AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Cynthia Cruz and Charif Shanahan on Protecting Your Feral-ness and More

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cynthia Cruz:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Dark Register”)

If you leave,
he said,
keep who you are.

Don’t let the world
and its desires
ruin you.

Charif Shanahan: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Charif Shanahan, guest editor of the magazine. This week, I’m speaking with Cynthia Cruz, who joins us from Berlin, Germany. Cynthia is the author of seven poetry collections. Her most recent, Hotel Oblivion, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published a manifesto for the working class, and a book of essays on silence. Born on a US Air Force Base in Germany and raised in Northern California, she is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. Today, we’ll hear from her forthcoming manuscript, Back to the Woods, which will be out this September. The poems in the book circulate around Freud’s concept of the death drive. Cynthia writes, “In its simplest iteration, the death drive is an attempt to begin again, through the act of self-annihilation.” Cynthia, welcome to the podcast.

Cynthia Cruz: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here. And it’s so nice to see you.

Charif Shanahan: So nice to see you. And so great to have you. I want to start by asking you about process, which is a question I typically shy away from in interviews. Our processes are idiosyncratic, and I find that when folks ask about them, what we offer up rarely helps them, because so personal and so individual. You are incredibly prolific. Your first book of poems, Ruin, came out in 2006. And after the publication of your second collection, The Glimmering Room, six years later, in 2012, you’ve published a book of poems every two years. I think it’s consistently been every two years. And so, I’d really love to understand a little bit more about how your poems come into being, what the process of finding and growing your poems is.

Cynthia Cruz: Thank you for pointing that out. I wasn’t aware that they’re coming out every two years. I was actually talking to my husband last night, I was talking about Lucie Brock-Broido, who I was really lucky to work under. And I was talking about the two different kinds of poets. It seems like there are poets who publish, irregularly, right. And I think every—she published just a few books, every eight years. And so everybody waits, right. And I am one of those people who I wish, I feel like I kind of wish I were one of those people, because there’s something about that, you know, everyone’s kind of waiting and waiting and waiting. But I’m, I think of the artists Dieter Roth or Mike Kelley, and they were, it’s just like this collecting of stuff. And this is the kind of poet I am. And so, as I’ve been writing these books, I’ve been in school. So I got an MFA in art criticism. And then I got a master’s in German Language and Literature, and I’m currently working on this dissertation. And so it feels like I’m not working on the poetry, but I’m always sort of collecting. It is sort of the way that I work. I think that the work that comes from our everyday life, and that’s like all of it, including research and the news, and everything, makes the best raw material. And I also have been talking a lot and thinking a lot about Clarice Lispector’s process when she was working on The Hour of the Star and her last stories, and she would literally write on scraps of paper what was happening. So she’d write, you know, “Went downstairs to the—not the bodega, but the bodega and got a pack of cigarettes and a Coca Cola and I talked to the guy on the street.” And she would literally just write on scraps of paper. And then she put that into the story. So you can, there’s an archive online, and you can see her notes. And then you can go to The Hour of the Star and those two last stories and see them as they show up. And so it’s not, it’s not William Burroughs, it’s not stream of consciousness, it’s rather just collecting the everyday material. And then of course, revising it, making something of it.

Charif Shanahan: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship between your critical work and your creative work? And I want to put an asterisk on that question, because I resist that binary that we so often see upheld within academic spaces, and even in just casual conversation among artists and scholars. You know, the presupposition of that binary, of course, is that the creative work is not critical, and that the critical work is not creative inherently, that there’s some kind of mutual exclusivity of those two things. And so, as someone who is, you know, kind of decidedly and in a pronounced way, doing both and publishing different types of work that is both critical and creative in poetry and cultural criticism, how do you think about these questions?

Cynthia Cruz: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how my work has always—I’ve always believed that the lyric “I” is the way to, to show the world that I live in. You know, and one of the things I always feel like, and I always tell my students, if I just write or we all just write about our actual life as a poem, right, not just, that then in 20, and 50, and 200 years that actually is writing about the world, right? You’re writing as an American. I am an American, even though I don’t live in the US right now. I carry all of that, right. So the US is highly militarized. You know, just all of it, all the class stuff, all that, racism, everything. It’s in the writing, even if I’m not explicitly stating it. But I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps writing from the “I” doesn’t do what I want it to do. And I’m not exactly sure, so I’m glad you asked the question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about because I don’t want to write didactic work. And I don’t want to write work that is very explicit. That I think is for the prose, it’s very separate, but it’s something I’m thinking a lot about. It’s a great question.

