Don’t Write Alone | Notes From Class

What Can a Poetry Collection Do?

Read a conversation with Angel Nafis and Alexis Aceves Garcia and discover poems from our 12-Month Poetry Generator students in this publication showcase.

As part of our publication showcase for our 12-Month Poetry Generator students, we’re pleased to share a conversation with Angel Nafis and Alexis Aceves Garcia, who was the TA for Angel’s 2020 graduating class.

You will find their conversation below, as well as poems from some of the students in the class here:

• Alexis Aceves Garcia, “What is a Country to a Universe?”

• Maghan Baptiste, “re: somewhere between me and the other side”

• Sophie Christenberry, “I’m First Cut Today”

• Diane Exavier, “and permutations”

• Gelesia George, “Self-Portrait as the Unknown”

• Katy Gero, “Shuffled Still Life”

• Jennifer Lai, “Self Portrait, With or Without Pandemic”

• Alice Liang, “Shanghai, July 2013”

• Em C. Ma, “Alphabetical by Last Name”

• Gabrielle Spear, “The Pine Trees”

• Caitlin Wolper, “Thanking Our Stars”

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Angel Nafis: We have like a thousand communication lines open right now. I’m in the Zoom chat, the Gmail chat, the Google Doc chat, and I have my phone next to me in case you text me. I’m about to get a landline put in.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Ha! Amazing. We can call each other there just for extra clarity and sound.

Angel Nafis: Seems quite right to make a space for land acknowledgement, even as we are talking now through digital space across the entire stretch of what we call these United States. Me in New York, you in California.

We’ve got this land-acknowledgement moment here, which feels always correct. But particularly today on Indigenous Peoples Day.

I was sitting in on a lecture in ISL recently and heard writer Marie-Helene Bertino speak on how she’d been thinking through and having a lot of conversations about land acknowledgments of all varieties—the benefit of them as recommended by different native folks from different tribes—and she said something that I’d never actually thought of, which was that an extension of the land acknowledgement is not just saying which occupied native land you happen to be sitting upon at that moment (which obviously is itself important), but actually doing the legwork of finding out where that specific tribe is right now and what they’re working on. Do they have stores? Do they have gift shops? Local cultural centers? Are they farmers? Finding out where they are and bringing that into the space, as a way to move the land acknowledgement of native peoples out of history and into the present. It’s not, it was this land, or that you know it’s still this land “in our hearts”; it’s actually that they’re here, and how might we amplify/support them, how might we engage them, how might we acknowledge their very current present-day thriving.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Yes, it absolutely does. I am calling in from the stolen land of the Kumeyaay Nation, who have been stewards of present-day San Diego, California, for over six hundred generations. Today, the Kumeyaay people can be found in eighteen different bands throughout San Diego County and Baja California, Mexico.

Angel Nafis: I am calling in from Lenapehoking, the stolen land of the Lenape people, whose diaspora is dispersed throughout the US and Canada.

There is The Lenape Center based in the city/Manhattan led by Lenape elders since 2009, which continues Lenape consciousness through programs, exhibitions, workshops, performances, symposia, land acknowledgments, ceremonies, and more.

Anywho, just thinking about the land we’re on. Thinking about, you know, the difference in where you and I are speaking from right now.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Yeah, definitely. Above the ocean in La Jolla, there’s this native plant species exhibit that they had created along this walkway along the water. And so it’s really interesting to think about.

Angel Nafis: And it’s still there?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Yeah, I don’t know how old it is, but it was just interesting because I hadn’t ever seen cacti at the beach. I had never seen succulents on the shore, and I’ve been thinking a lot about time. That tension in the landscape was something I really appreciated and was just trying to admire and hold my wonder while this woman was using it as a backdrop for her influencer video.

It was also so funny when you are trying to do some deep noticing about plant life and nonhumans and then you can’t help but deeply notice the humans in the landscape, too, and how wild that tension is. But, yeah, I’ve been trying to actually make it a part of my week to be at the ocean.

Angel Nafis: Yes, yes, I’m actually on a similar quest. I’ve been thinking a lot about living on the coast. It’s actually not very difficult for me to get to the beach. I’m off the Q and it’s like a straight shot to Brighton Beach to Coney Island, and an awkward but totally doable bus ride to Riis. And my eyes are set, my sights are set on Riis right now: just to spend more time on that land and to be over there. I’ve had some very startling discoveries about that particular land and its connection to my dad’s maternal line.

