Finding the Poem: Adela Najarro on Form, Family, and “Variations in Blue” [INTERVIEW]

Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow.

The poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author’s journey into her Latine/x culture. They cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

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

James: I’m going to start in the middle with the poem “What Poetry Told Me”, a poem I was compelled to read multiple times. You wrote:

"She was interested in rhyme and the metaphorical.
Her rhythm shattered glass, but she did not finish
what she began to carve into stone. She was fickle.
First she drank mead, then preferred a martini.”

This poem is so fun to read and, I suspect, was fun to write. What is your approach to achieving flow when writing, to pushing through when writing is a chore?

Adela: “I think you have to be open to your own psyche. When I sit down to write, I will just let it come out, whichever way it comes out. Just go, go, go, go, go, no stopping. Just go until the going stops. Whatever is going on in my mind and body, it just filters out and then I read what I’ve written.

“Sometimes if the poem’s not finished, after rereading I can go again to find the finish. Or if I do think it’s finished, then I go back in and I look at it and I try to analyze what I am doing. Like in that poem that you read, you’re right, I had so much fun imagining poetry as a guest in my home. When I was working on the poem I had to make sure I kept that in mind: ‘Okay. Poetry is a person in your home. So make sure you’ve got that in mind while trying to talk about poetry in general and the history of poetry.’ It is a lot of fun.”

James: I think your point to just start writing is so important. I’ve spoken to poets that are just getting started, and I think they feel like they have to release a fully-realized poem all at once. That happens, maybe, once or twice in your life, but most of the time it’s about just getting started. Start writing and worry about crafting a poem later.

Adela: “Yes, writing as discovery, right? You don’t sit down to create a perfect poem, you sit down to discover something and you keep writing until you’ve discovered whatever it is that you’re thinking about.”

James: This collection explores poetic form infused with free verse in a variety of ways. “El Perico Verde,” a free verse pantoum, is particularly effective. The poem begins:

"My father grew up under a verdant jungle sky.
He listened to el perico verde de Nicaragua.
She always told him what he had done wrong.
My father chewed limes with salt. He knew bitter times.”

“Poneloya Poolside Party” employs the prose poetry form, “What Changed” incorporates anaphora, ekphrasis is present in multiple poems, and more. How do you approach incorporating form into your poems?

Adela: “Going to form is what I do when a poem’s not working. I can’t get it to work, so then I’m like, okay maybe put it in a form. People can find books out there on form; I have a few, and then I also do Google searches. I know I like the idea in the poem or what’s going on in the poem, but the poem’s not working and I can’t get it to work. So then I’ll think, okay let’s put it into a form, and I’ll flip through the book or I’ll Google “forms” and I’ll see a variety of options. And then sometimes it actually comes out and works.

“The other idea is that every poem has its own structure, so part of my editing and writing process—because I don’t think I’m done until I’ve found not only the theme of the poem but the structure of the poem—is making sure that the structure works, whether it’s a prose poem or a pantoum or just a free verse poem.”

James: That reminds me of a poem I wrote years ago about a trip I took to Normandy, the D-Day Museum, and the beaches. The early draft was very structured with rhyme and meter and everything, and it just wasn’t working. Then my daughter said, ‘Hey, this seems like it’s kind of more like a screenplay.’ I had written another poem which didn’t work, which was structured as a prose poem in the form of a screenplay, and I applied that form to this poem, and then poof, it came to life. So yes, I think form, whether it’s a form that’s been around for years or a form in your mind, can unlock a poem that’s otherwise stuck. Maybe even as an exercise, if something’s not working, okay, try to put it into a Shakespearean sonnet, see if it works better. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

Adela: “Exactly. And one of the things about reading up on the different types of forms is just doing that makes you think about structure. Because you’re thinking, why does the sonnet have a turn? And that idea—oh there has to be a turn—just that might be what saves your poem or something that you can use in the future as you write your next poem.”

James: I love playing with ekphrasis in my poetry, and the way poetry intersects with other art forms. The poem “La Virgen de Patadas” opens with the lines:

"She kicks the moon in black and white,
a karate side snap paired with a power punch."

These lines so effectively, and succinctly, set up the rest of the poem using the context of the painting. As with most ekphrastic poetry, the inspiring art is a starting point and in this case, you pivot into the plights of the vulnerable and dangers of border crossings. How do you approach incorporating ekphrasis into your poetry?

Adela: “Well, I think this all started with Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas at Notre Dame, their Latino studies branch. The Smithsonian had a national exhibition, I believe it was Latino American art, I forget the exact name of the exhibition, but Letras Latinas collaborated with the Smithsonian so that at all their stops throughout the country, they invited poets to go to the museum and hold weekend in-depth poetry writing workshops. It started there, and that’s where I saw Esther Hernández’s print and that’s where that poem came from.

