This article is the third in a series on poets and poetry, both past and present, with roots in San Miguel.

by Catherine Marenghi

No one has brought more poets and poetry to San Miguel de Allende than Jennifer Clement. A brilliant and acclaimed poet herself, Clement cofounded San Miguel Poetry Week, the longest running literary series in San Miguel history, spanning 22 years. The annual event has hosted Pulitzer Prize winners like W.D. Snodgrass, Marie Howe, C.K. Williams, Stephen Dunn, and W.S. Merwin, as well as a panoply of other poetic luminaries like Mark Doty, Naomi Shihab Nye, X.J. Kennedy, Toi Derricotte, and dozens more.

Clement is first and foremost a poet. Although best known for her novels Prayers for the Stolen / Ladydi (2014) and Gun Love / Amor armado (2018) and her memoir Widow Basquiat / La Viuda Basquiat (2000), Clement infuses all of her work with a deeply poetic sensibility. In a recent conversation with Clement, I was fortunate to hear her thoughts on her richly poetic life.

"I enter all my writing through the door of poetry," she explained. Nowhere is this more evident than her most recent book, The Promised Party / La Fiesta Prometida (2024), a book that continues and enriches the narrative of the extraordinary life story she began with Widow Basquiat. The book is told in short lyrical fragments, each chapter a kind of prose poem, in the tradition of memoirs that were written as a series of brief recollections.

Born in Connecticut in 1960, she moved with her family to Mexico City in 1961 when her father, a chemical engineer, was transferred there to build Mexico's first water treatment plants. Her mother Kathleen was a prominent artist. Her parents fell in love with Mexico and never left the country. They eventually sold their US home, and her father quit his job so the family would never have to go back.

Both her parents were voracious readers. "My father used to recite Shakespearean monologues and sonnets by heart," Clement recalled.

When, as a precocious girl of six or seven, Clement began writing poems, her father had his secretary type them up and presented them in a booklet to his daughter as her first "published" book. Her poems included titles such as "Stay Quiet," "Carousel Horse," "Venice," and "The Word Moon Looks Like the Moon."

"I can still remember what a magical thing it was to know I had written a book, and that someone might actually read it. I never lost that sense of awe at holding my own published books in my hands," Clement said.

Like her father, Clement showed a facility with memorization at an early age. At the age of six, she played the role of Mustardseed, one the four fairies in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and she remembers memorizing practically the entire play. Her early connection with this play would later reemerge in her poem "Midsummer," which Clement describes as her favorite poem. (See full text below.)

By the time she completed primary school (which corresponds with U.S. elementary and middle school), she was well versed in theater and had memorized many full plays. She attended the Edron Academy, a British school in Mexico City, where she was required to read Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and many other classic works, in a decidedly British curriculum.

That didn't keep Clement from immersing herself in Mexican culture. How could she not? Her best friend Ruth María was Diego Rivera's granddaughter. The children of Gabriel García Márquez went to her school. Juan O'Gorman, the great architect and muralist who designed Frida Kahlo's Studio House, lived a block away and was always at her home. A younger generation of artists with new visions that moved away from muralism and nationalism were also a part of this world, including her mother Kathleen Clement, José Luis Cuevas, Gunther Gerzso, and the sculptor Helen Escobedo, as well as musicians, film directors, dancers, and writers.

She gained a perfect fluency in Spanish. She was deeply influenced by intellectuals like Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and others, many of whom landed in Mexico to flee dictators. Women writers in particular – such as Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro – showed an interest in indigenous culture, and their vision had a strong influence on her work.

Among her early influences were the Contemporáneos, or the Contemporaries, a group of Mexican writers and poets active primarily during the 1920s and 1930s. They played a central role in modernizing Mexican literature and challenging nationalist and revolutionary literary trends of the time. They are named after the literary magazine Contemporáneos, published from 1928 to 1931.

