Poetry as Wonder, Desire, Rage, and Memory: A Conversation with Natalie Diaz

Abstract

I first collaborated with poet Natalie Diaz in 2017, when she wrote the introductory essay for a catalog I edited for Visualizing Language. This Pacific Standard Time–sponsored exhibition brought Oaxacan artist collective Tlacolulokos to the Los Angeles Central Library to install large murals featuring their contemporary portraiture of Zapotec migrants beneath—and in clear repudiation of—Dean Cornwell's 1932 murals featuring “the discovery” of California. As I began to read her new verse collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, I recalled a brief, powerful sentence she wrote at the beginning of that essay: “Love, like art, is not subject to control or governance—they are two of the purest forms of potential.” The new book, a follow-up to her widely lauded debut, combines those two purest forms while rejecting the control and governance of colonial powers, whether governmental, personal, or aesthetic.