Enzo Silon Surin writes, composes, and publishes artifacts on the “witness continuum”—art that he says “pays homage to the culture in which it was formed” and the necessity of generational change. Surin’s work spans librettos commissioned by the Boston Opera Collaborative, four poetry collections, and a musical-in-the-making. He also founded Central Square Press, an independent publisher of works that “reflect a commitment to social justice in regards to African-American, Caribbean, and Caribbean-American communities.” We had the pleasure of chatting with Surin about how he came to writing as means of documentation—from intuitively producing plays and operas about his childhood in Queens to developing his 10-minute play, “Last Train” (which has a forthcoming operatic adaptation). We discussed the juxtaposition of violence and tenderness in his collection, When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Between witnessing the coup that forced Surin from Haiti and the “social violence” he saw in New York, he says he grew up in “state of violence.” It was by becoming a “clinched fist” that Surin says he protected his innate compassion and resilience. Finally, Surin celebrates how writing “saved [his] life” and speaks from the corner of publishing he’s forged, where he’s found that real-life audiences hungry for quality work “already exist."

Published Date: November 16, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the F***ing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a third year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to AWP day three. So excited to have you. Have a new guest to start off our day. Enzo Silon Surin is here, author of When My Body was a Clinched Fist, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry in 2020. He has a forthcoming book called American Scapegoat, out with Black Lawrence Press. Shout out to them. The recipient of a PEN/New England Discovery Award, a Professor of Creative Writing, and also a librettist. We have tons to talk about today. It is so nice to see you. Thank you for being here.

Enzo Silon Surin:

No. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Speaker 2:

We have too. I feel like it has been a long time coming. It's been in the making. We've been exchanging some fun emails, over the course of-

Enzo Silon Surin:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

I enjoyed digging into your work, but I think I'm just the most curious about Last Train, so I want to start there. It's been adapted as an opera to be produced this year, and we know a little bit about that because of a friend, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, back in Houston. She's also a librettist and has enjoyed getting a foot into the world of opera, and so I'd like to know if you've found a place there and found a home there too.

Enzo Silon Surin:

I have. So I thought it was a secret for a while, but now it's not a secret anymore.

Speaker 2:

Oh, no. Oh, no.

Enzo Silon Surin:

I started out writing songs, and so as a non-native English speaker, music became a way for me to learn the language. And so any ballad that was written out there, I know the lyrics to. But I also was listening to a lot of hip hop as well, so a lot of rap music and figuring out, I would tape it back in the day when there was a tape deck, actually.

Speaker 2:

Love it. Yeap.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Shout out to old school. But I kept playing it over and over, and then that's how I learned the language. So the rhythm was always with me. I was always writing songs. On top of that, I wrote scripts before I even discovered poetry, so I was writing these narratives about what it was like growing up in my neighborhood, and I used plays and screenplay type of script writing. I didn't know what it was then. I just knew I had characters and I had dialogue and some action.

But later on, I discovered that there was an actual audience for it. And so I would use the name of my classmates as characters and then they would show up and they wanted to know what their character was doing. So I realized there was an audience for that, but music always stayed with me. But once I discovered poetry, the music was always there, but I wasn't writing songs per se, at least not to publish. But I always write songs. And so when the opportunity came because someone discovered that I had written a short play.

Speaker 2:

They discovered your secret.

Enzo Silon Surin:

My secret. They were like, somebody told me that you were interested in... I was just having a dreaming conversation with a friend. She's a violist, and I said, do you ever compose music composition because I write songs. She was like, no. And I thought that was the end of that conversation. And then I get an email that said, someone said that you write songs. And I was like, oh, shoot, now I'm on the spot. But it was the song cycle, Robert Schumann, song cycle, they were doing a different version of it, and I had to write about falling in love and falling out of love. I was like, I'm there. That's me. I wrote a lot of cheesy love songs. Even some of my earlier work was cheesy love poems to the point where someone coined me the Barry White of poetry at some point.

Speaker 4:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Enzo Silon Surin:

For all of you who don't know Barry Wright, go look him up. But I felt like-

Speaker 4:

To our young people. All of us, we know him well.

Speaker 2:

The Barry White of poetry.

Speaker 4:

I depended on Barry White, a whole lot, but we won't go there.

