In the past few years or so, “political poetry” has often been shorthand specifically for work that engages with identity, much of which doesn’t actually present much of a critique of established norms. Much of the poetry establishment is far, far more comfortable with the hegemonic reality of American life, and empire, as it is than it would care to admit.
In such an often stifling space, steps in Kyle Carrero Lopez’s MUSCLE MEMORY. The poet’s debut chapbook unabashedly explores money, labor, antiblack violence and erasure; delivering an uncompromising critique of American power in the same breath as a vivid series of narrative vignettes of the speaker’s family and loved ones. The balance between the polemical and the personal is aspirational, with poems like “After Abolition” and “Prayer for Yemayá” fitting in seamlessly with one another. I had the pleasure of speaking with the author about this striking chapbook, and below is a condensed and edited version of that conversation.
HAZEM: How did the poems come together to make the chapbook?
KYLE: I wrote these poems over a period of about three years. For a long time, I felt like I was writing without a particular direction. I knew I had specific concerns, but I wasn’t writing with a topic or towards a full-length—I was just writing and writing. Eventually, I just wanted to try and see how I could fit these poems with one another, so I pulled as many together that seemed like they were addressing similar themes. There was a lot of writing in response to visual art, and a lot that was concerned with manifestations of antiblackness, whether they were physical or cultural. As I was going through iterations of the manuscript, a friend (the poet Natasha Rao), suggested that I split it into two sections. That idea helped a lot in giving me direction as to what the book might look like.
H: How did the title for each section, “Muscle” and “Memory” respectively, come to you?
K: In general, I love titles, and will title things before I even know what form the project will take. In this case, though, Muscle Memory just came to me. It was very instinctive. Over time, however, it increasingly resonated with the work. Additionally, once I had the structural idea of segmenting the manuscript into two pieces, I started thinking more about how a lot of the poems in the collection were themselves muscular in their movement. They were concerned with muscle in the body, but also memory—whether through trauma or history. The full chapbook came together in this way.
H: Speaking of the movement of the poems, how did you think of spacing as you were writing them?
K: Variety is something that I strive for in all of my writing. I certainly admire poets who have one thing that they are trying to do in a collection, and do it 30 times. That’s really incredible, but I cannot do that! I have to mix it up. I’m not even always drawn to sticking to the left-hand margin. I do that a lot by default, and I don’t necessarily feel compelled to move away from it, but I do try to do that a few times in the collection.
As far as spacing, I don’t always get super wild, in terms of doing stuff like spreading a poem across several pages. The longest one in Muscle Memory was about four pages, which for me feels long. But in general, I try to pick a spacing that feels logical for how the poem is moving, and how it sounds when I’m reading it.
H: Do you feel like you lean more towards a dense spacing?
K: Yes, it’s usually my tendency so I have to push myself. A lot of my drafts are lineated, but usually they’re not even spaced out. It’ll just be one long block of lineated text, and then I figure out how I want to space it. Although, there is no rule that says it can’t just remain like that.
H: The first poem of the chap, “Black Erasure,” is an incredibly powerful critique of the way the term “POC” has been used uncritically, especially in recent years. Did you always know that it would be the opening poem?
K: Initially, I didn’t know that it would be the first poem. When I was putting the manuscript together, it felt to me like it would really set the tone. A lot of the other poems in the collection are touching on its themes from different angles. “Black Erasure” feels like the large, grander statement. It’s very loud. And the conceit is very loud, so it felt like the right way to start—and then I could approach similar themes in quieter ways afterwards; like it was a good gateway for the rest of the book.
That poem also moves in all the directions that the collection does. It’s as much of a silly and playful poem as it is a deeply serious one concerned with grief. Some of the other poems lean more one way or the other, between serious and unserious that is. But “Black Erasure” allows all of these different modes to coexist, creating a space for a variety of tones to follow.
H: In “Mi Gente Estadounidense,” the speaker refers to their relationship to broad cultural categories, in the poem’s case “Latinx,” as a kind of “itchy sweater.” Tell me more about your thoughts on such frameworks as something that is worn, rather than something that just exists.
K: That’s exactly what I was trying to get at with that poem. These grand ideas of identity can be, depending on who you ask, very hard-lined. But everybody has preconceived ideas about what identity is. In my own experience, growing up as an Afro-Latino in the US in a place that had a lot of Black kids, but not a lot of Black Latino kids, it took me a long time to understand where I fit into the way that we understand race and ethnicity in the US. I believe there’s a lot of sameness, and I identify really strongly with Black US culture. But at the same time, there are definite differences between how I grew up and how a lot of African-American kids grew up. In exploring that tension in the poem, I waned to touch on how our understandings and misunderstandings of the ways that we learn about who we are from home caused us to sometimes get it wrong when referring to others, or to oversimplify how we view other people.
Also, sweaters are sweaty! I describe the one in the poem, especially, as an ill-fitting one. There are a few moments in the poem that are really garment-focused, and that feels like the biggest one for me because, as the last image, it’s the point the poem really lands on.
H: A lot of the poems also have very vivid details of food. What do you see as the relationship between food and your poetics?