Charif Shanahan: When you say that you don’t want to write work that’s very explicit and that’s for the prose, what aspect would be explicit? Is that—are you thinking about narrative or exposition? Or how do you mean that, Cynthia?

Cynthia Cruz: I’ve always felt that for me, poetry, for me, poetry is a form for trying to put language to what can actually not be articulated. It’s impossible. It’s Lacan’s real sort of, or, you know, just the impossible, or trauma, right? And then, you know, my philosophy or essays, or any of that stuff is actually providing the context. And it’s explaining it in a different way. It’s articulating, and they’re very different. What does it mean that they’re so different? And is that okay, is my, you know, writing these other poems that are not explicit, is that a cop out? I mean, I don’t know. You know, it’s something I’m thinking a lot about.

Charif Shanahan: You mentioned trauma just a moment ago. And I wanted to ask about treating traumatic subjects as material for lyric poems. And I want to say too that, I think you know this, but I am a Cynthia Cruz Stan.

Cynthia Cruz: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: I absolutely love your work. I absolutely love your work. Your poems astonish me, Cynthia, you know, and particularly, it really is, in a way, your treatment of very difficult material that has intense gravitas, but is never melodramatic. It is never self-indulgent. It achieves something totally, you know, which is probably the element of the work where poems about or of or a consequence of trauma might begin to move in this direction that folks, that critics often critique lyric poetry in and around trauma for. And so, how do you do that? (LAUGHS)

Cynthia Cruz: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: How do you find that, how do you find that balance? And I think also, you know, part of what I am interested in hearing you, you know, share is, you know, about the ethics, almost, of writing about trauma and what draws you to your subjects.

Cynthia Cruz: I think that actually listening to you talk, I’ve returned back to my, you know, that poetry is for this thing, because one of the things I feel very strongly is that anyone living in the United States, and you could also say under capitalism, anyone living under capitalism is suffering greatly, greatly.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Cruz: At different, different levels, in different ways, for sure, but everyone. I’m even getting chills thinking about it, I mean, we’re all—we all have trauma. Recently, I was at a panel talking about Italy, the book, Melancholia of Class, translated into Italian. So I was at this really great festival in a factory. All the workers had been fired, and they took over the factory. So there were like 200 factory workers there. It was just amazing. I felt like I don’t want to talk, you guys talk, but I was talking.

Charif Shanahan: Wow.

Cynthia Cruz: And I felt what I feel often, which is that the stuff I was talking about in that book is not special. I mean, there’s so many people just like me. And that’s how I feel about the poems, too, that so many people suffer violence or poverty or, you know, their parents, or what, it just, right, so many. So, in a way, it feels like if I can articulate that in a way that people can sense, right, then that’s doing something. So I am back on this. I think, I think that they are two different ways, and I am back on thinking that’s what I’m going to do is these things. And I was thinking when you were talking about trauma, I was thinking of my father. Or my mother, I mean, what they’ve gone through, their lives. And the way that, I couldn’t, there’s no way to articulate that in a poem in a straightforward manner. It would be reductive, right? So if I talked about, you know, poverty or the medical establishment in the US, it becomes a kind of lesson. And that’s not the way that it is rendered in their body and their psyche, right. That’s not what it is. It’s different. And so, I keep thinking, it’s like, well, I’m not gonna say what I think because it’s goofy, but.

Charif Shanahan: Oh, please do.

Cynthia Cruz: I was gonna say it’s like a dance, which sounds so goofy, but it’s like, the poems are a series of gestures, right. And I think a lot too about, you know, especially when I’m teaching that, you know, so if I were, like I said, if I were to tell you the story about my mother, and how she was diagnosed with kidney failure—kidney failure in the US, they do this terrible thing where they put a tube in you. I won’t, nobody wants to hear the story. But it’s quite horrible and traumatic and violent. And every once in a while, you have to get a new tube put into your body, where you have to be put under, it’s very expensive. And for a period of time, she stayed with my brother who lives on the other coast. And so she saw a different doctor, and that doctor said, “Actually, there’s nothing wrong with your kidneys at all.” There’s nothing wrong with my mother’s kidneys. So the issue was, you know, given this surgery, presumably for the money.

