Anna Martinez
Albuquerque's 2022 poet laureate
Words and photo by Clarke Condé
Anna Martinez made it plain in the first poem she read after being named Albuquerque’s new poet laureate — “Take nice and shove it.”
Martinez has lived her life speaking out, speaking her truth and speaking to defend the truths of others. Now that she is the city's poet, she has no plans to change. Not two months into her tenure she is already getting hate mail. Imagine a poet getting hate mail about her words. Those must be some extraordinarily powerful words.
Martinez is a grandmother, a poet, a lawyer and probably a couple of other things as well. She refined her voice on the poetry slam stage in Albuquerque and was considered by some (including herself) an unlikely choice to represent the city in this way. To many in Albuquerque, she seemed like the natural choice for the time and place where we live. We are a people not inclined to back down in the face of tough times.
The Albuquerque Courier’s editor Clarke Condé sat down with Martinez to find out more about being nice, being kind and what plans she has for her time as Albuquerque’s sixth poet laureate. The following is an edited version of that conversation.
Clarke Conde: Has “nice” lost any utility it might have had in society?
Anna Martinez: I have to say that at this point in time it has. I really do believe that. I feel like nice is more like a mask that we wear to protect other people's feelings so that we ourselves can find more acceptance within whatever groups they are. I don't like masks and I'm trying to unmask things.
Is “nice” etiquette?
I'm not even sure that it's etiquette. I feel it's a coping mechanism. I think it's something that we use to numb ourselves so that we don't find rejection. My intention is to leave an impact that causes ripples, which is something that I don't see “nice” doing. I don't even see “nice” as a nice word anymore. I feel like it's a fallacy.
You've spoken about the quality of kindness in ways that probably stretch common understanding. How do you see and use the word “kindness?”
I think kindness involves empathy and empathy involves having the care, the concern and the time to actually sit and consider somebody else's experience. We're living in a time now where history's being rewritten to not offend offenders so that we don't have to feel upset. But how do you change things if we are not upsetting things? You can't change things off your comfy couch where it's nice and cozy. It's not gonna happen from there. I see “nice” kind of as this sedative and we need something that's gonna light the fire rather than sedate people.
You’ve said, “Don't confuse my kindness with me being nice.” Can you elaborate a little bit more on what that power of empathy is?
I think the term “nice” connotes to me a passivity, whereas kindness invokes more of an activity. Kindness involves caring about your community and caring about how we move forward as a whole, rather than as an individual. I see “niceness” as an individualistic kind of trait because “nice” is something where you keep things comfortable and soft for yourself without thinking about how your passivity is causing everybody else around you to be passive and inactive because we're comfortable. So, if everyone is just comfortable and nice and inactive, then it's easier for the powers that be to manipulate things like information that we're getting. To manipulate voters, to manipulate even our kids, who they themselves will take that niceness and feel that they have a right to never be offended, to never be shaken, to never be moved in a negative way. I don't know who has that privilege in this world, but I think it’s something that is outdated already.
I've always thought the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison summed up his own passion for social justice perfectly when he said, “I have a need to be on all on fire for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” How do you see your own approach to social justice?
I love that metaphor because that is how I have always felt. I've always felt that we just willingly wear these blinders because we deserve to not be hurt by what's going on. But, as anybody that's dealt with any kind of, even physical ailments, knows the more you keep it quiet, the more you try to assuage it, the more aggressive it gets. So, the more time we spend being nice without addressing things that are really unsettling us, the more that unsettling is just going to take place. Then all of a sudden, we're gonna find ourselves in this world that we just don't have any control of anymore because everyone's got a mask and everyone's got their own story. Everyone's protecting their own delicate little heart.
I understand the notion of self-protection. As a child, I dealt with sexual abuse from somebody that should have been taking care of me. I'm lucky that I had books in my life at that point, because I was able to understand the duality of human nature and understand that, yes, I could still love this man and at the same time understand that what he did was wrong and understand that I had my own agency in dealing with the problem. Even if nobody listened to me, I was able to create my own plan. Don't get caught alone with him. Don't get caught alone with any other men, again. Watch out when it's happening.
From a very, very young age, at that point, I became this student, an observer of male/female interactions. Whether they're men and women, men and girls, girls and men, girls and boys. I was always watching those interactions to see how they played out and as a way to protect myself from being taken advantage of, understanding that at the same time that sexuality is a huge part of our life. It's a huge part of a healthy lifestyle. I knew that as well early on from my reading. I knew that I had to take my own agency to take care of that problem because the world was not gonna fix it for me.
You call Pura Puta a poetic memoir. Do you think of it as a personal memoir or as a public one?
I feel like it's a very public one. Part of it being that one of my coping mechanisms was always trying to address the problem through discussion, through conversation. When that didn't happen, through the writing of words. I could just sit there and write out my anger or write out my hurt.
I think it's collective injury and collective damage that I'm trying to address and heal, because I know as the outspoken one, that I was speaking up for my sisters, although I didn't know it at the time. I thought it was something that was just happening to me, you know? I didn't find out until later on. I've always had this sense of righting these wrongs in terms of gender dynamics.
