Doomsday’s Erotica

KARAN

Regina, your poems move like a parade of ghosts and grocery carts — lush, loud, shattering, full of jokes that hurt later. I kept thinking: here’s someone who’s smuggled the lyric into the undercommons. In “Baby,” you write: “I take my head out with my teeth to scream into my country.” And in “Tristeza”: “I’ve been labeling my sadness. This one sounds like your mother.” These poems grieve, mock, record, indict. Let’s start here: what can poetry hold that other forms of resistance — or intimacy — cannot?

REGINA

Poetry has always been able to incorporate so much resistance, and I think beyond any specific content, this speaks to the form that poetry can take. The way that poetry can break syntax, space, and interact very actively with the spectator's physicality (through breath for example) is what allows it to hold a very intimate space for defiance, particularly in its more absurd characteristics. What I mean by this, is that its ambiguity of narrator and interchangeability of code, is what makes it a medium in which multiple arguments can occupy the same line. It creates a liminal space between the hyper individual and the collective. Largely, I believe that poetry provides an essential place of mourning and contradiction for our social and political projects. It’s the ‘joke that hurts later’ like you said, doomsday’s erotica. Then there is also a surrealism to it that feeds our capacity to imagine, and which incorporates memory in a way that interacts with worlds both imagined and collapsed, and it's the capacity to record and feel these that is essential for when and how we resist.

KARAN

What does your writing process look like — structurally, emotionally, spatially? Do these poems start with language, with fury, with a line? Are they collaged? Do they ever behave?

REGINA

My process is definitely that of collecting. I try to walk as much as I can, and there’s a lot of daydreaming that goes into that. I imagine people jumping in and out of a community centre’s puddle, I see Henry Kissinger hiding under my bed, there’s finance bros in my garden and I run from them. On my commute to work, everyone is speaking to me. And I think this daydreaming, combined with a constant influx of news and evictions, results in my writing. Which is really stream of consciousness, which is really finding the smallest example to the wound and blaming it for the recession. So, I wouldn’t say they behave, or maybe I just don’t know what they could behave to.

KARAN

One of the thrilling things about your work is how it refuses the divide between the erotic, the political, and the absurd. In “Spring Time,” we get: “The Holy Virgin licks mango juice out of my Navel; America raises altars to strip malls.” (I that uppercase N in Navel!) It’s both blasphemous and precise. How do you think about tone in your writing? How do you modulate it? Or do you let it run wild and trust?

REGINA

I wouldn’t say it’s wildly conscious. But there is definitely an intention to maintain quite an intimate affair with contradiction and multiplicity. I’ve always enjoyed interjections, dissonance, and have been very drawn to it as a point of both analysis and creative direction. But, to be honest, I think that that mixing which you point to in my tone, is very telling of my upbringing, and it might just be my memories of childhood coming through and dressing up as literary symbols. Mexico is a wonderfully surreal country, and in my being of and from it, I recognise the language of the absurd that it puts upon our history, our commutes, that it links to religious imagery, to faith and disquiet, as well as to the idea of abandonment and enticement. I am aware of my body through fear and magical thought, and I can see where that comes from. In the same way that growing up in Mexico publicized the American Dream to me, all while walking through the hills of pink houses and six-meter high Virgin Marys. As a result I have had many icons, including my Navel. Perhaps there’s something to say of the influence of a polytheistic heritage, but I might just go ahead and stop myself there.

KARAN

There’s global, grief-stained surrealism in your work that I’m a big fan of — a poetics of late capitalism, surveillance, diaspora, and girls who don’t flinch. In “i am forgetting what i called for,” you write: “To exist is to make a private event out of the sea rise.” These are poems of global consequence written from hyper-local wounds. How do you navigate scale — the planetary and the personal — in your poetry?

REGINA

I really appreciate this question, it’s very thoughtful and moreover I think gets to the crux of what my poetry does. My poems are all very concerned with this play on scale and its management probably comes down to whatever that poem is trying to say, and to rhythm. I want the poems to sway quite nicely between the newsstand and your bed, and of course sometimes I want them to drop you. However this is done in each specific text is largely left to my love for play. To me it feels like an enchanted formula (I like formulas), and I love making interventions into very personal imagery, and shifting between the narrative knowledge of loss and the rational understanding of possession. I hope this makes sense. Generally, what I’m trying to say is that existence to me presents this constant dialogue and dissonance between the personal and the planetary, and I don’t know how I manage that, I definitely don’t do it well, I don't know if any of us can. But regardless of how we manage — violence, occupation, and conflict can’t exist separately from how we make coffee, to how we desire things. It’s a constant imposition into the mundane. So to me, these truths are undeniable, we just play with them.

KARAN

Let’s talk about the voice in these poems. It’s full of characters, contradictions, and offhand brilliance. There’s “Angel” pinning herself mid-rave, a “plastic bag” full of biosphere, a “cover band sponsored by NATO’s suburban plan.” Do you think of these voices as performance, or prophecy? Is it ever just you talking?

