Blas Falconer: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Blas Falconer

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Blas Falconer

Five Poems

The Battle of Nashville

Snow gives the sky a new dimension--depth,

a soft glow, as if the air lit the yard,

which slopes to the city, which shimmers.

The river is always moving, but the atrium

on Fifth, the Kress, where blacks locked arms

and would not budge. A plow takes the hill,

where cars line up in rows, and half-built lofts

replace the houses. The man who built our house

built diesel engines and kept the trucks

he couldn't fix. His daughters sold it all,

except the how-to books, the shop fan

he left in the attic. We're not brave,

but we find one another in bed each night,

your hand or my hand reaching out.

In the morning, you take the trash, and I make

the coffee. Nearby, battles were fought,

and men, whose wives waited for them, died.

If soldiers held the highest ground, one stood

here. If there is one, there is at least

one more. Standing shoulder to shoulder,

they share a blanket, as snow settles in the trees.

I think they are afraid. I think this is love.

Lighter,

the word that comes to mind after many nights.

As when a plane descends over a city

you call home, the body’s rise against the belt

strung across your lap. Darkness and lampposts,

like gold and silver beads below, falling

into them. Or better yet, wading in

the bioluminescent bay and each kick

creates a soft glow, each stroke makes you think

light could come from the body, and not

a world disturbed into brilliance. Because

it captures what I mean—both the weight

and how you see what you could not. As when

I heard him cry and lumbered down the hall

to find you there first, pacing the room, singing

softly in his ear. Through the window,

the city sparkled and seemed to have grown

though, by day, I never see more than

two or three men working at once, lifting

together, say, a plank of wood. Years ago,

my mother sat beside my bed, eager to bear

the fever with me. We pass him back

and forth between us until it breaks,

and I no longer want what I wanted

before. As when one day you look upon

the house you’ve built and can’t recall the field.

Apology for My Son Who Stops to Ask About His Mother Once More

The branch, bent to the ground as if under the weight of its

own white blossom, is

like a sadness I see

growing inside you. What can

I do but tell, again, how

under the fluorescent light, she bent

over your swaddled body, her face

pale against her dark brown hair,

yours dark against the pale sheet.

That is your story. This

is your share

of the world’s grief, what you must carry, and

which I cannot bear

for you.

Fatherland

The heat not having broken all

month long, we stood

in line and watched a boy

race down the park’s tallest slide,

drop into the shallow pool

below, from which he rose

renewed, a look of joy, relief

across his face. My son held

my hand, and looking up,

judged how long it’d take

to reach the top of the stairs.

In front of us, the man, a head

taller, fifty pounds, at least,

more than I, wore red trunks,

his hair, dark brown, short.

I saw the swastika first,

White Power, inked

across his back, the scene:

skeletons climbed his spine

above a sea of flames. I felt

each breakable bone

in my boy’s hand, he, who

days before asked to live

with us forever. Idiot,

my mother called me once

because, You think everyone

is good. The man looked

across the park at no one,

younger than I’d have thought,

and when the line, as if

with one mind, began to move

again, he stepped forward, the foot

or two between us,

perilous, uncrossable.

Where does the horse come from?

From the North American grasslands

over 55 million years ago. From the genus

Equus, evolving from Pliohippus

during the Pliocene. From a faint

memory or my imagination on the road

from Salinas to the beach one morning,

the sugarcane fields rising up on either side

of us. The sound of its hooves made

a music, one characteristic of

the Puerto Rican Paso Fino,

meaning “fine step” in Spanish. My son rides

each week. On the stable wall, a harness for

each horse, the name written under

its hook. Ohio. Montana.

My son’s father is from Pennsylvania.

My son rides slowly in circles inside

the pen, kicking up black dust, as I walk

in circles outside. Am I Puerto Rican?

He asks. Some days we walk the ground’s

perimeter to be among the horses. To be

among the horses is enough some days.

He holds my hand as we walk. Often,

someone will pass us on the trail, crossing

the bridge over the highway. When we hear

them coming, we step aside. Where are

they going? My son asks. We stop to watch

horses disappear into the mountains.

Interview

October 20th

California Poets Interview Series:

Blas Falconer, Poet, Translator, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s begin with what you’re currently working on. Without giving too much away, which subjects and themes you’re exploring this time around and to what extent has the editing process been different from previous collections?

BF: Much of my last book, Rara Avis, draws on the themes surrounding fatherhood. It’s taken some time for the new poems to point me in a new direction. More recently, I find myself writing about the moment when you encounter an impasse, and the imagination leads you past the obstacle. This new obsession has allowed more of the strange or absurd to enter the poem: a child is reincarnated into a two-headed goat, gold begins to speak to the prospector, a father, watching his son float into the air, grows wings.

