Featured Writer #120: Brent Ameneyro

I first encountered Brent Ameneyro’s work in the spring of 2022 when Ninth Letter ran an open call for “experimental” poetry submissions for our special print folio, Brazen, which appeared in our print edition Vol 19, No 2. Ameneyro submitted his “Tectonics” suite, a new form he created that re-envisioned the concept of erasure and prose poetry. Of course, we accepted three poems. As I followed more of Ameneyro’s work as it appeared in other literary magazines and websites, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would see an announcement for his debut collection.

A Face Out of Clay is a stunning debut. Written with astute attention to space, language, and movement, it is a testament to ancestors both literary and familial. The poems in this collection are precise and smart. The voice, arresting with an authoritative clarity. In this book, the political feels personal and universal without sacrificing a sharp attention to detail. Nothing here is obvious or expected but is exactly right in its unpredictability. A Face Out of Clay is a compelling read through which I felt myself propelled from page to page and eager to re-read.

We at Ninth Letter are honored to present this interview with Brent Ameneyro and an exclusive look at two of his Tectonics poems.

—Liz Harms, Editor

Liz Harms (LH): Hi, Brent! Thank you for speaking with Ninth Letter about your debut collection A Face Out of Clay. It is a beautiful book, and I loved spending time with it while preparing for this interview. What was your reaction upon learning A Face Out of Clay was selected as the winner of The Mountain/West Poetry Series?

Brent Ameneyro (BA): Liz, thank you so much for your ongoing support! Ninth Letter has been my favorite journal since 2008. This is such an honor to be having this conversation with you.

Although The Mountain/West Poetry Series is not a prize, I like the way you said it, because I do feel like I won. Much like a prize, only one book is selected for publication each year for the series. They produce high quality books, and I consider it a very prestigious series.

My book was a finalist for two prizes before being selected for the Mountain/West Poetry Series: Black Lawrence Press’ 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2022 Colorado Prize for Poetry Book Contest. Poems from the collection were selected for publication with prominent journals, such as Ninth Letter, and they were finalists/longlisted/honorable mention for over ten contests. All this to say that I knew I was on the right track with the collection, but I don’t think anything could really prepare me for how it felt to get that e-mail saying the Center for Literary Publishing wanted to publish my book.

After receiving the offer for publication, I remember pulling into a McDonald’s parking lot and calling my mentor, Blas Falconer. I was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk asking him for guidance. I felt disoriented, excited, scared, and a million other emotions all at once.

(LH): I love that you trusted the publication of individual poems to be a touchstone (and thank you so much for the kind words about 9L; we’re honored) for confidence in the collection as a whole. It can be so easy to lose that in this industry!

What strikes me about this collection is the attention to movement within individual poems as means to guide the reader and control momentum, and, in a larger sense, thematically, temporally, and geographically in how the poems communicate with each other. I’m left with a sense of both expansion and contraction of the physical realm, specifically Puebla, Mexico and California, Wisconsin, and the United States. How were you conceptualizing movement when putting together this collection?

(BA): Children are inherently borderless. They are much closer to the natural world than adults. As we grow up, I think the lines on maps are gradually carved into our subconscious. Children move freely throughout the world without knowledge or concern for politics and logistics. When sequencing and selecting poems for the collection, I wanted to capture that naïveté, that fluidity. I wanted the poems to capture both the confusion of childhood along with the freedom of it.

Movement became a theme as I meditated on memory (moving through time), on identity (moving through phases of life), and on the concept of home (moving geographically). I hope the reader feels disoriented at times, maybe even a little lost, but then I want them to feel grounded and comforted by the familiar and the familial.

(LH): You show great attention to ancestors, childhood memories, and the concept of “roots”—where they begin and how they persist. Across the collection, we encounter quotes from Whitman, Neruda, and Joyce. In the third section of the collection, you retool Odysseus and Ulysses and place them in the context of, respectively, a Mexican boy and in the city of Puebla, Mexico. In that same section, we see the speaker reckoning with his ancestry, identity, and nationality in poems like “Mom Is from Wisconsin Dad Is from Mexico and I Sing” and “Choose Your Own Adventure.” Can you give us some insight into how you were reckoning with lineage both poetic and familial?

