THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP: An Interview with Xavier Cavazos
Joey Rooney: The Devil’s Workshop is your third award-winning poetry collection (you published a full-length collection, Diamond Grove Slave Tree, in 2015 and a chapbook, Barbarian at the Gate, in 2014). In writing, compiling, and arranging the poems in this collection, what fresh discoveries have you made about your poetry or about poetry in general? What has this collection taught you about yourself as a poet that you didn’t already know?
Xavier Cavazos: A lot of Barbarian at the Gate went into The Devil’s Workshop, which is a very intimate journey of my life. Diamond Grove Slave Tree was a study of what I felt was missing from George Washington Carver’s life story that was not present in Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems. I was a graduate student at Iowa State University and that is where Carver went to school, so a lot of the poems in the book are about his experiences in Ames, Iowa and Iowa State. The collection was very heavy on the research side. The Devil’s Workshop was born from a different kind of research, experiential as they say. I learned that I could go deep into taboo, faith, and ceremony. That poetry can open those doors.
JR: Many of the poems in this collection contain a sense of geography, of movement within a space. For example, the very first poem, “I was cleaning The Top of the ceiling,” begins with the speaker oriented—where else?—toward the ceiling but ends with a woman’s face against the floor. The movement here is from top to bottom: as above, so below. What does such a sense of movement achieve within a poem, and in what ways does the geography or spatial dimensionality of a poem complement, complicate, or otherwise interface with the poem’s form?
XC: Helen Vendler states, “One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.”
JR: Your poems are bursting with punctuation, symbols, and signs. Dashes, slashes, ampersands, arrows, hyphenated text, and periods (which readers often take for granted!) abound. How do you decide when to utilize these textual tools? Is length management of lines a major factor in your decision-making?
XC: Vendler also states, “Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.”
JR: Throughout these poems, you employ enjambment consistently and liberally, though with some key exceptions. For example, in the poem “El Bloqueo America’s Bill / La cuenta de América,” written entirely in Spanish (save for part of the title), every line is its own sentence. Does the switch to Spanish underlie this departure? And how does this departure, and the presence or non-presence of enjambment in general, influence your abiding attention to word play and sonic repetition (if it does!)?
XC: Sonically, I wanted the poem to be an urgent command. So, anaphora was the perfect rhetorical figure to build the pattern of the poem. The poem was originally written as a response to a Jackson Browne statement that the “US embargo only hurts Americans,” which is a typical statement by Americans who go to Cuba and romanticize the country. The embargo suffocates all Cubans living in Cuba. Cubans pay the highest price in the daily suffering of basic human needs. Americans are treated like Gods there. The poem sets the record straight and is a punch to America.
JR: Two series of poems run through the collection: the “Harrowing of Hell” series and “The Devil’s Workshop” series (with offshoots). How and why did you come to structure this collection around these equal but (in some ways) opposite “spines”? And what was the thought process behind ending the collection with a poem from the “Workshop” series? Why give “Workshop” the final word over “Harrowing,” especially when the latter series concludes with the successful exorcism of the speaker’s spirit of addiction?
XC: The “Workshop” series is about the horrors and depths the human experience will dive to cover the wound. The addiction and behavior of the speaker are only the symptoms of the original trauma, which was the speaker being abused by their family relative. So, I ended it with the image of abuse, which again, was all the cause of the demonic behavior and shame.
JR: You are a grand slam champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City and were a member of three national poetry slam teams. In what ways does the live performance of poetry in slam settings affect (or effect) the meaning of poetry or make the poetry come alive? How do audience engagement and the thrill of competition shape a poem?
XC: Well, I was a slammer in the early ’90s, back before slam had a distinct pattern of voice and body gesturing, which I find deeply problematic for originality. My cohort of poetry slammers were poets like Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, Willie Perdomo, Paul Beatty, Maggie Estep, Todd Colby, Crystal Williams, Ava Chin, Joel Dias-Porter, and many more. The NuYoRican Poets Café brought this eclectic group together. Every Friday night most of us would workshop our poems at A Gathering of the Tribes founder and novelist Steve Cannon’s house and then perform the poems later that night at the café. It was all about craft and finding our voices by watching and learning from each other. It was a magical time before slam knew what it was or before slam had an aesthetic.
JR: In your work as a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, what do you find exciting, challenging, or inspirational?
XC: Being inspired and pushed by a great team of editors and poets. Also, the “Presenting” series I edit is a thrill for me. I have the honor of reading hundreds of submissions and deciding on a poem that I feel is new and fresh and alive by a poet who has not yet been published in a national journal. It’s like discovering a pretty rock on a hike. The challenge is to keep up with all the brilliant writers we have on our team!
Joey Rooney is an editorial assistant at the CSU Poetry Center. He is a writer primarily of fiction, but also of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a second-year candidate in the NEOMFA Program. Born and raised on the west side of Cleveland, he received his MA in English from Case Western Reserve University and his MA in Theology and Religious Studies from John Carroll University.
Xavier Cavazos is the author of The Devil’s Workshop (CSU Poetry Center, 2023). He is a performance artist, grand slam champion of the NuYoRican Poets Cafe, and member of three national poetry slam teams. His previous collections are Barbarian at the Gate (PSA) and Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press). Cavazos is a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, directs the Liberal Studies Program at Central Washington University, and serves on the board of trustees for Humanities Washington.