J. Mae Barizo on Intersecting Poetry, Music, and Minimalism in “Tender Machines” [INTERVIEW]

J. Mae Barizo, born in Toronto to Filipino immigrants, is a poet, essayist, librettist and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of two books of poetry, Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023) and The Cumulus Effect. A finalist for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Megaphone Prize, her work has been anthologized in books published by W.W. Norton, Atelier Editions and Harvard University Press. Recent writing appears in Poetry, Ploughshares, Esquire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, BookForum, among others.

As a librettist, she is the inaugural recipient of Opera America’s IDEA residency, given to artists who have the potential to shape the future of opera. Her monodrama ISOLA will have its world premiere at Long Beach Opera in 2024, and UNBROKEN, commissioned for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, will be premiered in 2024. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, Mellon Foundation, Opera America, Jerome Foundation and Poets House. She is on the MFA faculty of The New School and lives in New York City.

Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: I’m excited to discuss your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading not once, but twice. As summarized in your bio, you’ve explored the literary arts in many forms. What is it about poetry that attracts you to the art form?

J. Mae: “Well, it’s hard for me to pick favorites among literary forms, but poetry is certainly the most prevalent in my life right now, as you may have gathered. Growing up as a classical musician, I wrote poetry consistently since childhood. My interests in music and poetics have been interwoven seamlessly throughout my life, both in childhood and adulthood, and into my career. Being a performer for so long, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the constant focus on external presentation and being on stage. Poetry, for me, is a way to nurture the inner voice that I felt I had neglected for a long time.” 

James: The poems in “tender machines” are so rich in strangeness, yet light, with empty space playing a powerful role. Many of the lines made me think of Haiku, lines such as “a flaccid white fish // against my brown cheek” and “Eye lash petals, a blue sock // unravels at the heel, pulling // fast as lids fall.”

How did you achieve such consistency of voice in this collection during the revision and editing process? 

J. Mae: “As a poet, I navigate two impulses: one is to be verbose and superfluous, and the other is to lean towards a quiet, minimalist aesthetic. It’s interesting that the sections you mentioned are written from the perspective of someone just waking up. In music and in all senses, there’s this concept of distillation. I’m constantly thinking about how to distill language to its purest essence. My first book was more minimalist, and that style still attracts me. This influence comes partly from my literary mentors, like Gene Valentine, and poets like Timothy Liu, who employ pared-down language, reducing it to a concentrated form.” 

James: Musical references are present in many of the poems in this collection, references including “My lungs grow black lilies // while I play Bach’s Icht ruf zu dir”, “White cool of milk, whine // of street machines, Schubert steepling in my ear.”, and “She will be a string // plucked on the inside // of a piano.”

How does music influence your writing? 

J. Mae: “I think music influences my writing in a couple of ways. Poetry, to me, is a communication of everyday life, and my days are always surrounded by music, from morning to night. During my time at the Conservatory, sometimes we would practice for six to eight hours a day. The piano and violin were my most constant companions throughout my childhood. Naturally, they appear in my work. One significant influence of music is the concept of discipline. Writing, like music, requires rigor and is a disciplined practice. The second influence is the aspect of form. Both music and poetry are deeply intertwined with form, whether it’s fugues or sonata forms in music, or sonnets and haikus in poetry. My familiarity with these forms gives me the comfort to either adhere to them or to break and reimagine them when necessary.” 

James: The quote by Sylvia Plath that prefaces the collection, and the opening lines of the first poem, “The Mothers”, sets the tone. You write:

We must be the inviolate
petals, always queering
towards the sun, must
be water on the lips of
flaming cities, quenching
the husbands, insatiable. 

How did you approach organizing this collection, the decision to have sections, and choosing this poem to open the book? 

J. Mae: “As a poet, I’m constantly revising. Some of these poems were written over two decades, from post-9/11 to recent times. Think about the numerous revisions a book undergoes in two decades! It was crucial for me to ground the book in the idea of women as caretakers and to bring forth the unsung voices of my ancestors. I wanted to establish that first section with the voices of mothers, Sunday woman, and grandmothers. That was one of the key factors in structuring the manuscript.”

James: Did you do what many poets do, have one room in your house with the entire book printed out and laid on the floor or stuck to the wall? It’s a mechanism many poets, including myself, use to avoid editing the book’s structure digitally. Did you physically move the poems around in space? What was your method?

