Editor’s note: In this conversation, writer Angelina Leaños talks with author William Archila, winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for the collection “S is For,” selected by Douglas Kearney.
Angelina Leaños: I want to say, first and foremost, it was really wonderful to read your manuscript, and to be able to connect with it in such a unique way, because I'm second-generation. So, my parents are first-generation and my grandparents immigrated here, so it was a very unique perspective that I was reading it from versus someone who's first generation. But, I still felt those emotions and trying to connect with culture and countries. So my first question for you is, I noticed that bodies and countries are really significant elements within this collection, especially the metaphor of a body as a country, which I thought was really unique. What is your perspective on this idea that bodies and countries could both be populated, or maybe even conquered? Do you view your body as a home country or your home country as a body?
William Archila: I think–I wanna say both. I think it has led me to realize that my body is all I got and therefore I have to try to heal my body, reinvent my body, so that I can sort of exercise all the baggage that I have accumulated and that was given to me in the world in which I live. So in that sense, I think of my body as my country. But, my body as my country is also connected to the country where I came from, and that idea is what I'm trying to get at, which is that the body is still here, and so therefore that country is still here.
All these ideas about identity in terms of body and body as country all seem to kind of boil down to this idea of reinventing myself. You know, the Civil War was a very awful thing, obviously, and the diaspora as well. But a positive side to it is that it gave us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves: reinvent my country, reinvent my body, reinvent my identity. What is the type of body that you want for yourself? And how are you going to continue?
Leaños: Those are all such great sentiments, and I love the way that you reflect on your body being almost like a symbol for where you come from and making sure that your presence is honoring that.
In your poem “Spanish Lesson with a Handful of Dirt,” the speaker claims, “I think / bury the dead & your country roots / will bury you is a variation nailed and final.” I especially gravitated to this quote because it almost reminds me of this idea that if you decide to disown your ancestors, they might disown you in return or the belief that your lineage sort of dies off as you bury them both physically and mentally, in a way. That was the way that I interpreted it. So, what are some other ways that you keep your country roots, and by proxy, your lineage—your ancestors—alive, especially in a society where a lot of Latinx immigrants and their children are beginning to assimilate to the point of their customs and their language being lost in the next generations?
Archila: So, I start with my family, trying to listen really hard to who they are because, after a long time, family members become family members, you know? They are this blurred reflection of who you are, but it’s not until you actually sit down and start talking with them and asking questions about where they come from: “Can you tell me your stories?” that you begin to realize we’re all connected in terms of cultural and political events that happen in the country and how they affect us. In that sense, I think, my family began to stop being that blurred reflection and started to sharpen into a clearer picture of someone with flesh and bone with a heart and a soul. In many ways my immediate family are my roots and trying to understand their cultural and political histories and struggles keeps me grounded. Their presence becomes more powerful than all the distractions and shiny things we encounter in this country.
More specifically about the poem itself, I always thought… I could never claim this country as my homeland until a member of my family died here. The moment we bury one of our family members in this country, that’s when we plant roots. And that’s where that poem originated from, that idea of planting roots, you know? In the line you mentioned, I find myself writing about the dead, those that came before me…and by burying them I mean forgetting them, and if I do that, my roots will bury me, meaning my roots will forget me. However, somehow, at the same time, by burying them, I mean the country itself will begin to bury me, but in the sense of gathering me in its arms. That we all belong in that soil, and we’re all going to go back to that soil at one point, anyway. Once you begin to honor the dead, which, in a way, is an extension of that country, then it’s almost like the dead itself, meaning the country itself, is beginning to bring you in as part of the circle. Now you are here with us, and that was the idea behind that poem.
Leaños: I think that's really beautiful and insightful, and I think it speaks to the connotation of the word “bury,” right? Because when I first read that, I was thinking “bury” in the negative way, where it’s like hiding and disowning, but there’s also that honor and that embrace in burial.
Archila: I mean, there’s another side to it that you’re talking about, which is the great thing about poetry, right? There are so many sides to the words, the phrases–so many things that happen between one word and another one in poetry.
Leaños: Right! So one thing I was really curious about going into this collection is the title “S is For.” Since I started reading this with little context, I was wondering where that title came from, and as the collection moves forward, you write about S standing for images such as “salt,” “señor of a thousand choruses,” “savior,” “sueño.” I'm curious if you began writing this collection with that sentiment in mind for the letter S to be central in that way or if it just happened naturally.
Archila: No, it happened naturally, and that's the great thing about poetry—I never know where the poem is going, and in this case I never know where the manuscript is going to go. I know there are writers who talk about having a theme and an idea: “I want to develop these poems about such and such topics,” which is great if it works out, but for me, it never works that way. I tried that many times and something else always ends up happening.
