What You Refuse to Remember: An Interview with M.T. Vallarta

W. H. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen. But how do you actually do that? How does a writer embody nothingness? In this interview MT Vallarta discusses her collection What You Refuse to Remember, from Small Harbor Editions. This collection is created of short prose poems separated by large chunks of white space and silence. Vallarta discusses the way that this collection came to fruition as her “real” dissertation that she wrote alongside her scholarly dissertation for her Ph.D. program. This book allowed her to explore things she could not explore in her essays. The poems are lyrical, full of metaphor and simile, and also many pauses where readers can engage in reflection, process, engage with, and even add to the silence.