Awarded the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Prize by the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2019, Puerto Rican poet and essayist Irizelma Robles percolates ritualist practise, alchemy, and the occult into her scholarship and poetry. Her fourth poetry collection, El libro de los conjuros (Editorial Folium, 2018), embodies this fusion. The text has been translated into English by Puerto Rican poet and translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera as The Book of Conjurations and was published by Sundial House last June 2024. In this spell book, Dr Robles writes about how “water will make way for the earth / that will listen” and “pieces of language / erased like mist,” summoning skies, substance, soul, and source. In his translator’s note, Dr Salas frames poetry as alchemy: “transmutation through words . . . transform[ing] poet, reader, and language.”
In this interview, I spoke with Dr Robles (in New York) and Dr Salas (in Puerto Rico), on El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations and the mutability of poetry through the lens of alchemy.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Irizelma, your remarkable poetry collection from 2018, El libro de los conjuros, is now out in Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s translation as The Book of Conjurations. Taking us back to that period and before, what were the creative impulses and poetic foundations that shaped this work?
Irizelma Robles (IR): Ten years before it was El libro de los conjuros, its title was La tabla periódica (The Periodic Table) and when I began writing it in 2016, it was titled El libro de la Santa Muerte (The Book of the Santa Muerte). I did fieldwork in the Huaxteca region of Veracruz and Hidalgo during my student years under the direction of my anthropology professor, Ana Bella Pérez Castro. It was during that period that I came across El libro de la Santa Muerte, a book of conjurations and spells. Later, in conversation with Eugenio Ballou, my friend and editor, we discovered that its true title was El libro de los conjuros.
But, as I just mentioned, it was originally The Periodic Table because I understood depression was a regular thing, something that happened to me periodically. Some of those early poems survived, albeit transformed, and made their way into El libro de los conjuros. The rest vanished and I reconstructed the book. With ten years of intimate and lived research on the themes I was exploring, it was easier to find the metaphors in semiprecious and precious stones, in the elements of the periodic table, in alchemy. I went to Ballou’s house with my manuscript and read it out loud in its entirety. That day he knew he would publish it. That’s how El libro de los conjuros came to be.
In 2018, when the publication date was approaching, we decided the launch should include a performance. The sculptures, the paintings, and the paper dress I wore were designed by Puerto Rican sculptor Elizabeth Magali Robles. It was very easy to get to the Liga de Arte, where the performance took place, to act out the poems I read from the conjurations. It was very easy, among other things, to read each poem because everything in this book comes from my experience with mental illness, psychiatric institutions, medications, sadness, and melancholic states.
The response was immediate. I fondly remember the words of Lorenzo Omar’s daughter, Susan, who told me, “You are so brave.” She was right; it takes courage to perform what one writes, especially if the writing has come from such an intimate and painful place. Later, Salomé, my child, told me that while studying at the Iupi, the University of Puerto Rico, they witnessed young people passing the book back and forth, reading it out loud, and sharing it with others. Ballou has repeatedly told me over the years that books, unaccompanied, make their own path. El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations has forged its path in Spanish, and I hope it will do the same in its English version.
AMMD: Given that the book’s journey was so deeply personal (drawing from Irizelma’s lived experience), I’m intrigued by your role as translator, Roque Raquel. In a previous interview, we’ve discussed the ‘knot’ as a central imagery that best describes your process. Did that same metaphor hold true while untangling into Irizelma’s poetry?
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (RRSR): I think of translation strategies as tools that have worked for me before and are often still useful. When translating, I am moving between worlds, so it always feels impossible to give proscriptive strategies. I still don’t translate what I consider knots.
It was easy to work with Irizelma. Our friendship is based on our mutual respect as poets. I admire her. The bond between poets that admire each other is hard to break. There is a deep respect, a kind of love that deserves its own word. When a poet truly moves me, when their work changes me, I belong to them a little. A piece of me becomes theirs because I need to make room for what they’ve given me.
We sat down in my then living room in Santurce and read each poem and translation out loud. The whole book. Whenever I had a question, we’d stop and discuss it. It went through one or two rounds after that, but I always consulted with Irizelma.