I guess what I’m saying is you’re making me think about learning with/alongside/from (physical) space. And I don’t just mean that in the nature aspect, although obviously, like, plant medicine and all of the nature that comes from the earth, but also humankind’s interactions with space. When I think about haunted stuff, I think of the quality of haunting as a very explicitly human consequence. I don’t think some coral reef is going to just haunt some shit; it’s gonna naturally turn into the cycle, turn itself into the cycle of life. If there are some haunted-ass coral reefs, it’s from human interaction. Do you know what I mean? It’s that disruption or whatever you want to say.

Shira and I talk a lot about electrified space and how she feels that way about western Massachusetts, where she went to college and where she spent her after-college years. It’s actually where her maternal line comes through, that part of Massachusetts. People that she didn’t even know. When she moved out there, she always felt so weirdly . . . I don’t even think connected is the right word, because I think there’s a positive association with the word connection that I’m not trying to imply. I think she really felt like, almost like a dog whistle, where only you can hear it and you’re like, “Does anybody else feel that?” I feel that way about New York and specific locations in New York, places I’m learning that my ancestors have passed through.

Alexis Aceves Garcia : Memory is so wild and so geographical, and I always appreciated when you had us just list memories in class. And so matter-of-factly, because I think it’s so helpful to have that drawn out of you. Especially in a more intuitive way. I feel like if I have too much time to think about memory, it kind of defeats the intuitive spirit of it, which is something that I’m constantly striving toward. And I think there’s so much I have been thinking about time—and when you were mentioning the coral reefs and stuff, it’s like, what is time to a coral reef? What is time to cacti on the shore? How can I move through and away from my own sense of time and toward a sand dollar that I picked up?

Angel Nafis: That’s been something you’ve mentioned in our fucking absurd text exchange. Particularly that you’ve been thinking about time and having a physical body. Has it been healing work? Like, what is pulling you?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Mmmm. Yeah, I feel like it’s this deep molt I’m going through recently where I’m trying to redefine what I hold as valuable traits of myself. I think, as you’ve seen me through, like, skin fades and hard parts and a lot of button-ups, all the way buttoned up and shit, it’s just like . . . for so long I have prioritized this capitalist version of me that is overprepared and, you know, just, like . . .

Angel Nafis: Like professional drag or something?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: One hundred percent! Where it’s just that I’ve learned the rules of this game, and I have to play them, and then break them in the small ways that I can and still get a paycheck. Whereas now I’m like, okay, actually consider that intuition is of the highest value.

Angel Nafis: It’s sacrosanct.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Right. And this is a question that extends to every part of writing and coming up with a process for yourself, and then, you know, feeling bad if you don’t meet the process or whatever. It’s like the tension between building structure and leaving room for play. And I’m on this journey alongside you in terms of thinking about the page not being enough, and thinking about archiving and materials and speaking to our dead. How do you approach that from an intuitive place and wrestle with structure or not?

Angel Nafis: These are all great questions. The short answer is that I struggle. It’s a lot of struggling. As maybe we all are, I’m more able to see clearly if I’m working with your poems, or if I’m working with, you know, Kim’s or Dante’s or whoever’s poems. It’s easier for me to see where you’re at, what you’re making, where you’re struggling. I don’t even mean in your actual writing. I mean, as a writer, where you’re struggling, where you’re kind of stuck. I can kind of doula and help you through it and sit with you. It’s much harder to reflect it back to myself. But there is a sense of . . . if I wait, or if there’s a “right moment,” the poem will be the most true, best way it can be. And a lot of freedom comes in the form of laying that down.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Mmmm. Yeah yeah.

Angel Nafis: Laying down the urge to wait for some perfect constellation and just kind of trust that I will always have rather created, I will always rather have tried. I will always rather have a draft, an attempt of some sort, than keep my fingers crossed and pray that I’m in the space to create and play.