Charif Shanahan: Whew.

Cynthia Cruz: Do you know, each time this cost so much money and my mother, she, how do you, how do you digest that information? My mother is, I think, 80 now, so it’s been a lifetime of these kinds of things that happen, and you can’t talk to anyone about it. It actually sounds insane, you know. But it’s a series of these kinds of things. And so, it makes sense to me to try to put that into a different language so the reader will read a poem and just be devastated, and not know why. Because that’s what that feeling is.

Charif Shanahan: Mm.

Cynthia Cruz: You know, because if I reduce it to the story, I mean, the story is also horrifying, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t affect the reader as strongly, I think. And that story, my mother’s story, I don’t think is uncommon in the United States. I think that’s actually—and she had insurance.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. So I just got the chills. And I, wow, thank you for sharing that. And it demonstrates the point you’re making so, so powerfully.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: One of the commitments of your work, to me is the interrogation of beginnings and endings. And it’s something that we see across your body of work. Your latest book, Back to the Woods, is centered on the concept of the death drive, which you say in its simplest iteration is an attempt to begin again through the act of self-annihilation through ending. An earlier collection is called How the End Begins. Can you talk about how you think about these ideas of beginning and ending psychologically, existentially, poetically, both in the new book and across your work?

Cynthia Cruz: Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s really sort of funny, so I’m studying Hegel now, which, the way that it works with my life is that I’m always sort of blindly grasping at things and doing things. And then it’s only later that I realize, oh, that’s what I was doing, right. And so that’s what I was doing. And I didn’t know that. One thing is this weird thing, when I was anorexic, which I was on and off for many years, I had this really, this delusional belief, it wasn’t, like I knew it wasn’t a real belief. It was magical belief, magical thinking, that if I could just get—whatever anorexia is, right—if I could just get small, it wasn’t quite that, right, but if I could just get there, whatever there is, then I would be magically brought back to my, like, before it began, like the beginning of—it’s very weird. And I could never figure that out. And now it makes complete sense, because there was this, this desire to be able to go back and do it all over again. Of course, you don’t get to do that. That’s not the way that works. But with both Lacan and Hegel, it is this, always this constant, you know, the ending is the beginning and the beginning is the ending. Of course, I love that, right? It’s almost like every moment is a new, is a death and a rebirth, right? I mean, isn’t that great? It’s wonderful.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Cruz: But then also, so with The Melancholia of Class, right, so it was a bit of a memoir and also an analysis of melancholia in the lives of different working-class artists and musicians. And what I noticed as I was writing that book was many of those artists were very self-destructive, right? There’s a lot of alcohol and drugs, for example, there’s also eating disorders. So it’s an unconscious desire, right? The self-destruction. But it’s, the hope is that if you could just—it’s like the anorexia—if you could just get to the bottom of it, then you can start again, right. And so, I wrote another book, which right now doesn’t have a home called Becoming Nothing: On Negative Freedom on the concept of negative freedom and this idea of the drive, but also negative freedom, they’re similar. And I was trying to explain it, because I think that people, because it’s very complicated. Obviously, you know, if one is suffering greatly, it’s not going to be useful to drink to excess or eat to excess or watch TV all day. And yet, that is what we do. Right? And so this is, this explains why to me, right? This kind of idea. I know with How the End Begins, I really felt with that collection that I was marking the end of something and the beginning of something else, which I was, but it turns out, that’s sort of what I’m always doing, do you know?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: So I thought now might be a good time to hear a poem from the collection, specifically, “Dark Register,” the poem that appears in the May issue of the magazine.

Cynthia Cruz: Sure. I will read it gladly.

“Dark Register”

If you leave,
he said,
keep who you are.

Don’t let the world
and its desires
ruin you.

But after the dream
came the habit.

And no way to fix it.

What is gone
cannot be put back.

Damage
from the inside.

What I have become
is warmed over

with that now
ancient dream.

What I was
is vanished.

I came back home
but I came back
gone.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: There are two integral influences in forming your new collection. Can you talk about the late American poet Frank Stanford and the musician Mark Linkous and how these references came to be important to you as a person and a poet?