Speaker 2:

We won't go there.

Enzo Silon Surin:

That's your secret now that everybody knows. You're going to have to talk about it now.

Speaker 4:

But this is live.

Enzo Silon Surin:

But the music was always there. But the other part of it was growing up in Queens, New York, there was a lot of drama. And so for me, I always had these augmented versions of what was going on. And so I would say there was always an opera in my head because I'm always singing. There's always music playing. And so this was just for me to let down my hair, so to speak. Oh, you really want this? And I fell in love with it again. And so the song cycle led to Last Train, and then now it's like, okay, what's next? And so I've been working on a musical for the past four years, and that's been in secret, but now it's not.

Speaker 2:

Now it's not a secret. Now you got to finish it.

Enzo Silon Surin:

So now I have to finish it, but it gave me the strength to actually say, I can do this.

Speaker 2:

Incredible. And does that friend, you know who that friend is, and does that friend know what that dreaming conversation has began?

Enzo Silon Surin:

We've had a brief conversation about it, but I've not said it fully, just yet or what, but she knows.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing. Let's talk about When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, your collection out with Black Lawrence. In researching and reading some of the reviews, I want to interview or characterize it as a collection that grabs you by the throat. And I agree, and I also think it's not the only thing that collection does. I'm thinking especially, there's a lot of tenderness as well in the collection when the speaker talks about his friend, Frankie. And one of the other things that came up a lot when I was reading the reviews is the notion that you are a Haitian-American writing about violence, your community in Queens, it's often the first thing or maybe the thing that's most commented on. And I just wanted to offer a moment for you to say, how would you characterize your work or want for it to be characterized?

Enzo Silon Surin:

That's a tough question to answer because in trying to figure out what the world expects of my characterization of my work, so there's an expected answer. But for me, I live between worlds. I'm transient in nature by that way. But I'm also someone who was forced to leave his home country because there was a coup. And so there was already violence there. And now to come to a place where that's supposed to be a refuge, and then you land right smack in the middle of crack epidemic, social violence and even police brutality at the time, mid-eighties to early-nineties. And so I never felt like I left. I felt like I left a country, but I never left the state of violence in a lot of ways, which was troublesome for someone like me who was extremely sensitive and caring and compassionate.

It's a Haitian trait as well. There's this, the motto is behind mountains, there's another mountain. In the sense of resilience, there's always something to overcome. But in the middle of that, I always consider when we're not climbing up the mountain, there's like the valley type where we celebrate, we do all sorts of stuff, but even when we climb the mountain, we do it together. And so I had that level of resilience in me. But I think when writing the book, I asked myself the question, why do I always have to be resilient? What does this have to be in existence? And especially as a young kid, why should children have to be subjected to that? The wonderful painting on the cover of the book is a painting by a wonderful Cuban-American painter, Carlos Rancaño, who's based in Miami. And the title of it is, When I Ruled the World. And I thought, this is perfect because you're telling a kid that he's a grownup and he's supposed to tackle this on his own, because that was the age where people weren't really checking for kids, and kids had to grow up in that way.

And so forming their own sense of reality and how do I make sense of it? And if I didn't have writing, and this is as cliche as it gets, writing saved my life because it gave me a place to put all of that information, because grownups weren't necessarily listening. And even if they were, they didn't know what to do with all of this. And so writing became a way for me to actually go through the process of figuring out where I was, but also documenting who I was so that I didn't lose track of it. So it was a piece of fiction. I had become this other person, and because I wrote it down, I saw, yes, this is not you you, this is a version of you. And if you wrote it down, it means that somewhere along the way you'll recognize that. You keep reminding yourself that this is not you.

And I think the danger for me was, if one day I woke up and I said, this is me, I would know that the transition had happened fully, that I had been overcome by my environment and so forth. And so the tenderness that you talk about was how I kept a part of me alive. And the clenched fist is a metaphor for a lot of people think it's about violence in a sense, but if you think about a fist, we make a fist when we want to protect something as well.

Speaker 4:

We want to keep it.

Enzo Silon Surin:

We want to keep it. But it's not viewed as a fist just because it's turned in different way. And what I kept inside was this tenderness, even if it meant that my whole body had to become a fist to protect what was inside until it was safe.