There is a sense of play, improvisation, that I’ve been allowing myself in my creative moments. You know I just finished a portfolio with a bunch of visual verse and deconstructed forms that I’m working on. I love to have all the beakers open and everything boiling. So I want to mention that you sent me this scan of your abuela’s Portuguese passport. You sent me this scan with handwriting so deliciously strewn on the page, not vertical, but moving longways like landscape. And because I’m now finally starting to admit that I’m an archivist, I can see that I inherited so much of my dad’s compulsive collecting, shitty-museum gene. I see so much life . . . there’s so much for me even just in the ingredients themselves. I see this paper written on, and I see this passport cloth, and I’m like, I would go just to see that. I will go see your items laid out on a table. I feel, as an archivist, I don’t need to see the poem (I want to see the home! And I hope there’s a poem!), but for me, I will get light just from the ingredients. Now my constant vision is that as writers, ultimately, we’re not just gathering these totems, these elements; we’re photosynthesizing them into poems. So if I’m looking at my poem I ask: Is this photosynthesized?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: That shift in thinking, when you start calling yourself an archivist, is huge from being just your writer-self. I mean I think it’s all intertwined, but there’s that moment of realization; you keep coming back to these memories and you’re compiling them and you’re trying to talk to your dead and you want to do right by them. But then, in my opinion, I can’t find a right way to do this work with only words. During our yearlong class, you always referred to things as “artifacts” within the books that we were reading. And it really helped me understand what I was reaching for when I was writing and holding on to these sorts of objects, or this sort of language that made up the universe I was trying to enter or build.

Angel Nafis: Yeah, it really was a three-dimensionally-centric class, you know. I think it was Diane that coined that term we used as a guidepost for the rest of class, remember? We were discussing how the first poem in the book should in some way contain all of the notes, all of the tones that exist in the whole book. But then, Diane was like, “Yeah, the cosmos of the book should be contained in the first poem.” And it was like—DJ scratch and record stop—that’s exactly it! And that kind of thinking is so wide, and it’s not linear, and it’s not two-dimensional. It’s not that the first poem is going to contain every character, theme, and motif that is going to exist in the book. That’s absurd. But in some way there is a letter, a moment, a line break, an image, a shadow of an image that represents or nods at everything that exists in the cosmos of the rest of the book. And so, when you’re talking about the “artifacts,” for example, so much of the language that we used in class was lenient when it comes to multimodal thinking.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I am a clumsy archivist! It’s not a perfect science.

Angel Nafis: Right? I did not go to librarian school. That is probably the biggest holdup with claiming oneself as an archivist. Struggling against notions of qualification or whatever. But I’m just saying, me, myself, personally. I’m not even saying that there is an externally logical rhyme or reason to the stuff that I collect and find valuable and precious. I’m saying that I am the link. I am the thing. I am the aisle in the library that all this shit would be under, right? The prism of my mind is what I see as precious. I’m saying I am an expert on these particular strands that are woven together only through my existence.

And I just . . . am not good at throwing stuff away. I’ve never been. I always, always have this, like, unanswerable feeling that I’m going to need a thing later. That it will be useful later, and then later on, I’ll realize that it really is. So I just be keeping shit around. And that’s kind of how . . . that’s what I encouraged for y’all even just in the writing process. I’d be like, “Oh, don’t delete it! Just save it. Put it in an endless Google Doc of lines that you cut.”

I think all the chickens come home to roost eventually, and what is yours belongs to you forever. And I just feel like everything not in use is on the bench waiting for its turn to be the treasure.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I’m hunched over my scanner right now, you know. I took my abuela’s nightgown because I forgot that I had it and I was like, let me scan her nightgown! Then I was scanning the color of her night gown.

Angel Nafis: Woooahhhhhh LET ME PEEP THIS!!!!!!

Alexis Aceves Garcia: There are these beautiful buttons that are on her nightgown, and again, I was just trying to play and figure out how I want to show this. I think all the thinking about scanning her objects is really because I’m trying to, like, open a portal with her objects. I don’t know how yet, but I just know that I’m being called to do that, somehow.

Angel Nafis: Oh my gosh. This is so beautiful, Alexis. The way that the folds look like topography?! It looks like a map. THIS IS TOO MUCH. You are going in.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: There’s like a tear here that in the scan was closed. I don’t know what I’m doing yet, but I’m being called to these things. And here’s another scan of the collar that is not perfect at all. The label says “Coffee Casual.” And I’ve worn this nightgown before a couple of times just to be closer to her. This is all to say I’m trying to figure out who I am as an archivist and what I value. Just thinking about the texture of all of these objects and the landscapes of them. Filling in who my grandmother was outside of these objects, and alongside these objects.

