Brandon Som’s Tripas (Georgia Review Books, 2023) won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was a finalist for a National Book Award. He is also the author of The Tribute Horse, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
The Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is open from March 1 to May 15. Each year one winner gets $1,500 and publication. We also publish three finalists, each of whom receives $200. All submitted poems will be considered for publication. Read full contest details here.
Editor-in-chief Gerald Maa recently interviewed Som about his poetry practice and “the attempt to get closer to poems that more fully represent those intimacies, intersections, and complexities” of familial and personal history. The emails were exchanged in early April.
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Gerald Maa (GM): Tripas is the follow-up to your award-winning debut, The Tribute Horse, and it took nearly ten years in the making. Is there one or two questions, topics, and/or elements that came from reflecting on the first book and motivated the writing of the second book? If so, did these motivating elements come early or late in the writing of the manuscript?
Brandon Som (BS): As a Chicano and Chinese American, I’ve always struggled to make poems that are inclusive of my multiple cultural heritages and communities. As a poet and poetry student, I was lucky to have mentors giving me Asian American poems to model and Latinx/Chicanx poems to model. While this apprenticeship was invaluable to me in my development as a poet, I believe it led to a bifurcated collection of poems where I could show you my Asian American poem or show my Chicano poem, but I didn’t have, didn’t know how to make, poems that included the full complexity of who I am, who my family is, and where we come from. Tripas (and the entwined figure the book’s title suggests) is my attempt to get closer to poems that more fully represent those intimacies, intersections, and complexities.
GM: Family history is at the core of both books. What is poetry capable of doing in terms of your interest with family history that nothing else can?
BS: My poetry focuses on orality, sound, and written language. I grew up monolingually speaking primarily English. But I was hearing Spanish at my maternal grandparents’ house and Taishanese (a dialect of the Sze Yup region in Southern China) at my paternal grandparents’ corner store and home. I’m interested in a poem’s ability to listen to and amplify multiple languages. I’m also interested in ways a poem might perform lyrical histories—a kind of storytelling where with the help of verse we might hear translingual intimacies, translingual language play and punning, as well as engage with a transnational enjambment where crossing verse lines is also crossing (and questioning) borderlines.
GM: As a writer, when you’re ready to sit down to start the next poem, what are some thoughts and questions that come to your mind more often than not?
BS: It’s rare that starting a poem, for me, is a singular discernable event. My poems are often a collage of multiple writing sessions, so my starting point is often multiple starting points converging and surprising me with new figures constellating and new sounds resonating over time. In an interview, the Black Feminist scholar and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs talks about working in her writing process with both intuition and intention. I think I’m often sitting down with the goal to be both intuitively open to my present moment alongside my intention, my commitment, to participate in conversations engaging with race, class and critical gender studies as well as Asian American and Latinx critiques of imperialism and empire.
GM: Thanks, Brandon—we’re excited to see your selections this summer.
