Interview with Tomás Q. Morín on Machete — December 20, 2021
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the collection of poems Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Connor Yeck:The opening poem of Machete is “I Sing the Body Aquatic.” It’s biological, historical, oracular, and so much more, and the way it handles leaps in both time and space brings me back for multiple readings.
We have the intimacy and nearness of skin-to-skin contact that launches the piece—the speaker’s hand, a handshake, a need for immediacy: “You would never know any of this / until we met on the street”—but then also vast evolutionary and cultural distances. Nods to a 300 million-year-old “distant relative with sleepy eyes / and splayed fins” and later, human descendants who one day come “to the land of Montezuma / to roast in the sun for four centuries.” And all of this framed by the prescience noted in the first line: “When I offer my sweaty hand in greeting / I can see the future.”
It’d be fantastic to hear your thoughts on this poem as an opener—how it found its place in the collection, and the tone or root notes you feel it sets down as we enter the book.
Tomás Q. Morín:The origin story of this poem starts in this condition I have called acute hyperhidrosis. So, in run-of-the-mill hyperhidrosis, people sweat a lot. The acuteness of mine is that—it’s very bizarre—if I’m not wearing socks, the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet will start sweating profusely. If I’m in bed, and my feet are covered, I’m fine, but I can't just lounge around without socks. If I do I can see the beads of sweat starting to come out of my pores!
My body just gets disregulated. I always felt ashamed of that, and writing about it was a way to reclaim my body and find a way to accept it and celebrate it for what it is, and not see it as a defect, as a part of me that’s genetically broken.
Poetry was a way to imaginatively explain this and become a spin doctor. I thought, “Oh, it must be because I’m part fish!” In the same line of thinking, a couple of my fingers on my hand are crooked. My pinkies and my index fingers curve in. So I thought, “Oh, like fins,” and you know the associations just started rolling, and I remembered Whitman’s “I Sing The Body Electric,” and suddenly it was “Aquatic.”
I realized the poem was going to be a really big family tree, and I asked, “Where does this family tree start?” Well, it has to start with a fish. What’s sort of tied into the various notes of the book is that this fish originally left the water because it felt like it didn’t belong. There’s this thread of self-exile that runs throughout the collection: making peace with being on the margins and the plight of the introvert. Being on the margins but finding happiness in the margins, because it looks like they're having fun in the group, but you know, it’s better to keep it at arm’s length—or fin’s length, in this case!
So there’s this sense of self-exile, and I braid that with biology and history—the conversos who leave Spain, who then pretend to be Catholics and come over to the western hemisphere, and trying to trace that all the way up to my doorstep where there’s this missionary who’s come to spread the good word.
This makes me think of a really dear friend of mine who, when he opens a new book of poems, he reads the first line of the first poem and then the last line of the last poem to see if they make a sort of pair, if they speak to one another. I’ve started doing this since he told me about it. “I Sing the Body Aquatic” carries so many of the notes that are in the collection, which is why I placed it first in the book. It’s like a handshake, you know? There’s a sort of contract, a sort of pact. Brad Leithauser talks about this in a wonderful book he has coming out next year, Rhyme’s Room. How at the opening of every poem, there’s a contract, either a musical one, an imagistic one, or a narrative one that’s made with the reader, and the reader accepts this and then it’s up to the poet to deliver.
On a micro and macro level, I feel the first poem of a book does the same thing. It establishes the playing field, it tells us where we’re going to roam around. In this book there’s seriousness, but there’s also humor. There’s history, biology, and there’s self-exile. I hope, if nothing else, it compels the reader to want to read more, to read the next poem, and the next, and the next.
Yeck: The idea of a poetic contract is especially fascinating. I always find myself looking for new ways to visualize poems and their connections across a book, and to have the act of reading placed into a different sort of headspace. I’m reminded a little bit of what Kevin Young said in his conversation with Paul Holdengräber earlier this year over on LitHub’s The Quarantine Tapes. Basically, the similarities between curating an anthology of poems and the exhibits in a museum—how we naturally begin to find threads between poems/objects and hear voices speaking to one another between pages and rooms.
As a sort of parallel question, the poem that follows “I Sing the Body Aquatic” is “112th Congress Blues,” which immediately got me thinking of the winding, sometimes breathless chains of connection that Machete explores. There’s such a pleasure in tracing how a piece navigates from A to B, its many hinges and shifts and associations. Not to spoil the poem for readers, but we go from considerations of “In God We Trust” on the American dollar to fried chicken, with appearances by Jefferson, the Gospels, and vegetarians in between.
