Craft Corner: Code-Switching as Shapeshifting in Poetry

A poem that moves between languages has a special mystery. As a Mexican American writer, the Spanish/English code-switch speaks to me in a personal, almost mystical way. Through its agility, I feel the fluidity and tension of dual language, culture, myth, and perception. I sense the poem’s exploration of “otherness,” but also its “both-ness,” which especially fascinates me. What type of experience would compel a writer to enmesh two languages to communicate meaning? What is gained through the mergence, or the mezcla (mix), and the semi-obscurity of blending languages? I think that through code-switching, the poet inhabits dual identities simultaneously and “appears” to readers as constantly transfigured. This means that a code-switching poem is a shapeshifting poem, and in that sense, poetry is made metaphysical. 

Code-switching, or moving between more than one language in a poem, is an inherently daring move. The writer risks losing or alienating readers, obscuring the poem’s message, or skewing its ultimate landing and interpretation. Yet, poets who achieve this shapeshift imbue their poems with multi-textural meaning and voice that extends beyond literal translation. This act of linguistic agility often defies and invites multiple interpretations. It creates separation, mystery, and play. It imbues the poem with cultural nuance, regional parlance, idiosyncrasy, phrasing, music, humor, and voice. Poets who code-switch fearlessly and are masters of this linguistic fluidity include Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Iliana Rocha, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Eduardo C. Corral’s stunning “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” from his book Guillotine, is one example of an arresting English to Spanish code-switching poem.

In “Testaments,” Corral explores the stories of people displaced from Mexico along the borderlands of the United States. The “testaments” described in the poems revolve around graffiti and random messages scrawled onto water stations scattered throughout the desert. In this twenty-five-page poem, there is an arresting sense of loneliness and anonymous yet personal anguish. We share the visions of a speaker who is lost, ill, exiled, thirsty, hungry, afraid, wandering, and desperately lonely as he staggers between borders and cultures. The language mesh that happens in “Testaments” is deeply poignant. Diane Suess calls this an “erotics of loneliness” and says of the poem’s striking calligrams that blur walls of words in both English and Spanish, “it’s as if I’m reading through smoke, through tears” (Corral, back cover).

One of these calligrams creates a blurred cross shape using the word “clavo,” or nail. Running through the center of the cross is the phrase “Me falta un clavo para mi cruz,” or “I’m missing a nail for my cross.” Another juxtaposes random graffiti from the borderlands like “BUILD THE WALL STOP DRUGS” above “chinga tu madre gringo ™” (Corral 15). Another calligram in the poem, composed of the speaker’s haunted thoughts and prayers, says “Déjame viver, Señora de Las Sombras,” or “Let me live, Lady of Shadows” (Corral 23). The speaker tells The Lady of the Shadows (which we can interpret as death) “no hay dinero / ni trabajo” followed by “the dead gather.” This heartache and anguish are raw, and straddle both worlds. In “Testaments,” the speaker observes “God is circling like a vulture / gracias nada mas / corazón de oro / a quién vas engañar” (Corral 35). This is language that clearly expresses dread and struggle—even if the literal meaning of each word isn’t precisely grasped.

I think that intuiting the meaning of unfamiliar words creates its own engagement and mystery that deepens the experience of a poem. For the average reader whose primary language is English, words like diablo, río, corazón, for example, likely exist at some level of fundamental comprehension. Yet, even less commonplace words like molcajete, calavera, and charro, when taken in the context of an engaging poem, are thrilling linguistic gestures that invite further immersion and investigation. I find the musicality, delicacy, and bravado of Spanglish and its particular code-switch especially intriguing because the languages push in a “prickly” way against each other. When a phrase in Spanish is inserted into a stanza in English, a thrust and swagger happen that is part of the music, part of the shapeshifting. This happens when the speaker in “Testaments” observes “Blood soaks my sneakers. The handkerchief / around my head / reeks like sobacos” and “A severed hand / black yarn around / the thumb. Welcome / to the cagada” (Corral 21). Here, “sobacos” are “armpits” and “the cagada” is “the shit.” But doesn’t that swagger and music lead you to a strange sense of intuited understanding through context?

Even if the words in the poem are of a specific dialect not immediately understood, the reader can still sense an authentic utterance—and that these particular words have simply been chosen because this is how the poet experienced the poem. The speaker in “Testaments” says “I try to recall the taste of Pablo’s sweat. / Whiskey, no. / Wet dirt, si. / I stuff English / into my mouth / spit out chingaderas” (Corral 11). Regional aphorisms and untranslatable figures of speech create an innate sense of withholding, or inability for certain expressions to exist beyond linguistic boundaries in a single form. So, the poet must keep both language and meaning fluid and flexible, as in the lines “Cada noche / I sleep / with dead men. / The coyote was the third to die.” The stitching of languages is innate and hypnotic, as in “there’s a foto / in my bolsillo / of a skeleton / shrouded / in black flames: / Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte” (Corral 11). It’s a dynamic gesture and a dazzling process to feel happening in a poem.

