Arquetipos, Actores, y Solteros: Some Notes on the Writing of Bachelor

Bachelor, my forthcoming book, was written across from my mother in our small living room with the television tuned to Ultra Classicos, a channel that plays films from Mexico’s golden age of cinema all day and all night. That was the stage and constant sonic backdrop to its writing. I can now recognize the voice of the great actress Libertad Lamarque from any room in the house. I have finally stopped getting the names of Ignacio López Tarso and Carlos López Moctezuma confused. I know the lines of all the leading men. I moved in with my mother, who is in her late seventies, after the death of my father and at the end of a ten-year romantic relationship. I had not written a word since the release of Flower Grand First, my first book of poetry. It had been eleven months. I can’t say that this silence was a surprise. I have never been someone who writes continuously. After I am done with a project there is always a period of complete creative silence. I begin to write only when a new project, a shape, reveals itself. The shape of Bachelor began with the word bachelor itself. It’s an old word. A formal one at its core, first used around the eleventh century to describe a novice knight’s rank. It is a charged word, especially when modified with adjectives like “eligible,” or “successful,” or “confirmed.” It is a word that has been used to signal, to boast, to obfuscate. Bachelor is not just one thing, but it is just one word. Big and small.

My personal life while writing Bachelor felt both big and small. It was big because I processed the end of a relationship; grieved the loss of my father (which I’m told, and now believe, is a lifelong thing); considered and made peace with my role as the de facto patriarch of my family; had a sweet but brief love affair with a sweet and beautiful man; tried to imagine the legacy I’d leave behind for my youngest niece and nephew, whom I love like a parent loves his children. It was small because, as my mother’s primary caregiver and companion, I fit all of this into the modest container of my family home, where I spent most of my time. Flower Grand First had over forty years of imagery, rhetoric, landscape, and personal and familial history within its pages. Writing it felt like reaching out. Reaching out across Orange County, across Jalisco, across time and memory, and bringing what I could find back to the page.

It is normal to try and match a previous work in method and scope, but I knew that this wasn’t right for Bachelor. I was often told by my mentors and often tell poets who ask me for advice that when you come to a plateau in your writing, you must listen to yourself to move forward. Bachelor taught me exactly what listening to yourself looks like. I did not have the materials, the tools, the energy, or the will to continue writing Flower Grand First. Although I realized that everything I wrote about in that first book was still part of the lifeblood of my writing, I also knew that I would not be able to tap into those wellsprings in the same way. Listening to myself meant I had to find something new. It meant listening to my totality—my state of mind; my location; my situation; my patterns and rhythms, how small and circular they’d become. It meant knowing that with Bachelor I would not be reaching out, I would be burrowing in.

As far as poetic devices go, the burrowing in Bachelor is repetition. And like the word bachelor, repetition isn’t one thing either. It doesn’t always mean a carbon copy. Think of repeating motifs in a film score. Think of Pedro Armendáriz, who for most of his career played similar characters alongside Mexican cinema’s most iconic and distinctive actresses—wily and playful when playing against the fiery María Félix and softer in many ways when his love interest was the beautiful and graceful Dolores Del Río. Repetition (even in its carbon copy form) often leads to reexamination, and this is what is at the heart of this book—an obsession with getting past what poet Louise Glück called the “first circle of revelation.” To do that I created very plain containers, multiple poems that share titles: “Bachelor,” “Husband,” “Son,” “Nocturne,” “Poem,” “Conclusion.”  Doing this allowed me to reexamine and flesh out my subjects, but it also served as a generative push, which I needed. The words were electrified, vast, primal, but at the same time, concrete and guiding. They seemed manageable, but they excited me. The repetition in Bachelor also helped to create correspondence and unity within the collection. The containers formed one recognizable body. A consummate bachelor. An inhabitant of liminal spaces. An actor trying to tap into something immense within the pages of a script that has already been written.

My mother once told me she hoped I hadn’t truncated my progress by choosing to move in and be her caregiver. By sharing the poems in this book with her as I wrote them, I tried to reassure her that I hadn’t. I hoped she’d see I was growing while writing these poems. Growing by listening to the generational echoes in the stories she told me about my grandfather, my father, my uncles. Growing by surveying the archetypes I watched in the films on our television and the archetypes I had created for myself in my life up to that point. I hoped she’d see someone who was working, developing, maturing, as night after night she watched me come into the living room, laptop under my arm, reading glasses and handwritten notes in my hands.

Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and Bachelor (FlowerSong Press, 2025). In January 2024, Hernandez was appointed Poet Laureate of Orange County, California. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and was raised in Santa Ana, California, where he still resides.