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interview with

Blas Falconer

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2025 Poetry Contest Judge

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Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me! In 2018, you talked about writing your third collection, Forgive the Body This Failure, toward “a spare poetry,” using the short line and enjambment to create tension and introduce surprising meanings. These modalities are also present in your new collection, Rara Avis, which is full of caesura that underlines emotion and adds mystery to each narrative  that emphasizes the beauty in the turn toward a bowl of fruit or work of art as symbol. Has this ethos changed, grown, evolved over the years? During the creation of this book? 

 

Rara Avis continues, I think, where Forgive the Body This Failure  left off in some ways, stripping down the line in many of the poems. Several of the poems address my father’s struggle with pancreatic cancer during COVID lockdown, and in those, I found myself pushing the line to see how much enjambment could infuse the poem with a sense of anxiety and powerlessness. In other cases, I wanted to counter the spare poems with a discursiveness, allowing the reflection to wander and circle various subjects, the slow dissolution of a friendship over several years, for example. In the poem “Conversion,” which you nod to in your question, I’m hoping that these elements can help to suggest the heightened tension in the transcendent moment – Saul facing the divine, the speaker a bowl of lemons –  how we might feel compelled to both grasp at it and resist it. 

 

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You have been through life changes and experiences between writing this book and your last collection. Rara Avis overflows with narratives, relationships, confrontations, and meditations. What does the day-to-day of assembling such a personal and varied collection look like?

 

I thought a lot about the overall structure of the book. Early on, I used Fatherland as the working title, because I saw that the poems often reflected different relationships, considering questions of authority. But when I sent the handful of poems to David Keplinger, he suggested the title Rara Avis, taken from one of the poems. He recommended that I begin with this poem and end with “The Hummingbird.” I liked the symmetry of this suggestions – the two very different poems about birds opening and closing the book – but I also appreciated how this made me think more broadly about the themes. 

 

The title poem meditates on the mummified kestrels found in an Egyptian tomb. They’d been force fed mice and smaller birds to satisfy their needs before the long journey to the afterlife. The poem ironically describes them as the opposite of wanting or suffering.  Opening the book in this way cast human suffering in a different light for me, not something to run from or avoid, but (as my father might have said growing up) part of life. Hopefully, this frame softened the book’s argument about authority and helped to cast the poems as opportunities for reflection. Regarding how I determined the rest of the order, I aimed for more of an emotional arc than a narrative one. I mean that the poems reflect the speaker processing each subject over the course of the book.  

 

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I can imagine this book being titled Fatherland, but Rara Avis is beautiful and subtle. Your mention of the book’s argument about authority is interesting. “Authority” rings severe in light of the poems' empathy, and there is no shackle to the precision of memory.

 

The word calls to mind divine authority, patriarchy, and the assurance of the voices in conversation. For example, “the friend, who is / somewhat older, says, Yes, / you will be happy but / you will not know it.” This perspective makes me notice some lines (“....the shadows / of those driven out of the garden / fell beside the shadow of anyone / who’d come to stand before them”) as pointing more toward collective experience than I'd first realized.

 

“Providence,” the title of a crucial poem, means both “the protective care of god or of nature as a spiritual power” and “timely preparation for future eventualities.” Images and memories immerse the speaker, who is both a son: one of the eternal human silhouettes striving to make meaning, with always more questions rising, and a father: foreknowing, aware of hidden origin stories, ready to care for the body, and looking for his keys. Alternately as powerful as Mendel might be godlike, but as searching and fallible as anyone else. Am I totally off the mark?

 

No, I think that you’re right here. 

 

I think of the opening poem, the kestrels “bred to brave/ the dark with their king,” as introducing the notion of serving a greater authority and the sacrifices endured for the “paradise” offered. As you note, there are other nods to a cosmic authority. With “On Parting,” you have the description of Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden,” and with “Providence,” where the announcer’s voice might be god’s, no one has the answers. At one time, the father was something of a lesser god, having all the answers, even those that couldn’t be explained (“Because I said so”). In “Providence,” the speaker is questioning that perspective. Here, the father can’t answer his children’s questions. He can’t even find his keys. 

 

In reflection, the poems become a quiet critique. For example, the speaker in “Long Gone” lashes out at the children. The father here has a moment of self awareness, noting the impression that this will have on the boys who will think of him as someone to be feared. In my mind, this behavior suggests something from the speaker’s own history that the children might not ever know. 

 

In the first section of “Figura Serpentinata,” the men feel justified in touching a woman, a stranger, in a sexual manner. Her young son tries to understand the situation, how a man can think that he has the right to do this. The second section suggests, I hope, how pervasive this kind of behavior is. Here, the father and son both misunderstand a voice on the radio for the daughter crying out in danger. When the two recognize the mistake, they laugh, but neither questions how they both jumped to this assumption. The final section examines Giambologna’s “Abduction of the Sabine,” in which the violence is made beautiful. It ends with the voice of an art critic: “you must engage the sculpture in 360 degrees / to see the drama unfold,” and when it was unveiled in 1582, “not one / person could find fault with it.” This is meant ironically, of course, asking us to look at other examples of abuse more carefully, to find fault in them. 

 

Regarding this theme of authority, I see it again in the poem “Kindness.” Even the judge who believes that the gay speaker has the right to marry will not challenge the authority if it means sacrifice on her part. 

 

As I continue, I wonder, maybe authority isn’t the right word. I’m thinking of someone who exerts power over someone else. Some poems (i.e., “Forgiven”) address the hold that lovers might have on one another, even after the relationship has ended, even after the beloved has died. Poems question and critique power dynamics that people of color (“Fatherland”) and members of the queer community (“Reconciliation” and “Kindness”) are often subjected to daily. One poem (“Conversion”) suggests a suspicion of the command that poetic inspiration might have on the poet. 

 

I should probably qualify all this by saying that these poems emerged because I became fascinated by a memory or an image or a sound or some other detail, and I just started writing. Only later did I note these themes underneath.  

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You mentioned “Figura Serpentinata,” which references the artistic technique of Giambologna (an Italian Renaissance sculptor) as well as the form of the poem  a narrow plait of three memories. Meanwhile, the spare poems “Pancreas,” “Legacy,” and “Heredity” use the white space of dropped (chiseled away) lines to suggest different placements in time and visually support the idea of fragmented pieces and parts. How did these develop?

 

In each of these poems, the form revealed itself over time, sometimes several months. 

 

With “Pancreas” and “Legacy,” as I touched on earlier, I was pushing the line break as much as I could, and I loved the way that this stepped stanza allowed me to reflect the unnerved speaker, fractured because of what he’s facing. 

 

“Figura Serpentinata” took years to write. I wrote the first section ages ago, and the other two sections came slowly, but when they did, they spoke, in my mind at least, to the formal sculptural theory, this gravity defying spiral, where the parts don’t look like they should balance out, and yet they do. The three sections allude to the thematic connection among them without speaking directly to the subject. Here, the figure I’m hoping to build through these three sections is an argument about the treatment of women. 

 

“Heredity” is actually a loose pantoum, braiding Mendel’s theories of genetics with the son’s questions about his mysterious biological father. I think that because so little is known about the father, circling back again and again to what was known – the son's biological traits and the father of genetics – worked well. â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹

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Blas Falconer is the author of Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024); Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018); The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012); A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007); and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship. Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an MFA from the University of Maryland (1997) and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston (2002). He lives in Los Angeles with his family and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. www.blasfalconer.com

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Interviewer: Marina Kraiskaya

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