William Archila: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems

William Archila

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

William Archila

Four Poems

[I caught a plane exploring the abundance of...]

I caught a plane exploring the abundance of Los Angeles

luminous light where the names of the dead take up

the empty spaces. Something was broken. Something

about nothing. The country told me to go. The dogs bark

to avoid thinking. I cannot escape it. There’s a street of dogs

in El Salvador where it’s impossible to find meaning.

They said corpses were multiplying the empty spaces.

My family advised I stay indoors as much as possible. I was lost.

I was Juned. There was music. That summer heat stuck

to my skin like a sponge. An elder swimming the waters

of a river that I will someday have to cross is another

of God’s disguises. The siblings still had to pay for services.

The reporter says bodies were found in the morgue rotting.

If I close my eyes for a few seconds, I am likely to miss it.

[When I come home & roam the cornhusk...]

When I come home & roam the cornhusk at dusk, my god

crouches on the couch chomping on wood chips & ashes.

I read him facts about tattered ruins & scattered masses

till I’m so ready to thicken the air like a bro who knows

absolutely nothing. When I come home, I tell him there’s

an ash trace of fingers on the walls. A trail of faint smudges

from the fridge to the couch. He piles up the facts to bedevil

my trap. My god, he’s at it again. Out my window, his face

pops up, never lets up. My god, in my ear, his book of curses,

down the chimney howling like a monkey. My god, cast

this outcast out of my house & all the other duendes as well.

Even conquistadors experienced the sublime, carbon-stained

shadow of his body. When they leaned over the cliff, peered

at the river below, hands holding back the dirt in their mouths.

Three Minutes with Mingus                                        

When I read of poets & their lives,

  son of a milkman & seamstress, raised

in a whistle-stop town or village, a child

  who spent his after-school hours deep

in the pages of a library book, I want to go

  back to my childhood, back to the war,

rescue that boy under the bed, listening

  to what bullets can do to a man, take him

out of the homeland, enroll him in school,

  his class-size ten, unfold the fables

of the sea, a Spanish galleon slamming up

  & down the high waters. This is why

I write poems, why I prefer solitude

  when I listen to your lazy sound

of brass on the phonograph. You give

  language to black roosters & fossil bones,

break down phrases between the LA River

  & the yellow taxi cabs of New York.

I picture you in Watts, the 240-pound

  wrath of a bass player building up steam,

woodshedding for the strictly segregated

  hood, those who seek a tiny shot of God,

digging through hard pan, the hammer’s

  grunt & blow. I need a gutbucket of gospel,

the flat land of cotton to catch all those

  Chinese acrobats bubbling inside your head.

When I think of the day I will no longer

  hold a pencil within my hand or glance

upon the spines of my books, I hear

  Picasso’s Guernica in your half-choked

cries, a gray workhorse lost in a fire’s

  spiraling notes, a shrieking tenor sax

for the woman falling out of a burning house.

  I want to tell you if I wrote like you pick

& pat in Blues and Roots, I would understand

  the caravel of my childhood, loose

without oars or sails, rolling on the swells

  of a distant sea. That’s all I got, Mr. Mingus.

I give you the archaeology of my words,

  every painstaking sound I utter when I come

to the end of a line, especially the stressed

  beats of a tiny country I lost long ago.

Guayaberas

In my boyhood, all the men

wore them, a light body shirt

with pleats running down the breast,

two top pockets for pens, notepads,

two bottom ones for keys or loose change,

each sewn with a button

in the middle of the pouch,

a complement tailored to the slit

at the side of the hip. If you look

at photographs in family albums,

men stand against palm trees,

their short-sleeved guayaberas

caught in sunlight, their Panama hats

tipped to the sky. There’s a black and white

of my father, stumbling along fields

of cane, head full of rum,

mouth in an o, probably

singing a bolero of Old San Juan.

On days like these, the sun burned

like an onion in oil. Women hung

guayaberas on windows to dry.

