering, do you ever have people who read your poems and they say to you, "You're not remembering it accurately," or "It didn't happen that way," and they argue about the truth of the way you're presenting it. Does that ever happen?

JP: It hasn't happened yet.

CB: Okay.

JP: But when this book came out, my father hadn't read the collection yet, and—I mentioned this recently at a reading—that he called me up out of the blue and just said, "You know, I'm glad you made it through this." For him to say that to me was an affirmation that I realized as a writer I didn't need at all, because the book wasn't about validating a child's experience, or a grown person's experience or something like that. But to have him say that, for me, as his son, is just . . . it was wonderful.

CB: I wanted to talk about influence and community. The poems in Birthmark seem to be heavily populated with lots of different people and characters. And I guess I felt a kind of ghost community present as I read the work, which is only reinforced by the numerous thanks on the acknowledgements page. And I was wondering about how those people help shape the work. It seems to be community driven, this particular text.

JP: Yeah, it is. So many of the people that are thanked in the book in one way or another, whether they realized it or not, were big influences on me, and things they would say . . . I used to carry around a, just like a little notepad. People would say things to me that, whether they realized they were helping me tremendously or not, I don't, to this day I don't know, but I would just stop and just write down the line, and I realized a lot of the people that I'm thanking are teachers. So their thoughts about writing and working with a larger text, structuring, sequencing, things like that, just invaluable. But from a community sense, the book talks to some degree about being part Filipino and being raised mestizo and things of that nature. You know, I wanted to write a book like this because there just isn't that literature out there. I wanted to write a book that my nephew, who is mestizo, will pick up one day, or my children as well, but just they have that kind of communion with. The Filipino writers, both in the Philippines and here in the states, have been great, just a huge support crew, very engaging people. The poet friends and writer friends from that community have really pushed me to think, or take myself more seriously as an artist, and I'm thankful for that. So I wish there was more space on that page. You know, it's one of those things, you list out the stuff, and then it goes to print and then you think, "Oh, man, there's . . ."

CB: Still talking about influence, you have dedicated a brilliant long poem from Birthmark to the late Larry Levis. Can you talk about the influence of Levis and how that poem, "In the Romance of Grief," responds to or pays homage to that influence.

JP: His book Winter Stars was the first book that I had read by him, and I was sitting in the Chesapeake public library and hadn’t applied to any MFA programs. I was just waiting table at night and writing stories during the day and poems during the day. And I told myself that I was going to try to read every book of poetry in the Chesapeake Public Library. Well, I was pretty young. I had sat down. It was ridiculous.

CB: How many did you get through?

JP: Oh, I don't know. Probably about twenty. And those were small volumes. But one thing that did happen though, which was amazing, was I had read Philip Levine, and then I came to Levis, of course, because of just the alphabet, but also Levine dedicates What Work Is to Larry. So I fell into this thing where I was researching and trying to find out these connections, like what are these relationships between these writers in the contemporary writing world, they're friends here, they're dedicating books to each other? I realized that, like a light bulb came on, that I could learn of new writers by looking at acknowledgments pages for, you know, for that work and finding these people that I had never heard of and stuff. So, anyway, I came across Larry's work and just was blown away by Winter Stars, where he talks about the ankle of a horse, as holy. And it's just beautiful, you know. So much about that book is amazing. The narrative drive of that book, but at the same time, there's just . . . it is so lyrical in places that it's a timelessness about, where you kind of fall into these moments where you don't even realize that you're still being driven by the narrative of the poem. That book really impressed itself upon me. And I went back and read his other works. When I get to Widening Spell of the Leaves, I see that he's at VCU. I think, "Oh, my God! He's just right up the road." But his work, to this day I return to his work. It's something that is haunting. It's so critical. He falls into moments where, like in Elegy, where he likens himself to Poe, and he's walking the streets of Richmond. I don't even know what to say about that other than it leaves me silent, because there's just a reverence for that kind of courage, I think, that poets can do and can go beyond themselves. And there's a certain amount, well, there's an incredible amount of ability that with Larry doing that in his work, where he goes beyond himself, where his poems are extending beyond the personal into the world.

CB: History.

JP: History, bringing you back in, not being afraid to reveal certain things about himself for the greater sake of the poem. That's very noble. And I think I aspire towards that. There is a considerable amount of courage in his work, and, yeah, his work is haunting, it . . .

CB: You mentioned reverence for so much. I mean, he seems to take poetry with such great honor.