Cynthia Cruz: So when I started this collection, Back to the Woods—I’ve changed the title a few times, so I wasn’t sure for a second, because it’s such a simple title. So while I was working on this collection of essays, The Melancholia of Class, I was also finishing up this book of poems. And in a way then they speak to each other because Frank Stanford is in this book as is Mark Linkous.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cynthia Cruz: So I had started thinking about the melancholia of class, the concept of melancholia, Freud’s concept of melancholia, which is this idea that, as opposed to grief, so if I lose something, I can spend time grieving it, and then I can move through it. This is what happens. With melancholia, one doesn’t know what the object is that one has lost. And I had the sense that with the working class, that perhaps this could explain some of the melancholia. So it’s different than depression. Depression generally happens, not clinical depression, but depression happens, right, if I lose something, if I don’t get a job, my dog dies or something, then I go through a period of depression. I moved through it. But melancholia you don’t, you don’t recover from. And so, I was writing these poems while I was thinking about this idea. And I was also thinking about my own journey as a poet, and it felt at the time that I had abandoned my own background, because I looked at my first book Ruin and then looked at the second book Glimmering Room and they felt very wild. They felt very—it felt like I had taken a lot of risks that I wasn’t anymore taking. And I wanted to return to the first book, but in a different way. And so that’s why it’s called Back to the Woods, although I didn’t grow up near woods necessarily. But Frank Stanford and Mark Linkous were sort of my, I was gonna say ghosts, they were my ghosts when I wrote this book.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: You mentioned that Back to the Woods is the name of the manuscript now, the current the current title of the manuscript. Would you feel comfortable sharing what some of the other possibilities were? Some of the working titles?

Cynthia Cruz: I would. I don’t know if I—I think the only other one I had was “If the Dead Ride By.”

Charif Shanahan: Hm.

Cynthia Cruz: Which sounded right. But then it—you could see how it didn’t make any sense. I thought, wait, it doesn’t make any sense. So yeah, so that’s why we, we didn’t do that one.

Charif Shanahan: Okay.

Cynthia Cruz: Yeah. But Back to the Woods just seemed so, seemed very, too simple, but maybe, you know, maybe not.

Charif Shanahan: Not for me, for whatever that’s worth, I like the title. And it’s arresting in its apparent simplicity. I like to ask our guests about the role that teaching and mentorship plays or has played in their lives and in their work as poets. I know that you’ve taught a number of workshops over the years at institutions and privately. Were there mentors along the way that were particularly important to you? And, you know, what has teaching done for and meant to you as a practitioner?

Cynthia Cruz: So it’s interesting, as a poet, I can say I was not mentored. It’s a very strange thing. I was having a conversation with another poet who admitted they had not been mentored. And it’s very, it’s a very strange thing, I don’t really understand that. So I had a very hard time. I, you know, I was always thinking I should just give it up. I didn’t get much encouragement. But then I was in Lucie Brock-Broido’s workshop. I wasn’t at Columbia, I was in the Sarah Lawrence program. And I was told by one of the writers at Sarah Lawrence, who didn’t understand my work that perhaps Lucie might. And so I would go, she had these private workshops in her home, and those saved me, and I’m so grateful for them. And, you know, she was an incredible, obviously, writer and person and teacher. But I think more than anything, I wouldn’t necessarily say, I mean, I wasn’t mentored by her, but just her existence, like her being there and her seeing my work. And being very, she was very enthusiastic about it. That saved me. And it’s interesting, because I would say that, now I’m in this philosophy program, and I feel mentored. And I think about that a lot and what that means. At this point, I’m working on a dissertation. So the person I work with, we meet every two weeks. We’ve met every week at times, which is extraordinarily generous. That’s incredible, right? And so every week, I, or every two weeks, I read, whatever philosophical text and then I write notes, because that’s the way that I learn best. And then I send my notes to this person who then reads the notes, shockingly, and then we meet for an hour, and they sort of free associate and tell me what they think about. So it’s very strange, because I wanted this person to tell me what I got wrong, what I need to do, and I don’t get that. And I’ve finally become accustomed to that. But that’s not going to happen. What I get is, I’m treated like a, like a mind, you know, somebody who’s got ideas. And yeah, it’s a little, it’s a little hard to get used to, but it’s really been helpful in my own teaching. I’ve been thinking about, what is this thing about, there’s like, absolute acceptance, and absolute listening and understanding the person you’re working with. But then also, it’s not a free for all, right, I mean, I’m not like hanging out with my students, we’re not smoking pot. It’s not that. It’s also like, you know, this person says, you know, read these, these two very difficult philosophical texts, and I’ll meet you in a week. It’s not, that’s not what that is. And yet the, there’s a generosity. And this is what I hope to give also. Because of my own experience as a student, and also as a workshop leader, if that’s what we’re called, I’m not sure, it’s quite brutal. It’s been quite brutal. And so, I really think I don’t do workshop the way people do workshops. We look at poems, and I say, it’s very beginning. We look at a poem, and we talk about what is on the page. And some people, you know, “Oh, you’re talking about craft.” We’re talking about what’s on the page, you don’t need to know anything, you can look at this poem, and say, “Okay, it looks like it’s, you know, a page and a quarter, it’s broken up,” you know, whatever.

