Maps and Dreams
Poet Jeremy Paden discusses how his book sprang from a confluence of personal and historical perspectives
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeremy Paden about how his book world as sacred burning heart sprang from a confluence of personal and historical perspectives, plus thoughts on the journey from fragment to poem, poems to book.
We discussed:
The long journey from first poem to published book
Conquistadors, contemporary Latin America, and rethinking conventional histories
Writing habits: When and how poems start for Paden
Book design, finding a publisher that would include historical notes and visuals
Jeremy Paden was born in Milan, Italy and raised in various southern states of the United States of America, in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. He obtained his PhD in Spanish from Emory and teaches Spanish at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. He is the author of three chapbooks of poems and one chapbook of translated poems. He has also translated three full-length collections of poems from Spanish to English. In 2020, he collaborated with the illustrator Anne Hermosilla and his co-translator Oswaldo Estrada publish Under the Ocelot Sun/Bajo el sol del ocelote, a bilingual, illustrated poem about the Central American migrant caravans, which won an Ada-Campoy Prize for Spanish Language Children’s book by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. His most current books are world as sacred burning heart (3: A Taos Press, 2021) and Self-Portrait as an Iguana (Valparaíso USA, 2021). Self-portrait is a bilingual collection of poems written in Spanish and translated to English, which co-won the first Poeta en Nueva York Prize, by Valparaíso USA Press.
Some context from the publisher: “To live in the American hemisphere is to live in a colonial state. These poems examine and interrogate that legacy. They respond to the self-aggrandizing myths the Western world tells itself about its own past. This collection argues that America (North and South) is a palimpsest, a layered story, born out of colonial occupation and resistance. Ultimately, these poems ask two urgent questions: can we live with ‘the madness/of finally knowing who we are?’ and ‘how do we sing a song that remembers the world into wholeness?’”
Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read excerpts from the interview in text. To hear the full interview, including Jeremy reading poems from world as sacred burning heart, check out the video (I highly recommend it).
Maps and Dreams: Weaving History into Poetry
Radha: The poems in world as sacred burning heart sprang from a rich confluence of sources. Where did the book start for you?
Jeremy: My PhD work was in it 16th And 17th century Spanish and Latin American literature. And so on the one hand, it's been a long time coming. The first poem that I published from it is a poem called “Quipu." That was published in 2009. So the the actual building of the book took well over a decade.
In my day job I teach Latin American civilization. We will read from the breadth of Latin American history and Latin American literature, sometimes diving into Pablo Neruda, looking at the paintings of Diego Rivera of Frida Kahlo, talking about them and analyzing them. We engage with a trilogy written by Eduardo Galliano called The Memory of Fire which include vignettes of Latin American history. I started responding to Galliano's work with poems of my own. A handful of poems in the book came from teaching that class.
In the early teens, we saw the reconsideration of Columbus’s position within U.S. culture on a popular level. It had been going on an academic level for a good number of decades. I began to write poems based on various conquistadors.
Having grown up in landscapes shaped by Spanish colonialism no doubt influenced the development of these poems. Could you tell our readers a little bit about the central themes of the book and how those relate to your personal background?
The central theme is colonialism, what colonialism does—extractive economies and what extractive economies do to culture and power, the way that power speaks to itself and justifies itself to itself. The way that power, oftentimes as it is justifying itself will confess, unwittingly, to the most horrendous crimes.
When I was seven, our family moved to Nicaragua. This was in ’81. The Sandinistas had just overthrown the U.S.-sponsored, dictatorial family, the Samozas. And right around ’80-’81, the Reagan administration began selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contra opposition. I remember as a young child hearing and seeing wars and rumors of wars happening. We lived in Managua. Most of the conflict was in the northern mountains, but we saw the army everywhere. And we heard about things going on along the northern border.
I also remember the Sandinistas revamping education. They worked hard to bring widespread literacy to the country, plus a different focus on Spanish colonialism than previously found. I remember seeing the history books didn't hold back in recounting the violence that the Spanish conquistadors meted out on on the native populations.
The book is very much tied to my having grown up in Central America and in the Caribbean, having lived and traveled through those spaces. The history of colonialism is one that I grew up with.
Radha: Poetry, literature, the spaces we create on a page, are a way to tie these threads together—the confluence of history, sources, personal experiences. There's a beautiful way in which the poems reflect that process of sifting through different influences.