JP: He really does. And the characters can be, let's say, characters who wouldn't be in a poem a hundred years ago. He's going to give you a character, or he's going to introduce you to a person that even to this day, the average person might think, might turn away from. You know, he brings a nobility to existence. It doesn't matter if you're that teenage kid in a pool hall who is basically telling Larry the poet, "I've never met a poet" or "My dad burned books." There's kind of the working-class stereotype or something that he immediately humanizes. I don't know. I just love it. My mother was raised on a farm in North Carolina, so I've always been exposed to stories of hardship and farm life. The trials of just making it through the seasons.

CB: The soil.

JP: The soil. You know, my mother told me a story once about her brothers, who were twins, and I don't think they lived to be two. And my grandmother picked up, and they just continued on with their lives. She had a brother that was killed by a horse. He wasn't even ten. So there were these amazing, yeah, I 'd say amazing . . . people are going through this every day. I think what's wonderful about Levis is that he makes us stop and take notice of the otherwise unnoticeable, and then, as we notice it, we realize how wonderful it is. And so I admire that.

CB: I was thinking of Levis when I was reading your work before I came across that dedication. Something he seems to do is go further with imagination than anyone else does. You mentioned "the beyond." He takes you to the beyond. So much of your work is set I think in that tone of imagination, that high tone of imagination. I'm thinking of a poem called "The Muse, or Stars Out on Interstate 81 South," "Arboretum," and "Memory in the Shape of a House Made of Doors." I was wondering if you could just talk about the impulse, or the desire, to kind of imagine these things in such a magical or mystical way. I didn't know if that was a Levis influence, or if that is just what poets want to do, you know, but so much of the work seemed, I guess, imagination driven, if it wasn't memory driven. Even when it is memory driven, it's still driven by imagination. But so many of the poems seemed to have that kind of reverent tone for imagination that Levis brings. Can you talk about the degree of imagination?

JP: Yeah, I think some of the earlier poems in the book are trying to forge a kind of communion with moments, getting the reader to accept the kind of tone that I'm setting. And whether it's as obvious as I'm half Filipino or something and now here I'm bringing you into this moment and things like that, and trying to reconstruct some wholeness throughout my life with this. Whether something as basic or as upfront as that, this sense of imagination, I realized as I was working on pieces in later drafts of the book, I would go in and try to push the poem further by taking the poem and seeing a spot that really that's what the poem was about. Why did I shy away from this? What is it about that moment? Am I too close to it? Am I considering it too precious? What is it? Then going into it and just really almost being irreverent with it.

Kurt Vonnegut had said to some of his writing students—I think it was a seminar down at South Carolina's MFA program or something; they had some clip of him visiting—and he was talking to them about just being just as mean as possible to your characters, because they're just characters. Really just put them in the absolute worst conditions. Just really wring it out of them. I thought that was pretty funny, and just amazing. But that sense of putting your work to task is what kind of, I think, got me into the mode of stretching the imagination. Realizing that, number one, there's something in this draft that I'm tiptoeing around. I really need to push it, and then open up and allow myself that freedom to go, being suspect of myself in a way. I think, still talking about Levis, I think there are moments where he is suspect of himself as writer. And so it's almost like he allows that imagination just to go beyond, get away from himself, just let it go.

So, in a sense, that was a big influence on me, but I also think that I kind of came to it, too, from trying to create this sense of communion in the work and realizing in later revisions that it wasn't there—more things had to happen, things had to occur—and being a little critical of myself. It's taken a while, and even now, I have trouble looking at drafts and realizing, "Am I going too far with things?" I mean, this new collection that I'm working on, I've had to take a break and started painting a couple of months ago because I've lost something. It's some kind of, some sense of ideal that I had when I started the second collection. And, in a way, I'm really happy that I have because now I can start from another spot. I've been working on this collection for three years now. And it's had a number of shifts, and the book, as it is right now, you can see the shifts. I don't want that. I don't want it to be so obvious right now, but that's where it's moving. And it's very taxing. The book is extending in places. I just need to reel it back in.

CB: You have a new story in the issue of Blackbird, and I was wondering, we know you as a poet. What role does fiction play in your writing life?

JP: Fiction is something that I've always wanted to write. I think that I give myself a break when I write fiction. And that's not to take anything away from people that write fiction, because I know that it's just as taxing, and there's so much involved with that. But for me, I write poems because I have to, and I write stories because I want to. When I'm writing stories, I tend to write stories when, like right now, I'm writing a lot of stories because I'm trying to get away from this collection of poems. It's just killing me. But, that's kind of what it is for me.

CB: Do you think of yourself as a poet, or as a writer, the word "writer" encompassing multiple genres, a poet being someone who just works in obscurity?

JP: Gosh. Can I say "C"?

