How LA childhood and freeways inspired this Tucson poet's newest book 'Southwest Reconstruction'

The Southwest and its landscape have inspired a lot of artists and writers over the years. The Show's next guest falls into that category.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a poet, essayist, writer and educator based in Tucson — their newest book is called "Southwest Reconstruction." It’s their first book of poetry and draws inspiration from both the natural — and human-made — environment.

The Show spoke with Gutiérrez and asked what they found interesting about writing a book of poetry.

Full conversation

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: Well, I’ve been writing poetry for several decades now. And so I grew up in Los Angeles, and poetry felt like it was all around me. It was something popular in cafe culture, sort of a pre-Starbucks era. And so, you know, in the sense it’s just a really fun snowball that happens when you’re just in a group of like-minded folks — you know, people with similar activist and political commitments and other sort of creative-led curiosities and inquiries. So, yeah, that was the thing, that was the bug that bit me.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so much — so many of the poems in this collection seem to be about place, and maybe specifically, you know, this place, the Southwestern U.S. I’m wondering if there’s something about the subject matter that maybe the medium — like, do they go together in some way, maybe better than it would in an essay or in some other form of writing? Like, writing about a place, and maybe this place, does poetry appeal to you for that subject matter?

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: Yeah, you know, we’re in a really beautiful place here in Arizona. And so for me, I am really grateful to the locale here just because it lends itself to description. A lot of poetry — most lines of poetry — are isolating an image. And any poet worth their salt is trying to create a thumbnail — beautiful thumbnail-sized landscape on that line.

And so for me, just traveling through the Southwest and traveling through Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and of course, California and Texas — you know, I have the freeway imprinted on me as a sort of a creative — my creative vehicle literally rides on the freeway. And so in Los Angeles, you know, you’re — I’m an asthmatic child of the freeways. And so I’m very familiar with the way that these infrastructural beasts allow us to go from one place to another.

In Arizona, being a really powerful intersection of so many cultures coming together — Tohono O'odham, Pascua Yaqui, the Diné Navajo Nation, the White Mountain Apache — and, you know, in the sense so many different Indigenous groups, and then the long — it’s an old settlement, one of the oldest settlements of the Southwest, of the west region. So in the sense that this used to be part of Mexico. And so the way that these cultures all interact with U.S. majority-white culture just produced a lot of really interesting, generative tensions and places to sort of think about the way that history continues to sort of cycle in and out of our present moment.

And the way that these histories and these landscapes and sort of modes of progress around Western expansionism through the freeway, through the railroad tracks — it just, you know, it just kicked up like a dust off, like a dust devil, and created all of these wonderful sort of images to explore on the page.

MARK BRODIE: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about freeways like that, because for a lot of writers, they talk about, for example, like needing to get off the freeway to get sort of into a community to really find the story. You’re saying that you’re kind of inspired to write by the freeways themselves.

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: Well, I think if I look back to my life and I mine aspects of my own personal history as a child of Southern California, I felt like I didn’t really have a choice. I had to use the freeway. I had to be on the freeway. It really contoured my existence as a younger person. But you’re absolutely right. I think as writers and artists, we need to sort of stay in place and have time and space and support to make our work.

MARK BRODIE: I’m wondering like how it was for you when you first got here, sort of finding your place in this place, and maybe how that has informed your writing since?

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: For sure. I used to call myself a Los Angeles nationalist and just felt like there was no place better than Los Angeles. Los Angeles has it all. And that may be true, and Los Angeles is a great place. But sometimes you have to leave something and see it through your rearview mirror, I don't know.

But being in Arizona, I thought I was going to panic if I couldn’t live less than two hours from the ocean. But, you know, the sky here is so expansive, and it’s just as exciting in the sense that it also gives me a huge oceanic feeling that I get when I stare out into the Pacific. But yeah, the desert is amazing. The desert really is revelatory and refractive in these really powerful ways that I was just, you know, sort of seized by the beautiful power of the desert.

MARK BRODIE: Do you find that writing poetry about the desert helps you see the desert differently?

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s that moment between like the natural world coming into contact with the concrete of modernity. It’s sometimes so jarring. I remember on my path — my walking path that I take my dog out on every morning — for a while on the other side of this chain-link fence, there was this decomposing javelina. And on the other side is Aviation Parkway.

And just the jarring sort of juxtaposition — you know, it was something that just like was another — I think was like a daily meditation on life and death every morning that year. But these moments that sort of like stick to me, or jump out at me like a cholla, it just comes when it comes.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is Raquel Gutiérrez, a writer, essayist, and poet based in Tucson, author of the collection of poems called "Southwest Reconstruction." Raquel, really nice to talk to you. Thank you.

RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ: Likewise, Mark. Thank you.