(BA): I’ve heard folks say “we stand on the shoulders of giants” as a way to suggest reading great writers of the past. I don’t like that expression so much. I don’t like pretending that there are these magical people that are somehow better than everyone else. I would rather say “we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.” Simple. It leaves room for their flaws, for their humanness, while still acknowledging the work that was done to make whatever I am doing today possible. This is true both in my poetic and familial lineage.

I see a debut collection as an opportunity to show gratitude, to shine light on the world that helped to shape the poet. It took sacrifices from multiple generations for me to be here, so, in many ways, my first book belongs to them.

(LH): You’ve written with great formal variety—both inherited and created. Throughout the collection we see traditional forms like haiku, epistle, ars poetica, ekphrasis, and pantoum.  But you also created your own form, like in the “Tectonics” suite, and brought in forms from other genres, like in “Choose Your Own Adventure.”  Can you discuss your relationship with form and what that meant for this collection in particular?

(BA): Explorations of lineage and honoring ancestors in the content made me want to match that in the form. I deliberately included many traditional forms to pay homage to the five-thousand-year-old artform, to show that my work is joining an ongoing conversation.

That being said, the literary canon is far from perfect. I think there’s an artistic duty every poet has to push the artform in new directions. That’s why I like to experiment with form.

(LH): To dive deeper into your formal innovations, I fell in love with the “Tectonics” poems when we published them in our experimental poetry feature in Volume 20, Issue 2 of Ninth Letter. I remember everyone in the editorial room being equal parts impressed and intrigued. What strikes me most about that suite is the number of times one can read the poems and still get more out of each piece. Then, one reads them all together and another conversation emerges. Can you talk about the process of invention or of writing this series? Did you have any specific hopes for how people would encounter or digest the poems? Any worries in how a new form might be received?  

(BA): In the beginning, I was looking for a way to disrupt my syntax. For several months, I felt my voice was trapped in a rhythm that I was desperate to break. I think a great poetry collection should have a cohesive feeling while also inviting variation and innovation. I don’t like my readers to get too comfortable. My hope is that people read these poems the way one might sit in front of a painting, with their minds open to the possibilities of their own imaginations.

The form uses aspects of prose poetry and erasure. To begin, take a prose poem, preferably one without punctuation (or simply remove the punctuation). I’ll use one of my poems to show the process of creating a Tectonic poem. Here is how the poem began:

pan dulce chiles en nogada salchichas picantes the first american grocery store was built and the panadería y la tortillería started to look so small under the shadow of the giant gray warehouse then the first american fast food restaurant was built and the tiendita where we bought cajeta y mazapán was swallowed in a cloud of dirt the whole city disappeared the dirt roads whirled up over buildings and snow-capped volcanoes spit up vapor and ash only seen by the birds that flew north

You can read this as fairly conventional prose lines without punctuation. The first step is to duplicate the prose block. In an effort to save page space, I won’t show that step here, but to say it more plainly, you just copy and paste the prose poem so you see it twice.

The next step is to remove words. Whatever words are removed from the first prose block need to remain in the second and vice versa. When drafting, I turn the words white to maintain the exact spacing of the words that are removed. In the final printed version, the white words are invisible. In the example I’m giving here, I will demonstrate this by using a strikethrough to represent the erasure:

pan dulce chiles en nogada salchichas picantes the first american grocery store was built and the panadería y la tortillería started to look so small under the shadow of the giant gray warehouse then the first american fast food restaurant was built and the tiendita where we bought cajeta y mazapán was swallowed in a cloud of dirt the whole city disappeared the dirt roads whirled up over buildings and snow-capped volcanoes spit up vapor and ash only seen by the birds that flew north

pan dulce chiles en nogada salchichas picantes the first american grocery store was built and the panadería y la tortillería started to look so small under the shadow of the giant gray warehouse then the first american fast food restaurant was built and the tiendita where we bought cajeta y mazapán was swallowed in a cloud of dirt the whole city disappeared the dirt roads whirled up over buildings and snow-capped volcanoes spit up vapor and ash only seen by the birds that flew north

Going through this process, new little magical moments like “the first american was built” start to emerge. The form also mirrors the content better than the original prose block. Here, the chaotic appearance of the words on the page, the erasure, and the fragmented lines all reflect the disruptive nature of globalization and the destruction of culture. 

