INTERVIEW: Albert Abonado and Natalia Treviño

Poets work with the messy clay of language not only to find shape or missive, but to access the glimmers of language that can act as spiritual beacon. I cannot overstate my exuberance about interviewing a poet who is also just a friendly and humble guy. Albert Abonado is a professor, an activist, author of the collection JAW (Sundress Publications), and he’s just arrived on one of the most elite literary islands a US poet can inhabit: the National Poetry Series. His new collection, Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press), was his ride. Selected as one of the 2023 winners of the National Poetry Series by Mahogany L. Browne, the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center, Abonado is delightfully chuffed.

The esteemed poets who judge this open contest select five winning poets each year. The winners receive a heap of recognition, a blessed and bedazzled launching of their book publication, and a cash prize. Natasha Tretheway said that this contest “consistently identifies, at an early stage in their careers, the writers we are likely to be reading for a long time.” I agree. I will be reading Albert Abonado for a very long time.

What a sweet honor it was for me to meet him for a chat to view the coasts of these islands up close. Islands—well, more specifically an archipelago of thousands of islands—play a large role in the consciousness of this Filipinx poet; and thankfully, Filipino culture, sensibility, food, customs, and Tagalog imbue the fabric that holds this book together.

The book’s title, Field Guide for Accidents, conveys much of its interwoven themes: a mystic and practical form of prayer, celebration, affection, and gratitude accompanied by scientific layers, biological observations, miracles, and a study of accidents that is downright useful. We also learn to be prepared for an accident that could take our closest elders and kin: parents. And as a bonus, we find what we need to be prepared for the accident that is this mortal life on our suffering, little blue planet.

Natalia Treviño: Your book is called Field Guide for Accidents, and the title placed across a vibrant, almost explosive orange and red artwork that evokes fire, danger, and even emergency tells me to get ready. Usually, a field guide is written for something that we would want to explore for pleasure: a region, or a park system, but the word accident here is a shocker. Aside from "Field Guide for Accidents" being a title poem, and the entirety of section three, why did you choose this as the book’s title? Why select the concept of a field guide to link the five sections of the book?

Albert Abonado: The book emerged as a response to a terrible accident that involved my parents. The accident forced me to confront questions about my family, about mortality, about my limited knowledge. I recall being in the hospital trying to answer questions about their insurance, their medication, their primary physician, etc., and realizing how little I knew, how unprepared I was for this moment. Accidents are, by their nature, unexpected, but you hope you know enough or do enough in preparation to mitigate the kind of harm any accident can cause. The title is really a wish to manifest something I didn’t have in that moment. A field guide, too, is often a product of experience. It can act as a place of reflection and even an offering, a way to say to others, “Here is my experience. I hope you find some of this useful.”

NT: The poems suggest the accident shaped your view on your parents, on family, even ghosts, sleep, driving, and the social inequities associated with sleep and driving. The poems speak heavily on the role of nature in our demise, the role of biology in our actual injuries. The title poem, "Field Guide for Accidents" is the center of the book, and it acts as an axis. On either side, we have the interlacing threads of prayer and poetry, as well as prayer as a form of poetry; and as we move toward the end of the book a sort of self-awareness explores the poem as a living shape—as the Talagog concepts of “manananggal” and “aswang.” Can you talk about the book's overall shape, your initial vision for it, how it came to you, and how it grew or surprised you?

AA: I had a very different idea of what my second book was going to be. My original vision was to explore my relationship with Catholicism, its cultural and personal significance. As a lapsed Catholic, many of the rituals, the ideas, the iconography, and the stories remain personally significant. I wanted to dig into that. I was interested in significant Catholic figures in the Philippines like the Santo Niño or Our Lady of Fatima. That book may still happen one day, but that is not the book that I ended up writing. I started seeing different threads emerge. References to the accident appeared more often until I could not deny the pattern in my poems. I stubbornly resisted this at first, but I eventually accepted that the accident would become the focus. I needed to respect the desires of the book and the poems. Some of the ideas from the earlier attempts at the manuscript remain, which you astutely note. The language of ritual and prayer carried over into the manuscript and the accident became a way for me to explore many of those religious and spiritual concerns, along with other things like family and mortality. Once I knew the focus of the book, I wrote poems more intentionally about the subject matter. As I did this, I found I wanted to widen the scope of the material, to move beyond the personal into the historical, the cultural, and the sociological.

NT: This book of poetry won a major American prize, and what makes it uniquely American to me is that it is actually representative of who Americans are today: descendants of travelers, travelers who could have benefitted from a map or a field guide, and in the case of this book, it clearly honors the travelers who are from the Philippines. The archipelagic nation was colonized by Spain in the sixteenth century, ceded to the United States in 1898, and after Japanese occupation during World War II became an independent nation. During Spain’s colonization, Catholicism became the dominant religion. Your book is heavily spiritual and redefines prayer several times. Is Catholicism a big part of your heritage? What is the role of spirituality, prayer, and Catholicism in your poetry?

