Born in Toronto to Filipino immigrants, J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist, and multidisciplinary artist. Her second book of poetry, Tender Machines, is a love letter to mothers and caretakers in their adopted homelands and the homelands they left behind. With quiet intensity and grace, Barizo writes of desire, womanhood, and urban landscapes. Her book questions how to remain tender in the face of dehumanizing forces—the persistence of colonialism, technology, and the changing terrain of a post-9/11 New York City.
I first met J. Mae after a reading at Greenlight Books in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Gentrification has fundamentally changed Fulton Street, which was once a predominantly Black-owned neighborhood, mirroring the development throughout the city. The cover of Tender Machines features Manhattan at night, the haze of white light washing over the city’s familiar topography.
J. Mae’s collection taught me how to understand “complicity” in its expansive definition, to reckon with the legacies of colonialism and the brutalities we subject ourselves to in order to gain acceptance in an ethnocentric, Capitalist society. As a critic, I’m used to erasing my identity to shine a light on the poet I interview, but behind the facade, I’m often churning through my own series of self-interrogations—considering who I am and want to become. Borrowing from a line from Barizo’s poem “Jetlag,” to me, interviewing Barizo was very much like “squinting at the gold teeth of the sun.” There is a refractory quality about Barizo’s work, how she writes of the many layers of the city and body, both as vestiges of colonial power and as an inhabited, social, and political space. We spoke via email about landscapes, ancestors, and her book Tender Machines, published by Tupelo Press in 2023.
Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem in Tender Machines, “The Mothers,” set up the rest of the collection that follows? I admire how it begins with the imperative of imperial impositions that become ingrained as internalized misogyny and questions the way it dehumanizes the mothers.
J. Mae Barizo: “The Mothers” introduces themes I navigate throughout the book—the ways care is enacted, how desire can be deferred or performed. There is a simultaneity in the happenings of the poem—the double bind of expectations on caretakers; the lived experience of living under a colonialist, capitalist, white patriarchy. It is a critique of these impositions, like you say, but also a love letter to the mothers, their tenderness and resilience.
We march the sinking
avenues, finger the curls
at the baby’s neck, hanging
from the brink at office
hour, gulping Xanax in
their white oblong shells.
from “The Mothers”
There are paradoxes in the poem, and these necessary acts of mothering are also acts of agency. I like to think this idea of female autonomy manifests in the later poems, with the narrator’s embraces of appetite, like at the end of “Sunday Women on Malcolm X Boulevard”: “See how my desire thrives? / Feeding on every living thing.”
Absolutely, I definitely sense that. To me, the book is also about lineage and reassessing one’s place as a daughter in diaspora. In “Woman Contemplates Her Complicity,” you write, “I’m writing you in yoga clothes made in the country / my parents left behind, an archipelago of over seven / thousand islands.” In the same poem, you ask: “Whose side am I on? My skin, my / skin beneath the sun of my ancestors darken so very easily.” Can you speak about the idea of complicity in this poem, and how it relates to you as a diasporic daughter?
Complicity is an intricate notion. I tend to think of it not just in its English context—as being an accomplice, or in partnership in wrongdoing—but also in the French and Latin roots of the word, which sets forth a more complex definition, one that encompasses shared moments of affinity and aspects of “folding together” (from the Latin plicare, meaning “to fold, weave”). As a diasporic daughter, how can I approach this concept while also acknowledging the intergenerational effects of colonization, and confronting settler colonialist contexts within and outside of the Asian diaspora?
My Filipino ancestors were colonized by the Spanish over four hundred years ago, but Filipinos also displaced tribes indigenous to the Philippines, of which there are over 110 ethnolinguistic groups. At this point, our bloodlines are interwoven; I could be simultaneously a descendant of settler colonists, Indigenous people, and Spanish colonizers. And the complicity I reckoned with in this poem is not just that double bind of colonized/colonizer but of someone writing from a space of privilege, someone born into the relative comforts of the Western world.
When I am visiting the islands where my grandmother lived, I am relegated to the status of a capitalist consumer. You could also view tourism as a neo-colonial violence, and I felt that most readily when visiting Palawan, one of the most beautiful islands in the world. When I’m sunbathing on the famous beaches of El Nido, I feel as complicit as those people in my poem who are trampling over the coral reefs.
Can you tell us about the process in writing this collection? Tender Machines feels very present to me, in the sense that it often describes what is seen, heard, and felt as the speaker goes about her day, at the park, inside a room, or before a piano.
Poets are seers. I tell my students that so much of writing is about noticing on a macro and micro level. But poetry is not simply a translation of the quotidian. Jacques Lacan writes that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” Even our unconscious is organized by a linguistic system, this “Other” that he writes of. For me, that Other is the poem.
