On Love, Community, and Fear: An Interview with José Olivarez on Promises of Gold
I am becoming a love professor at my university. This means that I am constantly teaching works that center on and complicate our idea of who loves and what love is. I’m forcing my students to write odes, to discover the parts about themselves they find worth loving. So, in my journey to find the next book for my love lessons, I stumbled upon and read José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold. I’m here to announce that I have found our love bible.
The description of Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro describes Olivarez as having “explore[d] every kind of love―self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural” in this collection. I will add, only, that as the poem explores the hybrid and transliteral potentials of language, that literary love is just as present in these pages. Olivarez displays a dazzling commitment to listening in this book, and I encourage you to give him a listen here, now, so that we can plumb the depths of Promesas together.
–Diamond Forde
Diamond: Let's start the conversation with the most apparent difference in the collection: translation. When I first opened my own copy of Promises of Gold, I actually started reading the Spanish translation first.
I want to acknowledge, José, that the simultaneous translation of Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro successfully engages with and defines community from the jump, while also dismantling the English-first hierarchy. But the most insightful avenue into its success stems from an engagement with your own words: "there's two ways to be a Mexican writer. you can translate / from Spanish. or you can translate to Spanish. / or you can refuse to translate altogether." ("Ode to Tortillas")
How do you see your engagement with simultaneous translation in Promises/Promesas engaging with the imposed limitations or expectations of being a Mexican-American writer?
José: Thank you for bringing up this moment. When I was writing “Ode to Tortillas” I was thinking of a different kind of translation: cultural translation. Maybe cultural translation includes the translation of language, but I was thinking about the expectations on Mexican American writers and thinking about legibility. When I was a beginning writer, it seemed like there were two pathways to being a Mexican American writer. One way was to make legible Mexican culture to non-Mexican audiences. This type of poem is easily understood by non-Mexican audiences and it makes them feel cool. It gives them access to a piece of culture without actually having to earn it. It’s also feel-good and gives Mexicans the illusion of representation. It fulfills everyone’s needs. Another option was to make legible my Americanness to my Mexican family. These poems emphasize the disconnect between those of us born here and those of us born there. They attempt to reconcile traditions. They make white Americans feel good because there’s often a sprinkle of that American Dream/American Utopia narrative. There’s an underpinning that suggests that only in the United States could these poems be written. And these poems hit in the migration feelings.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with either poem. However, I’ve been thinking more about what it might look like to refuse translation or even to mistranslate within poems. To write poems that continue to probe at Mexican life and culture without explanation. Or to write poems that offer poetic translations of Mexican traditions or slang, so a reader that is already intimate with the people, communities, and traditions I’m writing about already have a way to understand the poems. And any readers from the outside looking in are left with this indirect way of understanding: a map where the X marks where one should begin their search not end it.
The simultaneous translation of Promesas De Oro is a little different. It means that readers like my parents who only speak and read in Spanish can read the poems. My hope is that this act of translation is different from the act of translation I’m referencing in “Ode to Tortillas.” There are no explanations of the Spanish I’m using or not using.
Diamond: So, Promises of Gold is organized in eleven waves, the first of which is titled "folk tales." I find the invocation of “folk” in the opening stages of a large meditation on communal abundance so clever, so apt.
Not only do you ask us to return to the root of the language there, to inquire and define "folk", define "community", define "other", but you also destabilize the pressures tradition could play in such an invocation, encouraging us to acknowledge a generational past in poems like “Tradition” while simultaneously reading value in a Cal City boyhood or the tender interaction between lovers in a yellow cab. These moments, you seem to suggest, form the values and morality of this book's community and the speaker's exploration of self.
So, tell me, José, what values do you think guide the book, and how do you see yourself engaging with folk tales moving forward?
José: The values that guide the book are love and community and fear. “Mexican Heaven” was a series of poems I started in my first book, Citizen Illegal. That series continues here, but there are stark differences between the series of “Mexican Heaven” poems I wrote in 2016-2017 and the series of “Mexican Heaven” poems I wrote in 2020-2021. The new series of “Mexican Heaven” poems reject utopia altogether. They imagine God not as a benevolent being, but as something akin to Sid from Toy Story—a brutal child disfiguring toys. They’re a lot less funny and more grim. All of these poems are attempting beauty. They want to land in a place of hope—in part because I needed hope so badly when I was writing these poems. Over and over the poems attempt beauty and a lot of times the poems fail. The attempt is meaningful to me. It means a refusal to give in to despair or cynicism and a commitment to my people to try again and again. It also makes the poems that achieve beauty that much more powerful to me. It’s earned.
I see myself as a folk poet. I want to continue to write poems that non-poets can read and enjoy. I believe poetry is for everybody.
Diamond: Speaking of community, let's talk about family. Your brother Pedro is one of a handful of voices given the privilege of speaking for themselves in this book. In "Middle Class in This Mf" for instance, a found poem via text message between the two of you, we learn about the beauty and necessity of listening, even as the poem reminds us, tragically, how many basic rights and accesses are locked behind class disparity.
Listening is such a subtle but powerful theme in the book. After all, it is listening that saves the women in "Poem Where No One is Deported". And it’s listening that protects the speaker from the father’s anger in “My Sociology”--”we / didn’t know: there were no bosses / in our house, only us listening / to envelopes being ripped & waiting”. I could probably write an entire dissertation on the role of listening in this collection, lol.