Shirtless, men picked up their barefoot babies

off the floor, held them against their bellies

as if talking to a god. Even my school uniform

was a blue guayabera, but nothing

like my father’s favorite: white,

long-sleeved, above the left breast

a tiny pocket, perfectly slender for a cigar,

arabesque designs vertically stretched.

When the evening breeze lulled

from tree to tree, he serenaded

my mother, guitars and tongues of rum

below her balcony; the trio strumming,

plucking till one in the morning.

I don’t know what came first,

war or years of exile,

but everyone — shakers of maracas, cutters

of cane, rollers of tobacco — stopped wearing them,

hung them back in the closet, waiting

for their children to grow,

an arc of parrots to fly across the sky

at five in the evening. In another country,

fathers in their silver hair sit

on their porches, their sons, now men,

hold babies in the air, guayaberas nicely pressed.

Interview II

July 18th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

William Archila, Poet, Writer, Educator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Your newest project, Canícula / Dog Days, which is a bilingual selection of your first two collections, was released on May 12th by Red Hen Press. Could you speak a bit about how you selected the poems? In other words, did you start with thematic considerations, the chronology of when the poems were written, or perhaps form?

WA: Well, at first, naïve to say, I thought it was going to be the best pieces from each book, but as I started selecting the work, I realized certain poems were necessary to build an arc from The Art of Exile to The Gravedigger’s Archaeology. The book takes the reader on a journey—from the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s to the immigrant experience in U.S. cities—while revealing the chaos and memories of those who struggle in Central America and here in the States. It is a collection that chronicles exile and resilience across borders.

DG: Could you say a bit more about the Spanish title? It seems to be so much more than the simple translation of dog days. There are implications of weather, but likewise connotations related to Sirius, often called the Dog Star and its binary system. To what extent were you thinking about these subtleties—oppositions and identity in an increasingly polarized world?

WA: The Spanish title, Canícula, carries a resonance that the English Dog Days only partially captures. In Spanish, it certainly evokes the oppressive heat of summer, but it also retains echoes of its astronomical origins—the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star. I was interested in that doubleness: the way a single word can hold both earthly experience and celestial history.

Growing up in El Salvador, dogs were also part of the everyday landscape. Stray dogs were everywhere moving through neighborhoods, surviving on the margins, often overlooked but always present. That image became another layer of meaning for me. The "dog days" are not only about the season's relentless heat but also about endurance and survival.

I also think Canícula speaks to a period that many Salvadorans understand intimately: a long stretch of hardship, stagnation, or uncertainty. Whether shaped by poverty, migration, violence, or personal loss, there is often a prolonged season of struggle that leaves emotional and psychological scars. In that sense, the title suggests more than weather. It points toward those long, dark periods of depression, struggle, and emotional suffering that people carry, sometimes silently, as they continue moving forward.

For me, Canícula speaks to living between worlds—between Spanish and English, memory and the present, homeland and adopted home. Those tensions aren't simply oppositions; they're part of the same constellation.

DG: Being a Spanish speaker yourself, you must’ve had a certain vision about the way each piece should sound. Was how the poems would potentially come across in the target language (Spanish) also a factor when you were deciding what to include and what to leave out?

WA: That's a wonderful question because, even though I wrote the poems in English, Spanish was always somewhere in the background. It's the language that shaped my earliest memories, my ear, and my emotional vocabulary. I wasn't writing with translation in mind, but I was always aware that Spanish lingered beneath the English, almost like an echo.

When I was deciding what to include or leave out, my primary concern was always the poem itself—its music, emotional truth, and necessity—rather than how easily it might translate. That said, I was conscious of preserving a space where both languages could coexist. Some things inevitably resist translation, and I don't see that as a loss. Those moments remind us that language carries culture, history, and memory in ways that can't always be transferred word for word.