I think it comes from me being raised as a strict Catholic. My dad, he's so pious. He's such a man of faith. Having to go to church every Sunday and confession every Saturday. There were always debates in our household from me about that gender dynamic in the church. I was reading readings in the church from an early age, probably by the time I was 12 or 13. I realized that I could move the congregation in a way that some of the priests I felt couldn't even do. So, we'd get home and my dad was like, “Wow, that's great.” I was like, “I know, right? Why can't I be a priest?” There was always that discussion and always that push for equal advantage for girls and women. I knew that my outspoken nature was something that most women that I knew did not share. So, when I wrote this book, I do not feel that I was writing it for me. I was writing it for my grandmother, my sisters, my aunts and everyone in my community that I knew. This was just something that we culturally experienced together.
A Hispanic Catholic community is highly misogynistic. I feel that my dad was an outlier in that because at a young age he had to help raise his siblings when my grandfather passed away. So, my dad has a beautiful balance between masculine and feminine energy. Of course, I wouldn't tell him that [laughing] because he might be offended, but he really does. He's very nurturing and not a day went by that my dad didn't tell me that he loved me and that he was proud of me. That's huge for a girl like me. I wouldn't be sitting here with a book called Pura Puta if my dad had not given me that encouragement every day.
You’ve said you grew up with a mother who encouraged you to read out loud. Do you only write to read out loud?
I think I do. Everything I write is pretty much to read out loud. I feel like I'm an audio learner. Even when I'm writing poems. I've got my notes jotted down or whatever ideas that I want to bring together. It's not until I start speaking them out loud that they take on this shape and form. It's the sound, the song that comes and fills in the words that are required or that are relevant. I think I write each one of them to be spoken. I've been looking for stages since I was a little kid. I write so that I can find a stage and an audience for it.
You write in English and Spanish, you write in haiku and you write in legalese. In what language do you dream?
That's so interesting that you say that because for many years, probably from the time that I started college, I really don't remember my dreams anymore. When I was younger, I was always having these chase dreams. I was always running away from dinosaurs, tornadoes, vampires, whatever it was, always running, running, running, running, running. I think the moment that I started school again, I stopped running. I don't really remember dreams anymore.
When I do remember the split second or two of symbolism, I think that's what makes me different. I use all of them in all of the writings that I do. I think that's part of what got me the job at the legislature because of my creative writing. I know for sure that's what got me my own law firm.
I was in law school, in constitutional rights class. Our professor is Professor Margaret Montoya, who herself is a freaking trailblazer. New Mexico's full of them, but she was the very first Latina ever admitted to Harvard Law School. She was our constitutional rights professor. She loved to do this crazy poster project that you would give sixth graders. She gives it to law students so they can learn to work together and she mixes the groups. She sent me in a group with a bunch of people, half my age. There was this one white girl, she was dishing out the assignments and they were like, "Oh yeah, I'm on it." It was all PowerPoints and everything. She looked at me and she's like, "Well, you write poems, right? Why don't you just go home and write a poem about it?" I was like, "Bitch."
Welcome to law school.
Right? So I went home and I took the challenge to heart. I was up all night long until the next day. I wrote in every race case that we had studied that semester, I believe there were 27 of them in the original poem. I wrote them all into a poem. When we were done with it after class, I had this guy run up to me and he says, "I'm starting a law firm after law school and I want you in my firm." I'm like in my head, "Who the hell are you?" Then when I saw he looked serious, I was like, "All right." So, I hung my hat there. That's how Aequitas Law in New Mexico came into being.
What are your plans as Albuquerque's Poet Laureate?
I see it almost as a seed project, actually. Ultimately, my goal has always been to get my hands on youth and have these know-your-rights kinds of discussions. Not just the discussion, but to be able to tie their experiences to a political world because as part of that notion of "nice" and "kind," it's real nice to not understand politics. It's real nice not to know what's going on in the world. It's real nice to not get involved or worry enough to vote. I see those things as nice. They're also privileged. I'm trying to remove that. I want people to understand that not only is civic engagement empowering, but it's also a duty that we all have.
For the last 10 years that I've been an attorney, I've offered to all my poet friends that are teachers when they say, "One of these days, maybe we can have someone explain how this works to us." I'm like, "Hey, I'll do it." No one's really taken me up on it, so I figured that it was about time that I took it up upon myself.
When I applied for the poet laureate, this project was already coming to me so it was really easy for me to write about it and know that that's what I wanted to do in this moment in time. This was even prior to the overturning of Roe V. Wade. I knew that what I wanted to do was engage kids. I really just want to rekindle that civic engagement. So many people believe that this system is just way beyond them and that there's nothing they can do to change things, when actually the whole opposite is what is true.
I think you've just answered my next question, but what do kids in Albuquerque need to know that they don't know?
I think they need to know that whatever interest fills their heart, that's what they can use to change the world.