Please be X, Y, or Z
I want to know why what is often “other” ends up being labeled as poetry. I think it’s equivalent to forcing me to check the ethnicity box on the EEO data sheets. Which ethnicity most accurately describes me? Does this mean to myself or to other people? Other people who meet me for the first time always ask me if I’m Spanish. When they ask me where I’m from, I always say Texas. So that confirms for them that I’m definitely of Hispanic descent. I never say that I am from Thailand. I was born there, but I can’t say I’m from there. From, to me, denotes a forming of awareness and identity and memory. Most of these happened for me in Texas.
When I was younger and when I dated, my dates were always very uneasy about asking me about my ethnicity. You could see it in their hesitating restaurant decisions, their waiting to see if I’d order in a language other than English if taken to an ethnic restaurant. And then always, inevitably, I’d be asked if I’m Spanish. When I said no, they’d invariably be disappointed. The two most disappointed dates: the Spanish analyst who worked for the government and the boy who had just broken up with his Spanish girlfriend—I don’t know what they were hoping to find in me.
Poetry as refuge
A refuge is where unwanted animals go. It is also where some of my submissions to journals end up. Some intern or graduate student has dropped my submission into the poetry pile; in a way, that person has made it possible for my submission to live. It would not have lived in the nonfiction pile. There, it would have starved to death, or it would have been eaten alive. Once, I got a rejection slip from a nonfiction editor saying, “I’m not sure how to take this. I don’t know what this is.” That particular journal was solely a nonfiction journal; my submission, therefore, had nowhere else to go.
On the EEO genre sheet
I’m not sure which genre I would select. I guess, being who I am and doing the type of work I do, I would have to choose many. Do I choose “other” (if the option is even there) and write in a selection (if there’s even a write-in space)? Isn’t having to choose, being forced to choose, also essentially an act of bias? Being told that there simply isn’t an easy category for you, you just don’t fit in, you destroy the natural order of things. The term “other” also immediately connotes an agenda: if you don’t fit into one of our predetermined categories, well, you aren’t playing the game correctly. You are an other. You will always be an other. You will get thrown into a slush pile marked “origin unknown.”
Coda
And so, in the literary world, I find that I spend a lot of time trying to keep everyone from becoming disappointed in me.
I may look like an essay, but I don’t act like one. I may look like prose, but I don’t speak like it. Or, conversely, I may move like a poem, but I don’t look like one.
Do I bend genre? Or does genre bend me? I think it’s the latter. I have always been the same person: I have always been made up of three things. My birth may be fictional; I may be from poetry; I might now be living in essays. I can-not see these three things as separate parts of my identity; rather, they form to make one being. I may be the product of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but they come together to form one entity. To be told to choose is to be told that you disrupt the neat notion of where things belong, that you don’t belong.
The Poet’s Education
I don’t know if they were monarch butterflies or only butterflies that looked like monarch butterflies, but once a year, when they would descend upon my neighborhood in south San Antonio, I would sneak up on one sucking nectar from one of my family’s privet trees and wait for its wings to touch. I would then pluck it between my thumb and forefinger and run inside to my bedroom, where I would let it go, closing the door behind me. I thought they would stay alive forever.
The teachers never knew where to put me. In kindergarten, they put me with the green kids. Then, when they began to see something in me, they moved me to the blue kids. The blue kids had already gone oh-so-far in their studies, and to catch up, I began to fill in my worksheets; the teacher reprimanded me, and I got in trouble for not following directions. This was in kindergarten, when the families in my neighborhood were still mostly white, but not me; no one ever knew about me or what I was or how I fit in. They moved me around a lot back then.
In the children’s book Color My World by Wayne Carley, the lovely white cat, so fluffy and elegant, escapes its owner’s house to have a pre-nap adventure in a world punctuated by colors. It rolls itself upon a heap of green, delicate, fingerlike ferns. That was the world in which I wanted to live. I stole the book from my second-grade classroom.
If you paid fifty cents, you got to see the circus performers at school or maybe another troop of people doing something entertaining. My sister and I would save our change so we could attend the shows, and more often than not, we would have only enough saved for one of us to go. I remember this circus-themed show so distinctly because both my sister and I had enough money to go. This was at school, where we would
