Robert Francis Flor: Field Guide for Accidents, the winner of 2023 National Poetry Series was a great pleasure to read. You live and teach on the East Coast in New York, so many of our readers may be unfamiliar with your work. Tell us about yourself and your family? What brought you to become a poet?
Albert Abonado: As you note, I grew up in New York. I currently live in Rochester, NY, but grew up on Long Island. I received my MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. I’m currently the Artist in Residence at SUNY Oswego, where I will be leading a community poetry project that cultural, historical, and personal value of our names. I am also the Editor in Chief of the Bare Hill Review, which is a national literary journal produced by the students at Finger Lakes Community College. I spend my summers in the Finger Lakes, specifically just outside of Keuka Lake on a blueberry farm in a small rural community.
My first poem began with heartbreak, a poem I tried to use to seduce a crush, which she promptly returned to me. She was at least kind enough to tell me it was nice. Still, at an early age, I discovered a love of language, of metaphor, of the joy that comes from playing with the textures and sounds of words. Since then, poetry has been a constant in my life.
I like to believe I intuited the inherent power of language. My parents would speak Tagalog or Ilongo, but I didn’t speak either. This could be sometimes isolating. Here, my parents could communicate something to one another that I could not access. It made me acutely aware of how language shapes our realities. I think that experience influenced my interest in poetry as well.
RFF: Your poems have a very personal and intimate feeling. You open with “From the Trees Full of Birdsong comes Unripe Fruit,” a response to a poem by Rick Barot, immersing us in familial and cultural behaviors as prayers. You follow with “Mano,” a respectful gesture children make toward elders as “an emotional gut punch.” Would you say more about the importance and influence cultural behaviors play in your work?
AA: As I get older, I’ve been thinking more about those Filipino cultural practices that have been important to me, gestures I once took for granted. I’m interested in the intersections between the biographical and the historical/cultural. I’m interested in my evolving relationship with my heritage. I like to use my poems as a reflective space to consider the different dimensions to those behaviors. Why am I the way I am? I don’t think I come any closer to any answer, but writing my way through this subject matter, I discover all kinds of surprising threads, little rabbit holes I can travel down. Discovery brings me so much joy. I love when the poem leads me to unexpected places. I love poems that are both expansive and personal, and I want that sensibility present in my writing.
RFF: You employ a variety of poetic forms throughout your collection including prose poems, couplets, lists and line breaks. I found this very interesting and wondered how you determine form you’ll use for a poem or whether you experiment as the muse beckons?
AA: I enjoy this question. I suppose my answer would be a little from column A and a little from column B. Play is an important part of my writing practice. I want to find some joy in the writing process. There’s even joy to be found in writing poems that grieve. So I like to experiment, try things out. I want my process to always feel a little strange, a little off. If the poems feel too familiar, I look for ways to push against that feeling, to make myself a little uncomfortable.
RFF: Your closing section employing creatures from Filipino folklore such as the Manananggal, Aswangs and Kapre as poem was magical. Tell us more about these and how you imagined them.
AA: As I’ve been teaching creative writing, I think a lot about practical advice about writing, and this forces me to consider my practice and relationship to poetry. I like to imagine my poems as something separate from me, as living creatures with their own hungers, phobias, temperaments, personalities, fetishes, preoccupations, etc.
But poems can be so relentless, calling for you at the most inappropriate times. They crave attention. Little monsters. Little creatures of the night. As I started learning more about Filipino folklore, I wondered what would happen if I put my poems into the bodies of these creatures, creatures that are already rich with meaning. It would give me a way to think about my writing practice, a way to have conversations with poems.
RFF: What advice and direction would you give young Asian Americans who wish to pursue a path in poetry? What would you identify as the most significant steps in your career?
AA: I like to pretend I’m still a young Asian American. That said, the three things that I have found most valuable to me are curiosity, accountability, and persistence. Remain curious about everything. Study. Observe. Read other writers. Find your community. They will help sustain you in the hardest moments. They will lift you up. All those things require you to be active, to be curious. Poetry is as much an action as it is an object. So many of my poems often begin “what would happen if…” Be accountable to your writing. Show up. Do the work. Be rigorous and honest about your writing practice. Did you really give your poem what it needed? Finally, be persistent. Writing can be difficult and lonely. You will experience failure and rejection more times than you will experience success. That’s ok. It’s all a process. You will need to press on. You will need to keep writing. Somebody out there is waiting to read your work.