In many ways, the poems already live between languages. A Spanish translation isn't simply a return to the original language of my childhood; it's another version of the journey. I hope Spanish-speaking readers will recognize familiar emotional landscapes while also discovering something new, because translation isn't about reproducing a poem exactly—it's about allowing it to breathe differently in another language.

DG: Being a fluent Spanish speaker, the process of working with the translator, Mario Zetino, must’ve been a unique experience, given that most poets can’t speak the language their pieces are rendered into. How closely did you collaborate with him on the process?

WA: If I remember correctly, I spent about a year working closely with Mario Zetino, the Salvadoran poet, translator, and scholar. Most of our conversations happened through email, and what I appreciated most was that it never felt like a simple author-translator relationship. It became an ongoing dialogue about language, memory, and poetry. Because Mario is both a poet and Salvadoran, he understood the emotional landscape of the poems in a way that went beyond finding the right words. He understood the textures of exile, the music of Salvadoran Spanish, and the balance between beauty and hardship that runs through the book. I trusted his ear completely.

Mario Zetino with Canícula / Dog Days

One of the things I came away with is that translation really happens on two levels. There's the craft—the decisions about diction, syntax, rhythm, line breaks, and sound—and then there's something much harder to define, what I think of as the emotional translation of the poem. A translator isn't simply asking, "What does the author say?" but "What does the author mean?" Every choice is really an attempt to carry the poem's emotional life into another language.

This experience reinforced my belief that a poem doesn't belong exclusively to one language. If the translation is successful, the poem continues to live, breathe, and evolve. It becomes another authentic version of itself rather than a copy of the original.

DG: To what extent were their disagreements between you and the translator and how were these differences in vision reconciled?

WA: Honestly, I don't remember there being any real disagreements between us. We understood each other remarkably well from the beginning. Mario and I shared not only a language and a cultural background but also a similar understanding of what the poems were trying to do. Keep in mind that he had already translated three poems for Álastor, a Nicaraguan magazine, so he was quite familiar with my work. That made the process feel less like negotiating differences and more like discovering the best way for each poem to live in Spanish.

What I lacked in my knowledge of literary Spanish, Mario patiently explained. I learned a tremendous amount from him. There were moments when he would unpack the history or nuance of a particular word or rhythm, and it felt as though I was taking a master class in translation. I trusted his instincts completely because I knew he was always serving the poem rather than his own voice.

Over time, our working relationship grew into something much deeper. We developed a genuine friendship that became a kind of brotherhood. Translation is an intimate act—you spend so much time inside another person's language and imagination—and I think that shared commitment created a bond between us. By the end of the project, I didn't feel like I had simply worked with a translator; I felt I had gained a lifelong friend and collaborator.

DG: Your work never shies away from the political and this collection certainly reinforces that approach. In this respect, I’m very much intrigued by the cover. It features a red dog and a blue dog looking away from each other, but then their bodies overlap in Venn diagram fashion to highlight the commonality of each vision—that despite our differences, we’re the same in the end. Would this interpretation be reading too much into what you wanted to communicate in visual form, or were other aspects you wanted to emphasize?

WA: I don't think you're reading too much into it at all. I actually like when readers bring their own interpretations to the cover because it means the image is doing its work.

The cover really began with el cadejo, the supernatural dog from Central American folklore. There are two versions: the white cadejo, a protective spirit, and the black cadejo, a darker presence associated with danger and temptation. While researching the folklore, I came across a painting by the Guatemalan muralist Carlos Loarca. It showed a pack of dogs, each looking in a different direction, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. It captured something I was already exploring in the poems.

I wanted to use Loarca's painting, but Red Hen Press couldn't reach him before the production deadline. So, I met with the Red Hen staff and graphic designer Anna Madruga, and together we translated the spirit of that painting into the cover of Canícula.