When writing a poem like “112th Congress Blues,” do you write with a constellation of observations in mind—that is, you might know the thoughts and observations you’d like to tether together but not what might go in between—or is it more headlong, and seeing where each line takes you next?
Morín: It’s more so the latter. The poems that are a single sentence, headlong, rolling down a hill—a half a page, two pages long—those were poems that I was writing during a period of time when I couldn't write anything else.
My writing process had always been a very sort of typical one. I would make a first draft pretty quickly, and then I would move on to the second draft, but there came this moment where I started revising on the level of the line while I was composing the first draft. So that first draft, by the time I got to the end of it, was actually four, five, or six drafts all combined at once. What happened at that moment was whenever I would put down a period, the poem would close shut. I would put down a period to do a stanza break, and realize that the second stanza was actually the beginning of another poem. It was kind of frustrating because I didn’t feel like I had really gotten to the place where I wanted to go.
I didn’t have a list of things that I wanted to make sure to throw in. It was very much making associations as I was composing, but I really don’t compose like that anymore. Periods have come back into my life! Stanzas have come back into my life, as you’ve seen by some of the other poems that are in the collection. The poems that are long, single sentences are actually older, and they sort of date themselves, at least in my mind, because I know that. But I would compare the composing of those poems to being on a trapeze, which comes up in one of the poems, as well as circus imagery in a few of them. Whenever I would try to create a stanza break, it’d be like letting go of the bar. There’s nothing left to do but fall into the net. It’s over—until I climb back up.
It ultimately became a creative problem I was trying to solve: “Okay, how can I make sure that I say everything I want to say in these poems if I’m stuck in this style?” I knew I’d have to be better and more resourceful with coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. I didn’t want to just use the word “and” because I felt it had no narrative tension. So I looked up conjunctions and I made myself a word bank of sixteen or so—things like “in order to,” “because of”—and whenever I was composing and felt stuck, I realized if I didn’t know what line or image came next, I’d pull out a conjunction I hadn't used yet, and something would click mentally.
What I love about conjunctions is that they clarify causality, so the poems are always headed somewhere with purpose, as opposed to a collage of ideas and images that are impressionistic. I’m very much a narrative poet, you know. I like to tell stories in my poems, so those conjunctions helped me still be true to myself, while trying to get the most out of this particular style. Again, I have no idea why I suddenly became locked into it. It might have just been from reading too much Gerald Stern! This continued for four years before I transitioned out of it, and I knew I could make a different kind of music.
Yeck: It’s incredible hearing you unpack the personal chronology we attach to our work. Poems written in a certain place, at a certain time, with certain people, until a collection has its own sort of geological strata. The more breathless pieces within Machete certainly feel like a crucial stylistic thread, especially as we’re finding our footing early on—that idea of a contract, of what we’ll be getting into.
Near the start of the collection, we also encounter the piece “Whiteface,” which to me leaps out as a heartbeat poem in the collection, and formally, redefines the power of list poems. Throughout, we trace the arrival of white violence and authority, and the contingencies to avoid and survive such encounters. For instance, near the beginning of the piece:
7. ‘Don’t get stranded,’ our mothers had always said. 8. In the wrong neighborhood. 9. Or on the highway. 10. Or alone. 11. Or with friends.
The poem also showcases a striking tangent about midway through—a sequence that flows from the image of nodding heads compared to a Newton’s Cradle, to those heads not being made out of steel but stardust, to that stardust being delicate like a trapeze, until we arrive at the following:
52. We saw a trapeze on TV once. 53. Two people passed a ball to each other. 54. It was shaped like the Earth. 55. If the Earth was made of glitter. 56. We wanted a ball like that. 57. So we collected pounds and pounds of empty cans to sell. 58. All summer. 59. Coke, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Big Red Crush. 60. Miller Lite and Coors too. 61. Not unlike the ones on the shoulder now. 62. Where we have been pulled. 63. Because of a phone call. 64. Because a dog crossed the road. 65. Because a diaper needed to be changed.
Getting us in and out of this sequence so fluidly—slipping from memory back into an unfolding crisis—feels like another kind of trapeze, especially while maintaining the accumulation of brief, numbered, end-stopped lines. I was hoping you could speak a bit on the choices behind this poem. Was there a particular opportunity you felt the list form provided here in terms of style and topic?
Morín: The origin of the poem comes from a few summers back where it seemed every week there was a news report of someone dressed up like a clown standing menacingly at the edge of a playground, or the edge of the woods. I remember thinking, “What is going on? What’s become of the world?” And these thoughts dovetailed with weekly reports of another person of color who had met a violent end at the hands of police. I remember telling a friend, “I bet not a single one of these clown fools will be arrested, much less shot.” While for people who look like us—you're rolling the dice if you get in your car and go to the grocery store to get some milk. You may not make it back.
