It’s a couple of months to poetry month as I write this. Back when I was a kid poet reading in secret in my bedroom or, later on, rocking it on the Lower East Side, poetry didn’t have a month. Or, if it did, I didn’t know about it. It would have seemed silly to me. Because poetry was everything and every day. We ate it for lunch. Took it for long walks and got lost with it. Slept with it. Fought with it. Kissed its round belly under covers. Held its cheek to our jowls. Begged it to have its way with us. I’m glad it has a month now, though. Today, a new book arrived, and I just want to sing about it. I bought it because I dig the poet. I dig the artist who is the poet. I’m reading it again now, and it’s reaching out to me in the language of essential things, word and image, blowing through my bones and teeth like a train whistle, decongesting my brain. My chest is open. “Only Art can save us” writes Virgil Suárez in the foreword to Amerikan Chernobyl (Q-Zine/Contagioso Press) and I hope he’s right. From “Citrine”:
fucker and so here we are our fingers in mud.
Our hands calloused by so much clawing.
All we are after is that hint of beauty,
how light catches on glass and turns green.
Known primarily as an award-winning poet, Suárez brings a broader array of his creative efforts to bear in Amerikan Chernobyl. He uses poetry, prose, painting, collage, and photography to take aim at all aspects of human disaster and suffering. It’s a record and reckoning by any artistic means necessary. Chernobyl is its central metaphor. And it’s that all too real deadzone relic of careless greed that is our starting point in the light of some random morning after. From “Hans Geiger Counter-Aubade”:
Headless dolls, and broken tractor toys riddle
The pathway into the schoolyard, a three-eyed
Crow pecks at the carcass of a rat. Feral dogs
already seem tired and dusty in the patches
of tall grass. They are used to long days
of hunger and misfortune …
For Suárez, Detroit and cities like it are our slow-motion Chernobyls,. The poisons vary. But the beauty of the world, both natural and that made by human hands, is too often left to waste in neglect. Factories and apartment buildings squat empty and exposed. We are makers of deserted places, a glut of junk. Everything is broken. Everyone is missing.
Still, Suárez isn’t just hitting dark notes. Pulled together during the COVID lockdown, Amerikan Chernobyl is an explosion of creativity. It radiates belief in the saving power of art. That’s something I wanted to share with my students. Suárez graciously agreed to Zoom with me and three young writers from the creative writing program of the University of North Florida—Megha Mohan, Isabella Blacutt, & Camila López-McCarl. We talked about the making of the book.
Megha Mohan: You name the city of Chernobyl in your book’s title. Why focus on a disaster that happened in Russia nearly 40 years ago when the book is largely about America today?
Virgil Suárez: I think the disaster at Chernobyl got into my system when it happened. The entire city, Pripyat, and the surrounding area got poisoned. Chernobyl is still there, abandoned. It never came back. But places don’t need to be radiated to be poisoned. There are plenty of others. Detroit, in particular, captured my imagination for the poems and art in the book. The automobile industry went abroad. Factories closed. People got laid off. Eventually, there wasn’t an economy to keep the city going. It had been beautiful, with all these gorgeous turn-of-the-century and mid-century buildings. They fell into disuse. Stuff we no longer use, we leave behind, unpainted and falling apart, a testament to consumption and waste.
MM: Can you talk about how the work evolved, your process of bringing words and images together?
VS: The book explores what I saw and felt in Detroit. I was looking for textures, layers. I used Photoshop to composite pictures and added photographs I’d taken of other things. While I was doing this, the poetry came along, too. All of it was addressing things I’d seen. It was exciting for me. People know me as a poet. That’s my stock in trade. Nobody knows that I take photographs and make art. It was wonderful for me to have it all happening like that. Then, during Covid, I got the idea to formalize this internal conversation I was having between art, photography, and poetry, and to make a book out of it.
Isabel Blacutt: Do you think this collection wouldn’t exist if the pandemic hadn’t happened?
VS: Yeah, probably. My classes went on Zoom. I had these long stretches at home. I love being home, but. I got anxious. What am I gonna do? So I started looking at the photographs. I looked at the art. I started making more art. I started writing more poems. The photographs were already taken, but the art and the poetry I had to create. I have an office inside and a studio outside. My bedroom is between those two spaces. If I made a right, I was going to work on poems. A left meant I was going to be working on art or looking at pictures. I was turning left more times than right for a while, but I created a lot of work. Then I went out on Instagram and Facebook to look at what other people were making. I said, “Look, like me, you’re stuck at home doing all this work. I’ll send you one of mine if you send me one of yours.” All of a sudden, our walls filled up with original art I thought “I’m in a lovely prison. I don’t mind it.”
Mark Ari: So COVID, by trapping us in our places and forcing us to confront ourselves, could prove a liberating experience?
VS: I heard of people filing for divorce during COVID. But I heard as well of people rekindling their love for one another. They cooked for each other. They had more conversations. They watched more movies together. People got stronger and relationships solidified. So it was a plus for those of us with partners who love us, and we love them. It worked out, you know. My youngest daughter got pregnant and gave us this beautiful grandchild. All against the reality of a brutal virus that got rid of a lot of people.
IB: In the essay “All Shook Up,” you write about creating the collages in the book. It surprised me that you place it at the book’s end. Did you have some guiding principle when composing the order?
VS: At one point, I had all the art together, all the photographs together, and all the poems together. I had written a long preface, too. A friend of mine said, “Going from art to photography to poetry from beginning to end like that might not give the reader a place to rest. Break that up. And break up the preface, too, using the parts for mini-prefaces at various places where the reader can rest while you’re talking to them for a page or two.” I did that, making sure the reader would not forget there’s this voice combining and orchestrating things. I wanted a kind of coffee-table book you can open and jump in any place, and it worked out. You can look at photos or art. You can read a poem or two. Or you can read one of the little prose pieces and get interested that way. It doesn’t matter. I like that.