Speaker 4:

That's beautiful.

Speaker 2:

It is beautiful. Incredible.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

You, in addition to writing librettos and stage plays and books of poetry, that's books with an s at the end of it. You are the Executive Director of Central Square Press, whose mission is to publish poetry that does not cater to the academic establishment, but is part of the witness continuum. And I wonder if you can tell me more about that mission.

Enzo Silon Surin:

So in a lot of ways, what I do, it seems like it's a lot of work, a lot of different things, but there's a thread throughout, and the witness continuum has to do with the responsibility of a writer. Not every writer, but those who feel compelled to write about an experience, there's a way to write about it that pays homage to not just the person who experienced it, but even the culture in which it was formed. But at the same time pointing out that there are significant changes that need to happen, but don't necessarily happen from generation to generation. So it is about documenting things. And I always consider all of my books and all these poems as artifacts. In my head I keep thinking, somewhere along the way, it's the end of the world and there's debris somewhere, and then somewhere buried underneath some ash is When My Body Was A Clinched Fist or American Scapegoat, and someone shakes it off, a few of the pages are cinched, but then they're reading this and they're like, wait, was this what it was like? I wonder.

And when they start to piece other things together, hopefully there's a hint in there about how we even came to the cataclysmic end of the world kind of. But this is how we live and this how we survive. And so when it came time to look at publishing, I was part of an MFA program, which I noticed a lot of people were writing about significant work, but they were afraid that it wasn't going to get published because as we were talking about before, there's no audience. And we talked and I was like, that's a shame. And I said, well, maybe one of us could be a publisher. They were like, yeah, that'd be nice. And of course, I'm like, researched.

I found this great publishing certificate program at Emerson. It was this one week bootcamp, extremely intensive. I'm like, can I tap out? Because it was intense, and I was working at the same time, full time. So I was just like, how do I do this? But I knew at the end of that, it was about other people's work. And so I needed to figure out how that was going to happen. So by the time I graduated, actually with my own MFA in creative writing, I already had the certificate. So I was ready to not just publish my own work, but other people's work because they are writing about significant things.

And for me, it's not about finding an audience. The audience already exists. And if a publisher has not discovered the audience, it's not up to the writer to galvanize and to... I was talking with an agent last year and they were thinking about representing American Scapegoat, and the one thing that they told me was, they went back and I didn't hear for a while, six months went by. And they said, well, they wanted to do it as a junior agent, but the agency didn't want to represent the work because they came back with my platform wasn't big enough. And by that they meant my Instagram was at 600 people. And it was that way because I had deleted about 300 people who weren't actually people.

And so at some point I said, oh, and I'm doing readings where the rooms are packed, and there are people in the room, but I'm also having conversations with people, which is even more important for me. In the real world, I'm like, there is an audience, but they're not recognizing that. And I thought about how, what is it like for an artist or writer who hasn't even published anything yet? It's very hard to break into it. So I said, if I can do something however small, and we did chapbooks, we continue to do chapbooks. 13 poems in the chapbooks, and that started with Afaa Michael Weaver, A Hard Summation, his book. Because he was having a hard time shopping that particular chapbook, which is kind of crazy because he's published 15 books. But the subject matter was what's at heart? And I thought, well, we need to represent a body of work that people find very difficult to talk about, but also very hard to publish. And when I found out there is a market, there is a readership, as long as you publish it.

So it's not about building, waiting for the people to show up, and then you say, I'm going to build a stadium. It's like, let's build the stadium because we know people will come. We just need to have room for that. So I just wanted to create room for the writers and readers alike.

Speaker 2:

And instead of it being about a platform of abstract numbers, it sounds like what you're saying is relationships.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Yes. Very much so.

Speaker 2:

It's relational. Okay. Here is the $10,000 question. Is it $64,000 question? How do you do it?

Speaker 4:

65. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

It's a lot of money. It's a question worth a lot of money. And if you can solve it today, Enzo, we're all going to be better for it.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Are we counting inflation as part of that too?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Does that mean go up?

Enzo Silon Surin:

It's probably 76.

Speaker 4:

Yes. 6%.

