The Texas Observer Interviews Poet Claudia Delfina Cardona

At the Texas Observer, Nic Yeager asks poet Claudia Delfina Cardona about her debut poetry collection, What Remains (Host Publications) and about writing and publishing in Texas. "I thought of What Remains because it was one of the recent poems I wrote," Cardona explains, "and I felt it encapsulated a lot of the themes that I was talking about with place and ancestry and longing." From there: 

I really enjoyed the introduction by Linda Rivaz Vázquez. What’s your relationship with her?

I met her in my MFA. We’re both Mexican-American and we were trying to navigate this mostly white MFA and really kind of kept each other from going crazy a lot of times. Me and Linda started up a literary journal called Infrarrealista focused on Texan writers. We’ve been dead set on publishing more non-MFA, non-academic Texan writers because there are so many of them, but they just aren’t really elevated. Or maybe they published books but the press went defunct. We want to focus on people who don’t have the same access to journals, and eventually want to publish translations and chapbooks in fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism.

One epigraph you include is a quote from Dorothea Lasky, “I say I want to save the world but really I want to write poems all day.” Tell me about that.

I’ve had this push and pull between feeling the way that certain people feel about poetry, as this very self-absorbed, apolitical art that can’t change the world and feeling very nihilistic about that, and seeing poetry as an act of archiving, which is where I am right now. That’s why I wrote a lot of the poems in this book. Each poem just serves as my own personal archive and also the archive of people in my life, my grandmother, my dad, his parents. It’s really important to me to archive that. That’s political in its own sense. It’s not going to, perhaps, change the world at all. But it’s still important for me and for my audience, which is regional. It would be nice to save the world, but poetry is also its own act of survival.

Continue reading at Texas Observer.