The roots of the poem landed in trying to find an answer to the question of, “If these people can wear these costumes and be relatively safe, what costumes do we have to wear whenever we get into a car?” The poem goes through various options. You dress up as a priest, as a doctor, as a soldier, before landing on the clown image.
The list form was inspired by a poem written by Sherman Alexie called “Pachyderm” that came out in The Awl. It’s really long as well, with end-stopped lines, and when I first read it years ago, I thought, “I have to use that form for something.” Then, when this idea for “Whiteface” came around, the poem contained these harrowing moments of change—going from lyrical observations, to the police encounter and the awful things happening through that moment. I thought I needed some sort of safe place for the reader to land as they navigated their way through the piece; and the numbers, they almost function like a drummer in a jazz quintet, someone who’s keeping the melody, you know? The saxophone can solo, and the trumpet can solo, but the listener has that melody always in the background. The soloist can drift out as far as they want, as long as they come right back to the start. I felt the numbers could do that. They could anchor the reader in a safe spot, numbers being morally neutral, while a reader works their way through this poem I wish I’d never have to write, that no one should ever have to write.
On a slightly different note, I also found myself going back and forth trying to decide if I should place myself in the poem, or someone who looks like me. I wanted the poem to be able to encompass all of us so that’s why there are parts where it’s “We are wearing pants” or “We are wearing a dress,” in order to make the person in the car really anybody. I wanted the poem to be as wide open as possible.
Yeck:Another thematic thread that runs through Machete, and which inspires so many memorable moments, is pop culture. “Sartana and Machete in Outer Space” is one of my personal favorites in the collection, as it elevates an already mythic character to even greater legend. We’re told of Danny Trejo’s eponymous Machete, “When he was born, God said, / you will be a Mexi-can, not a Mexi-can’t,” and how he’s “a chromed-out star that forgot how to fall.”
Beyond the visceral, grindhouse-style atmosphere the poem curates, I’m also deeply fascinated by the choice to write the poem not from the point of view of Machete himself, or a movie-watcher, but of Sartana, Jessica Alba’s character in the Machete universe—a move that creates room for an intimacy we might not immediately expect. For example, “He finishes rewiring the navigation system of a nuke / he’s sitting on and winks at me” and “Life hasn’t been all bad. He did find me here in space. / You could say our love is galactic now.”
While inhabiting and writing within this film-like space (its characters, narrative, aesthetic) did you encounter any surprises?Did you know from the start the poem would unfold from this particular angle?
Likewise, a bit larger, how do you understand your poetry’s connection to pop culture—what recreating, riffing, and reinterpreting film and other mediums ultimately allows?
Morín:I’ve been a big fan of the Machete franchise for a while— at the end of the second film there’s a faux trailer for what would be the third movie, which they haven't made, and it was sending the franchise off into space. A sort of nod and wink to Moonraker, the James Bond film.
So at least once a year I go down a rabbit hole on the internet trying to look for whispers of whether the third movie is in the works. I’m so eager for the movie to be made I finally thought to myself, “You know what, I’m tired of waiting. I’m just going to try to write into that universe.”
What I initially started doing was writing in a neutral kind of voiceover, a narrator voice. I forget how many lines in I was, maybe eight or ten, but there was a moment early on in the poem where I realized the poem was in the voice of Jessica Alba’s character. That was a huge surprise, and I thought, “Well, I guess I’m doing that now.”
At that point, I really started leaning into it. I had to go a few more lines, but then I had to stop again because I remembered she dies in the second film. So, then the big issue was, “Well, how do I bring her back to life?” I started Googling, trying to find all these tropes—movie tropes and soap opera tropes of bringing characters back to life. I went back and watched both films again, and rememered the second movie has clones, so of course I can just say it was her clone that was killed in the second movie, but of course I also have to explain what she’s been doing in the meantime, and all sorts of answers to fun questions that I feel we poets don’t usually have to think about.
Once I figured that out, the poem was filled with this dramatic tension, and I just started rolling with it. It was so much fun to write, and halfway through, it hit me that I was writing a Mexploitation poem—because the films are Mexploitation—and since it’s in space, it was also Mexofuturism, which is a term I haven’t seen anywhere.
There was so much discovery in there but also things in there that are me. The stuff she says about pan dulce on the weekends, and the barbacoa she likes—not too oily, not too dry—that’s me—these details are straight out of my life. Like the Selena statue in Corpus Christi. I grew up near Corpus Christi and have seen the statue many times. Selena was our local saint growing up. So there are all sorts of tidbits of information that, for as wild and fanciful as the poem is, they come from my life.