Charif Shanahan: Yep.

Cynthia Cruz: And that’s what we do. And so we don’t get into a lot of the other kind of stuff that happens in workshop. And then the other thing is that the whole idea of rules makes absolutely no sense, because each person comes from a different culture, a different class background, a different race background, a different country, a different—their experience of the world is different. I mean, I could go on forever.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Cynthia Cruz: And so the way that they are in the world is not the way I am in the world. It’s not the way anyone else is. And so the way that that’s going to sort of make a mark in their artwork is totally not going to be like anyone else’s, if it’s good. So my job is like a midwife, right, is to help bring that work into the world, right? And if it really, if I’ve really done a good job, it ought to be totally unlike anyone else’s, which is risky, right, because, there’s a lot of conformism, right. And there’s a lot of worrying about these rules and stuff. But if the work is really good, it will be unlike anyone else’s, because we’re all totally different, right? So, you know, no sonnet, yes sonnet, you know, small poem, it depends totally on the person. And it totally depends also on each poem, right, so that’s the way I teach.

Charif Shanahan: That’s beautiful to me, Cynthia, and it’s, in a way, the opposite of a very common mode of teaching, which, as you say, might move us in the direction of conforming in a workshop context. You know, the poem that is most celebrated in a workshop context is the one that is most agreeable to the people in the room, and not necessarily the one that is most itself. And so I love, I love what you say. You mentioned Lucie, Lucie Brock-Broido and the connection that you had with her, the time she gave you. Can you tell us a little bit more about what those meetings were like and what they did for you? Like what they did to and for you?

Cynthia Cruz: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. It’s also good for me to think about it. I mean, so I, you know, just context, you know, my mother, I just found out recently, my mother didn’t finish high school. She grew up in a factory town, Völklingen, Germany. And my father is Mexican American. His parents were peasants in Mexico, and they came over. And they met in Germany. And then I was born in Wiesbaden, Germany at a U.S. military base. But we were raised—I have a brother and sister and we were raised in Northern California. My father, he was unable to finish grammar school. So I am coming from a family, I mean, we had books in the house and my, you know, but they were not able to—it’s a weird thing to say, right? I mean, the idea of going to college was not even on the horizon. It wasn’t like, “You’re not going to college because XYZ,” it wasn’t even an option. So, but I ended up anyway, going to college late. So what that means is that when I decided to become a poet—which is a totally insane thing for my background, it’s so crazy,

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Cynthia Cruz: everyone told me not to do it—that I really didn’t know anything about poetry, right. And that’s a great place to start. But everybody knew everything. I mean, when I look back, I mean, they didn’t, right, but this was the attitude. Everyone knew everything, and I knew nothing. And so, you know, workshops were really traumatic, you know, I would get my poems back marked up, you know, all the teachers, most of the teachers, two out of four of the teachers said, “We have no idea what you’re talking about.” And the students, all my classmates agreed. And it was traumatic. And that’s why it’s so, you know, it’s really, a workshop is, you know, it’s just about the poem, but it’s also, you know, how does that not affect you?

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Cruz: Because what I was writing about, it turns out, is what they couldn’t understand. So I went to these workshops, and, you know, they were with people, I mean, there were people who were editors at the New Yorker, you know, there were people, you know, I remember these two girls who worked at the New Yorker, they showed up, and it’s weird to say this, it’s so weird, but like, heels, and I remember thinking they must, they must catch a cab here. Like, I was just in this like, weird place, right?