AA: Catholicism was central to my upbringing. Even if I’m not a practicing Catholic today, even if my devotion is far less fervent than perhaps my family would like, it remains the lens through which I see much of the world, and it continues to shape my thinking. My sense of faith, my connection to spirituality, is rooted in wonder, in the feeling that I am part of some larger, unknowable force. Poetry, both in writing and reading it, reconnects me to that sense. Writing a poem, then, becomes a kind of prayer. It is a practice that cultivates my sense of gratitude, to consider a life outside of my own, to be present and aware of the richness that surrounds me.

NT: My second question about the cultural inheritance your family has given you has to do with your poetic midwives, the persons who allowed you to leap forward with your full mind, your full self, your culture, languages, and knowledge. Most American kids grow up in an anglicized educational system, and I know my Spanish as well as my Mexican identity and cultural knowledge were not welcomed or considered valuable in my public education here in the US. Part of my consciousness was cut off by a border that formed in the middle of my brain for me to survive and thrive in school. It wasn't until I read a bilingual author, Pat Mora, that I ever felt my whole mind engaged or needed to fully understand a poem. Was there a moment like that for you when an author you read, or a professor or mentor, unlocked full access to your unique cultural and language bank? Who were those poets and midwives that helped you access the entirety of your unique and non-white sensibilities?

AA: I love the idea of poetry midwives. That’s such a wonderful way of thinking about literary influences. When I think of the writer who shaped the non-white sensibilities of my poems, I credit the poet Li-Young Lee. As a young Asian-American writer, I would read mostly white voices, poets like William Carlos Williams or Allen Ginsberg or Walt Whitman, poets who continue to resonate with me, but whose experiences did not resemble mine. I felt that reading these predominantly white writers didn’t give me models that understood my conflicted sense of identity. I was not exposed to many Asian-American writers. Reading Lee’s writing was a profound moment and opened me to all kinds of possibilities. I felt I had permission to write about the intersections of family, identity, mortality, spirituality, and more. I could write about being Filipinx, about skipping church, about navigating white spaces. Over the years, I would find writers who would become important to my work, but I still return to the intensity and precision of Lee’s poetry.

NT: You are such a close observer of factual detail, and as a field guide, this book delivers researched information and knowledge about the natural world as well as how to survive and even prevent an accident as violent and terrifying as the one experienced by your parents. This is, in fact, an informative survival guide, too! There is also an ostentatious sense of freedom to intertwine forms, to highlight how they interact physically with one another in the natural world. At one point, a poem asks of the wasps at the windowsill, "what held any of them / together, and what did they do with their suffering?" You highlight a figurative or spiritual intermingling between us and the animal kingdoms, and there is an immense attention on bodies and parts of bodies. What is the story of your relationship with nature? Who or what inspired you to become such a close and empathetic observer?

AA: My mother always had the green thumb in the family, but I never really understood why she was so attentive to her plants. The rows of plants on the windowsill often felt more like obstacles that hid the view of our front yard. I suppose her dedication instilled in me the value of the natural world. Still, I feel like my empathy and sensitivity is something that has developed more in recent years. Since my parents’ accident a few years ago, I’ve been spending more time helping them on their farm during the summers, managing some of the day-to-day operations, learning more about the care and maintenance of the crops, and generally becoming more familiar with the region. This time I spent there has become an education, a period of researching, learning, and reconsidering my relationship with the natural world. Who knew I could experience this much excitement from the appearance of seedlings? I said something earlier about poetry creating this feeling of wonder, and working on the farm has done something similar, helped me discover something spiritual in the care and management of plants I once dismissed or took for granted.

NT: There is such a variety of forms in this book. You work the visual possibilities of the page, and the sections create little neighborhoods for these varied forms, putting like with like, but also offering fascinating variations that echo like a chorus with one another, streaming in and out of the poems at various points in the book. You write about the animals inside of us. You show that prayers come in so many forms: as food, as feast, and saying, “all prayer begins with hunger” early in the book. When we spoke the other day, you mentioned that the poems need to be free, and that they are like “little monsters” that need to have their way. How would you describe your poetics in terms of form play, sound play, and “monster play”—if you will allow that term?

AA: I love that term “monster play” and I want to steal it. I think of my poems as little monsters with their own sense of agency, their own desires and preferences. I want to respect and nurture them. They are going to live outside of me one day and I want them to thrive out in the world. Sometimes my poems and I have very different opinions of what they should be, and we argue with one another, we fight over a line or a phrase. In the end, the poem seems to know what is best. I want poems that can capture the strange, difficult, fluid ways in which we live, which is why I often play with different forms. How can a life be reduced to a single shape, to a single pattern of sounds? Our experiences are layered. At the heart of my writing is a sense of adventure and play. I find joy and wonder in the writing process when I experiment and play, when I allow the poems to surprise me with their revelations.