A bilingual writer, Lucía published a poetry book, Sea of Rocks (2018), and two chapbooks: Life Lines (2018) and Longevity River (2019). Her work has appeared in Tin House Online, Sharkpack Annual, Into the Void, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.

Lucía’s poem “How Sound Travels” appears in the Winter 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.

What I admire most about this piece is its relentless pace right to the final moment. How do you craft a piece’s sound and speed? 

Thank you for this comment. Finding the right pace for a piece is very satisfying. In this particular piece, the pace was driven by the urgency I felt trying to capture in words the torrent of images and feelings elicited by listening to a musical prompt during a poetry craft session. While there certainly was this internal rush mentioned above, the musical piece itself had such a powerful cadence that I tried to carry it into the poem. There was a voice modulating highs and lows against the backdrop of a steady drum. Those modulations, in a language I didn’t understand, allowed me to have a physical connection with that song, with that voice in particular, unmediated by conceptual processing, by meaning. In general, I read my poems aloud as part of the reviewing process. As a non-native English speaker, sometimes I need to recruit help from my husband or my children to be sure the words sound like I think they sound.

What was the experience of leaving/ending this poem? 

After listening to the musical prompt and frantically writing for ten minutes, I really couldn’t add anything else to the poem. I have purposefully not listened to that song again; the moment, as it is implied in the poem itself, was gone. I edited the piece intermittently over the course of a year, which resulted in the streamlined version that is being published. For me, writing a poem is often a never ending process. Occasionally, okay, more than occasionally, I find myself reviewing, even rewriting poems that have already been published, and which I thought had reached a satisfying point. I have not felt that urgency with this poem, yet. Reflecting back, it struck me that it was as if the song and the music were born from a place of celebration, but also grief, as if trying to hold on to something that is disappearing, perhaps a way of life, or a language. It’s as though at that precise moment and place the voice, the music, the landscape, were one. Then, that voice and music were captured in a recording device, a cell phone maybe, and smuggled out to be enjoyed, decontextualized, in a place like New York City. There was some guilt involved, as if in the act of listening, we were appropriating something sacred, but at the same time there was so much joy and pleasure in it.

There’s a beautiful balance of concrete and lyric images throughout this piece. What are your images most inspired by? 

I grab anything I feel will contribute to the sensorial density of the poem I am writing, to give flesh and bones to the poem. For example, I wrote “How Sound Travels” late in the afternoon, with a glimpse of the sunset filtering through the windows, so the sunset was also incorporated into the poem, beating to the rhythm of the song’s drums. The poem connects two spaces: the location where the song was originated, and the location where the song would reappear: a table in New York. This was, of course, the table around which we were seated listening to the song being played on a cell phone. All of this was included in the poem. I try to be alert and not take my observations for granted, whether I am surrounded by nature, or in the middle of urban life. A few poems have been inspired by memories from my childhood in Ecuador, particularly from my early years living by the beach. Some poems are triggered by reading news and articles, especially about science and climate breakdown. I also love writing ekphrastic pieces, and wrote the most recent one after visiting Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room with my mom. There are many visual artworks I want to devour with words. “How Sound Travels” was my first poem written from a musical prompt; hopefully, it won’t be the last.

What do you hope to find in sharing your poems? 

The afterlife of a poem is not on my mind when I write it. Granted, I want my poems to find readers, but I don’t foresee a particular set of effects I want the poem(s) to produce, if any. I certainly want for this poem to be read, listened to, and enjoyed with the tongue, the ears and the imagination. Reading a poem could become an act of decentering, one that opens a small fracture in the carefully built fortress of our beliefs and prescribed reactions, our self-centered priorities, and makes us see something we are used to seeing, perhaps in a slightly different way, and makes us pay attention and, hopefully, care. And we need so much care in order to have a fighting chance to save our planet, the sentient beings we share it with, and our own humanity.