Author Interview: C.T. Salazar
Mississippi poet C.T. Salazar talks poetry, place, and how to inhabit both authentically.
I’m forever grateful to Twitter for introducing me to C.T. Salazar, a kind human who has already become a loyal friend to Belle Point Press. He took the time to talk with me about his work and to share his observations about the current landscape of the Southern literary community.
Casie: I’m sure you’ve discussed this before, but I’d love to hear more about your interest in form, especially the sonnet. For example, I love “Sonnet River,” and I know you’ve done sonnet workshops.
C.T.: Thank you so much for inviting me to chat! It took me a while to realize it, but I tend to retreat into the sonnet as a kind of panic closet. Some personal crises of masculinity and American-ness led to the writing of American Cavewall Sonnets. I love the sonnet and I think its contextuality helps me write through some of my own consequences of being. A history—a strata of impacts—made the sonnet what it is today; its existence here is similar to my own. And because the South is obsessed with tradition, I have the anxieties and the impulse to deviate within a confined space governed by tradition (the sonnet, the South). The sonnet’s demands feel familiar to a space I’ve lived within.
I write in other forms too; I don’t publish them, but I keep a kind of ongoing diary in the Cinquain form.
Casie: That’s a great analogy, and it makes me think of the connections between form and place in different ways. Do you have thoughts for other poets who might be interested in adapting traditional forms for their own purposes? Is there an appropriate balance between remaining faithful to the form while trying to innovate within it?
C.T.: The “reputation” of the forms cannot be harmed by folks trying to write in them. There’s a strange kind of fascist philosophy to keep these things “pure,” but that only reinforces a myth about their origins. I don’t think the balance needs to be kept in-check but can probably be seen laterally across a wide spectrum of people writing.
Casie: Along those lines, you seem to experiment with form quite a bit in your collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking. Tell me about all those spaces and plus signs.
C.T.: I love the plus sign! It might be my favorite piece of punctuation (I don’t think it’s punctuation though?). I’m infatuated by multiplicity, and the ways symbols and pictograms can be shorthand for different things and offer different experiences of meaning. Sometimes in a reading, I saw the + as “plus” like in the title “Parable About Changing My Name + an Elegy.” Sometimes the + means “and” like all the ones in “Sonnet For The Barbed Wire Wrapped Around This Book.” Sometimes the + represents the visual stitching of lines together, like in “I Called You Castaway And You Called Me.” As for the spaces, they’re more or less reminders for me to breathe.
Casie: Religious themes tend to pervade your poetry. One example where they’re particularly explicit is in the beautiful poem, “Triptych Just before Mass.” In a previous interview, you mentioned having both a Southern Baptist and Catholic background. I grew up steeped in the former tradition and converted to the latter in adulthood, so much of this vocabulary speaks to me deeply on an intuitive level. Could you talk more about that religious presence in your work?
C.T.: While I’m not necessarily a believer, I think the speaker of my poems certainly is. The King James language is a kind of home for me, and maybe other southerners too, and it’s a language we share. There’s elements of faith that are incredible, but I can only understand them through the contexts of a poem. I’m always in that space when I’m writing.
Casie: I relate to so much of that. It seems to me that a common misconception about contemporary poetry is that it has a purely subjective or insular quality, when in reality we’re often writing within the realms of these larger traditions that we can only feel our way around in. As you say, that shared presence seems especially pronounced in many areas of Southern culture that can be hard to articulate to others who haven’t experienced it.
Having now read all of your published chapbooks and Hitchhiking, I can see how your focus on writing about Mississippi/the Delta has become increasingly prominent over time. How do you think your sense of place has evolved in your writing and/or in your identity as a poet?
C.T.: That’s such a neat question. I think I’ve grown to understand Mississippi at the exact same speed I’ve been growing to understand myself. Mississippi’s definitely been in my earliest poems, along with the placelessness that floats among it. A lot of different folks are in or are from this place because of diasporic lineages, occupations, and imperial colonizations. For so many of us, being “from” Mississippi is kind of like Jonah swallowed by the whale if he described himself as being from the whale.
Casie: That’s really interesting. Is there a particular poem from Hitchhiking you’d like to highlight? I have my favorites but am curious to hear if there’s one (or more than one) especially close to your heart.
C.T.: “Forgive Yourself For Seeing It Wrong” was written for an uncle with an aggressive dementia, and that one’s been on my mind lately. It was a later addition into the manuscript. “Mostly I’d Like To Be A Spider Web” is one I’ll always love because it’s one of the few poems that came out almost fully as a draft. I usually only write a few lines at a time so that’s rare. It was an early part of the manuscript—I think between the two poems there’s six years of distance.
