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Juana Adcock is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland. She is the author of Manca (Tierra Adentro), Vestigial (Stewed Rhubarb), a suite of poems responding to the work of Alasdair Gray, and Split (Blue Diode), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was included in The Guardi- an’s Best Poetry of 2019. She is co-editor of the anthology of poetry by Latin American women Temporary Archives (Arc Publications), and is currently translating the Mè’phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa’s The Dogs Dreamt (Flipped Eye, forthcoming), Laura Wittner’s Translation of the Route (Poetry Transla- tion Centre, forthcoming) and Lola Ancira’s The Sadness of Shadows (MTO Press, forthcoming 2024). She spoke to editor Patrick Romero McCafferty ahead of the publication of her latest collection, I Sugar the Bones, out with Outspoken Press in November.
Patrick Romero McCafferty: I Sugar the Bones is your third full collection. Kaleidoscopically-formed, vociferous, and set mostly in Scotland, it speaks about the loneliness of consumerism, about commodity journeys, and the human structures that carve up the physical world: borders, industrial riverbanks, trade networks, to name a few. The places and materials it considers belong to the borderlands of late capitalism: brutal zones without doubt but also places of boundless interconnection and a spare, feral joy at times. Can you tell me a bit about how the collection came to be?
Juana Adcock: As with my previous collections, it was quite an organic process. The starting point was a visit I made to the border between Tijuana and San Diego. I noticed the heavily secured border wall and the absurdity of the structures becoming weaker and more feeble as they petered out into the sea. Despite the armouring, the border seemed a very porous site, with an economy built around controlling the flow of movement of people and goods, while the radio waves travel across the border regardless. This really grabbed me, as well as the way English and Spanish are interwoven in the local Caló language. I am quite a maximalist when it comes to subject matter, because I enjoy how interconnected everything is. Writing becomes a process of unknotting a string: you can start anywhere and reach the same conclusions.
PRM: ‘While still very young, she had attended a specialised voice-over school that taught her how to make her voice more palatable to a wider Latin American audience’ The collection pivots dextrously from voice to voice with poems often containing voices within voices. To me, your work is constantly negotiating and reflecting on the politics of register, across languages, discursive contexts, and within the poetic address itself. Is this something you were thinking about when you were writing the collection?
JA: My work as a translator means that I am constantly obsessing over register and the way the underlying political agenda or belief is reflected in the words chosen. When translating a piece, I feel like I am dismantling an artifact and seeing all the mechanisms at play. In my poetry, I fully exercise my freedom of movement between registers, because I love exploring the range of possi- bilities, and the contrasts between them as a way to question what is usually taken for granted.
PRM: In ‘The Problem Is Do I Believe My Own Fictions’ the self-enquiry of psychotherapy deteriorates into a jokey shoulder shrug, laughing at the impossibility of separating belief from reality: All I know is that there is a mechanism, liable to be hacked. Everything needs to be hacked these days A lot of the poems in the collection consider the question of what it means to believe. To what extent was writing the collection a process of exposing/confirming/dispelling beliefs? What role does humour have in making such fundamen- tal subject matter into a poem?
JA: So much of what is fed to us via the algorithm is about making us doubt our intuition, reshaping and “dispelling” so-called erroneous beliefs, and making it difficult somehow to sift any real knowledge out of the ruins of data and “information”. From clickbaity headlines like “8 reasons why you’ve been doing it wrong and how to fix it”, to full on media lobbying campaigns from powerful entities trying to gaslight whole swathes of the population into believing that asking for a ceasefire is violent, or that asking for environmental protection is terrorism. In such a space, writing becomes a place of introspectional resistance, where I can look at what these forms of discourse do to my psyche, and wonder about what the effects are to humans as a whole. In writing a collection, I want to expose and peel back the layers of noise cluttering the space where this kind of clarity can arise. In that sense, words can be transformed, from weapons of mass control, into magic spells or formulations, nets with which to catch the truth. Humour is the highest form of wisdom, because it takes a pattern of occurrences and digests it into very synthesized and direct kind of insight, where grasping the truth becomes possible (and not in the sense of gripping!). It is a form of communicating truth in a way that is easily received. I aspire the wisdom of the sacred joke—who knows if I will ever achieve that in my lifetime. But humour is also a very valid coping mechanism and a form of resilience when it comes to facing devastation.