Angel Nafis: STOP. I’M DEAD.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I love to know you’re really collaging too.

Angel Nafis: This is one of my favorite stones, just a smooth stone that just gives me a lot of comfort. I don’t know . . . it feels like checking in. I just feel like I’ve planted when I touch it. I keep it on my writing desk. This is my mom’s passport, as well. And then you can see the seal on her face and in her Afro. You can’t really tell here, but on the passport, if you get really close to it, you can see that her Afro is actually blow-dried straight and feathered. She made this linen suit. She just got dressed up for her little passport. This is her name before she converted to Islam: Delsie. That’s her handwriting. It blows my mind.

These are my little altars, but the objects themselves I’ve been calling coordinates. Because that’s my mode for when I write: I have these objects lined up near my journal or near my laptop because I’m using them to go to a specific place.

I do feel that I became braver in experimenting particularly because of this class and because you guys were so brazen. I think about a poem like Angbeen’s “Black and Brown People on Shark Tank” (that just went up for installation in Philadelphia) and consider to what extent did it already exist that way on the page, and how was it already hospitable to that physicalized form it’s taking now? It felt like a hypertext from the moment she brought it to the workshop.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Ripe with possibility.

Angel Nafis: Remember when Leena brought in that map poem? It was pictorial in structure! And there was never fear or hesitation—you all just stepped up to the plate to meet wherever someone was in their writing experiment. And I feel like I would not have allowed myself to wade so deeply [into my own experiments] had I not come into contact with your manuscripts.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I don’t think I’ve been in a more generous class than your class, and for that length of time as well. It was such a privilege and an honor to be in community with that group of folks, and we still talk all the time, you know. It’s not like one of those classes where you leave and it’s like, all right, well, I got one friend. We were all so happy for each other and our explorations, even though they were all very different worlds. We were orbiting each other in the same universe.

Angel Nafis: You became such good readers of each others’ work. There was just less conjugation, do you know what I mean? It just got to a point where after a while it felt like folks were in the pocket. There was such a unity and common language being spoken, even amid wildly different styles and such different concerns and concepts that people were working in with their projects.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: You make so many other writers possible.

Angel Nafis: You’re literally dragging me to drugs. Please stop right now.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I literally cannot let this conversation go by without talking about how generous you are, as a person first and foremost, and as a teacher, as a friend, as a writer yourself. I’ve learned so much about how I want to move in this wild, publishing, blah blah world—

Angel Nafis: Blah blah indeed.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Because of how you move and what you cherish and value in building relationships with other writers.

Angel Nafis: You’re going to murder me. It’s never been more difficult to interface with past students before y’all’s class. When I see you guys, it’s like, too much for me. It feels like what I would imagine meeting a birth mother feels like. Like I belong to you in this weird and powerful way that I can’t control but also, who are you? I feel like we were in the trenches together.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: IN THE TRENCHES LOL.

Angel Nafis: We were in the fucking trenches together. And I don’t just mean creatively, like even though we were. There was a camaraderie in the class that I don’t even know how to express. We were in the throes of contemplation together. And then the pandemic happened! I just remember being, like, there are powers greater than me at play. Here’s my resignation on trying to predict anything or be in control in any traditional sense. The world was literally ending as we knew it, and we were abruptly, like, okay, I guess we will not see each other in person anymore.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Can I ask you about your initial thoughts when you were approached to do this one-year manuscript generator? What were your initial thoughts?

Angel Nafis: So Julie Buntin approached me and she was kind of like, hey, we have this [twelve-month] fiction class and I love poetry, I value it, and I want Catapult to be a place for poetry too. And I was like, wait. An opportunity to talk poems and manuscripts with people, which I do anyway? And I can basically design the course with Catapult? And we can set up a really cool, dynamic, strange, classic syllabus to really sit with what it is we think makes a collection, with what makes a poetry book? It always struck me as an opportunity to explore being a student of what a poetry collection can do as an artifact, as a tome, as a masterpiece, you know . . . or as an attempt at saying a particular thing. And we could edit the work we’re making in real time and build out those intraconversations. It always struck me as an opportunity to basically have a book club, studio space, slash collaborative editorial space on steroids. We spend a year talking about the sequence, talking about the stand-out poems, talking about the logic of the arc, the motifs, the scaffolding . . . all of it. In the hopes that as we are side-by-side, writing weekly together, we can create this body of work and have that be a stamp in time of what we’re writing. I don’t know, it just felt kind of like all the best parts of the peer-editing and bookmaking circles that I’ve been blessed enough to be a part of, whether in my friendships, in my partnership with Shira, and with mentors—who from the time I was seventeen or eighteen would be incredibly generous and send me their manuscripts and what they were working on, and together we would build.

