Meet the Poets: Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli

Roberto talks to us about quotidian objects in poetry, birdwatching, photographs and his writing process

What can you tell us about these poems?

I am not entirely sure where or when I first heard the expression “spark bird”, but I recall immediately thinking that there was a lot of poetry potential in those two words, so I went on to do some further research. One of the documents I came across was this blog (mentioned in the poem) where birders shared their “spark bird experience”. The first few entries were, coincidentally, all by male birdwatchers. In fact, the first entry I read contained almost the same line as the first line of the poem: “It was a male dancing on the dunes of Ocean City, New Jersey”. That got me started. The more I was digging into the stories of those birdwatchers and their first “bird-crushes”, the more I could draw a parallel to our experience as gay people in terms of sexual discovery and education, both as young boys and adults. Differently from straight people, we are not taught how sex should work, how relationships should work, or what rules apply in the context of our intimacies. We need to go out there and find out for ourselves. In that, we approach desire and longing unchecked, unsupervised. We step into the woods at dusk, whether metaphorical or otherwise. And the poem attempts to explore that.

Harvest Scenery… really kicked off after listening to an episode of the insightful, funny, outrageous and joyously queer poetry podcast that is Breaking Form. That's when I was introduced to Essex Hemphill's work, specifically the poem Commitments. Commitments dwells on family dynamics in relation to queer identity by describing family gatherings so rich with home-made food as they are with unfulfilled expectations. The settings reminded me of my own family gatherings as a child, and especially of the years as a teenager when I would go and visit my best friend’s vineyard and help with the harvest of grapes, after which a glorious lunch would follow, attended by family members of all ages. There is a verse in Commitments that stuck out for me:

In the photos
the smallest children
are held by their parents.
My arms are empty

It is a very simple and brutal thought I had had myself many times growing up. It made me think of a similar verse I wrote years ago in a poem that was trying to reflect on those days of harvest, unsuccessfully. Hemphill’s poem really gave me an entry point to dig deeper into the subject. That is also why the shape of the poem flirts with Hemphill’s, and some details are borrowed, such as hinting at the speaker's arms and at the presence of a specific photograph. In Commitments, the photographs are mainly used as a premise to allow the speaker to expand on his experience, while, in mine, I wanted the family photograph to work as some sort of volta so that the reader for the majority of the poem is made to believe that they are shown the actual scenery through the eyes of the speaker, in real time, but, in fact, they are witnessing what the speaker is reminiscing; a take on reality. The space that we cannot see in the photograph is to me a place of admission in which the speaker struggles between a sense of affection (I really hope that affection comes through!) and a new understanding of specific physical objects, such as the white vests, the gold chains or the Tupperware. What I like about this poem, when I re-read it, is that I am left with a feeling that the speaker hasn't made up his mind yet. He is still out there looking at what is not in the photograph. Gathering evidence.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I have been reading an unhealthy amount of Carl Phillips (is there such a thing?) in the last few months. I wasn’t aware of his work, and now I am completely in love with the way his poems move on the page. Also, it really interests me the way in which he observes queer relationships and loneliness. Some of my favourites are Neon or Blizzard from Silverchest and Surfers from his latest collection Scattered snows, to the north.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I usually write during my morning jog. Okay, that doesn't make much sense. Let me articulate this thought. I go for long morning runs every day (about two hours), and that is the time in which I churn all that I have been in conversation with into a poem, if the poem is willing to manifest itself. All drafts, first and subsequent, are composed this way: I repeat to myself every line of the poem as I do my laps in the park or along the Southbank, thinking of changes in language, form and possible line breaks. By the time I am home, I have the poem (or the draft of a poem) learnt by heart. Only then do I proceed to type it on my laptop. I allow myself minor edits sitting at the kitchen table, but the big decisions are made during the run.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Years ago, for a whole winter, I wanted to write like Frank O’Hara, then spring came and I wanted to write like August Kleinzahler! That’s the beauty of finding one's own voice: slowly you understand you can only have your own. I am grateful for the poems that deeply impacted me on my journey as a poet. I don’t wish to have written any of them: they would be different poems if I had done! I am glad there was someone else writing them for me so that I could find them, savour them and study them. I can only wish that, one day, a poem of mine will be as useful and inspiring for another individual as those have been for me.

Five poems that have stayed with me:

Matthew Dickman’s Grief because a poet that has the imaginative genius to start a poem by saying “When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky” should have a national day where people read and discuss his work and his work only.

Kaveh Akbar's Reza's restaurant, Chicago 1997. A moving piece that deals with race, identity and migration through the eyes of a son looking at his father. I love poems with a restaurant setting.

Allen Ginsberg’s A supermarket in California, which taught me I had queer ancestors living and breathing in poetry books when I thought I was alone.

Philip Levine's The Mercy, the first poem I cried to. Not the last.

Jack Underwood’s Your Horse, which I read and re-read wide eyed, unaware that such things could be done in a poem.

What’s your first poetry memory?

I remember being given my grandfather’s WWII journal from the time he had been detained by the Nazis and brought to Poland, I believe, after Italy signed the Armistice with the Allies. Possibly not the fittest read for a twelve-year-old, but I recall being strongly affected by it in a positive way. So much so that during a test in school, I drifted off and started writing about it. At the end of the test, I showed whatever I had written to my teacher and she looked at me and said: “This is a poem” to which I replied “Where can I find others?”.

What’s on your bedside table? Books, etc?

There is a lot of random shit, things I have got on different trips, notes, pictures. It looks more like an altar of some sort. But there are also books somewhere, I promise.

At the moment, I keep a copy of each of the latest issues of Poetry London, fourteen poems and Poetry, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, Carl Phillips’ Then the War and a Selected Poems by John Ashberry a dear friend got me for my birthday.