A conversation between Madison Poet Laureate Angela Trudell Vasquez and Alfonso Doucette on writing, the poetic “Mmmm,” and eating dinosaurs. Vasquez will be leading a Community Poetry Workshop on November 15th in the Ellen Kort Mezzanine at ALL.
ALL Review: What is your writing process like?
Angela Trudell Vasquez: I write really fast, and I always have. Very similar to how I was as a child. I harvest free writes. Sometimes I'll be writing to a commission, sometimes not. But to me, it is the editing which is so much fun because that's when you do the digging, and I like to blow up the lines, make them double space so that I can work in between, and then I can look at sound and color code the sound, and I can look at how many beats there are, and I have all the secret rules that I use and break, so I edit my work probably 30 to 50 times before publishing.
Editing is important. I use painter's tape on my walls in my study so that I can put the poems up, and I can look at the inner architecture, and it's the discovery process that I really love. In order to understand my work I went and got an MFA at 48, because I wanted to understand what I was doing on the page and have language for it.
AR: I love thinking about the physicality of writing. I really like that idea of printing poems out and having those spaces between the lines, taping them up on the wall and being able to engage your text that way.
ATV: For me it's a very bodily thing, right? So every first draft starts on paper—pen, paper. So it's like a physical connection and you were saying you are starting as a poet. I would say go to open mics, share those poems because they sound very different in public. Even if you recite them out loud in your room or your study to hear how they sound, it changes when you go out into the public and share them. I don't consider a poem done until I share it like that.
AR: What do you notice about your connection with an audience when you're sharing something? If you're a comedian, I feel like the feedback that you're receiving from an audience is obvious, because there's laughter. What does that look like for a poet?
ATV: There is the poetic “Mmmm.” So when you read something they're like Mmmmmmmm. That's what you're wanting. The mayor asked me to write a poem for 500,000 dead, when we got to that point during COVID, and I wrote a poem with very long lines because if it's a serious subject you need long lines. Not short lines, because short lines are light and fast. For a serious subject you need long lines. Every person in that common council meeting was crying and that's what I wanted, and that's the power you have with poetry, with art.
AR: Do you feel like that is something you've developed? That ability to connect with people so deeply through your language?
ATV: There was this quote I used to keep on my desk from Joseph Conrad. He said, as a writer, you want to connect, only connect. When you write in your room and you're working on your craft it's great because it's you and the page, and sometimes I'm weeping when I write. When I go out and I connect with people as a poet, maybe you get five minutes or ten minutes and that's all of the time you have to grab their attention.
I did a reading in Chippewa, and someone came up to me and said, “I have ADHD, and sometimes I have a hard time concentrating, but you did one poem that pulled me back in” so he could listen to the entire set. That was a really huge compliment. The poem was a poem fashioned after the Chinese American poet, Arthur Sze. He has a theory that every line in a poem is a poem.
AR: Do you also apply that theory when you are writing a book of poetry?
ATV: Yes. How do you get the book together? If you don't have a lot of space, use a three-ringed binder. A lot of it is just spending time with your work looking at the collection as a whole. For me, I put it on the wall for the last two books, and I went through and found how many times I mentioned water, how many times I mentioned swing, so what are my through lines? What is my focus? How does it work together?
Santee Frazier, my mentor, told me to start small, don't hit them over the head right away, let them dip their toes into the collection. I follow that approach, but it really has to make sense. The only way it makes sense is if you spend a lot of time working on the inner architecture, what story are you telling, and the poems should tell you how they work as well. I do get some feedback from people, but I spend a lot of time on the editing and putting the collection together, so that it feels right. That takes a lot of time. I graduated in 2017 and submitted a collection in 2018 and it was accepted, but I spent the whole year reworking every poem and figuring out the collection.
AR: Is there a publication or a poem you recommend readers start with if they would like to start reading your work?
ATV: Finishing Line Press has published two of my collections, and I would say, if you want to see what I'm doing now that In Light, Always Light came out in 2019, and then My People Redux came out in 2022, which got some good attention. I'm really, really proud of these two. They’re my master's thesis. My People Redux got mentioned in the top 30 poetry anthologies by a Latina writer, and Ms. Magazine recognized My People Redux.
I'm consistently publishing in the Yellow Medicine Review, which is a wonderful anthology.
There are lots of YouTube videos of me at readings I have done recently.
AR: I’m really grateful for the time you took with me today.
ATV: Well, welcome to the mind of a nonlinear poet. I will leave you with this: we eat chicken soup. It's what we have when we have colds. Where do chickens come from? They came from the dinosaurs, so every time you eat chicken you're eating a dinosaur.
