Episode 137 with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal: Gifted Wordsmith, Crafter of Unique and Beautiful Language, and Creator of a Stunning and Memorable Visceral Experience through her Beast Meridian

Episode 137 Notes and Links to Vanessa Angélica Villarreal ’s Work 

 

   On Episode 137 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and the two discuss, among other topics, Vanessa’s upbringing, her bond with her beloved grandmother, religion and indigenous traditions in her family and in her communities, punishing and overbearing institutions that oppressed her as a student, finding solace in books and poetry and bands, and ideas both historical and personal that inform her standout poetry collection.

   Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Buy Beast Meridian

 

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Website

 

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Wikipedia Page

 

Review of Beast Meridian for Pleiades Magazine

 

At about 2:35, Vanessa talks about beginning to read at a young age, and how her dad’s music compelled her to read liner notes and still informs her writing

 

At about 3:30, Vanessa talks about childhood bilingualism and some early writing based on the loss of her beloved grandmother 

 

At about 4:40, Vanessa describes the resultant grief and rebellion after her grandmother’s death, as well as how her mistreatment in school led her to be part of a backwards educational/carceral experience

 

At about 7:35, Vanessa discusses grunge and other 90s music-”angsty” and “against the Man”-and how they led her on a path to poetry

 

At about 8:30, Vanessa describes Paul Celan as an inspiration for critiquing language in rebellious and “seek the haunted”

 

At about 9:35, Vanessa talks about how her poetry career took a pause as she began to work long hours at an early age

 

At about 11:20, Pete cites the famous quote about “art being a luxury” and Angelica adds that she considers it a birthright”

 

At about 12:30, Pete and Vanessa fanboy and girl about the previously-mentioned musicians, and Vanessa cites these creatives as “Romantics” and writers of beautiful and “strange” lyrics

 

At about 15:00, Vanessa responds to Pete’s questions about where her musical/lyrical sensibilities were born, and she expands on ideas of repetition and prayer derived from her father

 

At about 16:50, Vanessa speaks of “writing toward the body” in a lot of her work, “creating an understanding of the body”; she compares this writing to a chord change

 

At about 18:20, Vanessa highlights her father as “an intuitive composer” and his facility with sound and writing

 

At about 21:20, Vanessa discusses inspirational and formative writers in her writing journey, including Celan, Aase Berg, Harmony Holliday, Ronaldo Wilson & Duriel Harris & Dawn Lundy Martin (The Black Took Collective), and Jennifer Tamayo

 

At about 25:10, Vanessa discusses the implications and subtleties of nomenclature around Chicanx/Latinx/Mexican-American identities 

 

At about 26:30, Pete asks Vanessa about the implications of the term pocha and Malinche and ideas of women as traitors is discussed 

 

At about 30:15, Vanessa gives background on the famous quote by José Vasconselos 

 

At about 33:10, The two begin discussing Beast Meridian; Pete compliments Vanessa’s original use of verbs

 

At about 34:40, Pete’s question about the poet as speaker leads Vanessa to discuss background for the poetry collection and the ways in which she approached the pages and with what questions in mind

 

At about 38:15, Vanessa discusses implications of her epigraphs, including ideas put forth by Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldua’s ideas of Nepantla 

 

At about 41:35, Vanessa cites Christopher Soto’s work discussing implications for Nepantla

 

At about 42:40, Pete references the collection’s first poem

 

At about 43:40, Vanessa reads the poem “Angélica: An Elegy” and describes the importance of the poem ending with a colon (:)

 

At about 45:40, The two discuss ideas of Malinche and her contemporary reimagining and Malinche’s connections to a poem in the collection

 

At about 47:00, Vanessa cites femicides in Tijuana and among indigenous women and “Irish Murder Ballads” as stimulus for her collection

 

At about 50:15, Vanessa and Pete discuss the myriad meanings of her connected “assimilation poems”: connections to Malinche, inversion, Spanglish, the use of footnotes, comparisons of “Girl” by Kincaid, strong metaphors, etc.   

 

At about 53:20, Vanessa gives her definition of “assimilation” and speaks of ideas of identity/agency

 

At about 57:40, Pete points out beautiful and memorable lines from Vanessa’s work, especially regarding the ideas connected to “parallax”

 

At about 1:00:20, Vanessa remarks that “100% on her mind” was generational trauma and ideas of ancestral memory as she wrote the collection

 

At about 1:02:20, Pete wonders about the animals and mythology used in Part II and how they relate to real people in Vanessa’s life

 

At about 1:05:40, The two discuss the salient theme of loss in the collection, with a special emphasis on “Dissociative States”

 

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   Please tune in for Episode 138 with Miguel Valerio. Prof. Valerio earned his PhD from The Ohio State University. His research and teaching focus on the African diaspora in the literature and culture of the Iberian world from the late medieval period to the present. His dissertation focused on black cultural agency vis-à-vis religious confraternities and public festivals in the early modern Iberian Atlantic, particularly colonial Mexico City and Bahia, Brazil. His work has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, and the edited volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas. He is currently completing his first book, The Black Kings and Queens of Colonial Mexico City: Identity, Performance, and Power, 1539-1640.

The episode will air on August 19.