The process of writing is also the process of unearthing, even during daily activities like walking the dog or sitting down at the piano to play. When Lacan wrote that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” he meant that it is made of chains of signifiers—which he compared to the links of a necklace—that correspond to one another through their own rules of metonymy and metaphor. That’s as good a definition of poetry as I’ve heard.
The links of a necklace is such an apt metaphor, in thinking of the process of unmaking or unearthing. And isn’t poetry an act of making?
Yes, and not just a literal creative process, it’s the making and unmaking of the self. Julio Cortazar wrote that “writing is rarely the pursuit of answers, but is rather about investigation, of the self, of one’s work and the world at large.”
I’m also compelled by the decolonial and reconstructive capacities of poetry-as-making. By asserting presence, we resist erasure. In a sense, we deconstruct or destructure dis(-)appearance in the poem.
Turning to the overall structure of Tender Machines, do you think that a city can be structured like a language?
I’m interested in the idea of perambulation through the skeletal architecture of both the city and the poem. There is the conflation of the city and the body, the body and the text. So when I write about the body, I’m talking about the corporeal human form, but also referring to how a body of work or a text can be manipulated, plundered, disseminated across media and into a variety of forms. The city, like the poem, can be built by the logic of accumulation, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Both are systems. To decode language is to also decode underlying social structures. Elizabeth Grosz writes of the mutual relations between bodies and cities. I’m interested in this conflation of cities and language. Both are the reflection or projection of bodies. A city, and also a language, is not just a product of the literal body, but of the emotional and conceptual possibilities of consciousness itself.
In my first book, The Cumulus Effect, I explored links between geography and memory. I realized recently that much of my writing deals with the idea of fractured landscapes (the archipelago of my ancestor’s islands, Berlin, post 9/11 Manhattan) and the construct of borders, both natural and manmade. I think this comes from being the child of immigrants, trying to comprehend the disorientation of my parent’s early experience in North America while at the same time orienting myself as a first-generation child. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had,” wrote Italo Calvino. “The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
I’m also drawn to asemic writing and the fracturing of language; I think of artists like Cy Twombly or Mirtha Dermisache, whose frequent code-switching of shapes display a longing for language without the semantics of conversation or words. The sense of estrangement, the desire for connection, existing at the level of pen on the page. Dermisache’s non-language works as a kind of bridge, a polyphonic crossing of cultures and codes, a form of resistance against the officialness of language.
How do the city as body and the idea of non-language prefigure in Tender Machines?
I shouldn’t have used that term “non-language.” Asemic writing is language even though it may not correspond to conventional dimensions of meaning. Music—which I write about a great deal in Tender Machines—has always been a type of language for me. Now that you mention it, I don’t subscribe to the idea of non-language or any kind of linguistic hierarchy.
Regarding the city as body, the city speaks much in the same way a body can—it is both a container and a construct; it is a vessel for projections of the self and society as a whole.
. . . miniature city of her
face, the more Time presses the more
beautiful they become—lover
husband mistress child—I played
Goldberg Variations as she slept
thinking of the geologic proportions
of Manhattan: limestone, marble, malachite
from “Small Essays on Disappearance”
That’s there in Tender Machines too—the conflation of the city and the body, the performance of desire, how it slots into and interacts with urban landscapes.
I love your expansive view of language, in which what is conveyed can be a sound or feeling. How does that structure change at the micro level in Tender Machines? For instance, what signifiers and rules (or music) describe your Manila as opposed to your New York City?
In Manhattan, the urban explosion isn’t manifested in the same manner as in a city like Manila or Calcutta or Mumbai. For Karl Marx, the city signified the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I assume he was referring to the Western cities, but the outcomes are similar—the emotional and human costs of unrestrained (New World) capitalist accumulation. But I don’t write about these things directly in the book; they rupture beneath the surface of the poem, in the narrator’s subconscious, sensed but not seen.
When one experiences Manhattan, one does sense the nodal points in the circulation of capital, the attempts of capitalism to imprint its mark onto the environment. The colony is a capitalist project. In the city, there exists always the detritus and constructed social structures of domination and power.
What is the relationship between poetry and liberation? Or another way of putting it, what is your relationship between poetry and dis(-)appearance?
While domination and power contribute to the city’s framework, there is also another dimension: resistance. The political theorist Neera Chandhoke writes about this, how resistance “takes many forms ranging from day to day evasion of dominant codes to open protests and challenges to the system.” Resistance displays the ability of marginalized masses to insert themselves in the fabric of the city. These forces are always existing in modes of disappearance and reappearance.
