In Prelude Issue 2, Cornelia Barber and Jennifer Tamayo in Dialogue

By now our dear readers may have wandered over Prelude to peruse their second issue, featuring quite the stellar lineup. A few highlights include Diana Hamilton's "Essay on Bad Writing;" new poems by Rae Armantrout, Angel Nafis, Jacqueline Waters, Jason Koo, Ben Fama, Shane Book, Katy Lederer, Anne Tardos, Paige Taggart, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and many others; Robert Archambeau's essay "Tennis Court Oaths: France and the Making of John Ashbery"; and a conversation between Cornelia Barber and Jennifer Tamayo, which we're choosing to highlight here today as the two share thoughts on writing and performance, writing through performance, migration, and Tamayo's two books YOU DA ONE and [Red Missed Aches]. Barber sets the stage for us:

Jennifer Tamayo’s poetry is full of movement and vulnerability. It is not ‘about’ the relationship to patriarchy, or to being an immigrant and a woman of color. It is not ‘about’ working through her family history. It ‘is’ all that—words inseparable from life; experience embodied, breathing out words. When I left Harlem after sharing a delicious home cooked dinner I found myself comforted and inspired by JT to do my own artistic, emotional and social work. Just so there is no confusion, this incredibly honest conversation is not a form of catharsis or a pass. It is a call for all of us to do the work. It is not anyone else’s job to remind us of where our ignorance, privilege, and self-riotousness block us and blind us from seeing the truth about ourselves. JT is a poet who fearlessly confronts her ugliest, scariest inner recesses, and her work demands that the rest of us do the same.

Their conversation starts off with a discussion of the role performance has played in Tamayo's writing, with Tamayo describing her process: "So I perform and then I write into the performance. By ‘write into’ I mean I respond to the performance with poetry. Now I can’t write poetry without performing." Then they go on to discuss how they imagine language and the way those conceptions have influenced their entry into poetry:

CB: There is something I really admire about your work which is that, in my own head I have this binary between the political body and the language body, if you want to call it that—

JT: And what does the language body do?

CB: I think of the language body as poetry itself and what comes out of the words, tones and motivations that a writer puts into that language. Not just the symbols, but how a writer got to them. So I think about them separately. A poem can be ‘about’ a social or political body or not, but it is still always ‘about’ it. But I find in your work you access a balance that is not binary. It’s the same thing. I’m wondering about that, and I’m thinking of ‘ENGLUUUUSH’ a phrase from YOU DA ONE, and a lot of the word play that you do that incorporates broken English, and exchanging different signifiers changing the meanings of phrases, how that creates a body that is both social and language based.

JT: It’s strange I never saw it like that. I don’t even imagine it as separate. They don’t exist that way for me and it’s partly I think—if you had ever asked me you know what are you working in, what body? I would always say the language body, for sure, ‘that’s the only one I’m in.’ And then maybe after you or somebody else would interrogate that, it would be like, ‘no the political body that’s the one I’m more engaged in.’ The two are so intertwined to me. ‘ENGLUUUUSH’ is really strange, the way you’re describing it. I think it was connected to the language body and like this gushing of language that flows through me and how I constantly think English is a thing in my mouth. I feel very separate to it, English. It doesn’t come to me easily. I don’t feel comfortable in any language. I think that is where the word play and the homophonic shifts come in. Something that happened very early on in my poetry life; I would miss-spell something or write something incorrectly, there is no way I could get out of my body the fact that this is not my native language. No matter how many degrees away you get your body will never forget. At first I would try to stifle it, ‘I will fix that word, I will fix that word’,’ there was a strong desire to fix and tame this thing that was part of me, and then my mentors were like this is not a thing you tame, this is a thing you cultivate. Even if it makes you uncomfortable because it might come across as she doesn’t know how to spell or you might emphasize this broken language that isn’t broken, this is English too. You know? As if English were ever stable, that purity of the English language also felt really shitty.

CB: Or like a performance, a negative performance?

JT: Yeah, a negative performance, umm so it became this thing that instead of seeing it as a marker for my difference or a marker as the way my language was failing, it was the opposite. You rupture it. Be the thing that makes your voice, your voice. Suddenly that became so freeing as a poet. To have somebody say ‘stop trying to fix it and instead, dig into it, go more deeply’ and out of that came a poetry that felt a lot more alive to me.

Read it in full here, and be sure to return to the Prelude TOC for more goodness.