Jonathan Andrew Pérez
Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.’s work has appeared in POETRY, Split Lip Magazine, Prelude, The Write Launch, TRACK // FOUR, The Tulane Review, The Florida Review’s Latinx publication, Barnhouse, The Tiny Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review and numerous others. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry Nominee and has been featured in Crack the Spine’s Anthology of the Year for 2019.
His debut poetry collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, 2020) will be released in March 2020, although pre-orders are being taken now.
Jonathan Andrew Pérez first came to our attention when his poem, “Beasts of the American Wilderness“, appeared in Issue 2.1 of River Heron Review. We were taken with his use of imagery and language to speak to a sense of history and the past. His work appears consistently in national journals, reviews, and anthologies. His new collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, 2020) speaks to his experiences as a trial attorney as well as his keen eye for the world’s injustices.
RHR: Tell us about your writing process.
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: As a senior trial attorney devoted to Social Justice policy I develop policy and am actively involved in the intersection of procedural justice and cultural trauma at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement. My first published book of poetry is slated for March 2020 from Finishing Line Press.
The writing process, for me, is very routine. I am an amalgamation of my routine – and in the spirit of sharing and community:
Title and subject/ as I walk around the week, a thought about a poetic subject, a title, or a series of poems, I write it into my I Phone notes.
I have a series of folders on my desktop one to twelve, “I- XII”, each marks the migration of title poems from beginning to end. The poems stay in the “funnel” and move up toward completion. If they are not working out, I sometimes combine poems.
They go into what I call the “Freeze Locker” once they are published.
My revisiting of poems really relates to the amount of time I have had them in the “funnel.” I update them as time progresses and sometimes create new material by “blowing up” old poems.
To be honest, I believe the internal rhyme and foundation of a poem absolutely cannot be created on the first pass. The foundation usually comes out after some time revising and revisiting. Usually a poem has an internal logic. My personal interests veer toward nature, colonization, ecological crises, the U.S. history of race and systemic inequity, so I usually try to find a vehicle for these ideas, and movements.
Lastly, I read! I read my favorite poems over and over again, and try new genres, and incorporate them into my writing. At all times, I push my vocabulary, visual, and rhythmic muscle. Break tradition!
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: An idea for a poem haunts me! I feel like I’ve been writing the same poem over and over, in different variations. The poems are like blocks going block-by-block mapping out my work. I am still obsessed with roughly what could be called “the Criminal Justice Pastoral” or, “The Anxiety of White Privilege.” Strangely, that was also the name of my Master’s thesis at UVA, as a graduate student in English and American Studies.
I am fascinated by the way the urban environment, sociology, consciousness, community, and inequity, could come through the aesthetic disruptions of poems. I am also obsessed with artists like WALTON FORD, who brings in politics, sociological statements, and radical disruptions to the traditional pastoral of Audubon’s prints.
RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Absolutely not. Unless yes. I believe the use of techniques that are the-opposite-of-chaotic and which some might see as overwrought- like sonnets, erasure-poems, centos, crostics, the cut-up poem, and ekphrasis to speak from a point of view that is under-represented and newly found in the poetry community offer vehicles to some of the most creative works. (See Nicole Sealey’s ekphrasis work, or any number of erasure or cut-ups like Tracy K Smith, or the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets.
One of my favorites to read, in my chaotic process is the black out processes, and to use online-generator like e-diastic from L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet Jackson MacLow.
RHR: What is the role of justice in poetry?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: My latest project is a book of poetry, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies and is “focused on the meeting of the pastoral, law, justice and the reclaiming of history for communities that have been on the wrong side of justice.” My goal is to combine the mythos of the Savior, Hero, and extra-worldly fable to interrupt critical moments in the history of systemic inequity in the U.S. This debut book is a culmination of all the internal narratives and pursuits throughout the years. In it, the narrator travels through early slavery accounts, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and maps a consciousness of communities in large urban areas that have been alienated, in form and geography, because of systemic inequity.