REGINA

I think of these voices as companions. Maybe I was a lonely child, maybe that’s pretty obvious. So the daydreaming and collecting element is what forms these characters, I imagine crisis speaking through them. Sometimes they are my own voice, but mostly they are my process for making sense of the large and letting it dialogue with me. They perform the world, and they allow me to request something from it. I also see poetry as a very communal act - it is a result of the embodiment of politics both in me and those around me, so I like to have these characters as I would never want the poems to feel like it’s just me walking desolate through the earth and reciting it back to you. To be honest, I’ve barely had any thoughts myself, it’s just people.

KARAN

Some of my most favorite poets are straight-up hilarious — Bob Hicok, Mary Ruefle, Dean Young, Leigh Chadwick, Luke Kennard. What do you think is the role of humor in poetry? Or more specifically, what does humor do for you in your poems?

REGINA

Humour is central. Bob Hicok and Luke Kennard are also some of my favourite poets. I believe humour and absurdity give us the ability to anthropomorphise the factory, and in this way, especially with political themes, it lets us complicate the argument. When I was younger my poems were more preachy and stoic in their nature, but as I have kept writing, the essential element to be has always been that of confession, and in that I think I want to make clear that the narrator is spiteful, ignorant and lost - that the reader can also, with complete freedom, anthropomorphise me.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you see it moving toward a different direction?

REGINA

I think someone might have to answer this on my behalf, I’m really unsure. Of course, there’s interaction with all four axes, it could be that it’s about the points of intersection between these, but I’d like to give you an answer. I would say my writing is corporeal and metaphysical - so perhaps the body and the soul. But really what I am trying to do is create a poetry of intervention. Beyond my content, I have become very concerned with the place and form that poetry should take if it has any intention of being revolutionary. I am interested in how art can occupy and reinvent space, how it interacts with the social and physical architectures around us, and how it challenges forms of consumption. I’ve been very inspired by what groups like the White Pube in England have been doing, and have even made my first poetry pamphlet a physical walk, written through the practice of psycho-geography and pasted to the outside of pubs at 3am with my friend Eleni. At Set, At the Amersham Arms, and At the Royal George (published here) are part of that collection. So yeah, I want to write poetry that interacts with the physical and the imagined, very much through content but also through the body that it takes.

KARAN

What’s something you’ve recently unlearned about writing? And what is some of the best writing/writing-adjacent advice you’ve so far received that’s been a game-changer for you?

REGINA

I’ve unlearned beauty and intellect. In the exercise of bringing the narrative down to the ‘local-wound’ as you say, I have wanted to do right by unconscious thought, and while proposing a political thesis or offering a portrait of experience, I have found it important to give space to my pettiness of thought, to the cynical, perverted and self-involved elements of myself and the poem. Maybe the best advice I have had is to not defend anything in the writing, or moreover to never defend myself - I don’t think this applies to all poetry or all writers of course, but for me it was essential to abandon the proposal of an argument, or a clear one maybe. It’s not that I don’t have a stance, it’s just that I believe in collecting the  elements of the conflict, which the reader can then make into whatever they’d like.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

REGINA

This is quite simple but something that I have been doing a lot is to go about my day and write time-stamped poems. Leave them unedited, include the news, snippets in conversation, anything, and give one other character who isn’t you, some agency and a line. That’s really it. Just go through the day collecting.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art (or a few pieces!) — a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone would sit with.

REGINA

A song I’ve been listening to a lot right now is ‘The Beer’ by Kimya Dawson. Oh and I’ve been loving Os Mutantes a lot, especially their self-titled album. Give ‘em a listen.

For paintings: ‘El Inframundo Maya’ by Xibalbá and ‘La Balada’ para Frida Kahlo by Alice Rahon. And then anything by Remedios Varo, she’s enchanting and probably my favourite painter.

Finally, for films I’ve always loved Y tu mamá también by Alfonso Cuarón and The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov. I’d also recommend watching To Kill a War Machine—a documentary about the now proscribed Palestine Action and the direct action they took against companies in the UK complicit in the support and production of Israeli weapons, and the genocide in Gaza.

KARAN

And finally, Regina, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets — or artists — that have most shaped your work?

REGINA

God, everything inspires me. I’m a sucker for the Other.

But poets who have really shaped me from a young age are: Fernando Pessoa, Stanisław Barańczak, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Ruben Bonifaz Nuño, Efraín Huerta, Rosario Castellanos, and Alejandra Pizarnik.

After this, I arrived in London, and in 2020 I remember having my first moment of excitement and exhale where I could say “this is why I came here”. That was after the 2020 T.S. Elliot Poetry Prize readings in which for the first time I heard Jay Bernard and Anthony Anaxogorou read their work. Since then I have continued to love their poetry and it has surely informed my work a great deal.

Other contemporary poets that have really inspired me have been: Joelle Taylor, Luke Kennard, Joe Carrick, Gboyega Odubanjo, Cecilia Knapp, and Xel-Ha López.

Then there’s my peers, who constantly inform, edit, and even speak through my work: Eleni Dimopoulos, Elena Cruz, Bella Aleksandrova, and Francis de Lima. These are the most talented people I know, who inspire not just my written work, but with whom I am able to experiment with through multi-disciplinary, collective, and public interventions.

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