Casie: We could have a whole second conversation about manuscript development, though I can also say there certainly seems to be a cohesiveness to your book. What do you see as other preoccupations or interests in your writing? Where is your work going next? I’m interested, for example, in the Four Snakes Makes our Flag series. I enjoyed the recent piece in The Cincinnati Review as well as your comments about it there.
C.T.: Ecology and justice take up a lot of space in my thinking and my poem-writing. Along with the desire to never describe the world or anyone in it as one thing and one thing only. The poems I’m writing now are more confrontational about prison abolition and the ways the prisons are robbing us (all of us), especially in Mississippi. I’m glad the Four Snakes Makes Our Flag sonnets have been well-loved. For the longest time I didn’t think I was going to try to publish any of them. I thought they were a little too private for anyone to “get,” but they’ve been so cherished in a way that’s so affirming to me. Now that I’ve taken the step in sharing them, I’m in the middle of wondering how they and other poems shape as a manuscript.
Casie: I look forward to seeing more of them. And we’ll have two new poems in our forthcoming Mid/South Anthology. Are they related to that project?
C.T.: They are a part of that group! Those two poems are kind of opposite poles to each other, but have their backs pressed against each other at the same time.
Casie: I can’t wait to share them! Now I’d like to shift to talk more broadly about your writing life. You also work as a librarian. How do you see your “day job” or other professional work overlapping with your creative life?
C.T.: I’m the slowest writer of anyone I know. I try to understand being a poet as someone who pays attention, and being a research methods librarian or archivist are roles where I’m paying deep attention to things. My philosophies in being a poet and being a librarian are very much singular—to participate with being in my community, to be committed to my community and learning about their needs so they become mine too. Poetry is the place where I can understand how I feel about all of this.
Casie: Yes! Iris Murdoch has this wonderful quote in her philosophical ethics work: “Attention is our daily bread.” I think about that all the time and try to cultivate a similar practice. You’ve also done some teaching. Tell me more about that; it’s a dream of mine to expand in this direction with Belle Point. I know you were really excited to participate in the Southern Literary Festival this year with your masterclass, “The Queer Southern Line.”
C.T.: I’m probably not the best at it, but I love teaching and facilitating workshops. At the end of June I’m workshopping for a full week with some high school poets in my community through the Rosedale Freedom Project. A few days ago I was in a classroom for a group talking about poetry and its relationship to protest and resistance in Mississippi. In the new year I’m teaching a two-session sonnet workshop via Zoom with the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts. I love how poetry puts people in front of me that I otherwise may never meet. And then hearing some of their poems. I know I’ve heard future poets laureate, future greats, activists and intellectuals.
Casie: That sounds amazing! It’s especially exciting to hear how many regional opportunities have been coming your way and how you’re connecting literary pursuits to social justice. You’re also a generous reader who regularly promotes other writers’ work on social media, past and present. Who are some other poets we should be reading? You’re interested in besmilr brigham, for example—a writer whose work I discovered recently and would like to get to know better.
C.T.: I’ve got to pump up some Mississippi folks, so firstly Maggie Graber’s debut collection Swan Hammer: an instructor’s guide to mirrors. It’s so good. It comes out July 1st, and I’ve already read through it a few times. David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence came out a few months ago. T. K. Lee—one of my mentors—has a new collection coming out in September called Scapegoat and it’s amazing. Angela Jackson’s latest, More Than Meat And Raiment. Joshua Nguyen’s debut Come Clean has no skips; it’s all hits. I’m in the middle of writing a long essay on Etheridge Knight’s poetics and body of work, so I’ve been digging back into him the past few months.
As far as what I’m reading from outside the state… Roger Reeves’ Best Barbarian, Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight, Sonia Sanchez’s Collected Poems, Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything, Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex. Any of these make for great reading.
Casie: So many great recommendations! Nguyen’s Come Clean is waiting in my TBR pile. What would you like to see more of in the literary community (however we conceive of that these days)? This could mean either diversity in writers, types of creative opportunities, or anywhere your imagination takes you.
C.T.: That’s tough because I probably have to indict myself before I say anything about the larger community of us. I’m trying to be better about participating in collective care in both the online writing community and the community around me. I hope more institutions will find ways to accommodate parents and caregivers, writers with less financial privilege or access, and writers with disabilities into their fellowships and other things that tend to put poets in the “right time and place” of getting their work out there.
Casie: Agreed on all counts—I’m hopeful that Belle Point Press will be able to speak to some of these things as we grow more established. Thank you for making time to talk with me! This was an insightful conversation, and I hope more people will keep discovering and spending time with your poetry.
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) as well as three previous chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press 2021). His most recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, West Branch, Southeast Review, The Hopkins Review, Pleiades, Ocean State Review, and elsewhere.
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