Five Questions with Cynthia Cruz, poet and author of “Sweet Repetition”
As we continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series, we’re delighted to highlight poet Cynthia Cruz, whose latest poetry collection, Sweet Repetition, published with the series in October.
Sweet Repetition centers its movement on repetition and return, integrating Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and the works of other poets. As Cruz discusses in this Q&A, these poems work in ways akin to the psychoanalytic act. Here she also discusses her writing process and what it is to write “on the edge of the end of the world.”
Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.
I became who I am through my writing, which is a form of speaking. Lacan tells us we become who we are through the act of speaking. We are, he tells us, what we speak. Or, rather, what we speak forms and transforms us. This is precisely how psychoanalysis works. It is also, when we enter a poem in unknowing, the way making a poem works.
Entering in unknowing, bracketing off what the poet believes they know, the creation of a poem is akin to what Freud calls Durcharbeiten. This process of working with, and through, the unconscious brings that which had hitherto remained hidden from the unconscious, to the fore.
Treating each poem like a tiny machine, entering each new poem in unknowing, I have been able to work with and through my not knowing and, in this way, writing poetry has formed and transformed me.
What’s something you’re particularly excited about with your new book?
In “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud explains how what we repress, what we know but don’t want to know, reappears in our actions, which we repeat. We act out, in other words, what we repress when we engage in parapraxis, for example, through slips of the tongue or in the appearance of symptoms. These errors that reveal aspects of our unconscious that remained hidden, is a form of knowing.
The psychoanalytic session is centered in this form of unknowing-knowing where, during analysis, the analysand speaks her thoughts without thinking with the hope that, by doing so, she might give speech to this form of knowledge, bringing her closer to her obfuscated desire. Sweet Repetition does something akin to the psychoanalytic act. As the reader works through the poems, something new is brought to the fore. At the same time, the book is inherently political because the structure of repetition is inherently revolutionary. The word revolution means to revolve, “to change direction,” “to unroll, unwind; happen again, return; go over, repeat.” It also means to move in an orbit around, as the planets move around the sun. This is the motion of the poems in this collection; this is the movement the repetition in the collection makes.
What makes you excited to be a poet working today?
The state of the world we find ourselves in, this suspension between the end of the world and what comes after, situates us in the gravest of danger: we are on the edge of the end of the world. But it also situates us within a window of possibility. The moment we find ourselves in is a moment of twilight, the suspension between two worlds, that presents a window, a moment wherein something extraordinary could possibly transpire.
Tell us a little about your process—is there something or someone you draw inspiration from, a particular routine or practice you work with, or any rules you set for yourself?
Over the years my writing process has transformed. In the beginning, I revised a poem forty or more times until I felt it was completed. Over the years my concept of revision has changed as my concept of what a completed poem has changed. I am no longer aiming for a poem to be a compression of a moment. Rather, I am attempting to create a totality, a system. One way of thinking of the difference between the two forms is that in the former, though it may prove difficult, one may be able to describe such a poem while with the latter, such a feat would be impossible. The aim can be likened to what Michael Hofmann in The London Review of Books describes in a review of Celan and translation. For Hofmann, Celan’s creation of a poem, like a good translation, is not a one-to-one rendering, but, rather, something far more speculative. As Hofmann writes, “Celan perfected a style of writing that was able to absorb unprecedented quantities of reality: so much so that the poems don’t require to be read so much as reconstituted.”
Do you consider your writing process to be primarily solitary or collaborative?
I would call my work a combination of both: I write alone but when I write I am—as we all are—in conversation with the writers who have come before me as well as contemporary writers. In a number of my collections, I include the names and texts from other writers to make this explicit.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight books of poetry, two works of nonfiction, and one novel. Her collection Hotel Oblivion was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School.
Sweet Repetition is available through now. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order from us directly.