And I was so happy at the very end of the poem, because no one ever really dies in these kinds of movies, right? But it appears Machete’s died, and now the franchise is hers. And that felt perfect. Danny Trejo rides this nuke into a black hole, and it sets up the franchise for Jessica Alba to be the new Machete. I want to see that movie!
As for bringing pop culture into my work, it’s something I’ve grown into. Machete is my third book. In my first and second books, I definitely wasn't shy about incorporating my literary influences—writers, but also painters and artwork. It’s always felt very natural to include those in my poetry. But at the same time, two parts of me had a long evolution of getting into my poems.
One is my humor. I like to think I’m a funny guy. I like making my friends laugh. And two, I’m a total pop culture nerd. Among my friends, I’m not the one who would be referencing the Criterion Collection films. I’m the friend who’s referencing the TNT New Classics. Dirty Dancing, Die Hard, Talladega Nights—the last of which makes an appearance in the final poem, “Machetes.”
There just came a moment where I thought, “Why am I not making enough room in my work for these parts of myself?” The project was not to make my art engage with certain elements of pop culture. Rather, the project became, “How can I be more myself on the page?” And that's what I've been trying to do—something that feels organic and also essential to the work.
You know, there are tigers on the cover of the book, but there’s not a single tiger in the book. However, as I’ve been joking with audiences, there are the two cougars from Talladega Nights. When I reference them, it’s so important. I did deep research to find out who was behind Karen the cougar in that one particular scene. And come to find out it’s two cats, both males, Dillon and K.C. In that moment, I’m not just referencing the movie, I’m also kind of bursting the bubble of the movie’s magic. You think you see one thing on the screen, and you think it’s one way, but then you find out it’s something entirely different. This is the same as the very rude woman in the poem who puts herself in charge of our group after the Poetry World Series in NYC. She sees me, she sees Chen Chen, she sees the rest of the poets we’re with, and she thinks, “I know who they are,” when in fact we’re more-dimensional than her white gaze.
So I’m always trying out ways to be more myself. If pop culture is something that I’m super into, which I am—because it’s fun—it’s also going to contain these connections to larger concerns. Even goofy comedies can’t escape the time, because the people who write them and who act in them and direct them, they can’t escape our time either, even if they’re not writing and producing the next entry into the Criterion Collection. Racism and sexism, all the isms—they’re always there, either in the foreground or in the background.
Yeck: I really love the notion of “making room for parts of yourself.” When it comes to pop culture and poetry, there can certainly be that hesitation I think many writers have felt—no one blinks if you write about a painting, a sculpture, or a “great” film, but what about the comedy or schlocky B-movie?
It’s also great hearing your thoughts on the deeper connections any reference to pop culture naturally contains and which we can never truly separate. You referenced the cougar(s) in the collection’s last poem, “Machetes,” which is such a stunning piece to land on as we finish the book. Across thirteen pages of short couplets, we find our speaker revisiting a similarly-titled piece appearing earlier in the collection, “Machete.” We consider what was included in that first poem, what was left out, and the core tension between anger and laughter in poetry—a moment of revelation that arrives while hearing Chen Chen read:
You reminded me anger can also be funny
when I heard you read that poem about cats
...something I had known for a very long time
but had forgotten the day I sat down
to write my smile into a machete
I could use against my enemies.
The poem then ends with this tremendous call of reclaiming an “inner-something / that roams inside of us.” This gesture of cutting loose that’s carried along by your flipping of the description given to Karen the cougar in Talladega Nights—not a “beautiful death machine” but “a beautiful life machine.” We’re asked to join the speaker:
over a pile of spare ribs
our lips smacking, stripes of sauce
on our cheeks, not unlike how its was
in the beginning of our species
before we had words for what a life was
or someone to say we must change it.
There are so many intricate turns in this poem, and it feels like a perfect encapsulation of Machete as a book experience. I suppose my question is about this balance—if you find yourself continuing to explore the poetic landscape of “angry-funny or funny-angry” in your ongoing writing and how Machete came together as a collection that tackles this tension.
Morín: I don’t think I knew it until I wrote the “Machetes” poem. I think the oldest poem in the book is from 2010, “Duct Tape.” So the poems were written over a good span of time, and it’s been a preoccupation for a while. It wasn’t something I was keeping track of, counting off poems. It was just writing onward as we all do, and then there’s that moment when you sit down when you feel like you have enough pages to make a book, and you have to ask yourself, “Okay, is there a book in here?”