Speaker 2:

Okay. 76. That's good. $76,000 question. How do you balance your creative pursuits? I mean, you're representing other authors, you're doing your own work, but then there has to be some kind of space for you as an artist to experience life from which to draw from your art and your work. So how do you balance it?

Enzo Silon Surin:

The short answer is, I don't. The end. Okay, that's it. Can I get my $76,000?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Here you go.

Speaker 2:

Check's in the mailman.

Enzo Silon Surin:

And when I say that, I mean that we always look for balance, but what does that look like? What does that even mean? And we're thinking in percentages. So 40% here, 60% here, but we can't sustain that level of balance. We can't sustain that ratio all the time. And so kind of like the earth, it's always shifting. And so whether it's time zones or the tides means that the water's squeezed out on the other end of the world, so the high tide there and it's low tide here. I think it's the same with us as human beings is that we have to continue to shift. And so when I'm writing, I'm writing, and when I'm publishing, I'm publishing.

And so there's a reason why I publish one chapbook a year, and if on a particular year I don't have as much of my own plate, and being a single father as well, having two boys, it's like, no, I need to spend more time with my boys this year, or I need to spend time catching up with myself or checking on my mental health, my physical health and the likes. But it's about shifting. So there are time periods where I am 100% in the studio or in my own head, in which case I'm very careful about the type of things I accept. I've gotten better at it, simply because I was crashing before and I was struggling. I was stressed out, and I said, wait, you have a choice. It is an option.

Speaker 2:

We do?

Enzo Silon Surin:

We do. And that's the part that, you know? So it's about letting go. I think I've become a lot better at it because I've had to make some difficult decisions the past couple of years where I said, if I don't make that shift, I probably won't be around to see the fruits of my labor. And I said, more importantly, these boys need a father more than they need me as a poet and everything else. So I said, once I figured that part out, it was a lot easier to figure out that today it's 40%, but tomorrow is going to be 15% because that's only as much as I can do. When you have the right people, you talk about personal relationships, when you have the right people with you, including some of my authors, going through the pandemic, it's like, no, we have to push this book back because there's a lot of other stuff.

Angel Dye, her book, Breathe, was one of those. We had talked about it before the pandemic, but it didn't come out until November of 2021. Most artists or writers who have walked away, but she understood. And when it came time to publish it, wonderful design, great book, and it's out there now. And so it is about giving each other that grace, that time period to adjust, but more so self grace, telling someone no. And if you have to pass up an opportunity, you pass it up because at the end of the day, it's not worth struggling. It's not worth losing your mind over.

Speaker 2:

And trust that something else is coming down the road.

Enzo Silon Surin:

And there's always something down the road. It might be different than what you expected, but I'm here on this podcast because I had to cancel something before, and then all of a sudden AWP became a possibility.

Speaker 2:

Right. Well, we're glad you're here.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you about all of this. I could ask 16 more questions, I think. But I'm going to finish up with asking you, what is the most AWP thing that you've heard so far at AWP this year?

Enzo Silon Surin:

So I didn't think I had one, until I ran into a friend last night. And I'm staring at her right in the face, and she's looking at me, but she's seeing through me, and I'm waving. And her daughter's standing next to her giggling and waiting to see how long her mom would take to recognize me. And I'm waving, she still doesn't see me. And I call out her name and she was like, oh my gosh, Enzo. And I was like, yeah, for about a minute or so I've been waving. But she was looking to her husband across the street, but I was like right there and she didn't see me. And I thought, that's AWP.

Speaker 4:

That is everything AWP right there. Every relationship, every situation.

Enzo Silon Surin:

And to not take it personal. Because people were like, oh, I can't believe this person didn't see. I was like, no, they didn't see you. They're like in Deep Space Nine or something,

Speaker 4:

Staring off at someone else.

Enzo Silon Surin:

AWP is a portal, so you have to be careful because you might actually end up way on the other side of the universe.

Speaker 2:

It is true. And I think the portal are those windows up there. They're all staring down at us like little gerbils. It is a pleasure. I am so happy to meet you in person.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Same here.

Speaker 2:

And to know you.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for being on the show.

Enzo Silon Surin:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4:

Thank you, Enzo.

Phuc Luu:

F***ing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusted and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh. With special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff, without whom this would not be possible.