"How to Surprise Myself with Language" Eloisa Amezcua on FIGHTING IS LIKE A WIFE
wust el-balad #8
I don’t engage with sports much myself, but god do I love a good book about them. Boxing, especially, has such a larger-than-life presence in our media and culture. The pathos and politics of the Rocky franchise alone has been a mainstay in my relationship with film over the years. I even tried boxing (briefly) in early high school and found that I enjoyed almost everything about it except the actual fights. All to say, when I read that Eloisa Amezcua’s second collection was going to delve into the tragic story of former world boxing champion, Bobby Chacon, and his relationship with his wife Valorie, I knew that this would be a gripping and engrossing volume of poems. I was not disappointed! Even better, I had the pleasure of speaking with Eloisa about sports, form, and persona poems—among other things. Below is an edited version of that conversation.
HAZEM: What drew you in particular to Bobby Chacon's story?
ELOISA: Bobby’s story, like the story of many athletes and boxers in particular, isn’t unique. Someone has a special talent or gift for a sport, and sees it as an opportunity; a way out of the circumstances of their life. But there’s a cost: the body, the mind, the toll it takes on the people around them. What drew me into Bobby’s story was Valorie.
HAZEM: Which came first, the idea of a project on boxing, or your attraction to that story?
ELOISA: I started drafting poems very loosely—more like taking notes and playing with lines—in the summer of 2016, a few months before Bobby Chacon passed away. It was after Chacon died, in listening to a retrospective of his life on a boxing podcast, that I learned more about his personal life, the loss of Valorie and his son, his battle against pugilist dementia. As I went deeper into researching his career, especially in watching pre and post-fight interviews, I became obsessed with Bobby’s syntax, the way he turned a sentence on its head. then the real writing began.
HAZEM: Did you have a relationship or interest in boxing before starting this project?
ELOISA: Yes, my parents would have their friends over for fight night when I was a child. As I got older, I became more of a fan of both the technical aspects of the sport (what happens inside the ring) and the mythos that the sport operates within.
HAZEM: Do you have a favorite boxer/moment in boxing history?
ELOISA: This is like asking if I have a favorite poem or poet! It’s an impossible question because it’s always changing. I have been to one fight in person (Santa Cruz v. Frampton 2) and that is an experience I will never forget!
HAZEM: This is a meticulously researched book; the poems literally emerge out of the historical record. How do you view the relationship between research and poetry, and history and poetry more broadly?
ELOISA: Our task, as poets, is to translate feelings, emotions, experiences, thoughts, moments, etc. into words on a page. This project is based on real people and their real, lived histories so I wanted to honor that as much as possible in the making of the poems by using as much found language as I could. For me the relationship between research and poetry functions similarly to the relationship between history and poetry: they’re tools we use to make sense of the world around us for ourselves now in the present and for those who may encounter these records (whether historical or poetic) in the future.
HAZEM: Do you feel like your grasp of Bobby and Valorie’s story, and the historical context around them, has been in some sense clarified after writing this book?
ELOISA: It’s funny because I think it’s actually become more complex after writing this book. a lot happened in my personal life throughout the five plus years of working on this that changed my relationship to both Bobby and Valorie in different ways. The one thing that has become clear to me, however, is that they were just two people doing what they could, what they needed to, to survive.
HAZEM: In terms of this being your second book, what was the experience like going from a collection of poems with a personal speaker, to a more historically-minded project dealing with specific people through persona?
ELOISA: If I’m being completely honest, I was really sick of myself (the “I” in my poems) after writing From the Inside Quietly. I started working on the poems that would become Fighting is Like a Wife before the first book was even accepted for publication. Diving into Bobby Chacon’s story allowed me to get out of my own way and try things formally that I hadn’t considered when writing poems as the “I.”
HAZEM: Did inhabiting a persona speaker shape your relationship with your own poetic voice?
ELOISA: Absolutely! In writing and shaping poems using Bobby’s words, I learned how to be more playful, how to surprise myself with language, and that’s definitely something that I’ve carried over into newer work where I am the speaker.
HAZEM: There is a certain risk in the persona poem, particularly when the speaker is no longer alive. How did you approach the sensitive task of finding Bobby and Valorie's voices?
ELOISA: All of the poems in Bobby’s voice had the same set of rules: I could only use his exact quotes; I could combine quotes from different interviews and articles of different time periods; once I decided on the quote(s) to be used, I could only use the words from the original quote(s) within my poem. For Valorie, it was very important to me that those poems not be in the first person, but that they explore a possibility of what she may have felt throughout their relationship.
HAZEM: Do you have an overarching approach to how you tackle persona poems?
ELOISA: Just because “I” or “she” isn’t me, Eloisa, doesn’t mean that I don’t have a responsibility to the speaker. It’s similar to my approach when translating a poem—it is my job to communicate something (an emotion or experience or idea) as effectively and accurately as I can using the tools I have: language, specifically the English language, and form.
HAZEM: The book makes ample use of space and a great deal of the poems are highly visual in their form and expression. How did you approach formatting this project, and which works or authors did you look to?
ELOISA: I came to see the page as a sort of boxing ring. Boxers have a particular set of moves they use when fighting so for many of the poems I gave myself formal constraints or rules to work within, the hope being that much like in a good boxing match, the constraints give way to something more—honesty, beauty, violence, pain.
HAZEM: Between whom is the fight taking place in this boxing ring the poem became?
ELOISA: Unfortunately it’s me v. me haha
HAZEM: Repetition is a common device throughout the book, especially with notable phrases that Chacon himself said in interviews. What role do you see that motif playing in a historically minded work?
ELOISA: so many clichés come to mind about the cyclical nature of history and humanity etc. etc. the use of repetition in this book is at its core meant to mimic the use of repetition in the sport: the combination of punches a fighter uses, the bell signaling the end of another round.
HAZEM: Do you find the aesthetics of boxing more conducive to poetry than other sports?
ELOISA: Not at all! I think sports in general are conducive to poetry in that they all work within sets of rules and constraints that guide the different objectives of the sport. I think I was aesthetically drawn to boxing but great poems have been written about basketball, baseball, tennis, ballet, etc!
HAZEM: One of the main concerns of the book, highlighted in the very title, is the tension between love and power in the context of a normative and highly gendered cishet marriage. In what ways did delving deeply into the story of Bobby and Valorie shape your understanding of our culture's views on marriage, gender and violence?
ELOISA: When thinking about Bobby and Valorie, I constantly have to remind myself how young they were when they met, when they married, when they started a family and Bobby began his career as a boxer. I think our culture’s views on marriage have since changed as we see people waiting until well after high school to get married, but I’m not sure that as a society our ideas of gender (and perhaps more specifically gender roles) have progressed as clearly. And as for violence, I think our culture is obsessed with violence—whether it’s between two people or two nations.
HAZEM: Do you think a sport like boxing worsens or mitigates that obsession?
ELOISA: I think boxing might be a controlled version of that obsession. Homer wrote poems about boxing in the 8th century. so perhaps poems are a controlled version of our obsession with language, with meaning. I’m not sure whether that worsens or mitigates the obsessions, but it allows us to place them somewhere.
Eloisa Amezcua is from Arizona. She is the author of From the Inside Quietly (2018). A MacDowell fellow, her poems and translations are published in New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Eloisa is the founder of Costura Creative.
Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. You can find his work here and follow him on social media here.
Fighting is Like a Wife is out now from Coffee House Press. You can find it here, as well as in local bookstores and libraries across the US.