Above all, she described surrealism as a "huge" influence on her writing. She cited André Breton, founder and principal theorist of the surrealism movement of the early 20th Century, who was part of a wave of artists and intellectuals fleeing Europe in 1941. Breton ultimately ended up in Mexico City, where he made the acquaintance of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Trotsky and many others. Breton described Mexico as "the most surrealist country in the world."

"Breton viewed surrealism as ‘against miserabilism.' In all my books, even tragic characters cannot be written in a miserable way. This is even more so of my poetry, which elevates the experience of surrealism even further," Clement explained.

An example of this may be found in Gun Love, in which there is a poignant passage where guns "speak" to the protagonist, Pearl, during a half-awake dream. In this surreal moment, the guns recount various tragedies they've been involved in, such as drive-by shootings, school massacres, and other acts of violence. This haunting personification carries the reader beyond violent events to embody the lives affected, giving voice to the wounds themselves. Clement's lyrical prose infuses magical realism into a story grounded in bleak realities.

Clement once described herself as the "daughter of surrealism." Consider the following poem:

In this deeply erotic poem, quotidian objects in a bedroom come to life. Roses desire the clock. Chairs chatter like little girls. White walls worship a white moon. We can see the joy with which Clement plays with two languages, English and Spanish, with mastery of both, taking delight in how the gender of Spanish words transforms their meaning.

Clement completed her formal education in the U.S. She moved to New York at the age of 18 to study dance at New York University with Bertram Ross, who had been one of Martha Graham's principal dancers. She would get a combined degree in English literature and anthropology at NYU and studied French literature in Paris. She also earned her MFA in fiction from University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program.

The author with Suzanne Mallouk, Basquiat's widow
*

Her years in New York were particularly transformative. As a waitress in Greenwich Village, she met Suzanne Mallouk, Jean-Michel Basquiat's lover, and the inspiration for her novel Widow Basquiat. They became best friends. In her poem "My Young Widow," Clement writes these evocative lines:

During these heady New York years, Clement was embedded in a world drenched with art and poetry, chance encounters with the likes of Keith Haring and Colette Lumiere, and readings at Club 57, a hangout for performance and visual artists from Madonna to Ru Paul. When she left New York in 1988 to return to Mexico, many of her friends were baffled. Why would anyone choose Mexico over New York City?

Clement returned to the wellspring of her poetic inspiration: The land of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mistral, Fuentes, and Frida and Diego.

San Miguel Poetry Week

Clement began a new chapter in 1997 when she cofounded San Miguel Poetry Week with her sister Barbara Sibley, a chef, artist, and the current president of Les Dames d'Escoffier New York. They had a vision of bringing together world-class poets with students of poetry at all levels. Together they would study, practice, discuss, and celebrate poetry for one week every January.

While Mexico City was their home, the two sisters chose San Miguel as their destination for Poetry Week. Workshops would be held at the historic Hotel Posada de las Monjas. While acknowledging there is something magical about San Miguel, that wasn't why they chose the city. Their reasons were more practical: "Mexico City is simply a logistical nightmare," she said.

For 22 years, in addition to securing internationally renowned poets to appear at Poetry Week, writing several books, and teaching writing classes at universities and conferences internationally, Clement was actively engaged in leadership roles at PEN, the international organization that defends human rights and freedom of expression for poets, journalists, and writers of all kinds. From 2009 to 2012, as President of PEN Mexico, Clement was instrumental in changing the law to make the crime of killing a journalist a federal crime.

Then, between 2015 and 2021, she was president of PEN International, the first woman to hold that role since its founding in 1921. In this prestigious and demanding role, she was giving speeches internationally and forging important new initiatives like the groundbreaking PEN International Women's Manifesto and The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto.

"I was living on an airplane," Clement recalled. "It was exhilarating." Meanwhile, Clement dreamed of living quietly in San Miguel. "The syncretic culture of Mexico, combining indigenous and Catholic tradition, is fully evident in San Miguel. It's a city that loves the Virgin of Guadalupe, loves fiestas more than any city I know.

