Anthony Cody Talks Borderland Apocrypha and New Work
By Caroline Grogan
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), a collection of poetry based on the series of lynchings of Mexicans that was sparked by the end of the Mexican-American war and signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
He is the winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, he is a 2021 American Book Award Winner, a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet and a 2020 Southwest Book Award winner. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, Anthony has lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference. Anthony won the inaugural 2020 CantoMundo Guzmán Mendoza / Paredez Fellowship for his work-in-progress poetry manuscript, “The Rendering”, selected by Aracelis Girmay. He serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and a poetry editor for Omnidawn.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
The first thing that stuck out to me when I read Borderland Apocrypha was the elongated shape of the book itself. I know you experimented with writing on comic strip notepads before you published the book. How did that impact the way you wrote both when you were first experimenting with that form and eventually with the finished book?
In a lot of ways, I think that opening section was the key for the entire book in how it helps us as readers navigate through everything that’s about to come, and really, it’s asking us to think through how we engage with a book. When I started to open up the page a little more, it set the tone for me to be able to push out the page and experiment with where I wanted the poem to sit. As I started opening up the field of the page I started seeing ways that I could push things forward or revise, so it was even a new lens to revise things.
More importantly, it also made me think about time and compression. We think about time being this long, chronological thing, but realistically it’s all stacked on itself; today is stacked on all the days that went before it. I was thinking about history in that opening section and how that correlates to 1848, because all those events led to that moment just then.
Many of the poems in Borderland Apocrypha have overlapping words and can be read in different ways. How do you go about taking the words from the page to being spoken out loud?
I’m always trying to think through that when I’m making the poem. I do hear the lines in my head, but I don’t necessarily say the poem in its entirety out loud. What I’ve found, especially in some of the poems in this book, is that some of the sounds are happening at the same time, so when I read it out loud without the help of technology or recording, I have to invent or improvise how I think it should be read. Even then, I’ve had the opportunity to be in classrooms and in readings where other folks have read my work and I’m like, “Oh, you read it that way, that’s even better.” I really like that collaborative moment where nothing is finite, but rather it’s sort of this improv that we can do together.
Sometimes if I get too caught up in how I’m going to read it out loud, that gets in the way of the poem. The poem is its own sort of amorphous, amoebic thing that’s shifting around on the page, and if I get too focused on how it should sound out loud, that’s also me trying to impose my will on it. I try to not think about that until sometime at the very end when I have to read out loud.
The visual images in Borderland Apocrypha seem like such a key part of the work. Did you always plan to have visuals in the book or how did that process of connecting images with your poems come to fruition?
When I think about doing the research for the book, earlier versions had much more imagery. I found myself being very intentional about a certain point of how much of it becomes gratuitous or desensitizing. How many times can you see someone being lynched until it sort of becomes the norm? Where you can turn a page and not think about it, versus what happens if I have redacted the image I have chosen and instead share the poem with a completely blacked out image? I think sometimes imagining the horror is even more damning to our imagination because we’ve seen it, we know what it is. There are a lot of images I pulled that I felt were too gratuitous, and I didn’t want to cause more harm to individuals who have much more proximity to the event or to the moment.
In terms of your new work, I’d love to hear about ‘The Rendering’ and anything else new that you’re working on right now.
I was driving back from California to Chicago where I was doing my MFA and, while driving, one of the things that I thought about but never really had a chance to touch base with is another half of my identity: I’m an Irish-Mexican. My grandparents were actually a young newlywed couple who left Oklahoma at the start of the Dust Bowl.
There are moments in Borderland Apocrypha definitely have an eco-poetic slant because I do think about how we have forced nature into complicity of our harming people via trees, via rivers. We’re using those as mechanisms for hate crimes and there are moments of that where maybe the earth is angry and upset, and that steadily morphed into another seed that I didn’t know was there until getting back and saying, “well, Dust Bowl.”
This project after Borderland Apocrypha is like an extension and amplification of technique and style because now I’m no longer thinking about the page, I want to think about something larger than a page and have it be more interactive. In Borderland Apocrypha you have to move the book and you have to engage with it differently, but what happens if a poem is on the side of a wall? What happens if the poem is feet long and you have to scroll through it? What happens when you introduce sound files or background soundscapes to a poem?
That’s what I’ve been working on, but also in the same way thinking about how history is still the present and doing that research about the dust bowl. For the longest time, I was under the impression that it was a weather event as a kid, and then over time, seeing how manmade it really was and the echoes of the modern time and how what we’re facing now is what happened in 1930, which was probably happening right at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, but we kind of sweep in under. So the new work, ‘The Rendering,’ is a book length project and it’s sort of one part Dust Bowl, one part climate collapse and one part annihilation, and in some ways it’s a different kind of devastation.
Our theme for the review this year is ‘homecoming’ and people are interpreting that in many different ways. Do you have any thoughts on what homecoming means to you?
The first thing I think about is connection. If you’re from a displaced or diasporic community, what are those connections? So I’m thinking about connections to the familial, the ancestral and the earth. Who are my ancestors? How do I return home to them in my work and honor that, but also how do I remain present in the moment to connect with the people who are alive?
Also, we all have to understand that we’re on land where there were other people here before that still have rights to this land. How can we honor that and continue to help support displaced native communities? I think about that, too.