For me, the two dogs also became a kind of self-portrait of El Salvador—a soul split in two. I was thinking about the country's internal conflicts, its contradictions, and the lingering divisions from the civil war, between the Left and the Right. I was also thinking about my native tongue and the English language, my native homeland and my present-adopted home, my past and present. They're almost like a married couple filing for divorce: they want to separate, but they share too much history to ever completely untangle themselves.

So I do think the overlap between the dogs speaks to our shared humanity. My poems have always been interested in borders—not just national borders, but the emotional, political, and psychological ones we carry within ourselves. The dogs are looking in different directions, but they still occupy the same space. That's the tension I wanted the cover to hold: difference without denying connection.

DG: It’s been almost two months since the book was released. Could you talk about some of the readings or other things you’ve done to promote the book and what the reception has been like so far?

WA: It's been a wonderful couple of months. Every reading has felt less like a book event and more like a conversation around the themes that shaped Canícula. I began with the Los Angeles launch at Beyond Baroque, a place that has been an important literary home for so many writers. I was also scheduled for the Eastside launch at Libros Schmibros but that had to be postponed because of the structural fire in Boyle Heights. We’re working on a future date.

One of the events that meant a great deal to me was Cecilia Woloch & Friends Poetry on Zoom series. I was joined by Mariano Zaro and the translators Mario Zetino and Blas Falconer, and it was especially meaningful because the book has always been in dialogue with both English and Spanish. Sharing the stage with translators underscored how much the collection is about crossing languages and borders.

In July, I will have the pleasure of celebrating the book at Booksmith in San Francisco, where I will be joined by fellow writers Lory Bedikian, Leticia Hernandez, and Eduardo Martinez-Levya for another conversation about Canícula. It's always gratifying to see a book continue its journey beyond its release and find readers in different communities.

The reception has been very encouraging. Readers have connected with the poems in ways that continue to surprise me. Some respond to the political dimensions of the book, others to the family stories, migration, or the translations. What has stayed with me most are the conversations after the readings, when people share how the poems intersect with their own lives. That's always been one of my hopes—that the poems create a space where personal memory and collective history can meet.

DG: Let’s stay with reading these poems in relation to performance. To what extent do you notice differences in how you read, what emotions you feel, and even the transmission of themes when you read a certain piece in English, and then the translated version in Spanish?

WA: That's been one of the most fascinating parts of these readings. After living with the English versions of these poems for almost fifteen years, they've become part of my own voice—almost to the point of merging. I know their rhythms instinctively.

Reading them in Spanish has been a different experience. I've noticed that I naturally slow down a bit more, whereas the English versions move faster. That makes sense because Spanish often requires more words, but I also think the language invites me to linger differently, to inhabit the emotional texture of the poems in another way.

Seeing the poems move into Spanish also revealed something unexpected. It had a haunting quality—the realization that even though I write in English, the ghosts of Spanish have always been present in my work. A second voice emerges, one that has always been there beneath the surface. Hearing the poems in both languages has reinforced my belief that a poem is a living entity. It isn't confined to the language in which it was first written; it continues to evolve as it enters another language, another music, another community of readers.

DG: As a follow-up to the previous question, are there perhaps pieces in the collection that you now think are more emotionally relevant to you in the Spanish version as opposed to the original English language in which you wrote them?

WA: Definitely. There are a lot of pieces in Canícula that feel way more emotionally charged in Spanish. Spanish words and phrases just feel thicker with unsaid things, probably because that’s the language I originally heard in my head when the poems were forming.

Take the title poem, "Canícula," for example. It’s actually a love poem for my wife. I don’t normally write love poems, but honestly, if you met her, you’d completely get why I had to write this one. Funny thing is, when The Gravedigger’s Archaeology—the book where this poem first lived—came out, I never read it at events. I just skipped right over it. But now, in Spanish? It’s my absolute go-to poem.