And so–my wife Lory Bedikian, who is a poet as well. She won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Philip Levine poetry prize as well. She and I share our work. We read each other’s poems… And then, one time I said, “Okay, this manuscript is not working. So let’s go through it. Help me out. What do you think in terms of the title? I’m thinking of ‘Saturn’s Country.’ That’s the poem I’m looking at as a possible title source.” But I also know that with Saturn’s Country–there’s the planet and there’s the myth, right. So there are all these connotations. And for me, I’m particularly thinking of the Goya painting where Saturn devours his children as a metaphor for the way that El Salvador devours its own citizens. So I was talking to her about that. And she's looking at the poem as I am rambling, and she's focusing on “S is for [this],” “S is for [that].” And she goes, “Why don't you just go with ‘S is For’?” The poem “Saturn’s Country” is the idea of defining what S stands for in relation to El Salvador. And obviously, I mentioned the word “savior,” the English translation of the country, “the savior,” El Salvador. So it leads to that in the many variations of what S could mean.
Leaños: I noticed that the poems “Saturn’s Country” and “Sestina” both have “s is for” lines.
Archila: You know, it’s funny because that was not done with intention. This is the great thing about immersing myself in the world I am creating in my work. The tropes, concepts, the culture and history, the places and characters, they all come together. For my first and second book, I was really trying to marry sound and meaning, and sometimes sacrifice sound for the sake of meaning. I was also forcing the poems into what I wanted instead of letting the poem do their own thing. But now I’m just like, “I’m gonna let the poem do what it needs to do and show me where it needs to go.” And that’s where the poem went. I’m much happier with that idea.
Leaños: That's really cool and something that a lot of writers, I think, but especially those who speak more than one language, could really take advice from because there's a lot of ways to create double meaning, to play with language, as you're saying. So there's more than one layer to it when you're reading from that perspective.
Archila: Yeah, and I was afraid of that before. I wanted to be so much in control that I didn’t want to let that different layer of meaning come in for whatever reason that might be. Maybe it’s just a sign of being a beginning writer but I wanted to control it and I was afraid and very protective of my work. It was only in this book where I was comfortable in letting go.
Leaños: My last question for you is, do you have a direction for what’s coming next for you? Is there anything you want to promote? Or what are you working on moving forward?
Archila: It’s funny because I never like to promote. I mean, I never share what I’m working on because there’s always a voice in the back of my head saying, “You shouldn’t share anything about what you’re working on.” And I think that’s an anxiety that I no longer want to have. I no longer want to live in fear. So, I have a book coming out the year after “S is For,” which is a bilingual translation of my first two books. That idea of translating my poems in Spanish has been with me for such a long time. Ever since “The Art of Exile” people always asked me, “Where’s the Spanish one? I want to read the Spanish version.” My response was always, “I don’t write in Spanish, I’m sorry.” So that’s always been haunting me. So, a while ago I met the right translator, Mario Zetino, poet and professor from El Salvador, who did a wonderful job in translating a selection of my poems. The book will be out in the spring of 2026. It’s called “Canicula,” which means “Dog Days.” The title is one of the poems in “The Gravediggers’ Archaeology.”
I also have a new manuscript I’ve been working on. It’s a series of disheveled sonnets that are inspired, loosely based, and sometimes in the voice of a pre-columbian mythological figure from El Salvador named Cipitio. So this Cipitio is an illegitimate son of a forbidden romance and has been condemned by the gods to remain ten years old for the rest of his life. Of course, I’m paraphrasing the myth and simplifying a lot of my conclusions for the sake of the interview. And so, when I began to dig into that myth, I realized how much it may represent the social consciousness of El Salvador. I employed the myth as a vehicle to write about the country, its people in terms of its history, socio-political issues and its culture, whether we are in the U.S. or whether we are in El Salvador. Just recently one of those poems was chosen by Campbell McGrath for the poetry series Poem a Day from the Academy of American Poets.
William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. His first collection The Art of Exile was awarded the International Latino Book Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center and was selected for The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Round Up” in Poets & Writers. The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, Archila’s second book, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He has been awarded the Alan Collins Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fighting Fund Fellow Award from the University of Oregon. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies Latino Poetry: The Library of American Anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. He has work forthcoming in Ploughshares. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow and received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. An associate editor at Tía Chucha Press, he lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.
Angelina Leaños is a Ventura County Youth Poet Laureate emerita and a second-year MFA student at Fresno State. She regularly serves as a Poetry Out Loud coach and a Poet-Teacher, mentoring youth in poetry recitation and creative writing. Additionally, Angelina is a member of California Poets in the Schools’ Board of Directors and was a reader for the 2023 Philip Levine Prize. Her work has been published by Urban Word, Flowersong Press, the Chicanx Writers & Artists Association, Arkana, Fruitslice and others.
Photo credit: William Archila