I saw that there was one particular thread running through: this balance of being angry and funny at the same time, and not just on the page but in life. It all comes out of the challenge in 21st-century America of trying to figure out, “How do we protect ourselves from what’s threatening us?” While at the same time not sacrificing our joy. I feel like the people who are mentioned in the title poem—the ones who see the color of my skin and maybe hear an accent when I speak, who see difference when they see me, a difference that they find challenging or threatening—one of the things I think they find most threatening would be my joy. Would be my smile. And it’s so hard to stay connected, you know, as the song goes, “to stay on the sunny side of life,” especially during the pandemic. I hate thinking of a smile as something that is also a weapon, but at the end of the day, turning one’s smile and one’s joy into a weapon against those who would stomp us out is better and safer than going to the gun store when one is filled with so much anxiety and fear. I feel doing the latter would be becoming a different person, sacrificing who I am. Whereas leaning into my joy is being even more myself, you know?
Yeck: I’m awed by the ways this poem “closes out the contract” or perhaps “ends the poetic handshake” we entered at the very start of the collection. There’s such a sense of having the book relived for us—its core images, textures, and music. I know, among other things, “Machetes” made me want to reread the collection and to trace these threads all over again.
On the topic of poems speaking to each other across the years and pages, and being oneself on the page, Machete also contains these moments where we get to watch a poem examine its own creation—these wonderful sequences where the speaker applies pressure to the poetic choices being made, and the act of writing (and perhaps rewriting) the piece in real-time. For instance, in the opening sequence of “Two Dolphins”:
Have I told you how lost I feel,
how words confuse me when they sit limp
like a water hose with no water on a sheet of directions
next to words? I’m so disoriented right now
by the imaginary sheet of words
I just invented that six lines ago
I wrote “next to words,” when what I meant
to write was “next to pictures.” And even
the whole business of that water hose
simile is odd, but not in a good way
And in “A Pile of Fish”:
I almost wrote something
about the light being late—; the “late light”
is what I almost said, and you know how we
poets go on and on about the light and
the wind and the dark
I’m struck by how these moves can impact the tone and momentum of a poem, especially when they occur near the start—almost like we’re witnessing the poet rebooting the piece, trying out different lines of thought before we’re off.
Given that such moments represent a brief glimpse into the writing process, what, if anything, do you hope readers experience when they encounter these moves? Do you feel sequences such as these allow you to accomplish something special in terms of a poem’s structure or your voice within it?
Morín: I first got turned on to that particular style by reading Elizabeth Bishop. Obviously, she’s a master at it, but she wrote an essay once about “dramatizing the mind in action” and how John Donne would do this, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Those were her role models for how to dramatize someone's thought process on the page. So the effect of, let’s say, “In the Waiting Room,” “The Moose,” “The End of March,” or “Crusoe in England,” where someone is perceiving something and then they realize, “Oh wait, I’m miss-perceiving that.” Or they're backtracking their thoughts, and it’s, “I know what that is—I thought it was this, but it’s this.”
I’ve studied her moves very carefully because I just absolutely adore her work. She published a total of four books, I think, including the complete poems, but like I’m looking at my shelves right now and I have about two feet of Elizabeth Bishop—all the letters, multiple copies, her interviews, her paintings. She's often my North Star.
As for the move, I think it humanizes the poem. It humanizes the person speaking, and for a reader—when I sit down and read a poem in that style—I know the sort of ride that I’m in for is one of exploration. Not just, “Where will this poet take me?” It’s mutual exploration. It’s like when you’re a kid and you have a friend who comes over and says, “Hey, do you want to go explore those woods?” There’s such generosity in that gesture, that invitation. “I don't know where this is going, but let's go check it out. We can see what we can see, feel what we can feel.” And I love that. When I was first starting to write poems they were very prototypical first-person lyrics: “I’m feeling some feelings, so how about you observe me feeling?”
Those were the poems I was into as a reader, but after a while, I wondered what other people were doing and what kind of other experiences can be curated on the page. I tell my students all the time that when you're writing, you’re curating an experience for your reader. I’d always been a fan of Bishop, but once I went back, I did a really deep dive and found they were such human poems. It feels like they’re so vulnerable and there’s so much at stake, and once I knew more about her biography—like I could see she came by it honestly—these poems that really want connection but also find connection to be challenging. They’re struggling for it, and in her being essentially orphaned as a child and her experience of self-exile, I feel such kinship with her, kinship with her as a person and as a writer. If someone were to pick up my book and say, “Oh, this person’s been reading Bishop,” it would be the greatest compliment. So in the end, I’m trying to create a home. An invitation for mutual adventure with the reader.
