In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Albert Abonado
Your two poems, “Romance” and “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill,” are beautiful works of reclamation and loss. Where did the creation of “Romance” start?
I spend my summers helping out at my family’s blueberry farm. Each morning, a hummingbird would visit me at the stand, zipping around the petunias that hung over the stand. Sometimes, the blue bird would hover curiously close to my face, but most of the time, it would zip in and out among the flowers. I often begin a poem with a “what if?” premise, and see where the poem takes me. After watching that hummingbird every day, I asked myself what if two people decided to live as hummingbirds? It’s not the strangest or wildest idea, but I thought it would be interesting to see how a poem like that develops.
Humor is a gem in poetry, and you capture it with the phrase “hummingbird farts.” It greatly juxtaposes the previous two lines that mention “cancer” and “the end of history.” What was the impetus to lighten the poem at this point?
In this poem, I think humor is a useful way to speak to the desires of the speaker and their partner. The speaker’s list of concerns grows larger and more abstract as it progresses until it reaches a point where the poem needs to return to a grounded space. What’s more human and intimate than farting beside a loved one? Also, farts are just funny and not enough poems feature farts.
There’s a tenderness within the violence of “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill.” What was the inspiration for this piece? When did the splits between the lines come into the formatting?
Summertime, I’m frequently traveling through rural areas where roads are often littered with every variety of roadkill. Death is a frequent visitor to my poems and this seemed like rich material to explore. I’ve tried different versions of this poem before, and it probably wasn’t until several revisions of the poem when I started experimenting with the spaces within the lines, playing with the fragmentation and the violence the absence imposes on the lines. The spaces also presented new exit and entry points within the poem, allowing me to pivot to new thematic territory.
The line, “How else should we discuss the countless silences / that gash us” is such a thoughtful way to bind this animal with human suffering. Can you talk about that theme within this text?
Maybe my poems are just a way for me to be more comfortable with mortality? The poem, I feel, wants to confront this daily reminder of mortality, that we are as susceptible, as vulnerable as any animal, that their suffering cannot be disentangled from our own. Death here is a fact, an inevitability, and it operates on its own time. This can make one feel helpless and small. Something gentle and generous feels necessary in the face of that, a declaration that we do not suffer alone, and this offers some small comfort.
What themes do you find recurring in your writing?
As I mentioned before, mortality and loss make frequent appearances in my writing. I’m often exploring and unpacking my sense of identity, my American-ness and Filipino-ness, and the experience of that hybridity. As a lapsed Catholic, the language of ritual and faith, that appetite for the spiritual, continues to inform my writing, seen in a poem like “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill.” But all of these things intersect, mortality and faith, faith and cultural identity, loss and America.
What books and authors influence your work? What titles do you return to?
I often return to writers like Li-Young Lee or James Tate or Denise Duhamel. I deeply admire poets who can juggle tones. It always feels like magic to read work by writers like Chen Chen or Matthew Olzmann. More recent books that have been important to me include Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare, Obit by Victoria Chang, and frank:sonnets by Diane Seuss.
What projects are you working on now?
I am finishing up my time as the artist in residence at SUNY Oswego where I worked on poems that interrogate the idea of naming, responding to name-based prompts provided by people within the Oswego community. That has been a delightful challenge. It was a project adjacent to the new manuscript, which is still in the very very early stages. I hope to have a clearer vision of the book within the next year or so.
Albert Abonado is the author of the poetry collection JAW (Sundress Publications 2020) and the forthcoming Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press 2024), selected by Mahogany Browne for the National Poetry Series. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3, and others. He lives and teaches in Rochester, New York.
