Patty Interviews Laurie Ann Guerrero
Laurie Ann Guerrero is a San Antonio poet and adjunct instructor in the English Department at Palo Alto College. Guerrero’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palo Alto Review; BorderSenses; Global City Review; Literary Mama; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Feminist Studies; and others. Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Smith College in Northampton, MA, and is an MFA candidate at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Her first book, Babies Under the Skin, won the Panhandler Publishing Chapbook Award, chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye. Guerrero is also currently working as a writer-in-residence through Gemini Ink’s Writer in the Communities Program in San Antonio. She divides her time between Texas and New Jersey.
Patty Ortiz (PO): Describe your practice? How do the things you see/experience in the world transform into your poetry?
Laurie Ann Guerrero (LG): Coming from a tradition of storytelling, I try to create the kind of poems that—first— help me break down the truths in my home, my community, my nation, my history, and hopefully, when the poems are sent out into the world, affect others in a way that allows us to move a little easier as one. I try to take into my body this world, break down the truths associated with things like poverty, hate crimes, privilege, and then with the use of my own cultural experience—as a woman from Southside San Antonio— form poems that combine the sing-songy voice of my grandparents and the insistent manner of my generation. To be ready for this kind of work, I always listen. I always carry a pen. And I never use the kind of elevated or archaic language that would exclude my own people from reading poetry written about our world.
PO: Your poetry seems to touch both big and small ideas, simultaneously. How do you keep this balance so beautifully?
LG: When I hear or experience an event or moment that affects my world in a large way—colonization of many sorts, loss, or even the hope of a new president—I let these stories work their way down to the very personal. This trickling down to the intimate ways this affects me on a daily basis demands a reaction…or action as a Tejana woman, a mother, a daughter, a partner, a citizen of San Antonio, Texas, United States, and helps me make sense, or try to, of my purpose as a poet, documenter, witness. I zoom in. And sometimes, it works in an opposite way. For example, if I feel personally silenced in some way, by a colleague or an institution say, I think back to the generations before me and use their lives, their stories, as a way to draw a juxtaposition, and eventually, hopefully, a call to action.
PO: Just as you describe how you zoom in and out, you also mentioned that you like to shift from a sing-songy voice to a more contemporary tone. Can you talk more about that?
LG: I think it’s very important to honor the voices of my ancestors who, no doubt, were rarely, if ever, heard. I only truly know my grandparents and have vague remembrances of my great-grandparents, all of whom have or had voices that sound(ed) like music to me. Whether they quivered in fear of their own memories—in both Spanish and broken English— or celebrated small victories in their lives, it was about the cadence of their words, and the rise and fall of tone in their stories that I want very desperately to recreate. I know that it is in my blood, and I try to evoke it on paper. I think it is equally as important, and ultimately inevitable (lucky for me), to speak from the generation to which I belong. We have a voice that needs to be heard; a voice that (for example), as Tejanos, is neither in perfect English nor perfect Spanish. These are the kinds of issues I explore as a poet, and more than anything, I want to open up a dialogue. More specifically, as a Southsider from San Antonio, I want my work to be accessible to all those who want to be in dialogue. I want to address the issues that we are dealing with now— with educators, peers, neighbors alike. And so, my motto: keep it real.
PO: I like that. On the “needing to be heard” idea, how do you prefer to present your work, on paper or do you prefer to read it? Where do you share your work locally? Where do you hear/read other poets in San Antonio?
I really enjoy reading them; I think when a poet reads his or her work, readers get a glimpse into the pacing and tone that they may have missed in their own reading. Sometimes a poet emphasizes a word that likewise may have been skipped over. Although, I must say, one of the most important lessons I have learned about poems is that they must live beyond the poet. A poem must stand independently as its own entity, and be able to do the work intended. So, the written text may be even more important than a poet’s presentation of it orally. I have read in numerous venues around San Antonio. Some of the publications I have been in, Texas Poetry Calendar, The Weight of Addition: an Anthology of Texas Poets, have had readings at the Twig, of which I was a part. I also read for Gemini Ink in April at the Igo Library with other poets. Just last November, I read at BookWoman in Austin for Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, which published a poem of mine, “Put Attention.” My favorite reading in Texas, however, was in February of 2008 at Palo Alto College, when I was invited to read from my chapbook, Babies Under the Skin. PAC flew me into SA from Northampton, Massachusetts where I was living for three years while I attended Smith College. Being invited back to my home community, my home school, to share these poems meant a great deal to me. Gemini Ink is a great place to hear poets. Once a month (first Friday) they have a reading series, which gives San Antonio great access to some poets we might not have access to otherwise.
PO: Laurie, thanks for your time. It was great hearing about your creative process.
EXAMPLES OF LAURIE ANN GUERRERO’S WORK
PUT ATTENTION
Put attention, grandma would say, as if attention
were a packet of salt to be sprinkled, or a mound
we could scoop out of a carton like ice cream.
Put attention, put attention. Put it where? In her hands?
In the Percolator? On top of the television set
that seeps fat red lips and Mexican moustaches?
Next to the jade Buddha? Between La Virgen and cousin
Pablo’s sixth grade class photo—marshmallowy teeth
jumping out of his mouth? We never corrected her.
Like the breast, Spanish lulled grandma’s tongue, as we threw
down shards of English for her to leap in and around,
laughing. Put attention, put attention. Put it where?
Shall I put attention in my glass and drink it soft like Montepulciano
d’Abruzzo? Like Shiner Bock? Horchata? Put attention.
Ponga atención, she tried to say in our language.
Put attention somewhere large. Back into her eyes. In the part of her
brain that doesn’t remember her own daughters,
how to make rice, how to translate instructions.
Published in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Fall 2009
LAS LENGUAS
Once, a man told me
to hear the voice of God
one must first be able to speak
in tongues.
Years later, another man
told me speaking in tongues
was the kind of sin
you couldn’t hide.
Who knows what the priests
told my mother when, with a quivering
chin, she pleaded, Por favor, padre,
necesito ir al baño, squeezing
her tiny thighs together
in the best English
she could muster.
First published in The Weight of Addition: an Anthology of Texas Poets
(Mutabilis Press, 2007)
BABIES UNDER THE HOUSE
In Memoriam: Sariyah Garcia, fourteen months old
and her brother, Sebastian Lopez, four months old
San Antonio, Texas, March 2007
When you open your eyes again, Sariyah,
this’ll just be one of those things— like rice
and bean tacos every night, having to go
to the free clinic, buying gas with food stamps
at Ben’s Ice House at the corner of Pleasanton
and Petaluma. But you know that, don’t you,
know that your body will never grow completely?
When you open your eyes, your skin will be smooth
as the day you were born, not what it was
when they found you and the tiny thing
that was your brother. The dirt around you
will have licked away mother’s milk
from your lips, absorbed the sour scent of mother’s
breath on your neck. The iron-heavy taste of blood
in your mouth, you won’t even remember.
When you open your eyes again, Sariyah,
you will be the mother. Your tart Mexican heart
won’t let you be anything else.
No need for grownups—Child Protective Services
who were too busy, the legislators who couldn’t give
medication, education to this poor neighborhood,
this city, La Raza with no muscle, no voice. Hope
decomposing in a couple plastic bags. But there are two
things you will have that your mother never did:
a whole Sariyah, a whole Sebastian.
From Babies Under the Skin (Panhandler Publishing, 2008)
first published in FEMINIST STUDIES, 2008