Art Is + Paula Mendoza

SP Blog’s series "Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive here. and Geraldine Kang here.

Paula Mendoza earned her BA in English at the University of Texas and her MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan. She’s currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She’s the recipient of the Yalobusha Review Poetry Award, the Hopwood Award in Poetry, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry. Hyphenated, she's Filipino-Canadian. Regionally, an Austinite. Mostly, her home's in words. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City.

Published in May, Paula Mendoza’s Play for Time, selected by Vijay Seshadri as the winner of the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, is an accomplished debut with high personal and political stakes. Vijay Seshadri describes the poems in Play for Time as “unimpeachable in the rigor and mathematical clarity of their forms but are also round and rich and exfoliating with intuition, hesitation, self-questionings, and personhood.” Her poems interrogate their own forms and question the use of traditional narrative in describing the experience of a female immigrant. In order to investigate “how bodies become objects of consumption, voyeurism, and desire,” as Paisley Rekdal has it, Mendoza’s poetic experiments are entangled with colonial history, male speech, and the love poem. From brokenness and displacement, Paula Mendoza has made an object that survives oppressive power.

I recently spoke with Mendoza about her relationship to memory, the material presence of light, and Play for Time’s address to its reader.—Janelle Tan.

What is a poem to you?
”A thing made of words.”

Janelle Tan: How did this book PLAY FOR TIME begin?

Paula Mendoza: It didn’t really come together until a couple of years into my PhD program here in Utah. I took a workshop with Jackie Osherow in which we had to complete a manuscript of poems. It wasn’t until I had to put everything together and find a larger organizing structure that the ideas I didn’t even realize I was obsessing about found their shape. I took a class on the novel with Scott Black, and a lot of what we read, stuff that dealt with narrative and subjectivity, really helped ground a lot of things I was troubling through, like the lyric as both genre and ideology, and legibility vs. illegibility or integration vs. fragmentation.

JT: How old is the oldest poem in the book? How new is the newest?

PM: I think “Someone No One Anyone Everyone” might be the oldest. That was published in the The Awl in 2014. So, 6 years old? And the newest is “On the Topography of Tears,” which is about a year old. It’s hard to tell, to be honest. I want to say that “not a mermaid” was much older, but that’s because it was culled from a much longer piece written… god, I want to say almost a decade ago? I find some pieces don’t know what they want to say until much, much later.

JT: How long did it take to find a home for the book at Gaudy Boy?

PM: Far quicker than I thought, actually. A year. Once I had a manuscript, I made a spreadsheet of contests, deadlines, and fees, which I shared with friends here in my program who had books ready to send out. I’d also done this after my time in Michigan, with my first manuscript. It’s an expensive, tedious, and sometimes depressing process that you have to emotionally steel yourself for. There’s so much good work out there, so you need to go in anticipating that at some point, several months after the fact, your inbox will be flooded with rejections. Having a group of friends to help each other dust off, get back up, and cheer each other on is invaluable. Anyway, it was after I had already sent out to maybe ten or so contests that Paisley (Rekdal) emailed me and Alleliah (Nuguid) letting us know about the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. I read up on Singapore Unbound, and Gaudy Boy, and saw that Jee and everyone on board were doing a lot of exciting, politically-driven and community-minded work, so I sent it along.

It’s not talked about a lot, I don’t think, the whole publication process. It’s like sausage getting made, y’know? Poets who’ve gone through the MFA process and then later into a PhD, they all know what the fancy presses are, the ones that will make a cv shine, that ones we think will get us closer to the ever-diminishing mirage of full professorhood. What I’ve found is that it’s less about that fancy press and more about finding a place that truly fits your work and finding the people who see what you’re trying to do. This is already a much longer answer than I’d planned, but I hope that we can all be a little more transparent about what it looks like, on the ground, for poets still looking to find a home for their manuscript. Find your people and help each other out. Ask published writers about their experience with their press. Look for the press that will give you the attention and care your work deserves. 

“I love to think of light as one way
of understanding or knowing something.”

JT: You mentioned at your book launch why the book was named PLAY FOR TIME, and how it references the poems’ disjointedness, play, and experimentation with narrative. You also described narrative as an organization and manipulation of time, of events. I’m curious then, about your relationship to information as part of narrative: how to decide what information to reveal and obscure from the reader, and when and how you reveal information in your poems. When did you realize that narrative was something you were interested in exploring in your poems?