CB: Do you see fiction writing as a vital part of your writing? You said earlier, you were talking about a collection of short stories. So you do pursue that.

JP: Yeah, I would say very much so. I see myself as a fiction writer as well. And that's because, I think that in a way, they kind of feed off of each other. When I write a good story, I suddenly feel like, "You know, I want to get back to that book of poems." And after I've kind of worked through on drafts of poems, it's like I get this sense of, you know, just this happiness to kind of work with characters. They go hand in hand. Yeah.

CB: For you.

JP: For me, yes.

CB: You were talking about a second collection. I always wonder how that works. Looking from an outsider’s perspective, it looks like a really clean demarcation, like your first book comes out and you wake up the next morning and start writing your second book. Obviously there was some overlap between Birthmark and this next collection.

JP: Yes.

CB: How do you conceive of those to keep them separate and to keep their integrity? I think I would have had the impulse to cobble everything together and make it like an über collection.

JP: Yeah. There's definitely some overlap that occurred. What had happened and what got me working on the second collection is I started writing these very compressed lyrics. So much so that it was painfully obvious that I couldn't fit this work that I was generating into the collection that I should've been putting it into. So it was almost like I had to have like a box where I was just throwing these pieces in there and saying, "Okay, I'm gonna come back to 'em later." And then, I had a false sense of structure for a collection early on. And it led me down, I think, the wrong road, to a certain extent for a while. And I've since gone back, and out of the seventy poems that I generated, I think I cut—this is not an exaggeration—probably sixty of them and am just glad that I did. About fifty of them had the same title.

I think with this first collection out, it's given me a chance to kind of breathe a little bit easier. Years ago I would have been kicking myself right now for saying that I'm going to sit back and let this second collection kind of develop a little bit more, as if I could prod it into becoming something. I've had this book in so many different versions in the last couple of years that each time I go and cut pieces out of it, little parts will stay and so it is becoming a collection on its own, rather than an extension of Birthmark, that type of aesthetic. There's a sense to explore and a freedom to do that. I'm allowing myself to do that. And I also know that a good portion of the book feels nothing like the poems in Birthmark, and in a way, that's a little scary because I feel very comfortable with these poems in Birthmark. Of course, I think, well, if people are reading Birthmark, and let's say they do like it, and then I come out with this second collection, am I going to surprise everyone with this new kind of . . .

CB: Yeah, there's that idea that you don't want to repeat yourself but you don't want to abandon your loyal fans . . .

JP: Right. Right. Yeah, but, you know, I guess, in the end, the work is just going to become what it's going to become, and I'm comfortable with that. I've heard writers talk about that in the past and didn't know truly what they were talking about. I would think, well, you know, you can work towards this. You can get up every morning. You can do this. And I have a pretty strict regimen when I get up and write, but there are some times when I'm writing where I'll just stop and I'll just start painting. You know, you just need to get away from the work. Those sixty poems that I cut, thank God I cut them because, after not reading them critically for about a year and then returning to them and seeing them for what they were, I realized that it was just, it was an exercise, to get to the next spot. And so I'm glad I wrote through it. I mean I really am. You know, it just goes to show you that you don't have to date everything that you write. It's not gospel, or at least, with me, I know it's not gospel. It can just as easily go to the trash.

CB: So do you write every day?

JP: I try to. I think what I'm starting to embrace more is to read every day. That's something that I got away from, especially in the throes of finishing up the manuscript. The first one, you kind of get wrapped up in it, which might be the reason that the book ends the way it does, you know, with this sense of just forget it all, come back to your life. But I'm always running across writers that [I] never knew existed, and I love that. You know, there's so many great writers out there, and there just isn't enough time to read them all. So I just kind of take comfort in the fact that, you know, just pile up the books and just start reading each day.

CB: It seems like there's always going to be poets to discover because they don't get any recognition to begin with. You think you've read every poet, and then you tap into a whole 'nother branch, and there's like fifty writers living and breathing that you've never heard of.

JP: And they're all equally just brilliant, you know. There's just that, yeah, that's amazing. I love that. That's kind of what makes all of this exciting . . .

CB: The discovery . . .

JP: Yeah, the discovery, finding those new voices. I'll never forget, as an undergrad studying English, and you hear that question, "What are you gonna do with this? What are you gonna do with English? What are you gonna do with that English degree?" to the point that it just sounds ridiculous to hear it coming out of someone's mouth. And you just realize that those people just, unfortunately, haven't had a chance to have those moments where they've read these wonderful books. I was seduced early on.

CB: All right, well. Thanks a lot for meeting with us. I really appreciate it. I had a good time.

JP: Thanks a lot.  

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