“Since then I’ve had a love of doing ekphrastic poetry. I go to my local museum and do it. I also always teach an ekphrastic workshop now. I just think it’s so much fun to look at a painting or artwork—it can be any artwork—and then write the poem because there’s an additional challenge. You have to relay what you’re seeing for a reader who has not seen it, but it can’t just be a straight description. It then has to inspire you to go into something else.

“In that poem, I thought it was perfect for the people crossing the border because if you think about it, the people who are crossing undocumented, they’re walking thousands of miles with no money, sometimes with their children. How bad does it have to be for you to undergo such a journey, right? And so then that’s what made me think, well, they have to pray, ‘Virgencita, help us make it through this journey.’”

James: Yes, I think that’s the thing I find so interesting about ekphrastic poetry is that it will create a connection or remind me of something or connect me to something that I hadn’t really thought about. And then it is brought out by a piece of art or sculpture or photograph. If you’re part of a writing group, go to a museum as a group. Go off into the museum, spend 20 minutes, do some speed writing, come back, share what you saw, go off again. I did that with a writing group once; it was really, really fun.

Adela: “Oh, that sounds amazing. Sounds wonderful. I love it.”

James: The references to “blue” start with the title of your collection “Variations in Blue”. Just some of the phrases that vary interpretations of the word “blue” include: “The fence tears blue tongues,” and “It all came clear under a blue dust / sky after a haircut,” and “we name these burnt sienna azure blue clay white alabaster,” and many more. I can’t imagine any other title for this book than “Variations in Blue”. Share how the title and infusion of the word “blue” with so many different meanings emerged as you built this collection.

Adela: “That’s a great question because whenever I’m putting together a collection into a book form, I treat it as a huge poem. When you’re editing your poem, you look through your repeating motifs. So you could write a poem and you notice, oh this poem has blue all over it. I better take out the red and the green and find some different words for blue. That’s one of the things you would do.

“That’s actually what I did with this collection. There were poems that did not have blue but had other colors and I was like, oh can I change these colors into blue and edit the poem so that it had blue? I took my poems into the collection and then there were quite a few that I then edited to fit into this overall blue theme.”

James: That’s really interesting, the way you articulated that the collection itself should be thought of as a poem. I think that’s why, when I talk to other writers working on their first collection, they say, ‘Oh my goodness, I thought it’d be so much easier to pull the collection together.’ Well, not really. The collection, the ordering, how you put sections, juxtaposition, all these different things you think about—it’s really hard. I do have this very ambitious, may never achieve it, goal of having the table of contents, just the titles of the poems, actually be a poem in itself.

Adela: “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.”

James: Building on finding a title, turning a collection of poems, most often written individually over many months or even years, into a coherent book is challenging. How did you approach structuring “Variations in Blue”? The themes that anchor each section? What were the trade-offs to make this approach work so well?

Adela: “It’s a mix of intellectual introspection of the book. You have to analyze your own book, you have to analyze your own poems. You have to step out of yourself and see what these poems are saying and you have to group them so that they echo each other. One poem has to flow into the next poem. Sometimes I can just tell that a poem doesn’t flow correctly into the next one. I don’t know why really, but I can feel it, that it’s not the right poem there, and so I have to move things around. That’s one thing: you have to go into your own work and critically analyze your own work.

“From there, I knew what I wanted to do with the sections. I gathered the poems together, and I think what happened is the second section, which is the poems that are about domestic violence, had to be together. I didn’t want to sprinkle those poems throughout the collection because I wanted the reader to come in and just take in that section as a whole. To tell you the truth, I had it at the beginning, I had it at the end, and then I settled to put it in the middle.

“What I did is I ordered the sections and then I moved the sections around in order to get the final version of it. And so now I really do think it moves into what I see and thinking and understanding the themes of the book, then it gets into that middle section with domestic violence, but then moves out into the theme of how writing and art can uplift and create hope and joy.”

James: And one of the things that I found useful in my collections is to get out of my computer, print them out, and put them on the floor and see them in physical space. As powerful as all our technology is, at least for me, I find it’s a challenge dealing with so many pages where I can only see one on the screen. Whereas if I put them out on the floor and keep them there for weeks, I’ll walk over and revisit, move something around, group them in different ways and play with them. Then I’ll put that back in digital form.

