Color / Story: An interview with Brandi Herrera

 

[July 2020, by Alexzandria Compton] In the fashion of a fine painter, Brandi’s personal practice combines her passion for visual art and the written word into something that is both intellectually and synesthetically pleasing. With a body of work as multidimensional as the subjects she writes about, we are honored to present to you the first in our interview series, the introspection of a poet, and the writer in her own words: Brandi K. Herrera. 

 

What are your personal and artistic practices, and how did you fall in love with these things? 

 

As a poet, I’m interested in how a piece may be experienced through a variety of senses, rather than simply being read on the page. So the poems I make may turn into sound works in order to amplify their sonic qualities, or visual (with still or moving images) as well as textual, or some combination of all three. As a nonfiction writer, my work tends to be lyric, and a bit fragmented. My undergraduate studies were in journalism, and I’m also a bit of a history and science geek, so all of that informs my writing to some degree, too. Still, the idea of creating a particular mood, experience, or sense of place is a lot more exciting to me than writing to convey information alone.

 

I’m not really sure how I fell in love with any of it. I’ve been making poems, and writing in general, for as long as I can remember. I guess I just never stopped. More than anything, I suppose writing is my way of parsing out this bizarre life we’re all living, and my place in it. It’s about asking questions I don’t have answers to, and then finding my way to some kind of revelation in the process. There’s no reason to do any of it if you think you already know where you want to end up.

"...hands can tell you what kind of life
someone has lived before they’ve uttered
a single word."

Do you remember the first poem you wrote that you felt proud of? 

 

The first poem I felt truly proud of was something I wrote during my final year of graduate school. I had gone back to school in my 30s to study poetry more intensively, and to earn an MFA. The program ended up being a lot more traditional than I had hoped, which just meant that many of the professors in the poetics dept. were pretty straightforward, narrative poets. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but more often than not, they encouraged their students to be the same. I had professors who would line edit my poems, crossing out stanzas or particular words, saying things like, “This is what I would do if the poem were mine.” And I always thought, “Well, the poem isn’t yours ...” 

 

Most of them also really wanted me to write about race and identity. I sometimes felt like writing about that, but it wasn’t necessarily how I wanted to be defined as an artist. I had so many other things to say, but I was too afraid to challenge anyone of authority. Something changed, though, in the second year of my program. I guess I just got tired of the same things being said over and over in workshop; graduate writing programs can be real echo chambers! Once I realized I could listen to people’s advice, but then completely ignore it, I wrote this really long, very abstract four-part poem called “The Seasons,” in response to a work by Jasper Johns. It was really strange, and didn’t have a typical narrative arc, and the syntax was all messed up. I was nervous to show it to everyone else in workshop, but did anyway. Interestingly, the two professors I had that time around loved it. I think they were like, “Oh shit, she has a voice!” It was a bit of a never-turn-back kind of moment for me as an artist. 

 

Do you feel it’s been a challenge to stay in alignment with your values when combining your creativity with commerce? 

 

It used to be harder to separate my creative practice from my paid work, especially when I first started out. I used to write mostly long-form narrative features, book reviews, and conduct interviews with artists, writers, makers, and independent businesses for weekly papers and monthly publications, which is pretty distinct from poetics. But the lines were a lot more blurred when it came to creative nonfiction. Sadly, all the viable newspaper and magazine work dried up, so I started writing copy, which, weirdly, demands a lot of the same muscles as writing poetry. With these highly visual digital spaces we now spend so much of our days immersed in, the intersection between art and storytelling for a commercial context feels more pronounced than it ever has. 

 

Even though the intended outcomes couldn’t be more disparate, I find myself applying a similar level of critical inquiry and sense of discovery to brand projects as I would for an art work. If I’m being totally honest, I think it helps me feel more invested. If I can’t find a way to make it meaningful to my brain and my heart, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning and convince myself that it matters. I’ve been doing this for a long time, though, so it’s also become a lot easier for me to say “no” to projects I don’t want to take on, or that conflict with my values. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, I said “yes” to everything. I had to. Now I get to be a lot more selective.

 

Tell us about @theposeistheperson, do you have a significant thoughtfulness towards gesture and hands that go beyond the usual passiveness at their mechanical daily usage?

 

I’ve been collecting gestures for a while. Whenever I visit a museum or gallery, I take photographs of various parts of bodies in paintings, and then I crop the images in order to abstract them. Sounds so weird, I know. But I love honing in on those tiny compositions within the greater composition, because they reveal things you might never have noticed if you didn’t bother to zoom in on that one small part of the whole. I didn’t think I was particularly interested in hands, until I noticed so many of the images I’d been collecting featured them. Maybe it’s because they’re so expressive. There’s that old saying, “The eyes are the window to the soul,” but hands can tell you what kind of life someone has lived before they’ve uttered a single word. 

 

I’m also intrigued by this idea of inherited body language. Our gestures, on the surface, seem as if they’re unique to each of us. But they’re not; that would be impossible. “Many people, few gestures.” Kundera said that in a book I love, and recently returned to. I ended up writing an essay about it, because it was really bugging me, and I couldn’t sleep until I worked it out a little bit more. 

 

 

 

 

Favorite textures associated with sensorial memories? 

 

I’m more drawn to color than texture, I think. A lot of my work deals with the emotional qualities of color, probably because I seem to store and process memories that way. I’ve been working on a memoir called “Some Life” that’s told through the lens of color, and these small, spare poems that give the color a bit of context. Some of the memories are just little moments, others are life-changing events. Racism at the Wedding, Mother in the Hospital, Tea at the Fertility Clinic, Cat in the Fruit Basket, Dinner by Myself at Chinatown Express — those are just a few. Each memory is defined by a five-color palette, and it’s been interesting to see what colors overlap certain memories, and which ones are totally individual. 

 

 

If you could summarize your life over the last 6 months into a symbolic collection of colors and tactile objects that represent you, what would they be?

 

I love this question! The colors and objects that have come to make up my daily existence over the past six months have definitely been shaped by a couple of things: our new home, and the pandemic. My partner and I bought our first house together (the first home I’ve ever owned) in December, but didn’t move in until late January / early February. Just as we were starting to get unpacked and settled in, the coronavirus outbreak hit the US. I already work from home, and am definitely a homebody, but the pandemic has made my connection with this house only that much more intimate.

 

As far as color, I would say Mexican Pink and Ochre Yellow, which are two prominent colors in the main living space of our house. But also, Seafoam Green and Tangerine Orange, which show up here and there in little vibrant pops. As far as objects, the things that I’ve found myself gravitating toward over the past six months more than ever are the radio in our kitchen, clocks, calendars, windows, books, the bathtub, and my bed.