Same with the poem. The poem fluctuates between poles of appearance and disappearance, and its very landscape is a liberated space. The mothers and grandmothers, the fugues and sonatas, the sonnets and pantoums, are all terrains where voice is deployed to reveal instances of liberation, even within the containers of structure and form. “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different than my own,” writes Audre Lorde. The poem cannot relish in liberation because we cannot be free until Palestine and Sudan and Ukraine are free. There is no postcolonial city. To be American is to promote the agenda of the colony. To liberate oneself from the colonial project is impossible because language itself furthers the project, even as it can enable us to access liberation, even if just for a moment. I live for those moments. The poem lives for that instant of liberation.
Digging a little deeper, why the subsections, “Small Essays on Disappearance” (which is a longer poem) and “Tender Archive”?
Morning in the city and the performance
that is Madison Avenue wearing diamond
studs for breakfast, my eyelashes crop
open and I rise believing in almost every
god, I didn’t expect life to be kind to me
with my skin and second-hand pearls, at
school the other mothers’ lips are bud-like;
melon-pink on top of immaculate incisors,
if I fixate on the other mothers I see them
as retrospectively luminous, what happens
to the past after it loses its radiance? All
my life sacrificed to the arrogance of cities,
their empires of skin.
from “Small Essays on Disappearance”
I’ve always been interested in the serial poem—I think of Jean Valentine’s Lucy or work by Cole Swensen in books like Goest and Book of a Hundred Hands. There is a fixation on certain subject matter but also necessity of perambulation; the poems themselves need to be allowed to meander.
The poems in “Small Essays of Disappearance” are not discrete in the ways that the other poems are; there are threads between them (cities, motherhood, impermanence, mortality). There is a skeletal architecture to a book; subsections are my way of organizing the bodies of the texts. In each subsection, there is connective tissue between the poems, and some poems in the sections are also linked by what I like to call the ligament of Time.
Perambulation is just the right word, as is the ligament of Time. How does this navigation of urban space reflect your chosen themes? Is it related to the dis(-)appearing urban fabric you mentioned before?
Especially at this junction in time, the tragedy of the dis(-)appearing postcolonial city—dis(-)appearing as in literally being destroyed—is painfully clear. I’m talking about gentrification and urban developments but also historic places like Seneca village, a place where many freed slaves settled, before being destroyed for the creation of Central Park. I think now of Gaza and Kyiv, the way the forces of imperial impositions work to demolish and destroy cities and their cultures. We’ve been talking about the postcolonial city, but there is no “post.” The colony is ongoing; it eats at the urban fabric, a tear in the system.
In a sense, humans are also being colonized by machines. Artificial intelligence itself is a form of dehumanization. Paul Virilio writes of the replacement of geographical space with the screen. Cities disappear into the heterogeneous regime of technology.
Thus tender machines! I’m also interested in the role music plays in shaping the form and content of your poems, which are often inspired by music and musical forms, instruments and sound. To me music seems to be a container of feeling for what cannot be described, as when you lament the “muteness of your hands.”
I like how you put that, a “container of feeling.” I grew up playing music, but I suppose that phrase you mentioned aims to describe the limitations of language when practicing a non-verbal method of expression, which, as a violinist and pianist, music was to me. It wasn’t quite enough for me to be the conduit for the composer, even playing Alban Berg’s “Sonata,” or Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” pieces I love so much. Do you get what I mean? The hands were mute, I wanted to be known.
I know what you mean, and I admire the poems in Tender Machines so much as a result. I’m interested in the book’s title. In the title poem you write of machines in juxtaposition to “mechanical birds.” And of course in some ways the piano is a “machine,” being a percussive instrument. What does the title mean to you?
Can I answer your question with another question? What does it mean to be woman in the twenty-first century, to live a life inundated with technology, to have a history that has been shaped by both violence and migration? We are all tender machines.
Jacques Roubaud, the Oulipo writer, talks about what he calls the “Gertrude Stein axiom,” that “a book is an autobiography of its title.” I think what the title means to me as an author is almost less important than what the reader absorbs from it. Once we write a book, and put it into the world, it’s out of our hands. All of the things you mentioned could pertain to the book, or your readings of it. That’s the beauty of poetry, that it can mean wildly different things to whoever reads it.
It is wonderful, indeed. And I feel so much tenderness next to the double-bind of expectations that you mentioned earlier. As the poet, do you give shape to a broad identity through an homage to motherhood and homeland?
I don’t aim to give shape to any type of broad identity. As writers, we’re able to learn about ourselves through the process, and what I learned through writing Tender Machines was to listen to my ancestors, as they speak through the poems. I listen to the cities, so they will not wound me too much.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote.
J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist, librettist, and multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of performance, poetics, and decoloniality. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books) and Tender Machines (Tupelo Press). As a librettist, she is the inaugural recipient of Opera America’s IDEA residency, given to artists who have the potential to shape the future of opera. She is a 2024 artist-in-residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center and has works premiering at Long Beach Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. She is on the MFA faculty at The New School and lives in New York City.
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