H. L. Hix: I find myself wanting to treat the lines “like all history / they distort the view / — in this case beautifully” (72) as a haiku-like statement of your poetics. How far off base am I to do so? What is the importance to your poetry of distortion?
Gabriela Jauregui: I think all writing is distortion in the fullest sense of the word: I don’t mean it in the narrow and negative sense of the perverse distortion or misrepresentation of facts (as in the media, say) but rather in the sense of “to turn to one side, or out of the straight position,” (OED) also in the sense of altering the shape of any figure (or reality) without “destroying continuity, as by altering its angles; to represent by an image in which the angles or proportions of parts are altered, as by a convex mirror.” (OED) And poetry does this in particular ways: poetry is full of rhythm, sound/meaning excursions that distort the way we think and use language normally, that give it different value and new angles by which to read/enjoy/decipher it. So I think distortion is essential to poetry. I hope my writing can be a revelatory distortion, like the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors painting.