Maps appear throughout the book, various artifacts. And so do dreams. Both describe a reality of sorts but also are wishful thinking. The maps represent a kind of dream, right? The dream of an idealized place. And the dreams that occur throughout the poems in the book are also like maps, because they point the characters toward particular desires. And the book as a whole is a kind of map out through a territory. How do you think about the territory of the book? And how these motifs interact with that territory?
Jeremy: Writing poetry is oftentimes an entering into dream space. In trying to follow a dream logic that establishes connections. You’re moving through spaces that are sometimes comforting, and sometimes terrible and terrifying.
I started writing poems about colonialism based on cultural artifacts. Some of these are based on the stories of conquistadors, and some remember how when we lived in the States, how Columbus was spoken about. I was born in Milan, Italy, we moved to Rome, Georgia, when I was when I was four. From that young age, I heard different discourses in the culture at large about who the conquistadors were, and whether they were virtuous and whether or not they were heroes to whom we should look up. Or villains?
These poems reconsider who the conquistadors are and what the process of colonization was. It isn't an exercise in arcane and outdated history but is, in fact, engaging with the present reality of the Americas. Statutes of Columbus were being decapitated in 2019 and 2020. We’re responding to the violence against black and indigenous peoples, against LatinX and Asian peoples in this country.
Radha: I’m curious, in terms of your process, you mentioned that writing poems is like entering a dream state. Tell me more about that dream state and how a single poem emerges for you.
Jeremy: Most of the time, a poem will start with a flash, either an image or a line. And, I'll follow that for a bit to see if anything is there. It’s not always. I write in different ways. Sometimes I write on my walks. I'll take about a five mile walk, and as I'm walking I'll work a poem over in my mind. By the end of the walk, I've got only two or three lines. I'll jot those down and come back to them.
During the time I was writing this book, I had gotten into the habit of waking up around 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning and just writing for about two hours or so.
Radha: Before you enter your day, before the logic of whatever it is you have to do in your life takes over.
Jeremy: Yeah. In walking, you have this repetitive movement that is rhythmic. And it helps push away distractions. There’s a way in which the rhythm of walking frees the mind to play. That might happen in the early morning, too, when I'm barely waking up and and the clouds of of sleep and dream are still there.
Radha: Could you say a little bit about how you brought in terms from various cultures and languages? What did you consider?
In English we don't recognize the neologisms and loanwords we use in our own language. Hammock comes from for comes from the Taino language through Spanish. The name for the American alligator also comes from the Taino. Chocolate comes from Mayan. The book uses terms to refer to the natural world, in part because Europe didn't have words for things like E iguana. Europe didn't have words for things like chocolate. It didn't have words for animals.
So that's one of the class of words that I'll use from foreign or first languages.
Another is family relations.There are two poems in the voice of 16th century women, one being the daughter of Moctezuma. Both poems refer to family relations—husband, wife, father, mother, child.
Radha: Tell me a little bit about the visuals—maps, artifacts, and historical notes—that augment the reader’s experience of the book’s poems?
I'm so very appreciative of Andrea Watson and Lesley Cox and the whole team at 3: A Taos Press. They put so much care into the book, including the design. They allowed the book to have extensive notes, a cover that reflects contents of the book and explains the context of the poems, and a several-page bibliography that will help people who are interested to follow up on the history of colonization of the Americas. Finding 3: A Taos Press was a real godsend.
This is a book that demands a lot from its readers, asks readers to sit with some discomfort, not just discomfort in terms of the images, but discomfort in terms of wondering, Where in the world am I? The notes and the bibliography at the back help situate a reader so that the poems can instruct as well as delight—to use an old medieval idea about what poetry should do. I think poetry is a constellation of philosophy—Lucretius on the nature of things. The world of poetry is much more expansive than we think it to be.
Radha: I often say to my students that any poem that you read, any book that you read, contains a challenge and a permission—and they are often the same thing. To me, in your book, the challenge is putting oneself in the uncomfortable position of taking in all of the many threads, the many sources, which can make you feel off kilter the same way that traveling to a new landscape puts us off kilter, right? But it enlivens us, it wakes us up, it eliminates the dark spaces in our psyche. I appreciate so much the corresponding permission, which is: One can do this. One can sit down and, from the knowledge and the experiences and the research collected, produce a work that allows for a reader to enter into that territory in a profound, beautiful way.
Get a copy of world as sacred burning heart at 3: A Taos Press, Bookshop.org, or wherever you buy books.
Follow Jeremy on Twitter at @JeremyDae.
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