“No matter what, if a poem has any role in society, that role is given to it by the reader.”
Together Now (Belle Point Press, 2024)
Could you tell us a bit about your growing up and your path to becoming a writer?
Aside from a phase when I was five or six where I wanted to be a pro skateboarder, I have always wanted to write, so that must have been annoying for my parents; thankfully they were irritatingly encouraging of whatever my interests were, so it was a good environment to try my hand at bigger things. For the longest time I wanted to write short stories, and as early as second grade I would sometimes just draw up comics or write murder mysteries for fun. Crucially, I thought I hated poetry until I got to college. While I love the poems of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost now, I felt they were the exact wrong choice to get 15 year olds to like poetry. Coupled with the way they were taught, as if personal interpretation was unimportant and that each poem was just a puzzle to solve, with one real solution, I went into my first creative writing class in undergrad annoyed that we would be focusing on poetry. But the instructor, James Thomas Miller, brought an extremely diverse set of poets to each class, and revealed to me just how much I could enjoy and express myself in this form, and I’ve been stuck there ever since.
A question from Anna Laura Reeve: Do you understand your role in society—as a poet—to be influential, critical, observant, or something else?
No matter what, if a poem has any role in society, that role is given to it by the reader. I get a bit nervy whenever someone says a piece of art changed them, or got them through something difficult. The reader gives the poem the power, and anything a reader gains from something like my poetry is their achievement, not mine. If a poem of mine helps someone process grief, or their upbringing, or the state of the world, I’m happy to be part of that, but I didn’t do anything, the reader did, I just wrote a few words.
How do you contend with saturation? The day’s news, the disasters, the crazy things, the flagged articles, the flagged books, the poetry tweets, the data the data the data. What’s your strategy to navigate your way home?
It may be extremely basic to say, but curation is key for me. Everything matters all the time, but we truly can’t live with this constant flow of misery without just locking up. Stripping social media or your news feeds down to more actionable things, or causes you care the most about and can actually contribute to, helps me. I also recommend tipping your social media balance away from news and towards silly garbage that you enjoy; for me that’s skateboarding videos and beagles with good facial expressions (bigmootoo, if you’re reading this, hello).
A question from Shome Dasgupta: How are you doing?
Hey thanks for asking, I’m currently writing my grocery list at 11 pm and making myself hungry at a time when I can’t really do anything about it, but otherwise I can’t complain.
A question from Toni Ann Johnson: Why are you writing about what you’re writing about?
For this chapbook, I’m pretty focused on my family and belonging. I’ve done this for a long time now but the real thing that pushed me to keep writing about these things was the declining health and passing of my grandfather. I guess it’s supposed to be fortunate that the first great loss I’ve experienced was of a person who lived to his 80s, but that doesn’t really help. This loss, and seeing it coming for quite some time, brought a lot of feelings out of me that I didn’t quite know what to do with, and that just bubbled over and into my writing, where I’m best at expressing myself.
What obsessions led you to write your book?
Aside from the familial stuff, which is central to basically anything I write, I am also an annoying nerd when it comes to music. My parents have good taste in music, and my upbringing (one side of the family from Mexico who listened to a lot of latin music, the other side being stacked with talented musicians who constantly hit the dad rock genre) meant I had quite a range from a very early age, and my love of music has bled into basically everything I write. I write a lot about specific songs, but even when the poem isn’t about music, I think about sound first when I am writing, and that all stems from this musical obsession.
How did you decide on the arrangement and title of your book?
To literally say how I arranged, I wrote each poem’s title on a post-it, and gave it three descriptors based on what part of the story it fulfilled, what its emotional core was, and what rhythm I felt it had. From there, it was a matter of trying to keep the flow between them gradual, and the order just happened to make sense in that way. For the title, it was much less organized; I have always been terrible with titles, and I just sort of took a line from the first poem and manufactured a headcanon of how it was actually a deep and interesting choice.
Which poem in your book has the most meaningful back story to you? What’s the back story?
“Interpreting Light” would fit the bill. My mother once told me that when she was pregnant with me, she would go out to the sunlit backyard and sort of play peekaboo with light and me, putting her hands on her stomach to block the light and then slowly letting light through hoping that I, in whatever stage of being I was at the time, could see or get some kind of outside stimulus. I thought that was just such a beautiful “my mom” type of thing to do, so I had to write something out of it.
Which poem is the “misfit” in your collection and why?
“The Ghazal I Asked For” is kind of the odd one, partially because it came from my first semester workshop peers at the University of Kentucky telling me that my early poems were too safe and invulnerable. So in order to break out of that I tested myself in pretty much every way; I wrote in a form that I love but have always struggled with (I still broke some rules, sorry everyone), it remains the only poem I’ve written that’s kind of about sex, and it deliberately references a poem that I consider to be one of my favorites, sort of as a reminder of what can be done and how far I have to go.
A question from Caroline M. Mar: What was the soundtrack of your book? Were there specific songs, musicians, or sounds that helped you access your writing?
I am always waiting for people to ask me this question and now I’m in charge and can type as much as I want; I feel powerful. Part of my writing process is throwing on records whenever I sit down at my computer. The record thing has no meaning other than the fact that it forces me to get up every twenty minutes to flip the sides, but music is constantly running. Once I establish the tone I want to take with a poem, I throw on whatever music puts me in that headspace. D’Angelo, Grupo Control, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, Radiohead, Angelo Badalamenti, they all carried me through writing.
A question from Lynn Domina: What element of craft continues to elude you? What have you tried and failed to master?
How does anybody write a truly funny poem? Like I’ve seen people do it and I just can’t imagine; I have a couple of laugh lines here and there, but I have never been able to strike that balance between humor and meaning that so many talented writers can do.
A question from Lucien Darjeun Meadows: I’m always fascinated by ancestral lines, inheritances, and legacies. So, I would love to ask: What three (or so) authors, creatives, or works most influenced your collection?
Since I’ve already talked about music too much, I’ll stick with poets: William Matthews was the first poet that made the form click for me, Ada Limon for gorgeous honesty, and Roger Reeves for his references that deeply tie everything together.
A question from Susanna Lang: How do you find the next poem?
Everything starts in the notes app. Whenever a phrase with an interesting sound or rhythm to it appears in my head, it goes into the notes, and when I sit down to write I scroll through the massive list of scattered ideas and pick one as a seed and see what it can grow into.
What are you working on now?
I am very fortunate to have a full length collection on the way from Texas Review Press, so my Poetry Time (™) has been spent going through things I wrote up to three years ago and really trying to polish them up one last time. This is basically going to be the last time I’ll be able to chip away at all of this work and it is a bit stressful. It’s a sad endeavor, please feel bad for me.
What question would you like to ask authors featured at Speaking of Marvels in the future?
What was a piece of writing advice you received long ago that you’ve had to throw away over the years?
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Alfonso Zapata is a poet living in Lexington, Kentucky. He received his MFA in poetry at The University of Kentucky, and has attended The University of Toledo and The University of Southern Mississippi, where he obtained his master’s degree in poetry. He has previously received the 2022 & 2023 University of Kentucky MFA Poetry Awards. His work has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, and his first full-length book of poetry, To Pay for Our Next Breath, will be released in spring 2025 by Texas Review Press.
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