PRM: In ‘This is not a Metaphor’, an essay you wrote on translation for POETRY, you quote Rafael Perez-Torres: ‘[poets are] coyotes, moving people and goods back and forth across aesthetic and cultural as well as geopolitical borders.’ This feels particularly apt of Split to me because of its bilingual fluidity among other things. Do you still hold this to be true? If so, what goods do you think I Sugar the Bones is trafficking and to what end?
JA: Yes, to me this collection is about the “smuggling” of additional meanings, whether it is via the dubbing of a popular American cartoon into Spanish, or via the crossing of border walls, checkpoints, rivers, the veil between life and death, or romantic (mis-)encounters and mutual incomprehensions between two people. That’s why the river is an element that repeats throughout the collection, I was thinking of the things that are carried across (which is also the meaning of the verb “to translate”), and the things that are lost, as well as the way rivers (metaphorical or real) are shaped by human activity. Perhaps the main difference for me is that I Sugar the Bones is more firmly placed in the landscapes of Scotland and the UK, while continuing to direct its gaze to the US-Mexico border.
PRM: Speakers in your poems frequently express interest, fascination, boredom. Poems such as ‘Sugarbuilt’ and ‘Hogweed’ can only be the result of research: how far is your practise driven by intellectual curiosity/an appetite for knowledge on subjects as eclectic as these?
JA: My favourite stage of the writing process is research, and I always have to stop myself from going down another rabbit hole. Taking a topic that interests me, researching extensively and then finding a small nugget that I can use for a poem is extremely satisfying (though perhaps not the most time-efficient!). But I don’t see the subjects as that disparate: much like the rhododendron, the giant hogweed was brought to the UK from Eurasia by the Victorians as an ornamental plant, which then became an invasive species, very difficult to eradicate and with huge damage to native ecosystems. A colonial approach to collecting interesting botanical species from around the world in order to plant in gardens-as-museums or aristocratic shooting estates, has very tangible present-day results in terms of environmental destruction, which cannot be seen as separate to other processes that happened at roughly the time such as the Highland Clearances, which cannot be seen as separate from the brutally rapid industrialisation (and then de-industrialisation) of Glasgow, which cannot be seen as separate from slavery-driven capitalist production, which cannot be seen as separate from present-day climate change and neocolonial structures of power. It is all connected to the same colonial-patriarchal-imperialist project. How to translate all of that into poetry, though? This collection is at least one small attempt.
PRM: In conversation with Raina J Leon for Curated Conversations, you say ‘poetry is music’. As I read some of the longer poems in the collection I want to connect this idea with duration in your work, not just because of the way they make use of the musicality of language but because of the passage through movements and dynamic shifts they make: a kind of vociferous, at times mantric, sostenuto.
Firstly, is writing a poem like ‘In A Way The Clyde Is’, for example, anything like jamming, or composing a piece of music, for you?
Secondly, is the voice an instrument if one is writing for the page, in your opinion?
JA: Music is my first love and anything else I do is just an approximation to the happiness I get when playing in a band. I would like to compose music, but not knowing how to write for orchestra, I resort to writing poetry. I like the idea of musical movements and dynamic shifts in a collection of poetry, and I also like the idea of a poetry collection as a prog rock concept album. When it comes to joining various threads of research (like in “In A Way The Clyde Is”, which happened when a podcast on witch hunts in Scotland gave me the key to what I was researching in terms of the transformation of the Clyde from a shallow tidal river full of populated islands (or “inch” in Gaelic), to the deep, dark ex-industrial thing it is today), how do you bring together such disparate elements? It has to begin with jamming, or ‘playing’, with a lightness and non-seriousness first, before allowing the texts to find the shape that they want to be in. In terms of voice, I like the idea of layering meanings and voices (polyphony) and creating counterpoint and contrast, like in the Latin American tradition of baroque poetry.
PRM: In another essay published in POETRY, you call translation a kind of conversation, unlike the solitary act of writing. Although many of the poems in I Sugar the Bones take a sustained look at solitude, the register and address of the collection (as well as your poetry in general) are quite conversational. Where do you position your reader when you’re writing?