I’m tentatively calling the manuscript The Middle Ages. I have about twenty pages finished, with another fifteen or so developing, so I’m still very much in the process of discovering what the book will become. I’m less interested right now in knowing exactly what the book is about than in following the poems and seeing where they lead.

DG: Teaching is an important aspect of your work, and I couldn’t imagine a better place than San Diego to do this. Could you talk about how you structure your classes and what you enjoy most being in front of a class?

BF: I guess that I gravitate towards classes that invite a thoughtful consideration of both tradition and innovation. We spend a lot of time considering how a mode, device, or form has evolved over time, drawing inspiration from earlier models to think about what might best speak to our own world.

In one graduate course, we looked at influences in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, thinking about themes, aesthetics, formal innovation, and cultural movements, but also about race, gender, sexuality, and geography. Then the students had to think about where their own work fits into those conversations. For example, in one class we looked at poems by Whitman, Hughes, Ginsberg, and Espada to consider how the poets defined and redefined the U.S. In another class, we looked at poems by Dickinson, Moore, Bishop and Ryan to think about wit and restraint. After each class, students are challenged to write their own poem that defines a community or leans into restraint. Essentially, they join the line of influence.

What I’ve found is that student poems seem to speak to both contemporary readers while resonating with other poets and texts. The poems seem larger.

DG: In addition to San Diego, you’ve lived, studied, and worked in different places like Virginia, Maryland, and Texas. Though California is the place where you work, and the latter three states are where you studied, it’s Puerto Rico where you spent a great deal of your childhood and many of your poems are about the place you used to visit. In fact, to paraphrase, it was your grandmother’s love for poetry that ignited your own. Would it be right to say that you’d have never become a poet had you not gone to Puerto Rico, but you would’ve still become one had you not studied in Virginia, Maryland, and Texas?

BF: I think Puerto Rico was probably the more fundamental influence, simply because it entered my life so early. My mother was born and raised in Salinas, and my grandmother introduced me to Juan Antonio Corretjer and Julia de Burgos. So Puerto Rico gave me a relationship to poetry very early on, but also a relationship to a particular history, landscape, culture, and language.

But I don't want to diminish what happened later. I began writing seriously at the University of Maryland, and then in Houston I found teachers and mentors who really shaped the poet I became. Phillis Levin, Michael Collier, and Stanley Plumly were important to me in Maryland. In Houston Mark Doty, Ed Hirsch, Phillip Levine, Cynthia MacDonald, and Adam Zagajewski. And then there were all the friends and peers who were brilliant writers and models simply because they were around me.

So I think I needed both, but in different ways. Puerto Rico gave me something very early and deeply personal. Maryland and Houston gave me a community and a way of thinking about poetry as a practice.

DG: Another important aspect of your work is parenthood and you write about it with emotions that never slip into sentimentality. They say nothing changes people quite as much as the day they become parents. I’d like to ask how fatherhood changed you as a poet. On the one hand, the discovery of new things to write about must have been great; on the other hand, you probably found yourself with less time to sit down and do all that. Could you talk about the transformation your creative process went through in this period?

BF: All of what you say is true. On the one hand, no time. Overwhelming feelings and responsibilities. On the other, incredible focus. My children were always at the forefront of my mind, so sitting down to write, there was always something begging for some attention.

As my role as a parent has evolved, so has my writing habits, and as the habits changed, so did the poems. Before I became a father, I would spend hours upon hours writing. I could live in a poem all day. When our first son was born, I didn’t sleep much, as often is the case. I remember debating often if I should write for twenty minutes or take a nap, wash dirty bottles in the sink or grade papers. The poems came in fragments for months, only to be stitched together later in a collage-like fashion. As my children grew older, I was able to go away to different generative conferences, Napa Valley Writers Conference and Community of Writers, where I had a full week to write as many poems as I could. Because I’d write a poem a day, the poems were short, lyrical, spare. With the last book, much of which was written during COVID, I had more time again, and I gravitated to longer, discursive poems.   

Now, as my sons grow older, I sense a kind of freedom I hadn’t had before. I'm looking outward again.

DG: I’m fascinated by translation and would like to touch upon the work you’ve done in this respect, specifically Padre Tierra: A Poem in 50 Sections by Mariano Zaro. Could you talk about some of the challenges and intricacies of this project? How closely did you work with Mariano Zaro?