AMMD: Following up on that exquisite description of your collaborative process, Irizelma, I’d like to turn to the poetic influences. Your doctoral dissertation at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) explored the vital roles of women among the pochteca (traveling merchants) and amanteca (feather artisans) in the Aztec Empire. Considering this deep background, how did rituals from Mesoamerican and Caribbean belief systems permeate your poetry in El libro de los Conjuros / The Book of Conjurations? And could you speak to the influence of your own personal and familial history with these rituals and alchemy?
IR: You don’t need to study anthropology to know that humans are beings of ritual. Anthropology, in any case, pays special attention to some rituals, naming and describing them, but rituals always guide our acts. I was deeply interested in Mesoamerican rituals, which is why I went to study them at the UNAM. My first Mesoamerican reading, the Popol Vuh, was a myth; myths sometimes dictate rituals. In poetry, I always wanted to be what anthropology denies: the unique voice of a mythopoet.
I’ve also always wanted to write my own myths. I’ve worked on them to a lesser, greater, better or worse degree, in one book or another. In Agave azul, the section titled “El cazador y la húmeda” is a myth. Then came Lacustre, which won the award you mentioned. It’s my own myth, although it is based on the Aztec myth known as The Birth of Huitzilopochtli. Myths give us some rituals, some explanations for life, ways of acting in this life. I think your question can be answered by thinking of my poetry as the ritual of a mythical imaginary.
In the conjurations, there’s a poem for Motolinía, this cronista of the Nahuatl world who was one of the first Franciscans to arrive in Mexico and who received that name because the Nahuatl saw him in his poor clothing, following his vow of poverty, and decided to name him that: the poor and sad one. I mention him in this book of conjurations because it deals with sadness, among other things. In that poem, I mention that I am the poor and sad one, like Motolinía. So, my poems would be the rituals for images that, like this one I’m telling you about the Franciscan, are born from a mythical world.
There’s more on the family and personal side. My mother became a Spiritist, to go against my grandmother, who was Catholic. I’m a Buddhist, but not because I am denying her the right to have her beliefs, but because I detest the idea that a spirit can invade a person’s body and mind to express itself and make itself understood from the beyond. Anyway, she’s a Spiritist, and in our house there was always this certainty that my grandmother’s spirit came to visit as a blue juey crab. This is literal, not symbolic. When I was a teenager, a juey crab once knocked on my door. It was scraping the door with its pincers until I opened and saw it, only to hear my mother offer the only possible explanation within her framework of beliefs: that it was a visit from my grandmother.
And, for her part, my grandmother would take me to Catholic processions in Toa Baja’s town center, where I would walk beside her, singing, “I sinned, I sinned, dear Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy,” etc., and, above all, behind Dolorosa, that Virgin who always sparked great curiosity in me as a child because she was pierced by a dagger and wept, represented by the tears in her eyes. There, I believe, is the answer, in the grandmother transformed into a juey, the alchemy, in Dolorosa, the pain that has haunted me all my life, the pain I don’t shy away from, but which I also don’t want to have too close at hand. It’s better to follow from a safe distance. I didn’t even know it, but I think all this has greatly influenced my poetry. Especially El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations, where some poems take place in Toa Baja, like the one I dedicate to Milagros, herself, and I say this with great sadness, another Dolorosa.
AMMD: We’ve seen the distinct anchors in your other poetry collections: El templo de Samye (Editorial Folium, 2020), named after a historic monastery in southern Lhasa, is engrained with Tibetan Buddhist thought, De pez ida (Isla Negra Ediciones, 2003) and Isla Mujeres (Fragmento Imán, 2008) were largely Mexican Neo-Baroque, and Agave azul (Editorial Folium) was an abandonment of all that, as critics and readers claimed. Looking more closely at The Book of Conjurations, beyond ritual and alchemy, what other intellectual or philosophical currents specifically informed the construction of the book?
IR: Through the experience of depression itself and the story of my psychiatric hospitalizations. The conjured are in the conjurations: some poems are secretly dedicated to my companions (nothing like the bond between people who share a hotel room). But all of them, men and women, and all of that, transformed by metals, semiprecious and precious stones, the elements of the periodic table, as I mentioned earlier. The periodic table plays a vital role, informing the poems, the writing.
