Polishing the Mirror, Steering the Light

Tim Z Hernandez: It’s a gift to have been writing poetry for twenty-five years and to have built a readership along the way. Assembling the poems gave me the chance to look back at where I was at in my life when I wrote them, which always offers a kind of appreciation, and even gratitude, for the journey. But also, I don’t spend too much time thinking about the poems themselves. I see them as more of a stamp in time, a marker of where I was and even who I was, both of which have changed so much over the last two decades. That’s the thing – once I write the poems and publish them and they’re in the world, I don’t remain too attached to them; they belong to the reader at that point. I do however like that they will find new audiences with the release of Some of the Light.

TH: Poetry enables me to think freely, not just on paper but also in life. It’s shaped me in more ways than I can count, and continues to play a vital role in my life. But I don’t approach it in the way that the question suggests. I don’t go into writing thinking this will be a poem.

Instinctually, I’ll either pick up a pen or paintbrush and start there. I write rather freely, exploring a subject in language and allowing it to take me wherever it wants to go. Eventually it’ll tell me if it’s a poem, or story, etc. For me it’s the process of discovery that I’m after. I don’t know my purpose until I begin to explore. This the real reason I’m not loyal to any one genre or medium. I see genres and mediums as different tools in the toolbox. My only loyalty – if there must be one – is to telling a good story, as honestly as possible. How that manifests is always up in the air, until it feels done. And even then, sometimes an idea will shapeshift with time. Years after writing a poem it can still become a story, or a song. The journey is never-ending.

TH: Fatherhood absolutely changed the way I write. My writing is much more fragmented, in relation to the amount of the time I have to myself, or to jot an idea down. I write while waiting for my kids to get out of school. I do a lot of writing while waiting, actually. But also, at least in recent years, the subject itself is focused on my children and my experience of single fatherhood. For me writing is way to make sense of the experience of living, so it’s a natural move for me to write about my children and about parenting.

TH: The place that I’m at. The moment I find myself in. The people I’m surrounded with in the moment. For me, poetry is closer to a meditation practice than anything else. With prose I tend to write more about the past, especially with the research-heavy books I’ve been working on for more than a decade. But with poetry, I tend to write more from the present moment, things that are happening in my world today, at this moment, this hour. I also write a lot about place, and the people who inhabit place, so that becomes part of my intentional observation. I value witnessing and listening, and being as wholly present as I can be with a moment or situation or circumstance.

TH: During the pandemic we had to remain inside, so I used writing as a means of going deep inside. That was complemented by my meditation practice. The pandemic was a useful time for me for many reasons. Mostly it offered a moment of pause, a parenthesis, to take account of my life, where I’d been and where I’d been hoping to go; the writing was a means of tracking and chronicling that. I know there was a lot of suffering and anxiety during that time, and that my situation was a very privileged one, since I was already working from home and had time to tend to my children’s schooling, but I also did my best to make use of it in a way that would perhaps recalibrate my life, and writing was an integral part of that experience. I didn’t initially envision that these would go on to become poems, again, because that’s not how I write.

It wasn’t until the second year of the pandemic, after I had received letters that my previous books of poetry were no longer in print, that it occurred to me I should find a way to get the poems back in print. I opened up my files and started to look at all the stuff I had written over the past several years, and that’s when the idea jumped out at me. That if the pandemic offered me a space to recalibrate my life, perhaps I could use these new writings as a cue to return me to old spaces, ideas, and situations in which the older poems could be revisited anew. It was an accidental catharsis.

TH: As someone obsessed with archives, I believe anything we write down is a time capsule. Poetry is just one possible way to ‘bear record’, but I do think it has a kind of inherent power that perhaps other genres don’t, which is its unapologetic freedom. Ideas come through with less of a filter in poetry, which moves without loyalty to anything but the truth. I don’t think it’s a matter of either/or, though; I do think that poems offer us an alternative perspective to ‘official accounts’. Poems don’t pretend to have all the facts, as ‘official accounts’ do, but they do offer us alternate ways of looking at a subject, and that option is what is almost always missing in ‘official accounts’. In this way it’s honest, and less misleading.

TH: Yes, complicity is a major theme in all my writing. It’s easy to point fingers. For me, writing has always been about polishing a mirror, seeing clearly what my role is in the issue at hand. And seeing how I can change my own life accordingly. What I look for in poetry is less about craft and more about subject, content, and honesty. I also look to poets who inspire me to think differently, or look at a subject differently. There is a long list of writers/poets whose work has in some way informed my own, and whose work I continue to greatly admire. Here’s a partial list of some writers that I feel my work is in constant conversation with: Juan Felipe Herrera, Lee Herrick, Anthony Cody, Mai Der Vang, Joseph Rios, Brian Turner, Sarah Campos, Andre Yang, Marisol Baca, Brian Medina, Michael Luis Medrano, Daniel Chacón, Daniel Grandbois, Jason McDonald, Rosa Alacalá, Sun Yung Shin, Juan Luis Guzmán, and others.

TH: Love is front and centre in my life these days, in all of its variants. I imagine I’ll keep writing and creating art about it, for as long as I can. At the moment, this seems to be a natural step for me in the progression of what I’ve been writing over the last several years. I do believe – and have been saying – that everything I write is about love, but for the first time I’m diving into that claim/subject headfirst. I have no idea where these explorations will take me, but I do know it feels aligned with who I am now. It’s a scary prospect, extremely vulnerable, but that’s how I know it’s the right direction for me.

TH: I meant that we are responsible for our own health and safety, and for our own shortcomings, as much as our own progress. I mean this on the individual level, but also, on the communal level.

I try not to envision the future, it’s too big an idea for me. Or at least it’s not the angle from which I work. Instead, I imagine what my response will be to the very next experience I have, and how I can bring my best and most attentive self to that experience. I’d like to imagine that this is the only way a future will be shaped. By each of us taking accountability for our own actions. Not just the work of progress, but perhaps more importantly, the work of healing where we’ve been, and where our ancestors have been. You quoted Brooks, but I can’t help but also think of June Jordan’s quote, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ And I believe this is true, and that we must act accordingly.