The Lightning Room With Christopher Perez

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

Read Christopher Perez’s Poems from “The Story of the Pocho” in our March issue, then read about why he empties drunk sound into a family of languages beverage to console the useless patrons of earth and Pepsi Cola.

1. What do you hear when you hear Spanish and English spoken together?

I hear aggressiveness among the languages, heterogeneity not only spurted from the voice but constructed as a self. Code-switching offers possibilities for thinking twice as fast or twice as slow or at least for presenting two selves, one doubled over the other. In my hometown and its surrounding area, which is the Rio Grande Valley, I hear both languages interchangeably and for me this develops my sense of placefulness even if ultimately I feel errant and more natural without everything heavy that pretends to house itself in the heart. I think Spanish is the most beautiful of the imposed languages and then English second. In Ramallah a Chilean-Palestinian friend and I code-switch between these languages and we are like secrets when walking down busy streets though we both ask ourselves why we can’t speak Arabic. People often think I’m Arab here because of the way I look. When I’m at a checkpoint and a soldier asks, I respond in English knowing I’m entering an international world that all but allows for errantry. How nice it would be to interject in Spanish and become amorphous and opaque or to even one day speak Arabic and fully assume the typified Other in this context.

2. Do you give sounds and meanings different levels of importance or how do you feel about what words do versus what words are?

I tend to find sound energetic and present whereas meaning eludes and is impressionistic. Perhaps I’m a very reflexive person because sound guides the writing of the poem and thus the writing of the poem is in some sense meaningless. I mean to say meaning follows the line rather than the other way around and it’s only once sound’s put into activity that I begin to conceptually grasp the word’s meaning. Of course, words have more than one kind of meaning and their conceptual meaning is farthest from what they are or at least can be. When I read over a poem I’m writing, I hope to travel across affective registers in a way that’s emptying. The poem must impend temporally and the sound of words is one determinant for developing the sense of urgency needed for a reader to surface out onto the world. I just read and am high off Marosa di Giorgio’s “Historial de las violetas.” I’m a guilty reader who always feels like he’s not reading enough and one night, to appease my guilt, I decided to read straight through “Historial de las violetas.” Then I had to sleep because I was working the next day but I found myself pulsating, almost convulsing, as soon as I was horizontal in bed. I felt like a great worm that only eats green things without knowing the beauty of what green things can be. “Historial de las violetas” is the kind of urgency I listen for when using words. It’s not even futurist in its direction. In fact, it’s—as the last line of the book suggests—a way of remembering eternity. It’s a strange idea when di Giorgio says I remember eternity. How do you remember something that’s continual? Perhaps remembering then is an act of presentness and that which surrounds us must be indexed. Or maybe the poet’s more sinister and eternity’s something that can end or exist outside of us, which is very edenic in its reminder of the Fall.

3. My hometown is the birthplace of Pepsi-Cola. Are you impressed and why or why not?

I’m not very impressed, sorry to say. I don’t drink or even like soda and I only sometimes make an exception for Mexican Coca-Cola (have you tried!?). But I am very interested in this fact and imagine you’ve some kind of responsibility to write about Pepsi, at least in the way that O’Hara would write about ORANGES.

4. When I read your lists I think, Family. Why do I think that?

Because I write about FAMILY in the same way you could write about PEPSI? “The Story of the Pocho” is about many things, one of them being the familial. I consider family and friendship, which is part of family, to be essential to a poetics of errantry in the sense that family’s placeless and built on possibilities for love. I’ve made my family out of the most motley crew—blood, drug dealers, assassins, cowboys, business men, painters, musicians, romantics, nerds, techies—and perhaps a list’s one way to evoke family without the necessity of situating place. Lists are great for their adjacency and I hope my family’s always adjacent to me. My most recent writing for a new manuscript called “LOVE PANT ALIEN” is becoming extraterrestrial and political, as my friend Mirene Arsanios says, in the way words relate to each other on the page. But I think underneath this otherworldliness is the world in which my family and all other associating histories crust and underneath that is the underworld, where the poet convulses. Maybe this is what it means to be errant: to try to agitate the world. It’s a dramatic way of looking at things, I know, but I think drama allows enough space for the comedic. In American Spanish the word vacilar, which appears in my PANK poems, means to vacillate but it can also mean to get drunk or play around and celebrate. Wavering between decisions and actions can be Dionysian and inebriating and this in itself is one possible basis for drama.

5. I think dickfacades is a great word and you deserve some attention for inventing it. Congratulate yourself.

Thanks. There’s a nice translation of Bolaño’s acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize out now from Triple Canopy and in it he mentions how writers don’t need praise because we’re always praising ourselves. I wrote the poem with dickfacades very quickly and when I finished the first version I got up and did a few push ups and then paced back and forth before looking out the window. I started to clench my fists and tried dancing a small Bachata. It was a painful kind of praise necessitated by a desire to emote using language. When I returned to the poem I finally noticed dickfacades, which I had somehow written with the same ease as I had written avocados. I love the word facade because I love the word facha even more. I picked it up in Argentina. Facha typically means fascist though in Argentinean Spanish it’s the colloquially abbreviated version of fachada (facade). Linking fascism to the rule of the facade seems appropriate when thinking about dickfacades.

6. Talk about being lost. Tell a true story.

All of “The Story of the Pocho” is a narrative regarding loss and being lost—floating. A while back I posted a quote on Facebook from Bataille’s essay on Kafka in his book “Literature and Evil.” I can now paste it here:

“Basically he knew that he had been banished. We cannot tell whether he had been banished by others or by himself. He simply behaved in such a manner as to be odious to the world of industrial and commercial interest: he wanted to remain in the puerility of a dream. “The escape he dreamt of differed essentially from the traditional form of literary escapism in that it failed—it had to fail and it wanted to fail. What common escape lacks—and by lacking it is limited to a compromise, to a ‘sham’—is the profound sense of guilt, of the violation of an indestructible law, the lucidity of a pitiless self-knowledge. The man who escapes in literature is a dilettante who knows that he is amusing himself. He is not yet free—he is not free in the true sense of the word, where liberty is sovereign.”

The move from self-exile to being lost often overlaps and so does the move from the literary to whatever’s outside it. All my poems in PANK serialize a moment when I had just been kicked off a gigantic 100,000-hectare ranch in Patagonia because a tendon in my right foot was torn and I was useless to my patron. So I forded a river and hiked 6 hours to the nearest bus station, all the while wondering how I’d get around almost penniless. Eventually I got to Chos Malal in Neuquén, where I spent some time in a hotel before moving to the town square, where some kids nightly visited and offered me box wine and cigarettes. An older guy named José came one day and offered to take me in so that his mother could nurse me back to health. Every night we returned to the square and listened to this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeFqnFHrRVA I’ve never felt so simultaneously lost and at home in my life even though I’m again approaching this feeling here in Palestine.

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DeWitt Brinson is a poet. That guy, he does it all.