Ai Li: Hermelinda, your poem has this beautiful movement and negative space that verges on fragmentation through which the body is deconstructed and made foreign and understood solely when categorized with images from the natural world: greenwood, moss forest, embroidery pine. What role does the landscape play in your poetry? How do relationships to the species that populate it further or affect the relationship to the body?

Hermelinda: My relation to landscape is that of displacement and constant movement. Perhaps that’s why words and lines are continuously in fragments. When it came to the construction of this poetic piece, I wanted to emphasize a surreal, temporal, dream-like environment where my grandmother and I occur and materialize in the same space and time. Where we interact even in transient states. When I was young, I witnessed my grandmother’s deportation. This has always haunted me, and thus the recurring shift of language balanced with some semblance of coherence that allows an ecosystem to exist without collapsing against each other. Here the body houses a setting with alien-like foliage and species due to nightmares, mixed with the desire to reimagine an alternate reality where our lives are documented in the same environment. 

The relationship to the species was carefully placed there as both technique and craft in terms of verbal texture, adjectives, imagery, and sounds. For example: before ‘leaves’ there’s ‘locust’; before ‘greenwood’ there’s ‘diabetes’; before ‘forest’ there’s ‘moss’; before ‘pine’ there’s ‘embroidery’. The relationships to the species that populate the page further or affect the symbiosis relationship to the bodies that inhabit the poem as both mutual and parasitic. Mutual in the sense that bodies breathe due to the symbolic thriving landscape. Parasitic in which these species affect the non/physical body with the vacuous depths of the human psyche. 

Another way I see this is by thinking about Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios that feature cast-off items that are tethered together and balanced, as stated at The Wexner Center website. These displaced items such as locust, diabetes, and embroidery are portraits of my grandmother. Locust describes grasshoppers describing location: Oaxaca, Mexico. While diabetes details her current health. And embroidery decorates the stitch work she used to make. It’s for these reasons the species that populate the poem further and or affect the relationship of these bodies.

Ai Li: I want to revisit that negative space in your poem, as well as the fragmentation. Your poem also includes no punctuation, allowing for ambiguity and challenging the function of each word included. In the line "Moss forest hand dialects," it's unclear which acts as the subject, whether an anthimeria is present, or how these words relate to each other, forcing language to assume a fluidity as it takes on new forms through the reader's own interpretation. Can you speak on the deterioration of language as a poetic device? How important is it to you that your reader fully understands the poem?

Hermelinda: Sometimes, when I’m writing I’m also uncertain about some of the creative choices I make. Whether it’s a conversion of a denominal verb or a deverbal noun. However, I do think there’s some type of relation between the fragmented words: ‘moss forest’ represents placement as ‘dialects’ traces my indigenous/ Zapoteco roots. I’m glad you mention fluidity as I do emphasize sound in my poetics. Coincidentally, words within this poem build ambiguity the same way my grandmother found English as a clash of unusual verbiage when I used to read in front of her. Within this poem, Alien, I use the deterioration of language to point out the title and body of words as unnatural yet natural ways of communication, coding, and fracturing in a dream-like environment that attempts to ground and grasp the subconscious. It’s a device that allows me to play with meaning and the transference of emotions. I agree to an extent it’s important to have some transparency of what’s happening within the poem, but I think this balance is mixed with vagueness. I’m okay with that as long as there is some type of balance. Although I’m not sure if I achieved this, I hope to in the future. I would like the readers to experience the poem by reading it out loud, first as a flowing expression of sound, and then, as their own interpretation. 

Ai Li: Could you tell me about one piece of art—this could be anything from other poems to TV show scripts—that has been deeply formative in creating the spaces your work exists in? In what ways does it continue to compel you towards new understandings?

Hermelinda: It’s hard to say because I consistently mention some of my favorite writers such as Mai Der Vang and Anthony Cody. It has a lot to do with proximity. I’ve had the opportunity to work with them (as a student) within the classroom, workshops, and even in a studio. Their work and teachings have shaped my understanding of poetics in many ways from craft to technique to style. But for this particular poem, I would say that Mai Der Vang’s emphasis on the economy of words and tightening of language is a skill I use in my writing. And I think both authors express in one way or another the arrangement of syntax to create landslides within poetry. I know both authors utilize photography/images or other multi-mediums to help their craft. For example: Mai Der Vang’s “Forest of Beginnings”, published in 2022, was a poem I came back to. And I know she wrote her poem as response to two photographs by Pao Houa. In some ways, I began thinking of the page not only as a landscape but also as a portrait of the body. 

Ai Li: No matter how seemingly common or unusual, what is your favorite part about your own writing process? Even if this varies from one piece to the next, what continues to surprise or delight you? What about writing, or delving into that headspace, allows you to appreciate it?

Hermelinda: My favorite part about writing is when I play with language and write down a feeling or thought I’ve been wanting to unfold. I use different phrases from a word bank I’ve collected from notebooks, notes, google keep, documents, and receipts. It’s exciting when I sit down and uncoil different ways in which language fractures, and it’s also challenging when everything has been said. I also continue to feel surprised when I read and listen to fluid, harmonious, or even discordant mergers I attempt in my writing. It’s these moments before considering revision I enjoy immensely since my initial ideas do switch from when/where I started.