PM: I’ve always been interested in the materiality of language, its textures and structure. I don’t think I’m all that deliberate or calculating when it comes to what I give away or withhold in my writing. As for the manipulation of time and events, what you’re reading in the book is the attempt at, and not the product of, manipulation. If I’m making any conscious decision, it’s the decision to let a reader in. Some poems are just me inviting you along and asking, “hey, yo, wanna see what this thing does?” Syntax is so supremely weird and resilient and amazing, why wouldn’t you want to play with it? And narrative, with its cosmic-super-glue powers of unifying the disparate, like, why wouldn’t you want to try and blow that shit up? I know a lot of this exploration is driven by my relationship to memory and the past, but that’s everybody, right? Remembering is a creative act, after all. And nostalgia is the willed illusion of an integrated, coherent, and meaningful past. So, when one’s past is a series of disconnections and displacements, it primes them to be nostalgic. I’m resistant to and suspicious of narrative because it’s so damn powerful. Which is really just another way of saying that I’m a kind of obsessed with it. It sustains behaviors and fathoms lifetimes. The stories we make up, make us up.

To answer the “when” part of your question, as I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t until much later that I realized I was interested in narrative as an idea. Early on in my career, when I was still invested in and encouraged towards aesthetic identification, I fancied myself a “lyric” poet and not a “narrative” poet. I won’t go into how bogus that differentiation is and only bring it up to say that the capitalistic efficacy of categorization is real. And, sometimes, you end up confusing a category for a goal, which is inevitably (and by definition, necessarily) limiting. I’m all for productive constraint, but identifying too much with any particular mode will blind you to a lot of language’s possibilities. And, to think of “lyric” and “narrative” in only adjectival terms is to underestimate the complexity and power of both. Also, narrative is a part of everything! That I, as a human being, make material and existential sense, is because of narrative. And it took me until a few years ago to realize that, and to want to study and explore that, because sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.

JT: In the poem “Halfway,” you write, “You were between two animals.” What is your relationship to in-betweenness?

PM: It’s nice here. I mean, not always, of course. Sometimes occupying an in-betweenness feels exhausting and you just want to be one or the other so you can lie down and rest awhile. But, I’d say my relationship with in-betweenness is an emotionally healthy one. “Halfway” was one of those rare moments where I wrote a thing straight through and didn’t much fuss with it afterwards. A lot of poems in this book look radically different from the original, and some have been edited over months and even years. “Halfway” is not one of them. The last couple of lines are referencing a lecture by the artist, Spencer Finch, and his piece The River that Flows Both Ways. Finch photographed the surface of water (of the Hudson River) once every minute for 700 minutes. I remember him talking about how what we perceive of any single color is a degree of light absorption. I love to think of light as one way of understanding or knowing something. And I don’t mean light in the figurative sense, I mean its material presence, the way it behaves, its mutable visibility and legibility, and how it renders our human apparatus of sight wonderfully inadequate. I don’t think I’m writer enough to succinctly explain why the condition of being in-between, like light, is a paradox of multiplicity and singularity. I’m definitely talker enough to ramble on for several more pages, but the poem exists, and so does the Hudson River, and what Spencer Finch did with it, so thank goodness for all that.

“I feel individual syllables in my body. Lines and sentences
evoke physical sensory experiences. Even when I think of landscapes,
these thoughts translate as sensation.”

JT: There are poems, like “Left by the Ship,” which play with different kinds of forms and different locales—and some poems which carry a similar rhythm throughout. You address the narratology of your poems head-on, for example, in “Narrative Poem.” How do you begin to see the shape and form of your poems? At what point in the revision process does that happen for you?

PM: I’d say that it happens pretty late in the revision process, for me. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it takes years to see what shape a poem can or will or should take. That poem was published in the now-defunct Drunken Boat, and the middle prose sections are pretty different. It may yet undergo another revision, or, I may just need to write an essay about the documentary, Left by the Ship. What my process has looked like, at least for the past few years, is that I write a large chunk of text and carve and winnow out a poem from that. I used to be a lot more severe and single-minded during the editing process, where I began with an idea of what the Poem™ looked like and I would edit and revise the writing until it looked like that thing. I’ve a bit more sense and humility these days. Or I hope I do. What that means is that I listen and think a little more, and for a little longer. In the example of this poem, I wanted to communicate how creepy it is that conditions of poverty or violence can be fashioned to appear visually pleasing, and how I am implicated in this pleasure, so I decided that I was going to need a few more sentences. Left by the Ship is wrestling with complicity and self-awareness, and trying to capture the pace at which these conditions move. For this poem, at least, I decided that the idea needed the breeziness and casualness of prose, where the speaker affects nonchalance and critical detachment even while she’s trying to reconcile the discomfort and alienation of her experience.  

