Francisco’s book All My Heroes Are Broke released September 15, 2017!
Over the course of this summer, C&R Editor Katie McGunagle spent time chatting with the young Miami Poet about his first book, who he reads, and his heroes:
KM: All My Heroes Are Broke fixates on place, specifically the cities of New York and Miami. We also find the narrator reading throughout the text, as in “Reading Keats at Freeman Station” or “Reading Lorca at Union Square.” How would you define this relationship between text and city in your work?
AF: I work a lot out of memory, whether trying to accurately convey a particular experience or using it as a basis and deviating into other directions. But there’s always some personal truth that I’m pulling from, so it helps to try and re-place myself wherever that memory is situated, often literally.
What are you reading right now?
Where Now, New and Selected Poems by Laura Kasischke, Basho: the Complete Haiku, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Franz Kafka’s Diaries 1914-1923.
What collection of poetry is All My Heroes Are Broke most like?
Oh, that’s hard to say. My favorite books of poems are those that function best as a whole, an entire thing. More than just a collection of poems. A few books that I think so this well and that I hope AMHAB is similar to in that regard are The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright, Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly, American Noise by Campbell McGrath, Ka-Ching! by Denise Duhamel, The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee, City of a Hundred Fires by Richard Blanco.
Who is the ideal reader for All My Heroes Are Broke?
Probably a sad American twenty-something. Hopefully anyone though.
What projects are you currently working on?
Quite a few things. I’m trying to avoid the post-grad slump I’ve heard so much about by having various projects I can bounce around between. I’ve written a lot towards a second collection, I dare say it’s almost finished; poems towards a third collection; a chapbook of Cowboy Bebop poems; a chapbook of translations of my dad’s poems that I’m almost done with (looking for a home this if anyone out there is interested…); very slowly working on a comic book.
Many writers have a certain space in which they prefer to write. Do you have a “writing space” or “spaces”? Can you describe it/them?
My room is my main space. I have a pretty big desk that’s crowded with two small bookshelves, a printer, my computer, and way too maybe books, my cat Basho in the background meowing at the poltergeist that lives in my building.
Many of the poems in All My Heroes are Broke are written after select literary figures (Kerouac, etc.). How do you level literary inspiration with your poetic impulse?
I like to do this a lot, yeah. It’s fun to be in conversation with other poets. And if you invoke the dead, that can’t really do anything about it. Why not bring Keats or Jose Marti into a poem if their present somehow in the writing of it? I like to think of it as a kind of shoutout.
Also, I do read a lot, so often some of the titles like “Reading Basho on the 2 Train” are actually true, and can give me an interesting place to start a poem from. It’s also a bonus for the reader, if they know the poet I’m referring too, they will also have that poet in their head as they read my poem, just as I had them in my head when I was writing it.
Many of these poems are tensely wry, often irreverent, even as they linger on breathless moments. Denise Duhamel writes of your collection that it “knows life is both preposterous and sublime.” What type of “life” does All My Heroes Are Broke attempt to portray?
Maybe an unsatisfied one. Slightly cynical, though not hopeless. One that’s coming to terms with the disillusionment of the American Dream.
In AMHAB, you write: “I was born in the city/ that never sleeps so perhaps/ insomnia is my birthright.” What does birthright mean to you, and how does it figure in your poetry?
That metaphor aside, birthright is never something I really considered, in a real-life sense. It’s a weird kind of entitlement that I associate with tyrants who like to overthrow kingdoms or whatever. I guess my only real birthright is trying to make sense of my life, which is why I write poetry at all.
In a recent interview with Full-Stop Magazine, you mentioned that the visual component of poetry is what you truly love. How would you describe the primary visual of All My Heroes Are Broke?
I’m not sure that there is a primary visual. I feel like the cityscape is balanced by the natural world creeping in every now and then, especially with the little animals that make appearances (turtles, jellyfish, birds, etc). There’s snow, there’s rain, there’s sunshine. We’re at the beach, we’re in the swamps of central Florida, we’re walking through Manhattan, we’re at a punk club in Miami. Maybe people are the primary visual? There is almost always some stranger, are a multitude of them, that drift in and out of these poems.
Who is your hero?
Muggsy Bogues
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Order Ariel’s latest book! All My Heroes Are Broke out now.
Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, his poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Fjords Review, Gulf Coast, PANK, Poets.org, Prelude, Quiet Lunch, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He lives in South Florida (for now).