"Everything about Mexico is a fiesta, from parades to bullfights. It's why the title of my book La Fiesta Prometida is so much more evocative in Spanish. In English, The Promised Party isn't quite the same thing."

But it was also something more visceral. "It's that feeling I get every time I return to San Miguel and descend that final hill into town. I felt it every year when I arrived for Poetry Week. It's a feeling of coming home."

Her dream of buying a home in San Miguel was finally realized in 2018 when she purchased a classically Mexican house in the city's colonia Guadalupe. Since then, she has lived a quiet but active literary life, twice appearing as a keynote speaker at the San Miguel Writers' Conference.

Despite her very active public life, she is still the same person who, as a young girl, wrote a poem called "Be Quiet," a reflection of her intense interior life. "I've always loved solitude," Clement stated. "As a child I used to run away a lot, just to find time alone."

A voracious reader, Clement counts both Spanish- and English-language poets among her major influences, reflecting her duality as a child of both Mexico and the U.S. They have included writers in Spanish such as Pablo Neruda, Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz, and Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as writers in English like Seamus Heaney, Caroline Duffy, Paul Muldoon and Simon Armitage.

When asked about her favorite poem among all she has written, Clement did not hesitate. It is called "Midsummer," a poem that "gives a curtsy" to the play in which she once performed as a little girl, "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The poem took seven years to write and presents an erotic dialog – with Shakespeare.

There are three distinct moments in the poem, each conveying different feelings and moods. All involve dreams, as in the title of the Shakespearean play. First there is the unmistakably erotic dream in which Clement is a rabbit, an animal identified by its long ears and its "scut," but never identified by name. She is willingly trapped, skinned alive, and her viscera laid bare.

In the second moment or dream, there is a direct reference to Puck and Demetrius from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The tone is lighter, since Puck is the play's conveyor of magic and humor. On orders from the Fairy King Oberon, Puck had thrown love dust into the eyes of Demetrius, who had shifted between two women in his affections, and Puck forgot to remove the dust from Demetrius – "never cleaned his eyes" – leaving him forever in a love dream with no cure.

In the third and final "act" of this concentrated miniature play, the narrator is abruptly awakened from her dream by returning to the workaday world, where she uncomfortably encounters the man who trapped and skinned her the night before in her erotic dream.

The poem "Midsummer" appears in Clement's latest poetry book, Poems and Errors / Dikter Och Misstag, a bilingual edition in English and Swedish published by Kaunitz-Ollson in 2023.

Clement is continuously writing poetry and is currently working on her next book – details were not disclosed. New editions of her latest book The Promised Party (La Fiesta Prometida,) continue to appear, the latest from France. In all, her books have been translated into more than 40 languages, underscoring the global reach and resonance of her work.

Among her many accolades and honors, her book Prayers for the Stolen (Ladydi) was adapted into an acclaimed film by Tatiana Huezo and was Mexico's nominee for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. NPR named Widow Basquiat "Best Book of 2015" in seven different categories. Clement is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, MacDowell and Santa Maddalena Fellowships and her books have twice been a New York Times Editor's Choice Book. Prayers for the Stolen was the recipient of the Grand Prix des Lectrices Lycéenes de ELLE (sponsored by ELLE Magazine, the French Ministry of Education and the Maison des écrivains et de la littérature) and a New Statesman Book of the Year, picked by the Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Gun Love was an Oprah Book Club Selection as well as a National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize finalist. Time magazine, among others, named it one of the top 10 books of 2018.

Clement is also a member of Mexico's prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. More information about Clement and her work is at:

www.jenniferclement.org

**************

Catherine Marenghi is a local poet, novelist and memoirist who has been active in the San Miguel literary scene for more than a decade. She has published three poetry books, a memoir, and a historic novel. A native of Massachusetts, she has made San Miguel her permanent home.

www.marenghi.com

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar