New Work of Poetry from Amy Shimshon-Santo Forthcoming Summer 2024 with FlowerSong Press
A remarkable collection of poems for cherishing language and habitat on Earth
From poet and urbanist Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo
Random Experiments in Bioluminescence tracks a woman’s search for connection, language, and belonging. She pays homage to urban trees, walks along the Pacific Ocean holding the feather of a gull, and hears rain play marimba on forest leaves and branches. She experiments with form, scribbling faux-mathematical formulas to echolocate herself within the cosmos. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of livability.
Amy Shimshon-Santo responds to questions via a live document with copyeditor, Avery Castillo, to discuss her latest body of poetic work, being in the land, and the use of multilingual poetry as a bridge to [forgotten] mother tongues, lineage, and understanding legacy and one’s place on planet Earth.
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Avery—One thing I so greatly admire about this collection is the expansion of language and translation, not just for our human languages but the languages of the Earth and other living species. What is your relationship with [creating] language and the natural world? How did this relationship shape the collection?
Amy—Thank you for your kindness and questions, dear Avery. It’s great to be together.
I wrote many of these poems when I needed to heal myself. I was lucky to experience the blessings of new plurilingual literary friends. We shared poems, translated each other, and did plurilingual-multinational poetry readings online. I have so many people to thank for this, starting with: Sabata Mokae, Mamle Wolo, A’bena Awuku-Larbi, Delia Chavez, Gloria Carrera, Teio Exaggat, Martin Egblewogbe, Nana Asaase, Margarita de Leon, Patron Henekou, Katleho Shoro Kano, and Efe Paul Azino. We did a lot of wonderful collaborations including reading poems in English, Spanish, and Mazateco on Mexican Educational Radio, co-translating poems in Ewe, Twi, and English with Writers Project Ghana, and convening global panels translating poems from across oceans and languages. This brought me tremendous joy and I learned so much. It was language ecstasy with excellent humans.
After our first reading for Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), I felt so happy that I had to take my body to the ocean and just sit there. Sunlight spotting silver on the surface of the water. Both me, and the Pacific, gleaming at each other. I wanted this feeling to become my new life.
I was also spending a lot of time studying outside, and the writing was starting to focus on habitat. Writing habitat poems helped me see and hear things I’d taken for granted. For example, “1000 Bird Tree” is a bird persona poem written from the perspective of an animal who lived in a tree that was cut down. It’s a fictional response to a true story. It took my neighbors a week of cutting and sawing to chop down an old enormous tree and dig up its roots. I feel this violence viscerally, weeping to the screech of the blades all week long. It was a massacre. The tree was older than all of us! It had lived there before any of us arrived. I’d always thought of gentrification in terms of people, but humans also destroy the habitats of other species. There are trees, racoons, opossums, and coyotes trying to live in big cities too. “Everyday, we sing our culture,” the bird says. “Everyday, you think: ‘chirping.’”
Avery—This collection invokes a sense of responsibility, or rather a call to action to listen and reconnect with our Mother Tongue/Mother Nature. In your poem “Ta’amim Autocorrects as Geranium,” you write that your family’s ancestral poetics were missing from poetic craft books. As a result, you write this poem. What was this poetic process of searching, creating, and re-claiming like for you? What advice can you give to those searching for reclamation through poetry and art?
Amy—I wrote “Ta’amim Autocorrects as Geranium,” to express how it felt to try and learn my mother’s language which has no vowels. I couldn't even imagine a language of all consonants. Vowels do appear as punctuation marks, but they’re like training wheels on a bike that people eventually take off. Vowels are unnecessary for fluent speakers. How do you read a word without vowels? So, I removed all the vowels from a poem in English. It's undecipherable. Another cool thing is that punctuation marks, called Ta’amim, tell the reader how words could be sung or chanted. Isn’t that awesome? I’ve heard that this is also true in Yoruba. This points to our literacy legacies in orality and song.
I had just finished a thick, wonderful, award-winning book on poetic form, and found no forms from my family’s heritages. It is not the author’s fault. One can’t know everything. But, I felt bereft—as if there was no space in the poetry world for someone like me. So, I called my mother to ask if we had any poetic forms. She said, “What are you talking about?” and she started singing “Baruch ata adonai…” She was praying over me. You see? We are made of poetry. We eat with poetry. We drink with poetry. We pray in poetry.
I would never have known that from the book. I had to ask my mother. Restoring mother tongue shifts the power of authority and expertise to include our families. We consult our elders as culture bearers—people who are not necessarily professors, publishers, or editors. People who may not have even had much formal schooling. You have to know someone, be a friend or family member since ancient languages are not often taught in schools in the U.S.
Many of us in the U.S. mourn or feel guilty about “losing” our mother tongues, but we didn’t just forget them behind the couch. A lot of violence has taken place for anyone to “lose” a language. “Loss” is systematic and intentional. It is dispossession.
We can advocate for multilingualism, mother tongue, and ecological responsibility. As writers, we can stop editing our different languages out. Even one letter in an ancient language can convey meaning. For example, in Hebrew, each letter has a specific gematria (numerology) and story.
Avery— “Random Experiments in Bioluminescence”… Can you share a little bit about the idea of “the woman’s body unbound” as portrayed in the title poem of this collection and how it relates to an “un-bounding” of ourselves through reconnection to our natural landscapes, mother tongue, and with ourselves?
Amy—The title poem “Random Experiments in Bioluminescence” is about locating oneself inside the cosmos. I harvested words by listening to physics audiobooks while hiking. Scientific language is strange to me. Funny and serious at the same time. They use simple words to explain almost inexplicable concepts. This particular poem is written in the voice of a pseudo-scientist of the universe who confidently believes herself capable of unraveling the inertia of patriarchy, greed, othering, and systemic oppressions. She calculates her liberation spatially, cosmically if you will, and is able to free herself. This is obviously fiction, but it was fun and made me laugh. There is no mathematical formula for justice, but writing in this way made me feel authority over feeling powerless from so much injustice. Humor helped. The poem tries to find its own light, its way, its place. Being creative helps me live better and navigate a very troubled world.
Avery—How much did experimentation with poetic forms influence the shape and feel of the poems on the page? What does experimentation of language mean and/or look like for you? And to go even further, how does experimentation and the art of translation work for you? Are they two separate forms of art or can they be blended and still achieve/arrive at the same core message?
Amy—Experimentation gives me a sense of freedom, movement, and possibility. I don’t want to obey systems that are failing us. Systems are held in place by stories, but they are held together by form. Form can become a hegemonic fiction. In this collection, I experimented with English language poetic structures, and then looked for the structures in my own heritage. I found ancient poems that are also songs or visual mandalas. I greet the ancient forms from my current reality, time, and place.
As to translation, multilingualism is natural to me, and it was to my ancestors. We’ve never moved in only one language at a time. That is the migrants’ story. You speak your home language at home, and collect other languages when you work or have to move somewhere else.
Even small language revelations can change your life. For example, in my friend Mamle’s father’s tongue, Krobo, the word for woman and mountain are the same. There is a particular mountain that is considered to be the mountain of her heritage. Now, wouldn’t that change your sense of self, knowing that you were a mountain? In English, a “woman” is a subset of “man” while in Krobo she is a mountain, and a mountain is the keeper of her heritage. This is beautiful to me. It also demonstrates how words themselves have different ontologies, different worldviews. These differences matter, and they might even save us.
When I was a child, my mother used to speak in her first language with her family on a chunky black wall phone. That long, thick, bouncy cord would stretch from one end of the kitchen to the other. As a kid, I knew that our family existed somewhere else and that they lived inside a different language. Hebrew wasn’t taught at school, and I wasn’t religious, so I never picked it up. Not learning her language is the only real regret of my life thus far.
Language is full of mysterious connections. Once when I was studying the letter ‘ (yud) for a collaboration with a contemporary queer, burlesque Jewish collective, I stumbled on an anti-patriarchal poem by Yehuda Leib Gordon in 1878 called “Kotzo shel yod.” It was translated into Ladino in 1901 as “לה פונטה די לה יוד” or “La punta del yod.” The poet decries Jewish women’s position in society by comparing us to the smallest letter of the alphabet — the י. We had no chance at autonomy or self authorship. The version of the poem I found in the archive was the Ladino version, a language that I had never read. When I sounded out each Hebrew letter, Spanish sounds came out! La. לה. Punta. פונטה. Del. די לה. Yod. יוד. This experience inspired the poem “Mixolydian” that weaves a conversation between English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew letters as one mash up.
I’ve learned that languages are an operating system. Language structures knowledge. There are no perfect translations. I’m writing this during an egregious conflict where thousands of people, places, animals, land, water, coral reefs, and more have been irreparably harmed and murdered. Billions of dollars are invested into the war machine that is inherently destructive, traumatic, and demoralizing.