It’s been years and years of sitting on bedroom floors with each other and talking through what we think the book might be doing. And, you know, obsessively reading over whatever fucking Sharon Olds book I’m obsessed with that month and being like, HOW IS SHE DOING IT? I was just like, what if it’s just that but, like, rigorous and dedicated and weekly, you know? What if it’s that friendly, what if it’s that encouraging? What if it keeps it funky and gives that deep-cut edit that you need? What if it’s that funny and that spiritual and that juicy? I was like, it should just be that. It should just be that because that’s the best part.

Designing a space where at the end of the course you’re not just slapped with a bunch of new poems, but you also have a better sense of yourself as a writer and a writer in a community, and you have a better sense of what you want your life as a writer to look like as well. Guest authors would visit and we would literally ask them, “What was your contract like?” I wanted the space to be like that, no murk about the “biz” aspects. And it was always understood that we were making something together, that we didn’t really know what it was, that the people in the class would define what it was as time progressed. That was always my hope, and I don’t think that I always succeeded, but it was always my North Star. So yeah, it was very much a project born of love, and I love y’all. Probably against Catapult rules, but y’all are my people. Okay, I want to throw some pics into this Google Doc.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Yeah, let’s do it.

Angel Nafis: Shall we go down memory lane? This Cancer and this Sagittarian . . . should we?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Let’s do it. Let’s keep it spicy.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I miss this.

Angel Nafis: Oh my god, we would just be in that bitch CLOWNING.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: With the heat! There’s a heat that we all generated when we were talking about anything.

Angel Nafis: Shout out to being in the room with each other. Shout out to the past.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Imagine. Shout out. What a time.

Angel Nafis: Does it feel like a long time ago or recent? Or both?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Both. I love to see everyone’s writing out in the world, and that’s been such a beautiful way to track time and connection.

Angel Nafis: Jennifer and Angbeen’s art show!

Alexis Aceves Garcia: It’s so awesome. Yeah, speaking of archivists.

Angel Nafis: Where is your writing at? If you could trace it through pre-generator, during generator, beyond the generator?

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I feel that pre-generator I was working in publishing, and I was trying to write my poems now and then, but I had little sense as to where I was at and “what I was up to,” as you used to phrase it. All I knew was that I had to reorient my life so that writing was a bigger part of it. And that kind of pushed me toward the generator. And then during the generator, you tricked us into writing manuscripts in the best way. As a young writer, you’re trying to figure out how this whole thing operates. You’re looking in the acknowledgement sections of different books, trying to constellate how people function, where they get published, and trying to learn the business part of it. And I think it was so helpful to have your class as a space to be like, “How did you feel about the process? Did you feel honored in that process? What was conflicting for you?”

And having a space to dissect it with other people—that “writerly” aspect, the career part of it. It’s one thing to understand what works for you in terms of writing and editing, but then it’s another thing to be like, okay, who do I want to be, and who do I want to be around and show up for? I’m in a lineage, asking who is my lineage in writing, which is something you encouraged. I remember Saeed’s [Jones] visit I think the most. His generosity around speaking to how he navigates publishing and what it was like for him to transition from all of what he did in the past to becoming the writer he is now—just learning his career path in general was really helpful. And then, you know, talking with Rachel Mckibbens, who was my second reader, was life-altering.

Angel Nafis: Ugh. I feel electrified and so fertile! Shira and I leave for our first joint writing residency soon, and I feel like I might pop off-off. It’s a three-week residency, and I cannot even remember the last time I had three consecutive days where I relaxed. So I’m very excited. And you know how sad gurlz like to turn up in the fall.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Listen, I can’t wait for the scans.

Angel Nafis: Scans on scans on scans on scans.

Alexis Aceves Garcia: I feel like you might open a portal.

Angel Nafis: You know, I might come get you!

Alexis Aceves Garcia: Come through.

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Angel Nafis is teaching a new iteration of her 12-Month Poetry Generator in 2022. Check out this listing for more information!