Camila López-McCarl: How are you able to work in so many mediums at once?
VS: When you’re young, you have life pulling at you in all of these different directions. I’m at a place now I call “cruising altitude.” I’m waiting for the peanuts and the beverages to be served on the plane. My children are grown up. They are having children of their own. So I’m getting a lot of time back, and I show up every morning, whether it’s at the computer or in the studio. I look at a blank page, and I have to do something. I have to. I have to create something. If I’m working on poetry, I’m working with words, images, memories. Things get triggered, and then I’m working on painting, doing shapes and colors. I get lost in it. Then something emerges. Working on art helps me work on poetry. Working on poetry helps me with the art. Photos I took in Detroit later became part of the conversation with poetry and paintings. I take pictures because my memory goes, will go, has gone.
CL: You mentioned you’re at an age when it’s easier to find time to create. Aging comes up in the book a lot. In “Confessions of a Drive-by,” you write, “… the young are not to blame. It’s the old, my generation, the folks who gave up and fucked up the world as we know it.” Then, in “Open All Night,” you write “… now that I am a grandfather, I get the same worries as when my daughters were little. Who is going to stop the madness?”
VS: The normal human cycle is: you are born, you come into the light, you have parents, you grow up, you have your own children, and your parents eventually die. Then you die. Then your children grow up, and then they, too, die. It’s an endless cycle. I think doing your art connects you to your mortality, to the time you’ve been given. It’s lonely, but I’ve always been restless. I need to create. I need to do something with my hands and with my spirit. Otherwise, I don’t see the point. I share that. If people welcome it, that’s wonderful. If they don’t, that’s okay. The world is big enough. There’s room for all of us.
MA: You describe a method of making art prints in the poem “Eco Printing.” You take raw materials from nature—ferns, leaves, Spanish moss—press them between sheets of watercolor paper, adding tea, coffee, and ash. Eventually, there are images on the paper that “make us cry or sing.” These images emerge from discarded and abandoned things. Something similar occurs in many of your photographs and collages. Images of discarded bits of civilization like old televisions, pool ladders, tendrils of dead cables, and weeds are pressed between the earth and the eye, and something new grows out of it. It’s a kind of composting, isn’t it?
VS: It is. The first kind of art I made was recycling. I had to stop, because I hoarded too much crap. I was buying lots on eBay: doll body parts, light bulbs, capacitors, all sorts of electronic stuff. I was making assemblage art, using cigar boxes to make 3D pieces. There are lots of artists doing this, recycling into art what people throw out on a daily basis. I like that, but I gravitated towards getting my hands dirty with colors and charcoal and chalk. These trigger waves of memory, and memory is a kind of compost. I”m recycling my life. For instance, I found out that my grandmother lived in Manhattan up until the age of 13. I had thought I was the first to come over to the United States, but I find out this mysterious woman who read One Thousand and One Arabian Nights to me when I was 7 or 8, lived in Manhattan as a young, teenage girl, because someone hired her father to do something on the Brooklyn Bridge. Wow! Fantastic! That floods my mind already with all sorts of creative ideas. I don’t know all of the story. I will have to invent some of it. That’s not bad. Invention is a great tool.
MA: The opening line of “Gristle,” is “Nobody paints guts like Bacon and Basquiat.” The poem goes on to relate how the species turns the living world into poison sludge, twisting and perverting nature, and only then, when it’s already too late, when the heat of what men have done is already on their skin and “they do not know they are already dead,” men rush to put out the fire. Then, at the end, you write, “… But back to Bacon, / back to Basquiat, man can they paint. // Bones blush brilliant in the soft light.” This last quiet, beautiful image feels like witnessing.
VS: Yeah, you’re talking about how I live my life. I’ve always found the need to express, maybe translate, maybe even filter some of the pain and beauty of life into art. I’m trying to exorcise my demons. I need to create every day. It’s why I’m not paying a psychiatrist $300 every week to figure out what is going on in my head. It goes deep and heals me from the inside. I love it for that reason. But it’s not only what we leave of ourselves as individuals; it’s what we leave of ourselves as the human species on this planet. Whether you’re looking at cave paintings or paintings in Louvre, you find who we are in them. We are all witnessing.
Mark Ari is a writer, painter, and musician. He is the author of The Shoemaker’s Tale (Zephyr Press) and editor of EAT, a series of audio chapbooks. New works include “Santa’s House on Sunrise Highway” in the Paycock Press anthology, Music Gigs Gone Wrong and, with collaborators Ginger Andro & Chuck Glicksman, the multisensory installations Via Brooklyn Bridge (Gallery Art Keller, NYC) and Colossus (CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea). He teaches at the University of North Florida where he directs the Creative Writing Program.
Megha Mohan is a student and writer based in Jacksonville, Florida. Their writing observes the world—the pain in it, the wonders of it—through absurd characters and bizarre happenings. Specializing in prose, poetry, and flash fiction, they are a recipient of an Amy R. Wainwright Award for Creative Writing, and their poetry can now be found at The Rising Phoenix Review.
Camila López-McCarl graduated from the University of North Florida with dual degrees in French Studies and Psychology. In her search for things that make her happy, she recently rediscovered her love for poetry, which is slowly taking over her life. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons, crafting, and narrating trips to Trader Joe’s to her cat.
Isabel Blacutt is a student pursuing a dual degree in communication and creative writing at the University of North Florida. She was born and raised in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where the weather is nice all year long. Currently based in Jacksonville, Florida, she finds resilience in writing about the triviality and beauty of her hometown. She is one of the 2023 recipients of the Amy R Wainwright Award for Creative Writing.
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Heavy Feather Review 