My tools are culture, not missiles or fighter jets. How can we come to know each other better? I can see how when people don't know each other they become vulnerable to the loudest, meanest voices in power. In both Hebrew and Arabic, people greet each other by asking about their condition of peace. Shalom means peace. Salaam means peace. We greet each other, “How is your peace?”—not “how are you?” We wish each other peace every time we meet or depart. Hello Peace. Goodbye Peace. Hebrew and Arabic are also cousins as abjad languages (alphabets made of consonants). You might never know this from the current tragic circumstances. The value of peace is something to embrace and build on.
Toni Morrison said that the challenge of the 21st century was whether or not we could create a shareable world. For me, translation is about valuing our uniquenesses and creating the conditions for shareability. The United States is not the center of the world, and our galaxy is not the center of the universe. So, let’s humanize our relationships with ourselves and each other, and become good stewards of the planet. If not, we are all seeing the inertia that is reproducing tragedies of trauma, perpetual wars that should be obsolete, atmospheres that are unlivable, and oceans filled with more plastic than fish.
This collection is playful, but with serious intent. I play to disobey. Play to imagine another way forward.
Avery—What do you want your readers to know before journeying into this collection? What are your hopes for this collection as it enters the world and into the hands of readers?
Amy—These poems came when I stepped away from my old life as it was, and began listening to habitat, multispecies, and writing with a fondness for language restoration. I hope that readers will have fun with it.
I know that most people don’t think about translation the way that I’ve approached it here, but there is a precedent we inherited from Gloria Anzaldúa. Pay attention to Nepantla, the in-between. Writing and publishing multilingually is freeing, but also challenging and disruptive. Languages are written in multiple directions and with different characters. A carriage return in Spanish does not go the same direction as a carriage return in Hebrew or Arabic. Most translations bring one whole text into another whole text, and most publishing works only in international languages, not mother tongues. Technology can play a role in translation, but our current translation technologies are not adept at multilingualism. My device is constantly autocorrecting multilingual messages, trying to make me communicate in only one language at a time.
There are 7000 living languages on Earth right now. In “Villanelle for Yemanja,” the poem says “the ocean holds all our languages in her expansive reach.” It's asking us to imagine a culture of connection that might be capable of acknowledging, hearing, and caring for each other and our planet. Call me idealistic, but that is—of course—my dream. That is what the poem “what if I were?” says: “Belonging to the iron Earth / (I pulse).” If our differences are spectacular and the Earth can hold all of them. Why can’t we?
Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is available for pre-order today directly from FlowerSong Press. Order your copy today to relish in language, Mother/Earth, and lineage.
A remarkable collection of poems for cherishing language and habitat on Earth — From poet and urbanist Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo.
“Listen with your natural body,” writes Shimshon-Santo. “In the beginning, there was song.”
Random Experiments in Bioluminescence tracks a woman’s search for connection, language, and belonging. She pays homage to urban trees, walks along the Pacific Ocean holding the feather of a gull, and hears rain play marimba on forest leaves and branches. She experiments with form, scribbling faux-mathematical formulas to echolocate herself within the cosmos. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of livability.
The collection opens with a “genealogy of the moment,” where a cast of human characters is replaced by a sketch of interconnections: paw prints, gestures, sunlight. Her accomplices are letters and millipedes, sparrows and lemon trees, shadow and light—in “x or x prime clock time.” All life has agency. Trees and vines tangle their hair together to escape over brick walls. A piano decomposes into forest mulch. Seaweed fronds curl around pilings. Gravity “plants humans in the ground like oaks” while a black bird murmuration elevates skyward. The poet finally locates herself within the cosmos as a “rapture gawker of infinity consciousness.”
Her verse has kinesthetic authority on the page, flowing from right to left, left to right, or woven top down into a conversation between four languages. Mother tongues share pages, side-by-side-by-side, in a line dance of translations by the author, her family, and friends. A “Villanelle for Yemanja” (Ifa deity and mother of the fishes) coexists with a piyyut inspired by the talmudic Akdamut. She morphs poems into flow charts, pictograms, haikus, and chants, all scattered between photographs. The outcome of her “random experiments” is a homecoming to the body and the planet; respect for womanhood, and awe for the multiplicity of life, languages, and habitats on planet Earth.
Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a warm-blooded mammal with hair. As a writer, teacher, and culture maker, she believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. Amy was born on Tovaangar land in current day Los Angeles, and has immediate family in the Southwest, the Middle East, and South America. Her art and community work nourish inclusive cultural ecologies for planetary justice. Connect with her at www.amyshimshon.com.
Avery Castillo serves as copyeditor for Shimshon-Santo’s latest poetry collection with FlowerSong Press. She also hosts FlowerSong Press’s Essentially Poetic, a Monthly Reading Series For Community Building. She holds a degree in English from Texas Tech University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
