More Alive, More Sensual, Smarter, Younger, Weirder, Older, More in Love

I have to acknowledge that we begin this conversation at a time when more of us in the United States are aware of mass-scale violence (from Gaza to Sudan). In recent months, Peru experienced a constitutional crisis and various protests, and the police response has left more than fifty dead. Because your work feels at once very immediate and intimate, but also spiritual and outside of time, I want to begin by asking: How are you right now? Answer that however you would like. 

Right now I feel good because I slept soundly, after a long time. I dreamed that I was looking at books from a friend's library. I spent a lot of time appreciating his books and fanzines. What is happening in Gaza and the state violence that occurred in Peru a few months ago and which is taking hold like a dictatorship cause me anxiety and keep me awake. Poetry is a way to return to our center, where we can find a peace outside of time. I think that just as important as not losing empathy and the capacity for indignation in the face of injustices and misfortunes is not losing the ability to laugh every day and celebrate the love we have earned. If some days the city lights do not turn on automatically, it is our duty to turn them on. I am happy because I am working on beautiful projects with great people, because I am in Lima and I can hang out with my parents, because summer is coming and the beach is very close to me.

In one interview you sketched out recent trends in Peruvian poetry, saying, “poetry of the ’90s/early 2000s was an exercise, generally speaking, in detachment, with which I don’t identify very much . . . The internet is a platform from which things are built and convened by and for the collective, without the need of ‘professional’ validation. And that’s why I’m most interested in the current scene, because it reaffirms poetry as a space of mutual knowing, deep listening, and community building instead of a space of macho-capitalist competition."

Can you say more about the ways the current Peruvian poetry scene is different from the past? How do you practice deep listening and mutual knowing in your poetry?

I was referring to a young scene—in general, the poetry scene in Peru is very diverse. It seemed important to me that this movement arose because it is irreverent toward tradition and the status quo (to the point of now being more focused on literary memes), and it is always healthy to remember that in poetry and art there are no authorities. Regarding the second question, a space for sensitive listening and mutual knowledge is how I live poetry in the spaces I frequent, which I find especially in Mexico and Argentina, where readings are often events where people propose rituals that make us feel closer, more alive, more sensual, smarter, younger, weirder, older, more in love. It is exciting to travel the world knowing that a community can welcome you and open its heart to you, starting with its ears.

I know you’re currently living partly in Peru and partly in Mexico City, and that you travel throughout the Americas. Can you say more about your experience in different national cultures and communities of writers and how these influence your writing?

I can begin by confessing that I am a nomad for love. It is difficult for me to settle in one place because I feel that I belong to several tribes built around poetry and the affections it provokes. I decided to live (on and off) in Mexico for over ten years because I felt like I wanted to grow with the amazing group of creative people I found there. Argentina attracts me today for the same reason, and because it is a mutual attraction. I am very curious about what my contemporaries are doing, and I would like to learn more about other Latin American scenes. I couldn't say how these displacements influence my writing, but I know that taking into account the performative space of writing that I appreciate so much (readings) makes me consider the form of the poem. For this reason I try to write longer texts. Short poems work to be read alone and to be shared on Instagram, but I know that I need to write long poems for our meetings, river poems where my friends can sail.

You write across genres and create across media, including poems for children, fiction, and film. How do you travel across or integrate these various practices? Have some of these media and genres taught you about others?

I think the most interesting thing about versatility is discovering that different types of languages are integrated into us by habit, by frequenting and enjoying them. I perceive these practices (cinema, poetry, narrative, comic) as languages with their own codes, symbols, and rhythms, and therefore they feed each other infinitely. The editing cuts, the framing, the enjambments, the vignettes, the way in which time passes through a certain space are the most interesting differences between these formats, in my opinion, and that is why it is rich to apply laws from one dimension to the others. Lately, I am orienting myself to those arts that require nothing more than my imagination and a computer, reducing costs and production equipment, exacerbating independence, agility, and mobility. Perhaps the genre that interests me most to continue exploring is the video essay, because of the poetry that allows the image and the romance that is proposed between everyday images and personal theories.

You’ve worked with other translators previously and concurrent to this project for Graywolf. Can you comment on the process of guiding your work through translation?

Generally, I prefer not to interfere too much in the translator's proposal. I usually respond to the queries they ask me and point out some inaccuracies when they seem substantial. It is a process of detachment and flexibility because it is inevitable to lose polysemic games, folds of the original words, but, with luck, equally suggestive alternatives can be found. Translation seems to me to be a very delicate job that must be done with as much love as a poem.