Alberto Rios is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Theater of Night ( 2005); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna's Two Kisses(1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award.  This interview was conducted via e-mail in Fall 2008.  It focuses on his most recent work The Theater of Night.

Laurin Wolf:  The poems in section two of The Theater of Night are narrated in the voice of a woman.  How does writing in a voice other than your own affect your perspective of a poem?  How do you approach a poem like this?

Alberto Rios:  I have many people inside me, so many people I was before me.  I don’t say this as if it were an illness—rather, all these people inside me are a celebration.  Therefore, when I write poems in the voice of a woman, I don’t write as a stranger. 

 LW:  Writing in couplets appears to be a favored form for you, as in this book as well as The Smallest Muscle in The Human Body.  Do you see this form as tempering your work?  Why are you drawn to the couplet as a form?

AR:  I have come to see this as my stride, my breath not just out but in as well.  Two lines for me is the full breath, and includes the things said paired with the things thought—which can also be and deserve to be said.  For every line I write, I know there’s more to say if I think of my lines in twos.  It is a device that draws more from me than I at first thought was there.

LW:  There are reoccurring characters in this book, particularly the emergence and re-emergence of Clemente particularly at the beginning and end of the book.  How does his importance affect the book’s structure?  Are poems subsequently chosen that illuminate the presence of an over arching character or to detract from it?

AR:  The book is the love story of my great-grandparents, Clemente and Ventura.  They are characters, I suppose, but they are people, too, and more than that, they are my people.  The overarching character of the book is not really a character at all, but the love story—a love story that, many years later, would produce me. 

LW:  The poems in this book teeter on the mythical and the real; I am thinking of the poems “A Marrow of Water,” “Noise from the Sea,” and “The River Was Their Honeymoon” to name a few, how do you enter a mythical place for writing poems like these?  How is that space different from the one that occupies that of narrative poems?

AR:  I think of those moments not as mythical, but simply as feeling put into words, into containers which perhaps have not held them before.  It is sometimes an odd pairing, and can seem almost magical, but to me it is absolute sense.  In this way, the more mythical poems are no different from the more narrative ones.  The narrative ones simply walk on more familiar ground, but all of them are walking, and have this in common.

LW:  A familial tone echoes in this book.  Not all poets tackle the loaded subject matter of family.  Your observations in poems like “Great-Grandmother Neatly Starched” or commentary in “Chance Meeting of Two Men” are important.  What relevance does family, as a subject matter, have on your poetry?  Do you approach this subject matter with more caution than you would other subjects?

AR:  I remember learning something many years ago, a thing that sounds awful when spoken aloud: for a writer, the worst thing is to have your parents still be alive.  I think we all understand this, and don’t take it literally.  But family, of course, family is always a delicate subject.  The good thing is that I have such a terrible memory—which is to say, I remember things in very different ways from other people in my family, and from other people generally.  What happens, then, is that when I write a family story, nobody recognizes it, even though for me it is as true and certain as whatever anyone else remembers.  I don’t want anyone to think that I make things up, certainly, but what I remember always seems to be mine alone.

LW:  Horse imagery is lurking throughout this book, and I wonder does something like this happen naturally, rising out of a possible obsession that you write about; or do you specifically craft these images into the poems so the reader can see a connection and possibly be comforted by their reiteration?

AR: I would probably say it is organic.  I grew up in a rural setting, even though it was close to the border.  The rolling hillsides of southern Arizona are horse country, cattle country, and it was just part of growing up, but a part that has stayed with me.

LW:  You have a vast collection of work in your repertoire, which includes stories as well as poems.  I wonder, how do you decide what becomes a story as opposed to what becomes a poem?  When you are grappling with a narrative that can become either, how do you choose?

AR: Quite often I don’t choose at all.  I don’t think a good idea can be exhausted, and simply writing about it once is inevitably inadequate.  So, I write it again, but often in a different genre.  There are many ways for an idea to dress, just as there are many ways for us to dress.

 LW: You were the judge for the Wick first book prize, and choose Anna Leahy as the winner.  Were there specific criteria that you were looking for when choosing a winner?  What resonated for you about Anna’s poetry?

AR:  Whenever I judge a contest, what I’m looking for is never different from what I want whenever I read a book—to be taken away by it, and to believe that, for the span of its pages, I am in hands that I trust absolutely.  As a teacher, the urge to lift the mythical red pen is strong, and when I can find a book that makes that urge go away right from the beginning, I am in the right circumstance.  Anna Leahy’s book did exactly that, taking me to that place of trust—and surprise.

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Laurin B. Wolf poems have appeared in Two Review, Madwomen in the Attic: An Anthology, and Pittsburgh’s City Paper.  She is in her final year of the NEOMFA where she is the potery editor for Cleveland State’s journal Whiskey Island, and additional interviews by her can be read on the Wick Poetry Center website.

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