Archiving Latenesses: a chronicle-review of MyOther Tongue by Rosa Alcalá
by José Angel Araguz
The many and pervasive latenesses in the lives of writers rarely gets discussed.
There’s a politeness (that other “ness”) that is assumed in the world of publishing and book reviewing, one that requires much be left unspoken, and not in the “poetic” unspokenality (to avoid yet another “ness”) of white spaces between stanzas, but, like, literally, don’t say anything, it’s rude. Editors are late in responding to submissions; writing groups/friends are late in providing feedback to each other; writers are late in responding to submission invites and calls and awards deadlines. And I know what you’re thinking: Y’all are getting invites? Y’all are getting awards? Y’all have friends? And, still, under the unspoken rules of this politeness, writers are often forgiven their latenesses. Or they’re not (I’m looking at you, stranger who reached out and asked I give feedback on poems and who, even after I admitted that I was crunched for time, still “nudged” me weeks later ((“nudges” are polite, btw)) but whose poems, like all poems, were worth spending time with, thank you for reaching out, I was only half as late as I feared I would be).
And that’s just it: a writer’s latenesses run parallel with a writer’s shame.* And by “a writer,” I mean, of course, me: I’m writer.
I won’t go too much longer in this vein (I’m late to this review as it is), I just want to make sure to clear the air for myself because the room in my head where I read poetry has been overcrammed with a mix of depression and survival mode instincts and trauma. So, yes. This review is late. A good deal late. Like I was living in a different city, working at a different job, fighting for my life on a different coast late. But I was polite about it, so a lot of what I’m saying may be a surprise to writers and most of my friends. And reading and writing poetry, including dwelling on other people’s poetry as a reviewer or editor, that’s the place where I feel most myself, the place where I do a large part of my living. So, if I’m late on a review or a submission deadline or feedback, it mainly means that I’m struggling to get back to that place, to living.** But, I keep at it, because poetry is worth it. Always.
Which brings me to MyOther Tongue by Rosa Alcalá, a book I’ve had with me on trains and cars and planes and bedsides, in backpacks and totes and once carried in hand across the downtown of a new city, for over two years. In that time, I have written poems out of it by hand to share with friends, photocopied one poem to share with a friend working on her dissertation, and read one poem in particular aloud at three different public events. I have read this collection as a whole a total of 2.5 times and will probably read it a couple of more times before I die (oof, I acknowledged mine own mortality – so much for politeness, ha). I can say this last bit because the poems are that good. And by “good” I mean they are the kind of poems that one comes back to for different reasons.
One comes back to the poetic sequence “Projection,” which engages with “And That’s Just the Way It Is” (2012), a media installation by Ben Rubin, for what it can teach about interacting with a work of art, how a poem can be an event and (literal) installation within an installation. One comes back to “Mother, Monster: A Lecture” for how it braids together myth and motherhood, showing both to be bound by history and contemporary experiences, and unbound by the empathy of human experience. One comes back to “Voice Activation” for the subversion of language worked out, how the speaker moves from the philosophical to the personal, all while meditating on the limits and possibilities of language.
One could say I’m failing at reviewing a book. One could say I’ve spent a majority of this review oversharing. Really, though, I’ve been archiving, giving y’all a sense of the context and history I’ve had with this book. It helps that the idea of the archive is central to this book. Part of Alcalá’s creative vision here is to evoke as much as possible the feeling of someone going through the stacks, sifting through history, listening. What can one hear through the “two misremembered lines of poetry” that are part of “Heritage Speaker”? What can one hear and add to when bringing together quotes from poems and essays as was done for “Voice, An Essay”? What can one hear going through the records, testimony, and letters of textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts as was done for the poem “My Body’s Production”?
I’m bringing up this last one on purpose as I find myself living in Lowell at the time of this chronicle. I was in Lowell when I came across the note about this poem upon my second read-through of the collection. Months had gone by, and yet, here was the book showing me how fateful life can feel. In a way, the archive – for Alcalá and for myself – is a marginal space where what’s left of people and experiences blurs with what’s felt.
One last archival note: Part of my process for book reviews is to use an index card as a book marker, and to keep a list of page numbers and notes on this card, a kind of map of my reading. There are 2.5 lists on the card for this book. One reading had me focused on “the idea of language + meaning + memory.” Another reading had me thinking “archive = self / traces.” Another reading had me thinking of margins: “ideas of the marginal = archive + misreading + remembering.” I look back at these notes and know, faintly, that I had something smart and polite to say about the book across them.***
But that’s gone. All I’m left with is this index card, a set of words and page numbers, and the feeling of other lives I have lived. Which is really the only thing to not be late for: living.
*Sidenote: Part of me keeps thinking that finally doing this review during a pandemic is a cop-out, that I’m using this crisis as a way to access a forgiveness that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible.
**Sidenote: Reading is also a large part of my two teaching jobs; in that context, I’ll just say that my students’ efforts and energy move me to always meet them where they’re at, writer to writer.
***Sidenote: I have, in fact, written smartly and politely about Alcalá’s work here and here.
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New South, and Poetry International. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on Instagram @poetryamano. With an MFA from NYU and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.