(LH): Tonally, the collection is a wonderful balance of curiosity and critique of the philosophical, political, and personal questions you’re exploring. You’re not afraid of taking a stance like in the lines “we all turn to children./ A group of migrants/ sewed their mouths shut// at the border because their voices/ fell through a hole/ in the sky…” in “As the Fog Starts Burning Away;” but, you’re equally unafraid of negative capability, like in “Outside the Observable Universe” in which we’re presented with a poem rooted in concrete imagery about the unknowable. (What?!) Can you talk about that balance of writing both toward an argument (if you subscribe to such notions in poetry) and toward the unknown, the oblique?

(BA): In my local library, there is no section for poetry. All the poetry books are together on a shelf within the non-fiction section. At first, this bothered me. I thought about how poetry can be surreal, magical, fictional, and so many other things. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that poetry has a way of showing us—both reader and writer—the light. In moments where the poem appears all knowing, it is most certainly not the poet speaking. There is a kind of truth telling that can happen in poetry. Sometimes that truth is clear and direct, other times it’s found when the poem unlocks a feeling deep within.

The poem “Outside the Observable Universe” is inspired by science, science fiction, religious texts, memory, and imagination. In a science fiction novel, for example, the setting is not often described in simile and metaphor, it is described in concrete imagery and clear descriptions so the reader can build the imagined world in their mind. The speaker doesn’t come across as didactic, yet the speaker doesn’t waver and doesn’t speak in abstractions.

(LH): This debut collection is ambitious! Eduardo C. Corral writes “the lyric space in these poems is a revved-up engine caught between the past and the present.” And Felicia Zamora says “breath becomes an act of the sacred, an act of survival” in A Face Out of Clay. Do you have any advice to poets working on their own debut collections, or those who are ready to/in the process of submitting manuscripts to contests and open calls?

(BA): Be humble. I never stopped editing, revising, and writing for the book. Even after it was a finalist for a book prize, I continued to rearrange the manuscript, remove lines, change titles, and restructure poems.

Write a great poem. That’s the goal, not a prize or anything else. Keep pushing for the best poem you can write. And if there’s a poem that’s not cutting it, pull it out. Serve the art, not the ego.

Publishing poetry should not be a capitalistic venture. This is more of a spiritual quest. Don’t worry about doing more or doing it faster, do what feels right. Listen to your gut and to your heart before you listen to your brain.

(LH): Thank you so much for taking time to talk with Ninth Letter about your work! To close out: What are you reading right now that you are excited about? Any specific writers on your radar? Any projects (yours or others) that spark your interest?

(BA): I just finished reading Blas Falconer’s new collection Rara Avis (Four Way Books 2024), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick (Delacourt 1976), and Maggie Nelson’s Jane (Soft Skull Press 2016). I usually have several books on my desk that I read at the same time. I like to read books that feed me in different ways. Falconer’s poetry collection brought tears to my eyes, Vonnegut’s novel let me escape into an absurd reality, and Nelson’s hybrid book broke my heart. When Nelson’s book would get too heavy, I could put it down and dance around in Vonnegut’s prose. Not only does this satisfy me emotionally, it also allows me to read each book more critically and thoughtfully. Jumping between different voices and writing styles sharpens my lens.

I have a similar approach with my own projects. I like to have more than one project on my desk at a time. In the past, that could have been a poetry collection and making the music for a short film. Right now, I am working on my second poetry manuscript and a prose manuscript. I’ve been working on the poetry manuscript for the last couple of years, and I fully anticipate it will take a few more until it’s ready for publication. The prose manuscript is a new obsession, and it very well could be a project that never sees the light of day. Time will tell. I’m always creating art, but what gets published, performed, or otherwise released out into the world is curated.

Photo Credit: Kent Ameneyro

Brent Ameneyro is a poet and music artist. He is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). His poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. He was the 2022-2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. He currently serves as an associate at Letras Latinas and as the poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review.