Edwin Alanís-García is the author of the chapbook Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). His poetry has appeared in Acentos Review, Periphery, SOMOS, and Tupelo Quarterly. He received an MFA in creative writing from New York University and is currently a graduate student in philosophy of religion at Harvard Divinity School. His poem “Parisian Needles” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Parisian Needles”?
It was originally part of a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by surrealist art from Mexico. I wrote a few pieces after [Alice] Rahon’s work, though this poem was still developing in my head for about a year. When I was back home in Illinois last summer, I finally wrote it down. It took an afternoon to write but months to figure out what I wanted to say. The speaker has a tremendous amount of ressentiment, a lot of self-loathing that manifests as self-righteous wrath at the end. It’s a major theme of the collection and my writing in general.
Can you talk a little bit about Alice Rahon’s piece Lluvia en Paris (La rue la nuit la Pluie), and how it relates to this poem? Where did you first encounter it? Was there something specific about this work that inspired you?
I had a sequence of poems based on Rahon’s more well-known paintings. Most of these poems were in the traditional ekphrastic mode. The subjects were the images themselves, the poems were more descriptive, and the narratives followed what I knew about Rahon herself. But over time the ekphrastic pieces diverged from the canvas and moved towards a personal narrative triggered by the image. They became more autobiographical.
I can’t remember when I first saw this painting, though I think it was after flipping through an extraordinary book called In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico. What grabbed me was more the painting’s title and the context of the image, the rain in Paris, which is something I’ve never experienced. Many of the surrealist artists from Mexico were actually European “immigrants” (or “expatriates”—both are racialized and classed terms, and I write a bit about this in my chapbook). Their art was very rooted in a privileged cosmopolitanism, so it was important that I not see the actual paintings in person, only pictures in books or online galleries. It’s the only way to see art in the flyover parts of the US. The ekphrastic project was partially inspired by the sense of writing from a remote location and from a particular class and culture. Paris here becomes a mythical place that does not admit people from certain worlds. Romantic clichés (like hooking a lock on the bridge) become spiteful fantasies.
Can you share a little more about the Thomas Aquinas line you reference midway through the poem: “Aquinas was right, that the only / way up the Great Chain / is to fake a place at the top”?
Sure! It’s an oblique reference to a very, very brief passage in the Summa Theologica asserting five ways to prove God’s existence. The five ways actually aren’t very important to Aquinas’s philosophy, and honestly I don’t think the arguments are very good compared to the rest of the text, but for some reason they became immensely popular in Christian apologetics. Ways four and five are explicitly about ranks of goodness (i.e., that some things are just quantifiably better than others, and there must be some greatest good that outranks them all) and the idea of certain things existing for a greater purpose (i.e. the “teleological argument”). This latter argument is pretty much a Christian reimagining of Aristotle’s teleology, or the view that things aim at some final goal or end. In Aquinas’s philosophy, the top of this functional hierarchy is God and everything below God exists for God’s sake, since the less perfect exists for the more perfect, etc.
The Great Chain of Being wasn’t necessarily Aquinas’s term of art, but his philosophy was important in promulgating the idea of a religiously defined hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being was already part of the popular imagination of the time and Aquinas probably just assumed it as a given. The Great Chain was a symbol for the hierarchy that places God at the top, plants and minerals at the bottom, and in between are ranks of humans, with royalty and nobility above peasants and laborers. The implication is that there’s a religiously motivated, quasi-scientific taxonomy that proclaims some humans are necessarily superior to others. In the poem, faking a place at the top would thus be the only way to the top, since the whole system is one elaborate fiction.
Can you tell us more about the Nine Hells in your poem? (Is this an intentional reference to Dungeons & Dragons?)
The nine levels of the underworld is a weird parallel between Dante’s Inferno of The Divine Comedy, the Mayan underworld Xibalba, and the Aztec/Mexica underworld Mictlan (hence the reference to Mictlan at the end of the poem). All of these views posit the existence of nine levels to Hell, and they all recount heroic attempts to navigate through these levels. I thought it was an interesting coincidence, nine being the magic number in all of these scriptural narratives. That similarity felt important when contrasting these worlds. Mexico City still feels a bit out of reach for me at times, though it’s closer to home and much more accessible to me than Paris, so that tension between imperialist counterparts (Mexica vs. Western Europe) became a theme in the poem.
Though I’m also grateful for your reminder that the Nine Hells reappears in Dungeons and Dragons! I’m a huge D&D fan, have been playing it since high school. I’m almost certain the D&D model is based on Dante’s Inferno, and most of the names are appropriated from Ancient Greek and Roman cosmologies.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Thank you for asking! I’m slowly putting together a full-length poetry collection tentatively titled Mal de ojo, as well as finishing a novel called Sunset Slope. I’m also working on a collection of philosophical essays about textual interpretation, and I’m co-writing a television pilot with my dear friend Mariana Roa Oliva, a brilliant fiction writer, poet, and playwright from Mexico City.