As you know, canícula means the dog days of summer—those sweltering, sticky weeks when the rain stops, the air just sits there, and the heat gets violent and heavy. But for me, it’s also a snapshot of being completely broke. I used that suffocating weather as a metaphor for hitting a wall financially and professionally—just being stuck in a rut, flat broke, and unemployed. When things get that hot and muggy, you start desperately looking for an exit. Writing this poem was mine.

Translating it into Spanish made me realize something beautiful: at the end of the day, all love poems start in Spanish.

DG: Though it’s readers that make their own meaning and bring unique perspectives perhaps not considered before by the author, I still want to ask what you, personally, want individuals to take away from this book and why now was the right time to bring an extensive collection of your work into Spanish?

WA: You’re entirely right—once a book leaves my desk, it belongs to the reader. They bring their own ghosts, their own histories to the pages. But if I had to pinpoint what I hope people carry away with them from Canícula, it comes down to a few things.

First, I want readers to feel the weight of what is often left unsaid or buried. In El Salvador, and in the diaspora here in places like Los Angeles, there is a lot of silence around the trauma of the war, the poverty, and the physical reality of exile. I want this book to be a reminder that memory isn't something you can just leave behind at a border. It follows you. It stays in your body like that sticky, suffocating summer heat. I want readers to realize that naming that pain and putting a language into that loss, is a necessary form of survival. I view memory as an active rebellion against power, history, and oblivion.

Second, I want them to look closer at the people who are often made invisible. Canícula is a snapshot of the working-class immigrant experience, the grit, the dust, and the daily hustle. I want readers to walk away with a deeper sense of empathy and witness for those who are just trying to breathe when the air feels too heavy. My poetry collection attempts to capture the trauma of the immigrant torn between the fragmented memory of their homeland and the asphalt of a foreign country.

And finally, on a deeply personal note, I want them to see that even in the middle of that suffocating urban immigrant experience—when you are unemployed, stuck in a rut, and everything feels violent and heavy—there is still room for love, room to co-exist. After all, the title poem is a love poem for my wife. So, I hope readers walk away understanding that love and survival are deeply intertwined.

To address your other point about timing: why was now the right time to bring so much of your poetry into the Spanish language? Back in 2010, when I was reading from my first book, The Art of Exile, the question I got more than any other was, 'When is this coming out in Spanish?' I didn't really have an answer for them at the time, but that question stuck with me for years. Now, given everything going on with our current political climate, it feels like the perfect moment to finally make that happen. For me, publishing these poems in Spanish is deeply emotional—it’s like bringing these stories back home to the very voices that inspired them in the first place. But it’s also an act of defiance. Our culture is constantly under attack, and there’s a lot of hostility out there toward Spanish-speaking people. Reading poetry in Spanish right now isn't just about literature; it’s a massive cultural, emotional, and political statement.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

I’ve always been a reader, constantly trying to get my hands on just about anything—prose, poetry, fiction, you name it. I just finished living inside a few incredible books: Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls, a powerful non-fiction deep dive into how empire and migration shape Latino identity in the U.S.; Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that blends street slang with the historical trauma of the Dominican diaspora; and Rafael Alberti’s classic Concerning the Angels, a surrealist masterpiece born out of a deep personal crisis by one of Spain's greatest 'Generation of '27' poets.

Right now, my desk is piled with a mix of styles that are feeding my mind. I’m currently reading Luis Alberto Urrea’s Across the Wire, which is a gritty, boots-on-the-ground look at the harrowing realities of survival along the border; diving back and revisiting the highly philosophical and imaginative modern poetry of Wallace Stevens; and spending time with La diáspora by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, a fierce debut novel that captures the political displacement of intellectuals fleeing their country's civil war.

Lastly, I’m working on a new series of untitled, quasi-sonnets that are loosely based on, and sometimes written in the voice of, El Cipitio—a foundational figure from pre-Columbian Salvadoran myth. Traditional folklore usually portrays him as a naked ten-year-old boy with a large belly, long ears, a massive straw hat, and backward feet. He’s the illegitimate child of a forbidden romance, cursed by the gods to remain a child forever.