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Cynthia Cruz: And so it’s like, oh, my gosh, you know, and there were people who had studied with her before. And so really, just, that’s why it’s important I was in that space. You know, I was in that space. And I think for—I went for many years, and I think for a period of time, it was like, I didn’t talk at all, I never made comments, you know, I just, but being in that space was important, because I felt like, okay, and also she understood my work. You know, as she would, she would put hearts by, you know, stuff and yeah, so that meant a lot. But I still felt, I remember feeling like I was weird. I remember, one evening, and I just remember like, the rooms were dark. I mean, they weren’t, but that’s just the—I remember, I just remember them in this way. It was like I was this, I felt like I was this wild animal. And I remember she called one of my poems “feral.” And I didn’t know what the word meant. I didn’t know but I knew it was bad. And I looked it up and I thought, “Wait, what does that mean?” And for many years, it was like a wound, because I did feel feral. And then, you know, all of this stuff in retrospect, like, now I go back and I feel like no, that’s exactly great, right? That’s exactly what we want is to—so it’s not about cultivating that strangeness, right? We already all have that strangeness, you know, whoever from wherever place, it’s about trying not to diminish that strangeness, right, if that makes any sense, right.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah, totally.

Cynthia Cruz: And so in a way, when I look back at, you know, who I was at that time, or the way that the difficulties I’ve had in academia, which is to say, my inability to get a full-time teaching job, for whatever reason, and having to adjunct for 20 years, was terrible. But it protected me in a way, it kept me, my writing has not, I mean, I don’t think it’s been negatively affected. If that makes any sense. I didn’t all of a sudden clean up the work, I don’t think, right. And there are certain things that may have happened if things had happened the way that I had wanted them. But this feralness, right, that I felt in the workshop, and I was ashamed of, turns out to be the very thing that needs to be protected, right. And I guess this goes back to the teaching, right?

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. Well, I abhor the notion of you working as an adjunct for 20 years when you wanted something else, and that opens up so many questions about the opportunities that are available to us as poets and the culture and the kind of ecosystems and economies that we’re moving through. But I hope that you’ll permit me to say that I’m glad, in a way, not that you faced challenge in that way, but that the work was protected, you know. One of my professors at the NYU program told me in office hours one week after I had had a particularly difficult workshop not to listen to the workshop participants. You know, he said it respectfully. He wasn’t demeaning or diminishing anyone, he just said, “Look, you know, you’re all at the beginning of your lifelong apprenticeship to this art. Listen to Sharon Olds. Listen to Yusef Komunyakaa. If they tell you something, consider it, you know, but if a peer insists, you know, you don’t necessarily need to take that on.” And it really helped me get through that program.

Cynthia Cruz: That’s amazing.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Cynthia Cruz: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: I really want to ask who the two were that did not understand what you were doing,

Cynthia Cruz: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: but we could, we could do that backchannel.

Cynthia Cruz: I think you know.

Charif Shanahan: Well, I have an idea.

Cynthia Cruz: If you had to guess.

Charif Shanahan: I’ll send you an email. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cynthia Cruz: (LAUGHS) But it all, it’s funny, because it’s that thing where, in the long run, I wouldn’t have it any other way. At the time, I remember thinking, “I wish I were in the Columbia program, because there’d be all these people writing like me.” But it wouldn’t have been like that either. It would have been something different. You know.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you today, Cynthia, and I thought to close out, we might hear the poem “Born There” from the forthcoming collection.

Cynthia Cruz: Of course, and thank you so much for inviting me and all of your wonderful, thoughtful and considered questions. So, this is “Born There.” And the title comes from a very short poem by Frank Stanford.

(READS POEM – NOTE the text for this poem is unconfirmed)

“Born There”

I remember the ventilators
of childhood.

Its broken machineries,
its duct-taped engines
and shut windows.

Racing with my brother
after rattlesnakes and rabbits
down the dusty path.

Food stamps, lost maps,
slips of paper, and plans,
with names and numbers
of what I can never
remember.

Waking, on the cold tile floors
of hotel
bathrooms.

Once I was a girl

wading in a cream
dress into the lake.

This is not a parable
or a fairy tale.

If you had asked me then
what I wanted

I would have said
Nothing.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: A big thanks to Cynthia Cruz. Cynthia is the author of seven collections of poems and two collections of critical work. She lives in Berlin, Germany. You can read “Dark Register” by Cynthia in the May 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)