So what we wanted to do now is ask each other some questions
very briefly about the sort of connection
to this question of ecology and art.
And the question for me is simple.
I sort of know the answer to this,
but I thought it would be interesting for the audience
to hear where this book emerged from, sort of the place,
right, because when we're talking about ecology,
we're not talking about the abstract.
We're talking about concrete places, right?
So the question to Lila is, were you
thinking of a specific landscape or place when
you wrote these poems?
Do you know anything about the ecology of the place?
So what is the connection between yourself
and the place that is referenced in the poems?
Well, the place, of course, is a specific place, not
in the first poems, actually.
In the first poems that we read, I
think, I was more talking about the connection of the body,
the body through--
a questioning about how the body connects
with nature in a more abstract way
because I never been to the jungle and I never
seen the monkeys in the jungle.
But it was trying to establish what
was that connection from outside and inside at the same time
because I was trying to get a feeling out
of what is inside the body and seeing the body as completely
surrounded and inter--
how do you say this word?
Interconnected with what it is outside.
But this connection with the cells
of my body and the glandular theory
that I kind of developed in--
what was the word that you use, that it was funny for me
and it's true?
Scientific.
No?
Scientific and sensual.
No, scientific and sensual.
No.
Prepotente, like something like that.
Mm-hmm.
Pedantic?
Eh?
Pedantic?
Oh, because it was--
Solemn?
No, it was not solemn, but--
Soporific?
No, before that word.
Because it's soporific, but you said something else.
I won't remember.
Like when--
Pedantic.
Pedantic, that's the word.
Pedantic.
In the first part of the book, I was trying to--
in that pedantic way, I was trying
to establish a theory of perception
through glands, that and how bodies connect with each other
but not through the mind but through something,
this kind of energy that is between us.
And I kind of was trying to put into words what that energy was
in between people.
But then-- and inside the body.
But then I got immersed in this landscape
that you are mentioning, which is
Shelter Island in Long Island in New York, where I go a lot.
And I spend the whole my summers over there, and I swim a lot.
I swim every day as I walk every day because I'm a person that
cannot be without--
I cannot be without contact with nature.
So when I was swimming during the summer,
I was thinking on this point.
I was not thinking, but I was feeling all this kind
of writing that I was doing.
And I was obsessed completely.
So I don't know like scientifically the landscape.
But it's-- like I have an experience of the landscape.
And I think all my writing comes more
from this connection with what surrounds me
than with knowledge of what maybe pedantic knowledge that I
don't have that is invented.
I like that word because-- you know why?
Because I wrote my dissertation.
And when you write your dissertation,
you have to develop a kind of language
that is you're from here writing from there.
So I was writing from inside, but also from the top
there in that way.
So it was good that you mentioned it.
So I wanted to ask Rosa also concerning her work.
Rosa writes a lot about the relationship between also
bodies and the places that people work and labor.
And she has a poem that is called "Factory," for example.
And she writes about the conditions of bodies during--
the conditions of people working in environments
that they are not so, maybe, healthy, I would say.
So what would you like to say about that?
Well, I mean, one of the things I've been thinking about
is, how is my work connected to this question of ecology
or nature?
And my first response to Lila was,
there's no nature of my poems, meaning that I grew up
in this very urban landscape, and there
was-- the places where the people I knew worked
were very cut off from this idea of nature.
I mean, this is sort of post-industrial revolution
or even post-industrial landscapes.
So there are a lot of images of dye houses,
but also sort of pink collar places like offices
working as temps, and this kind of way
where the body gets cut off from the landscape, right,
becomes sort of put in cubicles, for example,
or has to tend to a machine, and it's
kind of like this rote motion.
And some of my early poems really talked about the--
romanticized this landscape that my parents
came from which-- my father was a field hand, his family was.
And this is-- it's not an idealized landscape
because it's very hard to live off the land
and to work as a field hand.
But within a generation, these people who moved from the South
to the North of Spain to work in factories,
any kind of knowledge of nature, even if it was fraught,
because you couldn't make a living off of the land,
was completely lost.
So with me, I'm very anxious around nature
because part of it is--
well, it's difficult to make a living off of there.
I mean, I sort of sensed that from my family.
But also it's--
I not only feel like I'm losing the language in some way,
losing Spanish, even though I speak it,
but maybe my daughter won't.
I don't know.
That's sort of one of my anxieties.
But also losing, how do you plant something?
How do you grow something?
How do you live off the land?
Now, you're in a factory.
So this feeling of kind of moving away
from it and the anxiety that goes with it, though,
it's probably all of our anxiety of having to deal with,
how does work change?
How does labor change?
And how do we adapt to it?
And how do we adapt to this world that changes constantly
that now everything's technological, for example?
So that's kind of a rambling answer to the question.
So should we be reading--
Sure.
--some of the work?
Absolutely