I wouldn’t say “Narrative Poem” addresses the narratology of my poems so much as it expresses frustration with the conventions and false promises of narrative. It tactlessly points out how slippery syntax and tense are. It’s the frustration of desire; its operative phrases are “I want” and “I don’t want". The original draft began as a kind of pretentious philosophical inquiry about time and its relationship to plotlines and memory, but after several re-readings and edits, I realized the poem was not at all concerned with knowledge and truth. The speaker of this poem simply wanted the power to erase what they find messy and ugly and sad. That realization helped me to decide that simple, declarative prose sentences worked best, and I revised it towards that voice and tone.

JT: I’m thinking of the section “So” in your book. It seems the poems in that section are involved in a kind of writing and rewriting, or if you will, an utterance with correction or qualification. I’m thinking not just of the poems where you use filmmaking techniques like “Scene Rewrite” and “Alternate Ending I,” but even something more sentimental and earnest, like “Lyric.” Were you always aware of the threads in your collection? How did you construct arcs within sections and within the book?

PM: Once I fixed on the idea of narrative, that is, the incommensurability of narrative with lived experience, as well as the compulsion towards, or perhaps innate capacity for, narrative, then the sections came together pretty easily. Those qualifications and re-writings you point out were patterns I observed before I started assembling my manuscript. At first they sort of mortified me, like noticing I had a facial tic or had been walking around with a stain on my pants, but after making some key cuts and fleshing out other newer poems I was working on, I saw those patterns as an important part of the larger inquiry. Initially, the section headings were numbered chapters. But, ‘chapter’ as section title wasn’t doing enough. I played around with different narrative markers, like different iterations of “once upon a time”, before settling on “First, So, Then” and “Beginning, Middle”. It was pretty clearly five sections, so it’s a happy accident, in many ways, that there was never a sixth section there to name, “End.”

JT: At your book launch, you talked about how you’ve never written “an honest-to-goodness love poem,” choosing to describe your poems as “love-adjacent.” I do think of your poems as earnest—do you find it useful to characterize your poems as poems of desire? I sometimes wonder, then, if every poem is a poem of desire.

PM: Yeah, that’s useful, I think. But I want to clarify that it’s not eros we’re dealing with in this book. The first manuscript I had, which I’ve since scrapped, was all about erotic desire, and it had about as much depth and substance as a dollar bag of gummy bears. ‘Desire’ is one of those terms that I find lends false weight to things. It water-bloats an intention. Sometimes a poem is not about desire, it’s just about being horny. I think that’s an important difference and I want to insist on that difference. Maybe a love poem is one that captures the kind of grounded-ness and ease that exists between two people who see each other’s myriad contradictions and complexities and can forego preambles and disclaimers to say, hey, I’m horny and hungry, let’s have sex and eat a cheeseburger after. To say a poem is of desire is to abstract it to gesture, which seems like a demotion. A poem is a made thing, and I would rather it be about desire than of it. Though these days, I’d rather have it be about anything else. Quickies, cheeseburgers, penguins! Every poem as a poem of and/or about desire would be so exhausting!

JT: It seems that even if a poem is not a love poem, there’s an earnestness to the way the speaker addresses the “you” figure. I think of the beloved in your poems as more than a muse, as a kind of reflector in the garden shining the speaker’s musings back into the room. How do you think of the beloved in your own poems?

PM: That earnestness you perceive is my love for the reader. In the nineties and early aughts there was—I don’t know if you’d call it a movement—but perhaps a pattern and coincidence of rhetoric among a group of writers and artists that someone named “The New Sincerity.” It was around this time there were a lot of conversations about “Irony vs. Sincerity” and “Accessible vs. Difficult Poetry,” all of which seemed to suggest that these inclinations and conditions were not only mutually exclusive but actively in competition with one another. Anyway, those conversations were useful at least in moving me towards a more nuanced and generatively ambivalent understanding of earnestness and authenticity. In very specific terms, that “you” is any one of several beloveds or the “you” of self-talk. But, in its most capacious form, that “you” is always and ever the reader.

“There’s no lesson there. The poem is just letting you know
there’s no getting off this ride now… It’s saying, I’m tired,
and I know you’re tired, and I’m sorry, but if we made it this far,
we might as well keep going.”

JT: It seems the attention of your poems is fixated on the body – your images are mapped onto the landscape of the body. I know you have relationships to a lot of different places, in the U.S. and internationally. Some of the poems are in Texas, and in some of them, the only locations we get are places on the body. How do you think about the landscape of PLAY FOR TIME?

