The Rumpus Talks to Roy G. Guzmán About Catrachos: Poems

At The Rumpus, Michael Kleber-Diggs sets the stage for a conversation with Roy G. Guzmán by nodding to the titular poem in the poet's debut collection, Catrachos: Poems (Graywolf, 2020). "A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience," says the publisher. For Kleber-Diggs, that poem "introduces a collection [that] is an examination of personal history, family history, queer history, and cultural history." From their video-conferenced interview:

Rumpus: What led you to poetry?

Guzmán: Growing up in Honduras, a lot of what I now know as poetry came to me through the National Anthem which has all these different strophes that we had to memorize. It’s a long anthem, but incredibly poetic, and early on I was exposed to this other sort of artistic language that of course is part nationalistic but is also a language you don’t use in everyday speech. I went to art school as a kid. My biological father is an artist. I thought I was going to be a visual artist; drawing was not a hobby—it defined me. I did that for a while. As a child in Miami, I went to a magnet program that dealt with visual arts.

Having said that, I was exposed to poetry via Rubén Darío, who was this idol in Central America and of course in some Latin American literary circles. He was seen as someone who gave language to our people, and he was seen as someone who also cared about Latin American issues.

My relationship to poetry has been a relationship I’ve had to different forms of art. It’s been me learning and being frustrated and wrestling to see what language can do for me. Early on, language was a thing for me to use as means to an end, as a means to advocate for myself, as a means to advocate for my family. I was connected to language as survival as opposed to language as aesthetics or language as a career.

All of these contradictions, all these different constellation points added to me being interested in language and being interested in art-making.

Rumpus: Catrachos has an aesthetic that seems informed by your interest in visual art.

Guzmán: Absolutely, one colleague at the University of Minnesota called it holographic. When she read it, it gave her this sense of holograms. It gave her this sense of three four-dimensional structures.

In language, I’m not just thinking about image, I’m thinking, What is a word containing?  […]

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