Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2017) and Lima :: Limón, forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press). She has won awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN/American, and CantoMundo. Her poem “Receta en el cajón” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the July/Aug 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
Some of the ingredients in your poem “Receta en el cajón” are not items of food—Ladle and Stars, for instance—but nevertheless they are well-incorporated into the poem and the dish. How do you feel these things coexist with the food and the experience, are consumed, and or operate in a way that complicates a reader’s ability to see this as a general recipe?
Truthfully, this is based on the way the women in my family have given recipes to me over time. Often, the ingredients that they give me are more than what needs to be thrown into the pot—the time of day you start and finish can be important; the way you care for the house impacts the flavor. I also started writing recipes given to me by hand, which often bleeds into other stories, and those stories are as much a part of the recipe to me as making the dish itself. To me there is no difference. So I wanted to write a poem that captures the very messy notes I take when I am with them in the kitchen, asking them for their imprecise recipes and writing down their stories. When I make the dishes given to me by the women in my family, I am also engaging in a process of feeding their traumas, and in a sense, feeding my own. Each time I make a dish I am eating from the same ritual that women have been using for centuries to keep themselves and their families alive.
“Macho:: Hembra” introduces a dynamic definition of both these titular terms by showing embodied versions of them rather than general descriptions. How did you settle on the punctuation :: to mark the relationship of one word to the other? Did you expect your readers to feel the tension—even violence—between them?
“Macho :: Hembra” is a poem about my survived violence by men in my border community. This poem figures largely in my second, forthcoming book, Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, April 2019), and explores the ways I put my female body in danger for the entertainment of men, how I questioned masculinity and was met with violence for doing so, how once a man beat my head against a brick wall, how I let him hold me and kiss me after, how I grew up with women getting hit by men. In it, I explore the ways in which the same men who hit me were the products of neocolonialism, which creates a relationship between the US and México where men have to resort to violence not just against women, but against each other in order to survive. I will confess that I thought these stories so pedestrian, so ordinary in my border culture, that I could not bring myself to write about them for a long time. Most women on the border have similar stories to mine with the men in their lives. I use the :: throughout the collection in many poems as a way of playing with definition, analogy, and call-response. I hope the use of the :: provides for a variety ways to read the poem, and think about the intersections between machismo and marianismo.
How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?
I have gone through many different phases in my writing process since I started writing seriously. The most time I ever had to write in my life was during my MFA. Before that, I had to work so many jobs where I was on my feet for hours at a time. When I started my MFA, the idea that could have a cup of coffee every morning, and write for hours felt like a luxury that could be taken away from me at any moment. So I knew that I had to take advantage of it, and I did.
After I graduated, I got a job teaching high school English full time. Teaching high school was one of the most exhausting experiences of my life, because I was trying to be a committed writer at the same time. During the four years I taught high school I wrote my second book, in what I lovingly called rush-hush moments. Rush-hush moments were any small moments I had between classes, while students were journaling, and after work while waiting for a pot to come to a boil, that I could use to write. During my last year, I was fortunate to travel a lot with my first book, The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015), and had huge expanses of time on planes and in hotel rooms alone. This was the only way that I was able to revise my poems into a book. Without that time they would all be beautiful nothings, without structure.
In the fall I’ll be a Professor of Literature at Bennington College, and will have the mornings off to write again. Though after writing this second book I know I can write anywhere; it’s a compulsion.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Probably cooking, though I haven’t cooked enough in the last year. I like that it’s ritualistic. I like that women have been doing it for centuries, that it was and still is such gendered work. Many men I know who like to cook, men who watch cooking shows and like to talk about food, don’t understand what it is to cook meals day-in and day-out without praise for doing so. These men’s egos are weak to praise, and I’m interested in the women who know the worth of their nourishment without praise. I’m interested in the kitchen as a space for women, and “women’s conversations.” But most of all, I like that when you get good at cooking you can turn your mind off and let it wander.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Right now I am working on a series of essays. I often write essays as a way to explore what I want my next book to be, so I’m still in the dreaming phase of my next project. The essays are about narco-aesthetics and vigilante justice in border communities.