J. Mae: “I did print them out, but I didn’t lay all the pages out; perhaps my floor isn’t big enough. Some sections, like ‘tender archive,’ which consists of very short minimalist poems, naturally grouped together. There’s also a chronological aspect in the organization. For example, ‘tender archive’ was written within one or two months, and ‘small essays on disappearance,’ a longer section, also formed all at once. So, the ordering was both chronological and thematic.”

James: Poems including “The Cat”, “Jetlag”, “Exit Music”, and “Coda” are so slight, just a few lines each, and demand to be re-read. In “Jetlag” you write:

Morning scaled the window.
Pills stacked in the mouth: sandcastles.
Your finger, light saber.
Sickness needled the air.
Even the window went pale
Squinting at the gold teeth of the sun.

I’ve asked several guests on this podcast about the challenge of writing short poems. How do you know when a poem is just enough? 

J. Mae: “That’s such a hard question because it’s not necessarily me who knows, but the poem itself. Even a poem like this underwent many revisions, considering aspects like capitalization and punctuation. At one point, there was an iteration with no punctuation at all. For this poem, with its six lines, it felt like it could fit into the window described in the first line, ‘Morning scaled the window.’ It explores what can occupy the space between dream and waking, between darkness and first light. The narrator isn’t very present in this poem. ‘Morning’ becomes a character, and by the end of the sixth line, with the ‘squinting at the gold teeth of the sun,’ there’s the sense of eyes opening.”

James: “The Women”, which you’ll read later, works beautifully as a prose poem. In re-reading the poem I can see edits that could take the poem into different forms, a sonnet being one form. How do you approach finding the ideal form for your poetry? 

J. Mae: “It’s interesting because many of these poems in their original state were quite different from what you see in the book. A lot of them had long lines and were almost like free verse, with little punctuation. Then, during the editing process, which really happened subconsciously, I found that many of them had transformed into sonnets. This was the first form I ever fell in love with, though I hadn’t written in it for many years. As a teenager, I wrote sonnets religiously. It was my first familiar practice in poetry, and I memorized works by Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mallarmé. These were my earliest reasons for loving poetry. So, it’s fascinating that these poems, which I initially wrote in free verse, found themselves naturally fitting into the form of a sonnet, which I see as a little room. It’s another case where the poem itself knew how it would look and feel, and now I can’t imagine any of these poems any other way.”

James: “small essays on disappearance” is an arresting series of interconnected personal vignettes in the form of prose poems. Themes of motherhood, Manhattan, 9/11, and lines including “I remembered years ago // the quick slice of razors on wrists // what bliss, red aligning on the eaves or beneath the skin.” 

How did you approach constructing, revising, and editing this interview series of vignettes?

J. Mae: “I think they mostly emerged around the same time, possibly a few years after my daughter was born and I first became a mother. They feel infused with the physicality of motherhood and intense remembrances of embodiment. These pieces went through many syntactical changes, like deciding on capitalizations, punctuation, or the absence of it, and also form. For example, that last poem you mentioned; now, most of them are almost like one-sentence poems, or monostichs, though not all. Previously, some had stanzas, but it seemed that the stream-of-consciousness style, which runs throughout this section, mirrored the overwhelming simultaneous experiences I felt as a new mother.”

James: What is your approach to eliciting feedback about your poetry, and determining which feedback should be actioned and which should be ignored?

J. Mae: “That’s interesting actually. While writing this book, I was part of a writing group with some wonderful poets, like Timothy Liu, Charif Shanahan, Sam Sacks, and Sarah Wetzel. It was a constantly evolving group with different members, which provided a loop of really beautiful feedback. It’s important for me as a poet to always have at least one or two people who know my work and, more importantly, know me as a person. They can tell if I’m being true to myself on the page and call out any inauthenticity. I was never really comfortable in workshops when I was younger because I was too shy and felt overwhelmed by the format of remaining silent while others debated my work. Now, as a teacher, I reimagine the workshop process. I don’t tell my students to stay silent. They’re active facilitators in their own workshop, specifying the type of feedback they’re looking for and the draft stage of their work. They also share what they want to accomplish in the poem. It’s important for poets not to be voiceless, to not eradicate their voice. Part of that is having good mentors, but also about empowerment – how can we make this voice speak in a sense?”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear J. Mae recite selections from the book.