The Spanish/English code-switch has a special significance for me as a reader, but it has also changed my linguistic parameters so that I’m drawn to poetry with unfamiliar terrains. This makes the experience of turning to poems an act of seeking the shapeshift; that is, I turn to poetry not only to be immersed in a story, and a psyche, but also another psychic reality with its own elemental textures of language, phrasing, music, and thought. Immersing ourselves in the poetics of multiple languages is vital for growing in perception, awareness, and empathy—and code-switching is the mystical crossing that allows it to happen. As Eduardo C. Corral writes in “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” “a proverb: beauty / can’t be talked into speech. The sky isn’t blue. / It’s azul.” and “Saguaros / are triste, not curious.” Perhaps beauty cannot be conjured by speech, but it can be built and transfigured within these careful layers.

––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review

Note from the editors: The works in this craft essay are cited from Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2020. 72 pages. $16.00, paper.

Featured Writer: Benjamin Percy

On Thursday, October 5, Benjamin Percy visits Bowling Green State University as the 2023 guest for the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series. He will read from his work at the Donnell Theatre of the Wolfe Center, 7:30 pm.

https://events.bgsu.edu/event/creative_minds_residency_benjamin_percy_keynote_address

Benjamin Percy is known for world-building, but in some ways that term is misleading. He does build worlds, but most commonly it’s our world advanced past a circumstance—sometimes horrific, sometimes nebulous—that has irrevocably shifted its mores, practices, and structures. The speculation inherent requires not so much building as re-building, blending the familiar with the jarringly different. At the same time, that speculation reveals often unpleasant truths about who we are as humans, and how we treat those who stray from our tight definition of human.

Red Moon provides an early example, one that turned out to be uncomfortably prescient. The story sparks from a prion virus that causes lycanthropy. Some with the virus take medication and try to live as invisibly as possible to protect themselves and their families. Others, reacting to anti-lycan laws and violence, are building a war. The general populace of uninfected citizens does not come off well, treating the infected with hostility regardless of circumstance. That we have now, a decade later, seen some of this same level of disgust and suspicion toward the ill through a pandemic is not at all reassuring, but it does underscore the insight of Ben Percy’s writing.

The Comet Cycle shows similar perception. In The Ninth Metal, a meteor fall—less a shower than a hailstorm—has embedded a new metal into the earth of a northern Minnesota town. The discovery offers a new energy source, but produces in its wake a dysfunctional boomtown, delivering, as one character puts it, “a millionaire a day.” That “omnimetal” also produces a new narcotic, potential weapons, and a ferocious land rights battle pushes the dread to the forefront. We—humanity—will not handle it well. The Unfamiliar Garden moves to Seattle, and sets its protagonists against changes in climate, a dangerous fungus, and murder. The Sky Vault heads north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and blends the current questions with an ominous WWII secret. Each novel in the cycle thus builds a new world out in time and place from the central event, the comet’s debris, while allowing its characters to make choices in response to those changes, to each other, and to an ever-morphing concept of “familiar.”

Following Benjamin Percy’s oeuvre could be likened to a choose-your-own-adventure, a trait very much in keeping with his writing itself. He has published three short story collections, and his short stories have appeared widely in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Orion. He has also now published seven novels; his first novel, The Wilding, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2010, and his second, Red Moon, came in 2013 from Grand Central. His current project in longform fiction, the Comet Cycle, closed with The Sky Vault, published this month by William Morrow.

On another path, Percy is writing for comics at DC, Marvel, AWA, and Dynamite, with his best known projects including Green Arrow, Ghost Rider, X-Force, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and Wolverine. For the latter, he also wrote two podcast series, The Long Night and The Lost Trail. Continuing into further media, Percy is writing screenplays and adapting stories for TV, both his own (The Ninth Metal, Summering) and others’ (Urban Cowboy).

And, as a generous and varied craftsman, it only makes sense that that Ben Percy would offer what he knows to the public, this time in the form of Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf, 2016), a collection used widely in the classroom, including at BGSU. 

In all of his work, Benjamin Percy has much to teach us about writing, about building stories, but also about the myriad ways in which we cope with disaster, with change, and with each other.

—Abigail Cloud, Editor-in-Chief

Why We Chose It: “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman for publication in Volume XLII.