What fascinates me about El Cipitio is how his legend has morphed over centuries to reflect the historical upheavals of El Salvador and the broader Northern Triangle. He adapts to every era—evolving from the Maya world through the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, survival during the brutal peasant insurrection of 1932, and into the civil war of the 1980s that triggered our diaspora. In a lot of ways, he represents the very social consciousness of our people. The specific sonnets I’m crafting right now spring from that initial, intense epiphany and cultural friction between the indigenous Maya world and the Spanish conquest.

Interview

July 24th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

William Archila, Poet, Writer, Educator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s begin with exile, which isn’t just a theme of your poetry, but a reality of your life. At the age of twelve you were forced to leave El Salvador because of the civil war. At twenty-four, you returned with hopes of rebuilding the past, only to find that the country you arrived to was no longer the one you had left. You began composing the pieces that would be known as The Art of Exile in around 1992 and though these poems go from front to back cover, do you feel that the collection—in a metaphorical sense—is in fact not finished, and may never be?

WA: That’s a great question. Thank you. I would like it to be. I wanted so much to be done with that theme with my first two books, but it seems like I cannot escape all that which once was lost, the idea of being a ghost to myself and to those I left behind. It seems to me that to be exiled is to be cursed, to never be free from the past, of what I have left, usually because of a war. I don’t think I will ever be finished. I think I might be only interested in two to three themes and I will be writing the same poem again, just in different forms, from different angles, but mainly the same theme, hopefully each time with a greater depth and understanding of myself and the world around me.

DG: Fast-forwarding sixteen years, you’ve found yourself winning the Levine Prize for Poetry with the collection S is For. From The Gravedigger’s Archaeology to The Art of Exile, the title’s you’ve chosen have always been a combination of poignancy and wittiness. Could you elaborate a bit on the writing process of the newest book—how it both differs in style but also builds on your poetic trajectory?

WA: With S is For, I was aware that I wanted to try something different, even if the themes were the same. I tried something linguistically different. First, I tried writing in form and then dismantling the form. It didn’t always work, but it got my imagination going. I was trying to generate content and hopefully a fresh voice. When I detected a new voice, I disregarded the rigidity of the form and dug into what felt right in my body. I stopped reading and writing for meaning. I stopped reading my work the way that I was taught in school. I had to let go of that methodology and trust myself and the poem. As a result, I started playing with language, listening to the sounds as if I was listening to a song. I was taking more of an artistic approach to language as if I was a musician or a painter. This gave me so much freedom that I began to enjoy the writing process more than just following rules. The manual went out the window.

DG: You’ve mentioned Pablo Neruda as an influence and in an interview with Mariano Zaro on Poetry.LA, you’ve talked about how Spanish is somehow at the background of your poetic voice. Though you stated, then, that you write only in English, do you, these days, find yourself sometimes contemplating the possibility of composing poems in Spanish—and perhaps doing a whole book?

WA: Lately, I have had so many interactions with poets living in El Salvador, on the page, via readings or translations, that I have thought about writing in Spanish, but it’s still too soon for me. I need to be living in that language 24/7, maybe breathing and eating in El Salvador for me to digest that language. In the meantime, I don’t want to force it. It will come automatically.

DG: Because Neruda has been such a big influence, I wanted to ask if you’ve happened, also, to read him in translation and, if so, what, if anything, changes when you read the original piece alongside the English one?

WA: The first Neruda book I ever owned was a bilingual edition, the Selected Poems edited by Nathaniel Tarn. I always read the Spanish version first because I lost so much of the poem in the English translation. The translations always seemed too standard of an experience compared to what Neruda was offering in the Spanish. Words lose their taste or connotations. I often found myself surprised at the words the translators had chosen or the way they expressed a phrase. I began to doubt my own knowledge. Now I find myself thinking about how I would say it to make the poem come alive.

