"I wrote this poem’s wild ride after years of tinkering with a short poem about a homesick conquistador. I needed to summon the ghosts of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Walt Whitman to channel my own ambiguous, mixed-race, part-plant nature into being. Time-travelling, I want to see the giant Olmec heads in situ gazing out to sea, toward our crazed future."
"I remember once...dropping a poem off at Bidart’s apartment. He stays up all night and sleeps during the day. Our protocol was for me to put my poem in his mailbox. He would call me late at night, having read it."
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“'The Wake of Maria De Jesus Martinez' was one attempt to write, as form, a casta-like poem, where each section of the lyric was itself of a different time and space, yet, linked through repeating phrases. As the lyric progressed, the work began to be less 'pictorial' and relied more and more on sound: the emotional labor of the poem was performed/rendered through its music."