K: Nobody’s asked me that! I see food as related to the other concerns of the poems. Food is ritual, which the poems are concerned a lot with. I think that what we eat, how we eat, and who we eat with—these are all ritualistic, cultural, and deeply intimate acts. For example, in “Black capitalist wet dream,” there’s excessive feasting. For me, that is symbolic of the speaker’s decadence, and it serves as a way to contrast the twist of the poem.
H: A lot of the poems in the chap, most obviously “Ode to the Crop Top,” address objects. What role do you see the vocative “O” as playing in your work?
K: I definitely associate it with reverence and celebration. I appreciate drama in a poem. There’re few things that are more dramatic than: “O, blank.” It’s a little bit funny, but it’s also a very felt gesture, and it feels very loving. I use it when I want to express love in in a shorthand way.
H: In “Beauty Examined,” the speaker explores this notion that speaking up as an act is necessary, but at the same can be over-burdened and simplified. What does “speaking up” look like to you?
K: “Speaking up itself” is a complicated notion because it means different things to different people. And there’re different levels of consequence for doing so. There are also ways in which speaking up addresses one systematic issue while leaving out another. That section is concerned with the contradictions around what speaking up can or can’t do, and why people may be compelled to silence.
I think that silence—or rather not speaking up—is not a particular instinct that I have, as somebody who, both in and out of my writing, is pretty confrontational. But I have also come to realize that there’re many ways to be confrontational and speak up. It was a big, ethical concern to me at the time when I wrote that poem. I would ask myself: “what happens if you speak up? What happens if you don’t? If you did, what did that actually accomplish? And what could have been better?”
Speaking up can be a selfless act, but in some circumstances in can also be a selfish one. There’s power in—not silence, but in holding off and collectivizing and coming together with other people to decide what is the best thing to say. As somebody who has dealt with the backlash of impulsive speaking out, that was something that I was also thinking about while writing.
H: Do you think there’s such a thing as a leftist poetics?
K: I do think so. I think that a poetics of the left consists of poets who are thinking about money, work, and imperialism in particular ways that are usually thought to not be the place of poetry. There’s a rich history of poets talking about exactly these things, Diane Di Prima and Amiri Baraka for example come to mind. A leftist poetics is talking about these things in more overt ways, and sometimes quieter ways as well, but there isn’t exactly one aesthetic approach that I’ve noticed yet. There is however unity among poets of the left in as far as addressing particular concerns over and over.
I’ve always been really inspired by poets like June Jordan who write not only about their personal subjectivity and personhood, but also larger issues beyond the self. It feels like I’m writing the poetry that I want to be writing when I’m doing both of those. There’re so many different ways to write “political poetry.” That difference is grounded in the fact that we’re writing poetry, not polemics. One important way to do that is to just use voice. For me, that looks like staying committed to speaking in a voice that feels very much my own. It’s a way to remind myself that I’m not just somebody who is reading and thinking through thoughts on what I’m reading, but somebody who has opinions—and an attitude problem—and is funny.
H: Do you ever use the word “radical” to describe a poem?
K: I think there are certain poems that are radical, yes. I don’t know that I generally look at my own work and that this particular poem or the other is radical, although there are poems in this collection and in other work of mine that could be considered radical for a number of reasons. Certain subjects, when touched upon under specific contexts, are always going to be radical. Palestinian writing in he US is always going to be radical. Writing explicitly about the US embargo on Cuba, or about militaristic intervention abroad—these are subjects that are “radical” because they’re erased from mainstream discourses, media, and education.
H: What do you think is the role of poetry in emancipatory movements?
K: I think emancipatory movements rely upon imaginative thinking, and poetry can be a part of that. I think a poem can cause someone to ask questions about a particular subject that they hadn’t before, but I’m not under any grand illusion about poetry having a massive readership or anything like that. But I do think a poem can give language for specific issues and it can provide energy. It’s useful to have particular work that speaks to a movement; something that is easy to share and refer to. There’s power there.
Poetry is not always going to provide a concrete series of steps that outline what “should” happen. But I think that it can remind us that we should ask for exactly what we want. And it’s not helpful to go into something expecting that the desired outcome is unrealistic. You’ve already lost if that’s how we’re thinking.
H: A lot of the poems are written after writers, musicians, and artists. Is weaving other creators into your work an active process or do you feel like it happens organically as you’re writing?
K: I would say that, most of the time, it’s an active process. I’ll see, hear, or view something that gives me language that I didn’t know existed at all, like it’s unlocking something that I then start to write into. Almost all the poems that are written after another artist were sparked because of an encounter with their work, and I jumped right into it afterwards.
H: Would you consider those pieces ars poeticas?
I’m not sure that I would. They’re all pretty different. And I think they have different ways of moving, and they land in different places. I think of those poems more so as exercises in ekphrasis than anything else. One thing that a poetry collection can do, ideally, is provide a snapshot of the way a writer processes information and stimuli. A huge part of that, for me, is responding to art from mediums outside of poetry that do something I’d like to do within poetry. This feels like not only an act of fellowship, but an act of illumination for the reader.
Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey. He is the author of MUSCLE MEMORY, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. His work is published or republished in The Nation, TriQuarterly, The Atlantic, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and elsewhere.
Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. You can find his work here and follow him on social media here.
MUSCLE MEMORY is forthcoming from PANK. You can find it here, as well as in local bookstores and libraries across the US.