DG: Have you contemplated translation and how realistic is that you’ll go down this road at some point in your career?

WA: Yes, I have always thought about translating other poets. I never did it because I felt a deep feeling to get my poems out first. Now that I have three books out, I feel like I can start thinking of translating other people’s work. However, so many things must fall in the right place. For example, I must find an author I’m interested in and one I care about. I recently translated one of Vladimir Amaya’s poems in the New England Review. I was solicited for that publication and accepted the offer because I have always been interested in Vladimir’s work, so much that I might continue translating his pieces in the future if everything works out.

DG: Your work is deeply rooted in California and Los Angeles specifically, but it is not here where you received your education. Can you talk about how—or if at all—the change in scenery affected your writing and the MFA at the University of Oregon in general? 

WA: Aside from the academics I earned in the MFA at the U of O, I think writing the bulk of what became my first book in Eugene, Oregon was very important. One reason was because I was away from the streets of Los Angeles and away from my family and immigrant culture. Two, because so much of Eugene was rural. LA is such a city that you must go out to look for nature. Luckily, you can find nature, unlike other major cities. On the other hand, in Eugene, I was able to experience nature on my front porch, all four seasons long, and so much of the nature, the rivers and mountains I experienced, got me one step closer in touch with the rural side of El Salvador, the lakes and volcanoes. In Eugene I was able to find the language to write about the earth and black fields of El Salvador. Linguistically, I think it elevated the diction in my poems to the bucolic nature of a war-torn country. The physicality of a broken country haunts the language in those poems.

DG: Let’s talk about instruction from the other side. How have your teaching activities in high school shaped your writing and what are the challenges and rewards of teaching in general?

WA: My new book S is For is partly an investigation of the Central American migrant crisis haunted by the past of the civil war in El Salvador. The first section is informed by the stories my students, many of them unaccompanied minors, shared with me between the years 2014-2019. Poems like the “Northern Triangle Dissected” and “All Foot & Bone for My Insomnia” are a response to the violence, hunger, illness and threats of physical harm they encountered along their dangerous journey to the US-Mexican border. The impetus for the migration of many of these unaccompanied minors was the lack of resources, such as jobs, better education, housing and health, and the result was always post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. By the time they got to the US, their anxiety and mood disorders were devastating. These were the causes for dropping out of high school and developing mental illness and what not. Now, in the middle of all this, my challenge as a high school instructor was trying to teach these very same students how to write five-paragraph essays, how to present them, how to read critically and how to listen to their peers. However, I also had to wear the hat of a counselor, a therapist, a confidant, or father figure, etc. At the same time, I was struggling with the notion that these asylum seekers were considered less than human by the White House, but in the end, I confirmed what I have always known, what I have always believed, and that is the reward that teaching is an extension of love.

DG: What are the positives and negatives of working in a city like Los Angeles?

WA: Working in Los Angeles has its pros and cons for me. One of the advantages is its thriving literary community and diverse and vibrant culture which adds fuel to my work. Poetry readings pop up all over, from open mics, spoken-word nights, and readings at venues such as Beyond Baroque in Venice and The World Stage in Leimert Park Village. There's a supportive literary community in Los Angeles, including the independent Red Hen Press and organizations like the Los Angeles Poet Society. LA is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the US. The area is home to many enclaves and neighborhoods including Boyle Heights, the Pico-Union and the Westlake area, Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, and Watts. Unfortunately, the city has no focus. It’s all spread out like an amoeba. Plus, the high cost of living and competitive nature of the city poses a lot of challenges. Fortunately, I love the Mediterranean climate with mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers, but sometimes summers can get a bit too hot and dry, creating conditions for wildfires. From my days in Eugene, Oregon during my MFA, I miss the cold weather and sometimes dream about moving to northern California.

