What Do You See in the Clouds?: Aída Esmeralda Interviews Christopher Soto
Christopher Soto (b. 1991) is a poet based in Los Angeles, California. His debut poetry collection, Diaries of a Terrorist, was published by Copper Canyon Press. This collection demands the abolition of policing and human caging. He was honored with Them’s 2022 Now Award in Literature for representing the cutting edge of queer culture.
Diaries of a Terrorist is available for purchase here.
From Poetry Editor Aída Esmeralda: Diaries of a Terrorist is a collection roaring with the voices of collective resistance—of beloveds, elders, kin, neighbors, people lost to police violence, and strangers all rioting together as antagonists against state and gendered violence. This collection honors the lives of global figures, family members, detained youth, and village women to demand readers ponder their role in relation to borders, binaries, and human cages. In these poems full of grief, punk-rage, and wonder, Soto’s attention to language provides clarity and fluidity. Diaries of a Terrorist is an emotive, insightful, and critical read that offers an uncompromising radical queer pleasure, tenderness, and memory. In this interview, we discuss Soto’s thoughts on craft, the essence of poetry, and their admiration for the visual arts.
This interview was conducted over email in October 2022.
AE: Christopher, before I even opened your book, I was moved by the cover. It depicts an androgynous Latinx person in bright textiles, looking over some kind of brutalist concrete wall and seemingly about to climb over. To me this image immediately made me think about the role of Queerness in your work, and in our communities at large. Can you say a little about how Queerness is critical to Diaries of a Terrorist?
Christopher Soto: To be queer is inherently to be a threat to the police state. It is an identity of opposition or subversion or outsiderness, which refuses to be assimilated into white supremacist and homonationalist ideologies. This year, I have been thinking about the life of Nancy Valverde, a queer Latinx who was born in 1932 and has spent most of her years in Los Angeles. She is still alive today. Since the age of 17, Nancy Valverde was getting arrested by the police for breaking gender laws. She was butch. She described how other gay people wouldn’t want to affiliate with her in public because she was not straight passing. This uncompromising ethos is what my work strives towards.
AE: The cover also depicts clouds, a motif that I saw kept recurring throughout the collection. You open with a quote by Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Not a man, but a cloud in trousers.” In “Orgies for the Elderly,” we are told “each cloud dreamt of solid form.” There is a poem titled “When the Clouds Caught Smokers Cough.” Clouds come up in different poems, either above the speakers, or personified and whispering, teaching, dreaming, desiring. In many parts of the world, clouds are often related to dreams, to respite. We could also say clouds are malleable, fluid, and can’t be contained. Can you speak to these clouds?
CS: We were just talking about queerness and so now I’m thinking about the phrase “blowing clouds” and how queers will say it, referring to smoking meth, on hook up apps like grindr. I don’t blow clouds. But yes, the image of clouds does appear in different contexts and with different meanings throughout my book. I feel very fond of clouds because they are so soft and distant and everywhere and malleable and they evoke so many different images and emotions. We can see whatever we want in clouds. We project our meaning into the clouds, as if looking into heaven to see our struggles or dreams. In the Frank Ocean song “Solo” he refers to “a bull and a matador dueling in the sky,” which evokes the image of clouds and (for me) the red-orange hues of sunset. And it is that feeling, of looking towards the sky and saying to a friend, “what do you see?” that feels like the essence of poetry to me.
For this reason, I also adore planes. What magic it is, to be able to sit silently amongst a group of strangers, above the borders of the nation state, within the clouds. Some people slip into the dream world and nap, other people slip into the dreams of movies or books while en route to a home, a loved one, an adventure, something that necessitates their leaving the ground. Planes are a vehicle for eros.
AE: The collection is of course titled Diaries of a Terrorist and the poem “The Terrorist Shaved His Beard” ruminates on the etymological, social, linguistic, and even geological potentials to understand terrorism. In this book, the collective is not ambiguous in their desire to be traitors and violent resistors to the surveillance state, to gender, to censorship and forced erasure. What does it feel like to write a book that reclaims the label of terrorist as a queer, Salvadoran writer and organizer? How is this book particularly significant to Salvadoran people now?
CS: In El Salvador the word “terrorist” is used to refer to gang members, which are currently being hunted down and incarcerated without due process in the country. When I was writing the book, I was not thinking about this contemporary Salvadoran usage of the word “terrorist.” I was more so thinking about the contrast in emotions between the intimacies of “diaries” and the fear of “terrorists.” I use various forms of juxtaposition in my work, which make assumed incongruities appear in conversation. As years passed, working on the poetry book, I began to realize how I was also entering a conversation about terrorism held by other queer Black and Brown artists in Los Angeles for decades. For example, Joey Terrill has a zine called “Homeboy Beautiful: East LA Terrorism” and Patrisse Cullors wrote a book called When They Call You a Terrorist.
AE: Your poems engage with a lot of references to queer and radical artists whose work also comment on the disposal of life at the hands of the police state and the problems with the portrayal of this violence. I felt that your poem “Police Shot a Field of Daisies” after rafa esparza’s “Red Summer” is gesturing towards this observation. Can you talk a little about how you engaged with this artwork?
CS: After hearing a recording on the performance “Red Summer” by rafa esparza, I realized we were talking about police violence in California at the same time. I like to view my work as part of a chorus that resists police violence, and not as an artifact created by a singular individual. This is why the book uses the “we” pronoun throughout. This is also why I wanted to reference rafa’s work and so many other artists that I admire.
AE: In our initial email exchange you mentioned that you really wanted to talk about craft and anti-craft, about what you described as the tightness of the language in the poems. As I was reading, I was drawn to the balance of how expansive some of the language choices were, but also to the sharpness and precision of clarity in other instances. A place where I felt both happened simultaneously was in the semantic breakdown of “Nothing’s changed” to “Not // Him // Chained” and eventually to “No // Hymns” in your poem called, “The Children in Their Little Bulletproof Vests.” Can you describe your relation to expansive language?
CS: I think MFA programs, by default, encourage poets to cut excess language. In a sense, workshops often strive towards succinct legibility. There is not enough time to workshop long poems in a group of writers. And comments like “I don’t understand what this means” are often a cue for the poet to rework their lines. Because I come from an MFA background, I have these inclinations. Though, I try to push against them too. Since I am interested in poetry as a tool for propaganda and political rhetoric–I have used long poems, where the line length stretches and the voice meanders across a multitude of ideas, as a way to capture feelings that I couldn’t properly attend to with brevity. I think the mix in approaches is what gives texture to the book.
Aída Esmeralda is a Salvi poet from Woodbridge, VA. She is a second-year poetry student in the MFA program at ASU, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.