Thurman’s piece was selected for its overall strength but particularly for its nontraditional use of form and genre. The piece takes the form of an ethnography, detailing the different spiritual and cultural norms common amongst different groups of drifters. Drifters, in this piece, are homeless individuals distinguished from hoboes, who are mentioned but not examined, by the element of choice. “Hoboes are proud of their vagrancy…. Drifters do not suffer from wanderlust to the degree that hoboes might. Drifters have no choice.” The piece also makes use of a cartesian graph upon which individual drifters might be placed to complete the aesthetic of an academic report. 

This notion of choice, and its absence, is an undercurrent throughout the piece that helps to ground it and bring a balance to the absurd sense of humor present throughout. Thurman’s narrator has a strong voice that reads almost as a mix of Ken Burns and Raoul Duke. 

The further details of “Some Kinds of Drifter” are best experienced firsthand, but suffice it to say that the story is one that we on the MAR staff will still find ourselves talking about long after the selection process has ended.

-William Walton, Mid-American Review

On Renia White’s Casual Conversation

Casual Conversation by Renia White. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 80 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Although I usually don’t have much patience for poetic metaphysics, the abstraction common in Casual Conversation didn’t keep me from effortlessly gliding from poem to poem. I can recall very few collections I’ve enjoyed that passed through the same zip code as words like “epistemology,” but Renia White had me in a chokehold when, in the beginning of “I am not prepared for the inverse of this,” she observed, “how dangerous a logic we’ve made // proof is what happens afterward, to show us / the during was true.” The first half of this poem is completely abstract, yet White’s sharp, clean verse clears and composes such a vivid scene of concepts that it felt complete.

Imagery is scarce in Casual Conversation (with some stunning exceptions, such as “all over, but only here.”) Instead, the poetry sustains itself by the natural roll of thought through white space, line breaks, and stanzas. These are skillfully applied to incite rhythmic pauses in the reader for a steady momentum. 

This is not to say that Casual Conversation exclusively generalizes. While the collection offers a bird’s eye view of racism, brutality, incarceration, it is punctuated by poignant specificity. In the final poem of the first section, “some plans should be thwarted,” the speaker requests, “I wanna live real quick.” She is immediately shown “the way to tilt toward unending” (another example of her killer abstract language) and this plea for life is fulfilled throughout the following section. 

The middle section “lives” as an individual Black woman (and girl) anchored to the American landscape of flippant and brutal racism. Yet tender moments of kinship and joy pepper this chapter. I’m very fond of the connection forged in “in the name of half-sistering” ––“build a wedge called daddy and gulf us / in the name of your stolen thing,” she challenges a playground antagonist, “a sister ain’t a partial feeling. she so mine, we so sistered.” 

The arguments in these poems are clear, weighty, and impactful, whether they are grandiose or personal. Again, I am not typically fond of its rhetorical delivery method, but Casual Conversation shines in its abstractions. It thrives not by flourishes of language so much as careful manipulations of it, by the clarity of its thought. While my feet barely touched the concrete on my trip through Casual Conversations, I was surprised to find that I did not miss it.

––Jamie Manias, Mid-American Review

Featured Writer: Sherrie Flick 

On Thursday, August 31st, at 7:30 PM, Sherrie Flick will be reading some of her work for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. 

We are incredibly excited to be welcoming writer Sherrie Flick to campus. To say she’s covered a lot of ground in the writing world would be an understatement. She is the author / co-editor of five books: Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press), I Call This Flirting (Flume), Whiskey, Etc. (Autumn House Press), Thank Your Lucky Star (Autumn House Press), and co-editor of Flash Fiction America: 73 very short stories (W.W. Norton). Her anthology publications include Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze, The Best Small Fictions (2017), Short on Sugar High on Honey: Micro Love Stories, and among others. Her stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, and many others. She’s also an essayist whose work has appeared in quite a few notable publications including The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, and Superstition Review. She’s currently a co-editor with James Thomas and John Dufresne for Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, February 2023), a senior lecturer in Chatham University’s MFA and Food Studies programs, a manuscript consultant at Randolph Lundine, an urban garden monthly columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a freelance writer and copy editor. 

Here’s a bite sized sample of Flick’s work:

“There before you, in its quiet glory, is your garden. Finches perch on sunflowers; a blue jay flies paranoid into the neighbor’s yard: precision, noise, grace. The tomatoes heave down on their branches. The petunias have flopped into the lavender, which is touching the morning glories at the ankle of their trellis. The corn is human; the beans hectic.” – “Morning Coffee” Sherrie Flick

Along with being an accomplished author Flick is an avid gardener and baker. I mention this because those two passions are deeply woven into her writing. Flick’s work continually investigates the connections between food, place, character, and belonging with an almost relentless emotional accuracy. She never underestimates the power of details or small gestures: the act of sitting alone, the making of a pie, the falling of snowflakes. It’s these moments that work to elevate narrating occurrences in the world to thoughtfully observing it, something Flick does with a seemingly effortless grace.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor