“Provincetown”: Five Questions for Francisco Márquez
Francisco Márquez, born in 1983 in Miami, Florida, and raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela, holds an MFA from New York University and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry (2021), The Yale Review, and Narrative and has earned him fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Bread Loaf, and Tin House, among others. His debut collection, Waking in the New World (2019), showcases his unique blend of lyricism and emotional depth. It is not a conscience that Marquez holds a background in cinematic arts as his work displays vibrant imagery.
While reading The Best American Poetry (2021), I encountered Francisco Márquez’s poem “Provincetown,” and was immediately drawn in by its vivid imagery and the way it captured a seemingly simple visual moment. The description of the “blue shack,” for example, stood out to me, not only because of its striking color and isolation but also because of the way Márquez builds tension and mystery around it. The poet masterfully lets “mysteries form themselves” around the shack, using its stillness as a mirror for the reader to see themselves. This image encapsulates Márquez’s way of writing his poetry, extracting significance from the ordinary and making the ordinary feel universal. Whether exploring themes of belonging, loss, or self-discovery, Márquez’s poetry compels readers to slow down and notice the things we might otherwise overlook.
As you said, Provincetown is a magical place. How did being in Provincetown affect your sense of place as a creative thinker when spending time at the Fine Arts Work Center?
The answer to this question has many layers, I think, because before Provincetown I had only ever been used to being a writer in big cities and always while having a job and multiple responsibilities. So, Provincetown, of course, affected me because of its immediate landscape—and I’ll get to that—but it’s more important to foreground that what this opportunity offered me was the gift of time, something very rare, and this in itself dramatically affected my writing process.
Now, Provincetown in the off season (in the fall and winter) transforms into a new place. All the tourists and families leave, and the streets become bare, and the foxes come out, and sometimes all you hear is the bay’s crashing waves. The main way living in Provincetown as a writer affected me has to do with its natural landscape. Like I said, before this fellowship I had only ever been used to living in busy cities, where a public park can offer a momentary glimpse of natural respite, but never the full immersive experience. So, part of my way of becoming acclimated once I moved there was to go on daily walks down the bay, and sometimes through town all the way down to the breakwater, and my feeling is that by doing this repeatedly, I started to conjure encounters—sort of magical encounters—with nature: jellyfish, seals, whales, foxes, dramatically receding tides, dunes, forests, cliffs… Moreover, and perhaps more concretely, apart from this landscape making its way into my poems, something about taking these daily walks affected my writing process dramatically; it allowed the thoughts, images, and connections to cohere more slowly, and effectively, than they had in the past living in big cities, where my life was oftenfaster and more fragmented. In this way, and many others, Provincetown’s sense of place affected my life as a creative thinker, and my relationship with time, for good.
Your use of words seems very visual. When you formulate the words in your poem, do you view them as a stream of images, in a visual way?
That’s a very astute observation, first because when I was coming up as a poet, my teacher would often instruct me to only begin with images before anything else (to the point of her even editing out anything from my poem that wasn’t an image); but also, because before becoming a poet, I wanted to be a filmmaker, so the visual nature of my work is very important to me. Now however, many years later, I have many ways of beginning a poem—sometimes the poem begins intellectually, sometimes visually, sometimes in a purely linguistic way.
In the case of this poem, it started as an exercise. I was new to the Provincetown landscape, so as an assignment to myself, I decided to go on a long walk and jot down as many specific images as I could. My main criterion for these images was that they had to be both visual and temporal, that is they had to be described in such a way that it was clear that time was passing. So, for instance, instead of simply writing, “I saw a black flag,” I would write, “I saw a black flag frozen at half-mast,” so readers can get a fuller sense of the life behind the image. After writing down several images, I then arranged them into what became an early draft of the poem. Then, through revision, I was able to access the emotion behind the poem’s voice.
As I revisited the poem, I realized I was interpreting it through different perspectives each time. Do you feel that your purpose as a poet is to present the reader with images they can interpret in their own way?
Yes, and no. It’s hard to say what my purpose is with each poem, because they all have different styles, effects, goals, stories, and textures. Oftentimes, a common goal is to provide clarity to the reader, so they can be transported, concretely, to a new experience, something outside of their life. It’s important for me not to be too mysterious, because I don’t want readers to be confused; I want the poems to be accessible and moving. However, and this is the hard part, it’s important to balance the forces of clarity and mystery in a poem so that there can be room for a reader to insert themselves into the space the poem leaves behind. I want the poem to instill wonder, not to be didactic or even boring. In the case of “Provincetown,” I have a very personal attachment to the emotions and story behind the poem, but it’s purposefully left open ended so that readers can attach their own emotional response to the themes of loss, natural wonder, absence, home, and memory.
You mention the “momentous light” found in the ordinary and the “mysteries forming themselves in darkness.” Can you expound on the contrast between these two elements in your work?
It’s interesting that you point those lines out because the contrast between light and dark wasn’t something intentional—but that’s my favorite thing about poems, there can be so many ways of interpreting them. In the case of the “momentous light,” if you really think about it, the image of the shack has no “light” for the speaker, there is nothing momentous to it; in fact, there is a kind of ordinariness that provides no emotional response, so although the contrast is literally there because the words “light” and “dark” appear, if you really think about it, the poem is actually filled almost entirely with darkness. Finally, when it comes to “the mysteries forming themselves in darkness,” for me, it speaks to looking back at one’s past, figuratively “looking backwards” to the place where meaning comes to life for you. In my case, it’s the landscape of my childhood. I grew up in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where it’s summer all year round. I feel like memory sometimes can be such a fruitful space for building meaning in our lives, it’s how we learn and make changes for the future; I think this contrast is, in part, at the heart of the poem.
When revisiting the imagery of the wooden blue shack, I found myself perceiving it through many lenses. Can you expand more on the significance of viewing the shack in a state of exile and solitude?
In Provincetown, one key thing I realized while living there is that it was incredibly isolated geographically (it’s often called “Land’s End”), so the combination of that isolation with the landscape’s contrast to where I grew up, produced deep sense of separation from everything I had ever known. The foreignness of the landscape made me want to look back at the landscape of my childhood and to draw a connection between the two places. For some this condition is more acute, for others less pronounced, but the fact that something so strange could live next to something so indomitable produced a visceral reaction in me, a reminder that we must all persist in our lives, regardless of the difficulty and the circumstances. I found this tension, and this fruitful opposition, incredibly galvanizing, and I hope some readers did too.