PM: I have to admit, I’ve never thought of my poems in terms of landscape. That’s interesting to think about, though, and I’m curious now which poets conceive of language in terms of physical landmass, or geography. Poetry is a somatic experience for me. I know it sounds woo-woo, but I’m being very literal and serious when I say that I feel individual syllables in my body. Lines and sentences evoke physical sensory experiences. Even when I think of landscapes, those thoughts translate as sensation. The Philippines is both the clear, salt smell of the ocean and the pungent funk of palenque. Texas is the sweetness of grape soda flowers and oppressive heat. The landscape of Play for Time spans several climates, but I’m pretty sure it has four full seasons. 

JT: You were/are (?) an essay editor for The Offing! I want to talk about “On The Topography of Tears” – how it begins in the essayistic, and suspends itself in poetic lines, the anaphora “to believe” driving personal definitions of sentimental, before finally holding the reader rapt with the short lines in the last section. Do you see poems, and the poetic line, as a suspension (or collapse) of the prose sentence? How do you define and differentiate line and sentence?

PM: I was the essay editor for The Offing! I stepped down before starting my PhD program in Utah. I love essays, and I think there’s a lot of organizational strategies that poetry and essays share. There’re SO many essayists I adore (Jia Tolentino! Anne Boyer! Elisa Gabbert!) As for the difference between line and sentence, I defer to James Longenbach’s succinctly articulated argument in Art of the Poetic Line. I hope others who’ve read and loved that book will pardon my paraphrase when I say that the difference between prose and poetry is that the latter works with the line and the former with the sentence. The poetic line recognizes and manipulates that tension between syntax’s propulsive energy and the minor chaos of white space, breath, and expectation.

The way you frame your question suggests that a poetic line is a derivation of the sentence, where a poetic line does, and the prose sentence is what is done to. Maybe I misinterpret your meaning? In any case, what I can say is that I don’t think one is primary and the other secondary. They each do very different things, and it’s the integrity of their difference that compels me to throw them together into a poem. A prose sentence stays a prose sentence even if it’s inside a poem. A poetic line and a prose sentence can both collapse (meaning) and suspend (energy), in different ways, and I pick and choose which one to use depending on what the poem needs.

JT: I want to ask you about the last two poems in the book – the ending sequence – “Nostos, a Longing” explores several threads of the book – myth, exile, beloveds, time and its doubling, and the slow shutter of filmmaking. “Go-To” feels like an inevitable last word, a nod that an end is not an end but a gesture back to “the first, again.” It seems to me that no other poems could have ended the book. Can you speak to your process of finding the book’s ending – when did the poems come about individually? When did you know you had found your ending sequence in them?

PM: To hear you say that the last poem feels like no other poem could have ended the book feels SO gratifying that I am immediately suspicious of it! Not you, of course, but of my sense of smugness and vindication that I indeed made the most perfect and correct decision!

When I was sending out this manuscript, there were a few different versions in which the last poem was, alternately, “One After the Other,” “Autopoesis,” and “The End.” “Go-To” was a late-in-the-submission-process decision, but it seemed right, or at least it seemed the most honest, because it felt caught in the middle and less sure of itself. Those other poems I mentioned which ended other manuscript versions were motivated by the desire to have the book end with the satisfying ‘click’ of something closing shut. I initially wanted an ending that felt like the closing credits, to have some kind of meaningful message or lesson the reader could take with them. In “One After the Other,” it was the imperative to care for other people; “The End” cracked me up because I liked the idea of ending the book with a poem that blunt and obvious and literal while still suggesting that the story you’ve just heard is “full of holes” and contradictions; “Autopoesis” chants the lesson that “Narrative Poem” refuses to acknowledge, which is that there’s no going back. But “Go-To”… yeah. That was the right choice. There’s no lesson there. That poem is just letting you know there’s no getting off this ride now. It’s got this weird, ambivalent inertia. It’s saying, I’m tired, and I know you’re tired, and I’m sorry, but, if we made it this far, we might as well keep going.

JT: I know you spoke about this at your book launch, but I’d like to ask you this again. This is your debut collection. What are you thinking about for your next book?

PM: I really want to finish a couple of essays and take more photographs and paint some pictures. I don’t know if I can speak to any subject or themes yet. In very practical terms, I want to find intuitive and useful ways to merge my photographs and artwork with my writing. Abstractly, I’m still working on a better love poem, still trying to make sentences and syllables do strange and cool things, and I’m still looking for words for home.

You can purchase Paula Mendoza’s PLAY FOR TIME at these places:
N. America: Bookshop / Indiebound / Amazon
S.E. Asia: SGBookshelf
E-Book: KIndle

Janelle Tan is a Singaporean poet in Brooklyn. Her work appears in The Southampton Review, Nat. Brut, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was Web Editor for Washington Square Review. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow and Assistant Interviews Editor at Singapore Unbound.