So, years later, it would no longer be called the periodic table, but there was a time when I would write poems with the periodic table next to the computer, entering, precisely, the titles and tones. That is, Bhorio, well, Bh. . . I would look at Bhorio on the table and I didn’t know what the poem was about, what the poem was going to be about, but Bhorio sounded like a boreal cry to me, for example, so then came the poem, from that free association. That’s how I wrote about my boreal cry. That’s what alchemy means for me; in poetry, everything is alchemy. The transformation of Bhorio into a boreal cry is one of many examples scattered throughout El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations.
RRSR: I feel similarly. For the introduction, I wrote a piece about alchemy in this collection. I thank Irizelma for the opportunity to explore it further and offer my reading of her work.
What draws me most to the book is that these poems are conjurations. They are as literal as any conjuration. It’s easier to think they are metaphors or poetic figures, but they are much more. They conjure life were there was none and offer death when it is needed.
Poetry for me is conjuration. I know it isn’t that for everyone, but I can’t see it any other way. A switch was flipped in me when I was very young and how I change my world is sometimes through poetry first. This book feels like an homage to that.
AMMD: Irizelma, your work, particularly in Alumbre (Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2018) and the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Award-winning Lacustre (Trabalis Editores, 2020), is often discussed within a larger, critical framework as decolonial and ecocritical discourse within women’s literature that speaks to the current global political upheavals. This has drawn compelling comparisons to the work of Peru’s Gabriela Wiener and Brazil’s Helena Zelic. And Roque Raquel, in a similar vein, your own body of work is often framed with terms like ‘transdecolonial’ and ‘eco-queer’.
RRSR: Decolonial can mean a lot of things, but I am interested in decoloniality as an extension of anti-colonial politics. What I like about decoloniality is that it asks us to dig deep to root out coloniality. I don’t know if those two projects (anti-coloniality and decoloniality) are even that different.
Irizelma’s work could be described in many ways and, sure, decolonial is one of them. People who live in colonies can’t help being decolonial. To love or respect ourselves we must also work to heal the harm enacted by our oppressors. But it’s really hard to do that when your people are being displaced and under siege. I’m with Fanon. Decolonization is a violent process.
AMMD: Irizelma, your work resonates with influences from Mexican Neo-Baroque poets like José Carlos Becerra, David Huerta, and Coral Bracho, as well as the Nuyorican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri, and the Puerto Rican poetry of Vanessa Droz, Joserramón Melendes, and Aurea María Sotomayor. Which other thinkers, poets, and scholars have fundamentally shaped your philosophical and creative ethos?
IR: It’s very observant of you to note that I am jumping from Mexico to Puerto Rico and from Puerto Rico to Mexico; that’s been my life for thirty years now. I earned my PhD from UNAM in 2002, and since then, I’ve only traveled between those two countries, among other reasons because my child is Mexican, and I always wanted them to have a close relationship with their Mexican family, and because, whether by chance or as a form of karma, my first Zen teacher was Mexican, Roshi Gerardo Gally, who passed away about a year ago. It was because of him that I returned to live in Mexico in 2022. After his death, I was left without a Zen practice in Mexico, and I left Mexico again in 2024.
I can talk about other voices outside of Mexico and Puerto Rico, about Olvido García Valdés, a Spanish neo-Baroque poet, and José Watanabe, a Peruvian poet, who was not neo-Baroque. I’ve always been drawn to the symbols of neo-Baroque poetry; they call to my imagination, but I’ve never written neo-Baroque poetry. On the contrary, my poetry—like the Puerto Rican poetry written by the generation of the 1970s, especially the unique and beautiful voice of the poet Luz Yvonne Ochart—is more descriptive, metaphorical, synthesized, with clear images rather than folds and creases.
AMMD: Might we discuss one of the collection’s most haunting figures: the poet Julia de Burgos?
IR: I never intended to end the collection of conjurations with her, but the book and the theme of the book led me to Julia, especially because of her poems in English, the ones she wrote after a hospitalization on Welfare Island, in the Goldwater Hospital where she must have been treated like they treat all of us who write “poet” as our profession. . . It was inevitable to end the collection paying homage to Julita.