JA: I have to write first for myself, for my own pleasure, intellectual indulgence, spiritual play, and even for emotional regulation – things start getting out of whack if I don’t write. The reader can only come in later, when I am assem- bling a manuscript for publication. That’s when I attempt viewing the whole thing as if outside of myself, the collection like a room that the reader is en- tering for the first time. Does it make sense? Is it intriguing? Does it make you want to find out more? Does it say anything you don’t know already? Going about it the other way around has never worked for me.
PRM: Has your perspective changed on the links between English and Spanish and translating since Split?
JA: The more years I spend translating and continuing to develop my sensi- bility as a translator, the more attention I pay to register, the longer my poems get, the more intricate the narratives and layerings become, and the more voices seem to want to claim their own space, veering dangerously towards fiction. And this happens because translating is essentially rewriting the voice of another in a different language. In recent times, I have started to notice a small amount of resentment at the fact that I must prioritise these other authors’ voices above my own, as if if were a kind of literary co-dependency: throughout my career I have devoted about 90% of my productive time to translating, and only 10% of it to writing for publication. But most of my recognition has come from my writing. Does that mean I need to invert the ratio? Would that make me a more prolific author? No way to know unless I try! But I wouldn’t change the way I have travelled so far.
PRM: The humorous and horrific faces of absurdity figure significantly in the collection’s imagery: to what extent do you find the absurd helpful when ex- ploring selfhood, womanhood and community within late capitalism? Further, though it doesn’t deal with the narcostate to the extent that Manca and Split do, do you think the absurd elements of your imagery build on the ways in which you portray extreme violence in Split and Manca in any way — I’m thinking about Sayak Valencia’s ‘Gore Capitalism’ and the failure of quantitive analyses in relaying the extremes of collective trauma, state violence etc.
JA: Some realities are so extreme, and they shake our belief systems to such an extent, that the mind baulks. Sometimes the mind cannot be open to cer- tain things if it is not through the means of humour. I agree that quantitative analyses often do not help communicate the extent of unthinkable horrors. We like to think of ourselves as thinking, rational creatures, but in reality we are deeply emotional and the thinking part comes mostly only after the fact, sometimes years or even centuries later. Then there is also the effect of inter- group empathy bias: we find it easier to feel empathy for people we know, or who we see as similar or close to us, than for people who seem different or far away. Numbers definitely do not communicate the horrors. We see that with Mexico’s war on drugs, and we see that with the war on Gaza: the number of children and adults killed is growing day by day, and instead of moving into action, there comes a point where the mind wants to switch off and become numb. It is then the task of poetry to re-sensitivise us and create empathy. Some poems have the power to change the world, to catalize entire move- ments. If it weren’t the case, then autocracies would not go around assas- sinating and imprisoning poets in different parts of the world throughout history. Although in this collection I deal less with gore and more with struc- tural violence and the legacy of colonialism (with a sprinkle of toxic relation- ship dynamics on top), all these various forms of violence deserve thought and attention. I don’t think I’ll get assassinated any time soon, though.
PRM: The collection contains some of your most exciting titles (You Were A Manchild Trapped In The Body Of An Old Kitchen Cabinet’ and ‘Springfield, Mexico. A Fan Fiction In The Voice Of Lisa Simpson’). There are short ones too, of course. I’ve wanted to ask how you settle on a title for a long time — also, what do you like seeing in the relationship between title and poem in your own reading?
JA: I like titles that are almost like mini-poems or that function as preludes to the poem itself. I found that often in poetry readings we preface the poem by telling a story or saying “this poem is about…”. But for this to really work, you have to say something intriguing and unexpected, rather than explain the poem away before you’ve given it a chance to do its job, much in the way that you can’t explain a joke without killing the laughter. Utilising the title as a way to reclaim underused space, like the space in the margins, and as a chance to add more layering in terms of meaning and interrogation, is a very playful approach that I enjoy a lot. Basically, if it feels like a waste not to, then I must!
PRM: The collection is due to be published in November. What is on the horizon for you now?
JA: I have written a collection in Spanish that delves deeply into a much more personal, intimate space, which is the experience of chronic pain – a topic I find extremely difficult to talk about, because it so easily descends into basic pity. Again I have had to make use of playful, humorous methods. This col- lection is currently on a pilgrimage around Mexico in search of its new home. And I want to make a return to fiction – since my polyphonic poems are trying to spread out, maybe I need to just let them. This season will hopefully see me translating a little less and writing a whole lot more.