M. Soledad Caballero is the author of the poetry collection Flight Plan. Her other work includes the poetry collection I Was a Bell. She is a professor at Allegheny College.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?
A: I started writing these poems in embryonic form in April of 2020, really at the beginning of the beginning of the pandemic time. From there, I spent about two years writing most of the poems and then revising them.
I often write in a flurry of activity and then sit with individual pieces for a long time. Some pieces come almost finished and there’s not much to do, but then there are those poems that are hard make stable! Words keep changing, lineation, and often for me, it’s form that keeps me working and revising.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I knew, on some level, the title of this book even as I was writing my first book, which actually has a poem called Flight Plan.
The title suggests a kind of paradox to me, the idea that there’s a plan for something that to me seems mercurial, like flying is a way to bring up the tension between what can and cannot really be controlled.
Flights have plans and often they follow them, birds have ways of flying and often they have built in blood knowledge that lets them do thousands of miles of travel and migration.
And, and there’s so often that “and”! And, plans are often not what ends up happening, what ends up being how the journey works out. For me that’s what I was trying to think about and think through with the title.
Q: The poet Jasminne Mendez called the book “a meditation on the body: the immigrant body, aging body, female body, and bodies of land and water.” What do you think of that description?
A: Jasminne is a brilliant poet and writer and such an incisive reader, so able to link multiple modes and ways of knowing and being. I think she captures a large thematic of this book – that bodies are connected and not just those we wear or are but those we are carried by and in.
I wanted to make explicit the sense of geographical, spiritual, and physical bodies as part of the stories in these poems and she describes and offers such a generous and expansive way of reading this book.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the collection?
A: Organizing a collection is one of the things that takes me such a long time to think through, especially because I did not have sections for this book, as I did in my first collection.
I wanted the arc and possible arcs of this collection to be fluid and, at the same time, I wanted to have connective images and thematic elements that could carry a reader through the whole of it.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Isn’t this the question always? There are several projects I’m working on and they are various stages. I think I have a third collection drafted, though I thought that a year ago and it turns out I’ve been writing new poems and taking out other poems from it even just this month, so who knows!
That collection does seem to have some cohesion now and my revision for a couple of months now has been at the level of the line, which often tells me I’m in some final version of revision.
I also work in a collaborative team with a scientist and we are working on a project but that is in its very beginning stages.
And I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some poems commissioned to be part of the Ballet Collective. I have worked for several months with a composer and choreographer and our work will premiere in New York City in November. I’m incredibly excited about this project.
Working collaboratively and in interdisciplinary partnerships has been a real gift for my writing.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: If you’re in NYC on November 3, 4, or 5, come to Ballet Collective and watch the premiere of three incredible performances. Here’s a link for more information.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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