Watching it go, each passage a passage-wide: throat to air; concept to synapse; bone to voice; thought to language. Person to person.
A long-time fascination of mine has been with language. Specifically, anything revolving the differences and transformation between languages: the near-imperceptible meanings drawn only by fluency, the playful distance of wordplay which only occurs when learning a new one; what gets translated and what gets lost. I like to learn in that way, trace the absences of something I knew and until it becomes new. This line of questioning may or may not be common for any bilingual person, but it’s something, perhaps as a poet specifically though I have other reasons, that I know it in my heart.
From an interview with Mexican-American poet Eduardo C. Corral:
Words in Spanish appear throughout the collection. How does being bilingual inform your writing and your understanding of how language works?
Growing up in southern Arizona, I heard horrible things about Mexicans and immigrants in public spaces. I’d go home ashamed, but then I’d look at my parents and think, “Those things aren’t true.” When I realized I was queer, all the terrible things said about queer people that I internalized stayed with me. But I knew that language wasn’t true. So, when I heard a teacher say I shouldn’t use Spanish in my work, I dismissed his advice. What a foolish thing to say to a young poet. All kinds of dictions and syntaxes should be available to a poet. I refuse to privilege one language over another in my work. Also, displacement is one of the pleasures of reading. Displacement isn’t a site of anxiety for me—it’s an opportunity to enlarge my knowledge, to replenish wonder.