BF: I discovered Padre Tierra in April 2020, during the quarantine. I came across a recording of Mariano reading the poem, and I was immediately taken by it. The book was inspired partly by his father, who was a farmer in northern Spain, and it also engaged with landscape, family, and his queer identity.

I ordered the book, and my mother was actually visiting me in Los Angeles when the quarantine began. She ended up staying for eight months. We would read the poem over lunch and talk about the images, the themes, the phrases. At the time, I was working on my own collection about fatherhood and had reached a kind of impasse, so translating the poem became a way of moving back into poetry.

I contacted Mariano, and we began corresponding regularly. I translated a handful of sections and sent them to him, and he gave me feedback. As our correspondence continued, the translation became easier because I began to understand not just what the Spanish meant literally, but what he was trying to make the poem do emotionally.

I kept thinking about Borges's idea that you shouldn't write what someone says, but what they mean to say. Every word choice, every shift in diction, every line break, every decision about syntax or omission was an attempt to get closer to that.

There were also little cultural and linguistic things that I could never have understood without talking to Mariano. At one point, for example, he describes quince being put into drawers or chests with freshly washed linens so that the fruit would give them its scent. I initially misunderstood the image. Those moments forced us to talk through not just the language but the world behind the language.

Even the title became a problem. I didn't want to translate Padre Tierra as “Fatherland,” because that introduced a nationalism that wasn't there. “Father Earth” suggested something almost New Age. Eventually I realized that I shouldn't really translate Padre Tierra at all. It was the name of an archetypal figure within the poem.

DG: Staying with the topic, I tend to think that an exact translation of anything is impossible. To what extent did your views on translation change after finishing Mariano Zaro’s book and how likely will you do a similar project in the future?

BF: I think the project confirmed for me that translation is less about reproducing the exact words than about trying to understand the spirit of what the poet is doing. That was probably always my instinct, but working so closely with Mariano made me much more conscious of it.

I’ve been translating another book of poems since the summer, but I’m not sure it’s something that I would ever try to publish. I haven’t even looked into acquiring the rights. I’m just fascinated by the way that this writer’s mind works. The poems are brilliant and campy and defiant, maybe impossible in any other language. I love those moments most when the poems reveal themselves to me.

DG: Some of your poems include Spanish words. Have you ever attempted to write an entire poem in Spanish? If not, would you consider doing a bilingual edition of poems? Mariano Zaro's pieces in the aforementioned book are originally in Spanish, but poets such as William Archila (who likewise appears in California Poets) have also done originals in English that were translated into Spanish.

DG: William’s Canícula / Dog Days is a gorgeous book, and having the poems in both language is even more powerful because of the subject matter. Usually, Spanish enters a poem of mine when someone else is speaking. I’ve never tried writing a poem entirely in Spanish. Having a much better sense of how the sounds of English might convey different tonal registers, I just feel more comfortable writing in English. If an opportunity to work with a translator presented itself, however, I would certainly be open to it. 

DG: Juan Antonio Corretjer and Julia de Burgos were early influences in your poetic development. Who are some contemporary writers you turn to regularly for inspiration?

BF: There are a number of poets I return to regularly. Louise Glück, Stanley Plumly, Carl Phillips, Phillis Levin, Jorie Graham, David Keplinger, Vievee Francis, John Murillo, and Li-Young Lee have all been important touchstones for me.

But I don't really have a fixed list. Because I teach and because I edit Poetry International Online, I'm constantly encountering new work, and that changes what I'm reading and thinking about. Sometimes a student introduces me to a poet, or I encounter a poem through the journal, and suddenly I'm reading everything that poet has written.

I think that's part of what keeps poetry exciting for me. Even after all these years, there are still poems that can surprise me and make me rethink what a poem can do.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

BF: I’m reading a lot of poetry because of my work with Poetry International Online, especially while I’m editing the next issue. I’m excited about work by Linda Gregerson, Kazim Ali, Hayan Charara, Adedayo Agarau, Katie Ford, and Allison Bennis White.

In all honesty, I’m often inspired by my students. Sometimes, I finish reading something that one of them has written, and it’s so good, I wish everyone could read it.

Author Bio:

Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024), winner of the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry. His other books include Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, and A Question of Gravity and Light.

His translation of Mariano Zaro's Padre Tierra: A Poem in 50 Sections was published by Artepoetica Press in 2025.

He is also a co-editor of The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).

Falconer's awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship.

Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland (1997) and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston (2002). He teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University, where he serves as editor-in-chief of Poetry International Online.