DG: In the same interview with Mariano Zaro, you talk about the need to distance yourself from the po-biz, and to write more for yourself. Eleven years have passed, and since that interview you’ve seen increasingly greater amounts of success. On the one hand, it would be sensible to assume that poetic development has made writing poetry easier; on the other hand, it wouldn’t be unnatural to say that technology and visibility have become even more inseparable. How do you feel about the challenges of writing a strong poem today?

WA: Well, writing a strong poem has always been a challenge and I hope it remains that way. Otherwise what’s the point? However, some things have changed over time and got easier when it comes to publishing and generating work, but at the same time other issues arise and make it difficult. For example, the managing of submissions has gotten easier with technology, but there’s also a lot more competition now, especially with the Hollywood focus on young writers. It’s a challenge that pushes me to keep wanting to improve myself. It’s getting harder to stand out in a crowded space. Plus, maintaining a reader’s attention span now is a difficult task in this era of constant scrolling and immediate gratification. Connecting with readers and building a community is an obstacle for me when social media seems to be the medium everyone has agreed on. I don’t do social media, and this makes it difficult for me to reach readers in the old fashion way. Fortunately, I now have more confidence in my work, and I no longer doubt my voice nor the mastering of my craft. So, I’m hoping I can still reach readers through the page.

DG: I’d like to keep with the po-biz theme and talk about the entire trajectory of your career. Having published The Art of Exile in 2009, you’ve released two more books in a span of sixteen years. These are long stretches between publications and run contrary to the approach of more prolific poets. Are you concerned that increasingly rapid advancements in communication, coupled with greater and greater redefinition of the term relevance—by mere proxy of informational bombardment might force you to sacrifice quality for volume in the next ten years?

WA: Yes, I have given it some thought, and I try not to focus my energy on such conundrums. I enjoy writing and I enjoy sharing it with readers who are interested in the themes I’m interested in. If the reader is hungry for the type of poetry I’m interested in, they will search for it. Like you said, I don’t want to sacrifice the quality of my writing for the sake of relevancy. I will write as inspiration comes to my desk. I don’t believe in forcing poems out for the sake of being out there all the time just to make sure I’m relevant. Now having said that, there’s another more significant reason why it’s taken me 16 years to put out two books. I started a little family. My wife and I have twin boys. They are now eleven and they have kept us busy for the last eleven years. It’s a been a beautiful and chaotic journey.

DG: In a 2010 interview with Aaron Michael Morales published in the Notre Dame Review, you stated the following: “Today I know that the U.S., like most other empires, is founded upon genocide. However, if I compare the daily freedom—or should I say the illusion of daily freedom—I have and enjoy here with the lack of freedom and comfort experienced in other countries, which is considered the norm, especially third-world countries, I must say that I’m very fortunate to have come to the U.S. I realized that I’ve allowed this country to shape me into the best of what it can offer, but I also believe that I’m adding shape to this country and I want to offer the best of who I am.” The question Aaron Michael Morales asked to illicit that part of the response was about your perception of the US at the time. Taking the matter to its most logical conclusion, I would hence like to ask if the answer you’d give to that inquiry might be different today?

WA: Yes and no. There once was a time when it was debatable if this country had a racism or classism issue. That argument is very difficult, almost impossible, to defend now.

DG: What are you reading these days and have you already begun thinking about your next collection?

WA: After AWP here in Los Angeles, I picked up a lot of my colleagues’ new books and I’ve been reading those throughout the summer, too many to name here. I’m always reading contemporaries and classic authors. It’s a combination I like to keep for insights into historical contexts and perspectives with present-day conversations.

As far as my next book is concerned, I have a book coming out next year titled Canícula/Dog Days. It is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology. Translated by Mario Zetino, it is an introduction to my work for the Spanish reader.

Author Bio:

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For, a finalist for the California Book Award. He is the author of The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archeology. His new collection, Canícula/Dog Days, is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry. He was awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. His work has appeared The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, among other magazines, and the anthology Latino Poetry: The Library of American Anthology. He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press.