During my day job, I develop policy and am actively involved in the intersection of procedural justice and cultural trauma, and at the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement.
In each poem, the pastoral features prominently as a metaphor and a historical moment from racial oppression. The work, I hope, will allow the reader to envision a reclaiming of the painful experiences that communities of color had been subject to, while also envisioning a rewriting of the history with a new future of both moral and environmental ownerships over the many landscapes that have marginalized and oppressed communities.
RHR: . How do you determine what makes a poem successful?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: The simple answer is that it is finished when it is published. But then, the question is, where is it published? Secondly, despite publication…the poem itself is a living breathing entity. It lives in the world, and it fits with your block-by-block world that you created in the sequence of other poems. Are there any accents you can add? Any dressing or framing that would it make it fit in the entire family of work or, using the older metaphor, fit in the neighborhood and architecture of the entire sequence.?
RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Absolutely KEEP. I am now on folder number 12, or what I call “individual poems XII” which are worked, and reworked recycled poems that travel on my desktop through the systems of folders until they are published. Then I do less editing on them. Some of these are five years old, or more. However, over time, I have been shifting and reworking the poem.
A lot of times, when I think of the whole “world” of my poems and put two up side-by-side, I see similarities and lineages. Since I began writing I have been obsessed with the world of race, justice, and natural environments in U.S. History. I personally take my metaphors and motifs from the natural world and 19th century American Renaissance-type poems (Whitman, who has inherited Wordsworth and Keats) to American Modernist poems obsessed with symbolism (Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane), then rework them as contemporary issues of race, justice, and law.
This is where my poem you see here (below): “The Bobolinks as a Flock of Signifiers” has come from. My debut book is based on this same motif, often each poem dedicated to a single bird species, or migratory avian flock, and the poem itself has historical nods to U.S. systemic inequity, in particular Jim Crow, U.S. Slavery, and later forms of de jure segregation like housing politics.
I truly believe that whatever is your influence, aesthetic, or politically-motivated, and the change you narrative and pain or joy you wish to transfer to a poet-audience should be alive in your work.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: the contemporary poetry of Cortney Lamar Charleston, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ada Limon, Jericho Brown, Nicole Sealey, Terrance Hayes' Sonnets, Reginald Dwayne Betts' Yale Law fellow, and poet-author of "Felon" against earlier Afro-American and Latinx writers in the Harlem Renaissance and California Chicano/a movement, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Anzaldua, and the New York Lower East Side writers loosely associated with the Puerto Rican poetry collective.
RHR: Notebook or paper or computer? Pen or Pencil?
Jonathan Andrew Pérez: Believe it or not, I am all DIGITAL baby! I use my I Phone notepad for notes when I think about a poem subject, or poem title, or a few lines as I walk around during the day or wake up in the middle of the night. Then I transfer them into my 12-folder sequence, and move it up the ranks.
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Read Jonathan Andrews Perez’s poem, “These Signifiers as a Flock of Bobolinks” which appeared in POETRY (January 2020):
These Signifiers as a Flock of Bobolinks
This neighborhood map thrives on rising sentences,
arbitrary Icterid with signified arms; Ventriloquist!
shook-throated, a rock-hard reed-lance thorn by the landfill—
a bird almost-mistook-for erasure shared in a thin migration,
like marauding packs of boys who fight or make out, discover song, hinge:
on the talk or sheen of feeling, grass-rooted as if contra-the-wind enough to prevent erasure?
Its moat of fear, reinvented burps, throbbing streetlamp burst on the fritz,
the self-appointed-like throat, chewed on ambition, held choked as a corn-flavored chip,
fed and left to dust the milk of the park, where seaward, another earth throws shade:
the moon, almost, or a hurricane, we dawn and we signify our own sentences’
justice, justice, built on migration from conjugations the winds once institutionally appointed:
at last—this hurricane!
from POETRY (January 2020)
This poem also appears in Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.’s debut poetry collection, Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies (Finishing Line Press, March 2020).
~ fini ~