RRSR: Julia de Burgos has become a mythic figure to the point that it is hard to know what is true or a projection when it comes to her work. Back in her day, psychiatric institutions offered food and a free bed to sleep in. In her letters to her sister Consuelo, she describes being fascinated by the doctors’ diagnoses and I think it was her way of coping, by seeing herself as another doctor studying her own brain.
Irizelma picks up on something that is undoubtably a striking anecdote: the moment when medical practitioners think de Burgos is delusional because she claims to be a poet. This is something Puerto Rican poets often identify with because we are pathologized as Puerto Ricans (see Puerto Rican Syndrome) and because we are denied as poets.
But everyone who knows our poetry, Puerto Rican or not, always say what impressive poets we are. We have a saying: Here, you throw a stone, and you hit a poet. We are a country of poets. We are also a colonized people, and we know it. We have defended our identity against all forms of erasure. This is what I think of when I read Julia de Burgos through Irizelma Robles.
AMMD: If you were to design a course on ‘Poetry as Alchemy’, which anthologies and collections would be essential? Which poets, from antiquity to the present, would be central to your syllabus?
RRSR: Jajajaja! All my poetry courses are “Poetry as Alchemy.” I can mention some of the authors I am teaching this semester for my Comparative Poetry course: Raúl Zurita, Farid ud-Din, Anne Carson, Vicente Huidobro, Mallarmé, Gonzalo Arango, M. NourbeSe Philip, Federico García Lorca, Jack Spicer, Ángela María Dávila, Néstor Perlongher, Manuel Ramos Otero, Estéban Valdés, Ulises Carrión, Alfonsina Storni, Julia de Burgos, Anne Sexton, Amiri Baraka, César Vallejo, Saul Williams, Denice Frohman, Danez Smith, Alexandra Pagán, Ana Castillo Muñoz, Francisco Félix Canales, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Urayoán Noel, Mara Pastor, Alejandra Rosa, Mayra Santos Febrés, and Irizelma Robles.
IR: My book talks so much about alchemy that it might seem like I’m an expert on the subject, but that’s not the case. I haven’t read anything about alchemy, but what I did read with great enthusiasm was Bachelard’s alchemical metaphor, which refers to the poetic image, from The Psychoanalysis of Fire to those that came later: Water and Dreams, Air and Dreams, and Earth and Reveries of Repose.
If I could offer that course I would work with Bachelard, because according to Paul Ricoeur in “Living Metaphor,” whom I would also include, Bachelard is the only philosopher who attempts (and for me succeeds) to explain what the poetic image is once the metaphorical process has ended, that is, what happens to the image and what happens to us in front of that image once we have left language and its limitations, how the poetic image expands outside and above the language that made it possible, but from which it becomes independent or completely free.
Dr Irizelma Robles’s responses were translated from the Spanish by Dr Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.
Irizelma Robles, PhD, born in 1973 at Hato Rey in Puerto Rico, has authored several poetry collections namely, De pez ida (Isla Negra Ediciones, 2003), Isla Mujeres (Fragmento Imán, 2008), Agave azul (Editorial Folium, 2015), Alumbre (Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2018), El libro de los conjuros (Editorial Folium, 2018), El templo de Samye (Editorial Folium, 2020), and Lacustre (Trabalis Editores, 2020), which won the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Award. She also authored the anthropological monograph La marejada de los muertos (2009). She studied at the Universidad de Puerto Rico and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México where she obtained her PhD in Mesoamerican Studies, and taught at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico and the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. She has previously received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, PhD (he/they) is a Boricua poet, critic, and translator working in both Spanish and English born and currently living in Puerto Rico. He has authored poetry collections such as, among others, antes que isla es volcán / before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022), winner of the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book and the Premio Campoy-Ada; x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación / poems for the nation (University of Arizona Press, 2020); lo terciario / the tertiary (Noemi Press, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry; tierra intermitente / intermittent land (Ediciones Alayubia, 2017); and oropel / tinsel (Lark Press, 2016). In 2018, he was selected as the fourth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. His epic Algarabía is out now from Graywolf Press. Visit his website at https://raquelsalasrivera.net.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines and the author of three books of lyric essays and prose poems, including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, The White Review, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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