Adela: “Yes, exactly. I do the exact same thing. And too, when I get a version—oh now this is it—then I’ll print it out as though it was in book form and I’ll take a break and then I’ll read this version. The poems that don’t work or that are in the wrong place stand out. And then you take them out and you move them back and you put them around. But it helps to let people see my work, so I usually ask for help from my writing groups and people I trust.”

James: Research plays more of an important role in crafting a poem than many people realize. The prose poem “Below the Momotombo Volcano”, which you’ll read in full later, is a terrific example that builds on the volcano’s propensity to erupt, with so many mythological and cultural references woven in, including:

“Out back by the cascading red flowers of the banana trees, Vulcan sets up Tiki torches to keep away the buzz. There’s a Twitter feed on him about complicity in forging lances for conquistadores, Remington rifles for US Yankee banana companies, and AK-47s for the School of the Americas.”

How do you approach incorporating research into your poetry?

Adela: “That’s a great question because I actually do use research a lot and I’m so grateful that we are living in this age of the internet. People always downplay too much screen time, too much internet, blah blah. But on the other hand, the internet allows us instant knowledge. I know what I don’t know, and so I will go down the rabbit hole of researching volcanoes and volcanic myth and click on one article and then another article and then another article, and fill my mind with new information.

“The book has a lot of poems about Nicaragua, and I was only there once when I was 14 years old for a month. So there’s a lot of things I don’t know or I can’t visualize about Nicaragua. Google Maps, oh my goodness, you can zoom in and you can walk down a street and look at the buildings. I mean, you don’t get the sense of smell and the heat and the humidity and all that, but I find it invaluable to do that because I don’t know everything and so I have to learn about the details that I don’t know.”

James: While my wife is fluent in several languages, I can only dabble, lightly, in French and Italian. As a result, my poetry is unilingual. Your poetry incorporates words and phrases in Spanish. When I interviewed Safia Elhillo, we discussed her incorporation of Arabic into her poetry. She shared that her poems exist in two versions, one version read by a reader who knows exactly what she is talking about, who speaks all of her languages and understands all of her intersections, and readers without that context. She said she hopes the poem works for both audiences. How do you think about the incorporation of multiple languages into your poetry?

Adela: “Well, that’s a wonderful description of how a multilingual poem can work. I love that idea, that it’s for everyone in many, many different ways. This goes back to when I was in graduate school and trying to identify, who am I as a writer? Ultimately, you read all these theories and you have all these discussions, and I had to come to the point where Spanglish is my language. So if I’m going to be my true self, then I have to put Spanglish in my writing. If I was taking out the Spanish, I would be inauthentic to who I am. And that’s a killer for poetry.

“The one thing you have to do when you’re writing a poem is be 100% who you are, looking at and existing in this world. And if you start cutting yourself off, ‘Oh, I can’t put Spanish in there because most people won’t understand it,’ then all of a sudden that truth veil that you have to tap into to make a good poem is damaged. And so I had to do that.

“At the same time I consciously chose to make my work understandable. That doesn’t mean make it easy, but it does mean that I work very, very hard for a reader to understand the poem. And if there’s a section that a reader doesn’t get because of the Spanish, A) there’s Google translate, which I think is a great thing, and B) as a Latina in the U.S., I am sending out the message: Okay. If you don’t understand these parts, what does that mean to you? Why aren’t we a multilingual society? That’s what I believe. I have that in my mind. If you don’t understand my bilingual poem, hopefully that’ll get you thinking about why we only have English when in many other nations throughout the world being multilingual is just normal.”

James: I loved the series of three “En la voz” persona poems, each of which starts with short, punchy lines. The first begins “The sin is sex. We all give in,” the second begins “What Lola wants, Lola gets,” and the third begins “Morning arrives. Coffee, then something / sweet.” Like so many poetic things, these poems work so well as a trio. Share how you approached editing and revising these poems to get them to work so well together.

Adela: “Thank you for bringing those poems up. When you were reciting the first lines, those are my family. That’s my grandma, that’s my mom, and that’s my dad. Hearing you say those lines, it just was like, oh yeah, that’s them.

“There is a Buddhist writer, Thich Nhat Hanh, he has a book, What is Love?, and in there I read that he said, through love, you can really know someone. And so I was like, oh, I wonder if I really know these people? It just gave me that idea: I love them, so let’s see if I can write a poem in their voices.

“This was a little bit later when I had already started the variations, so then this was another variation. Okay, let’s do one on grandma, one on mom, one on Dad. Let’s see if I can capture their voices. These were a little bit magic. There was extensive editing that had to be done, but it was a joy to write a poem in the voice of someone I loved. Maybe that’s a challenge for anybody out there: go write some poems in the voices of the people you love.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.