But instead of me guessing and getting it all wrong, I figured you could say it better.
José, what has listening taught you about your relationship to poetry, your community, and your future?
José: Listening is everything. Often, people will talk about poetry as being about self-expression. I began writing poetry in the spoken word community and even that title- spoken word—emphasizes the act of speaking. Poetry is not about speaking. It is about listening. As I am writing, I must listen to what the language in a poem is moving towards. I cannot let my intentions predetermine what I am going to write. I can begin with intentions. I can light a candle. Ultimately, the poem guides me as much as I guide the poem.
You asked me about what listening means to my community. That’s a hard question to answer because I’m a part of many different communities. Here is one answer. One of the origins of Promises of Gold is that while touring for Citizen Illegal, I learned a lot about my own poems and what my readers were seeing in my poetry. Namely, my readers enjoyed poems like “Mexican American Disambiguation” that think about ethnicity and race and belonging. However, those questions are not new to them. The poems that my readers most wanted to talk to me about were poems like “Getting Ready To Say I love You To My Dad It Rains.” That poem is a quieter poem. It is verbalizing an attempt to continue to love someone who communicates differently. My readers told me, “I don’t know your dad, but I know your dad.” I learned that while publishers and media think about race and identity and belonging as big picture themes that can help them market a book, what my readers were actually responding to was the intimate portraits where complex sociopolitical realities pressure and affect our relationships with one another. Did my readers have questions about migration? Sure. But they also wanted to talk about family dynamics with Mexican American households—our goofy cousins, our siblings, our uncles, our parents, our grandparents. With Promises of Gold, I was trying to disregard the question of “What does it mean to be Mexican in the United States?” I’m focused on questions like what does it mean to love each other and really show up for one another in the face of violence. Why do Mexicans love Taco Bell? (Because it’s delicious.) I’m trying to zoom in. We’ll see what I learn and what questions I pick up from readers next.
I’ll also say that Matthew Olzmann and Alan Chazaro are both working on or have published books that feature poems by others. I’m sure other poets are doing the same. I would like to write more books of poems with my friends and family as features and co-writers.
Diamond: I have to say this collection is thematically rich, José. Family. Love. Migration. Belonging. Capital. And that just scratches the surface.
You quote something I’ve oft heard myself in “Poem with a Little Less Aggression”--”there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”--which rings true but erases, as capitalism erases, people trapped within and under a capitalistic system, whose very livelihood is dependent on a system we know hurts us but we are too powerless, too broke, too hungry, too tired of being broke and hungry to fix.
In “Moonshine” you write, “when i give you a bouquet of roses, / i give you a bouquet of bloody hands” and that observation skewers me as a person both capitalized upon and capitalizing. Your collection made me realize, José, how fraught capitalism makes our relationship to desire.
Of course we know the American Dream is a fallacy, but that doesn’t keep us from hoping for it, even at our own detriment. What advice might you give someone who is struggling with the fraughtness of desire?
José: I don’t know what good advice is for someone struggling with the fraughtness of desire. In my experience, desire is an animal that pulls us by the throat. You can resist, but desire is going to pull harder.
About capitalism, I’ll say that there are no individual solutions. You can stop wearing any clothes made in sweatshops. You can cancel your Amazon Prime subscription (and you probably should). However, individual actions will not halt the machinery of capitalism. We must find ways to collectively struggle against capitalism and show up for those already engaged in struggles against capitalism. It doesn’t mean that our individual actions are meaningless—it means that context is important. Our individual “goodness” will be meaningless if we don’t join in and participate in collective struggles against the destruction of the planet and for better living and working conditions for all people.
Diamond: Finally, I want to thank you for how much gratitude the book carries in its ending, and, without spoiling the last poem too much, I want to ask about your own relationship to gratitude. Do you think poetry has taught you to be more grateful or does the act of looking, learning to listen to the world, stimulate the gratitude in us?
José: I don’t know if poetry has made me more grateful, but I do know that before I started writing and reading poetry, I was deeply angry and bitter. I don’t think poetry itself made me more grateful. Through poetry, I met friends that I soon deeply cared for and, I believe, deeply cared for me. Those relationships taught me to be grateful. I stretched to be the person I was imagining I could be. I stretched because I wanted to be the friend my friends needed me to be.
I am not a poetry zealot. I love poetry. I’m sure the act of looking and learning to listen to the world has been deeply meaningful for me. I know it has. There is even a spiritual quality to writing poetry for me that is undeniable. I can’t name exactly where all the language and images come from. I’ve pulled Lucille Clifton poems out of my backpack at bars to recite them to people I love. At the same time, I think others might find the same meaning from engaging deeply with bird watching or gardening. Perhaps my argument is that engaging deeply with the world—through poetry or basketball or anything else—is deeply meaningful and important. There is no guarantee that it will stimulate gratitude, but I’m sure it will open up some new possibilities.
Photo Credit: Mercedes Zapata
About José Olivarez
José Olivarez is a writer from Calumet City, IL. He is the author of Promises of Gold and Citizen Illegal. Alongside Willie Perdomo and Felicia Chavez, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. His poems appear alongside photos by Antonio Salazar in the hybrid poetic text, Por Siempre. In a review of Promises of Gold, The Chicago Reader declared, "White people have Emily Dickinson, Mexicans have José Olivarez."
About Diamond Forde
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.
