1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book of poems, Skins of Columbus, was an inquiry into the colonial unconscious. In practical terms, for the three months during which Christopher Columbus traveled the coasts of the Americas on his first voyage I read his journal entries before going to sleep at night—thinking intently on the plots, symbols, images, motives, landscapes—to try to make myself dream in that colonial phantasmagoria. I made notes throughout the nights and in the days made the poems, art, and essays of that book, which ended up being about colonial encounter but also family migration histories and the hard histories of the Americas. People have asked me: why the hell would you do that? Why enter a colonial nightmare to try to dream with it? What I learned from that project and from subsequent conversations about it is that the job of the poet, artist, or writer is to swallow the poisons of history and to sweat orichalcum. You can’t get at poetry by avoiding history, even hard and ludicrously grotesque histories. It was instinctive when I did but over the years it changed my understanding of the work of art.
My newest book continues this ethos—which I think has driven my other books in the interim too—but approaches its objects differently. Cantares is a collection of translations and adaptations of the sixteenth-century, Nahuatl-language anthology of songs, Cantares Mexicanos—along with micro-essays to contextualize the gritty and confusing world of colonial Mesoamerica—that takes as grounds the soundscape of such historical crisis. Rather than tune into the rhythm of dreams primarily (although there are also dreams in this new book), it tunes mostly into the rhythm of sonic, historical, cultural, and political rhyme and repetition. Built out of a Mesoamerican philosophical and aesthetic concept of non-synthesizing binaries, contradictions, and doubles, its poetics intends to translate the historical music of these songs, emerging across worlds. I also wanted very much to give them a musicality that is sometimes missing from their translation; a musicality that hear in the compression effect of literal song, so, whereas Skins was something like a long-form song about colonial and oneiric travels, Cantares is something like a Kurt Weill-esque collection of travelling songs for journeys across contemporary, indigenous, and colonial scenes of crisis and creativity.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It was the prosody of fate playing its music in the sheer contingency of life. At fourteen years old, I had been expelled from high school for persistent disciplinary troubles. This sent me to a program for at-risk and otherwise challenged kids who maybe just needed a different pedagogical model than the one I was getting. It was a peculiar program because my main job was to take home packets on different subjects (history, science, literature, etc.) and then come back to the center once a week for about an hour to do write-ups, take short exams, and talk about the packets. This was surprisingly transformational for me because it was the first place anyone had ever asked me directly: what is your passion? Is there anything that you read that interested you? What do you want to do with your life? It was here that I first read poetry—and one poem captivated me: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Something about that poem moved me deeply. I couldn’t understand it at the time but somehow I must have sensed that, like me, the poet in the poem hears a bird in the sky that he cannot see—that he cannot fully grasp—yet that makes him feel something, and which he in turn can conjure through a page. I was seduced by this mystery. I soon wanted to know how a poem did that; and, in turn, how I could do that. I wanted to learn everything that I could about poetry. This ambition was fed by the program, which helped me to graduate high school and in turn go on to community college whereby I was able to transfer onward to pursue this strange dream to learn as much as I could about poetry.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I work across multiple projects always. I do not have the sensibility to stay on one track. I prefer to see multiple streams at once, seeing how they flow into each other at times or diverge into their own channels and pools. Sometimes the drama of a project’s ideation is sudden and severe; other times it is a more winding story. My collection of nine essays on the Popol Vuh (the K’iche’ Mayan story of creation), Emergency, came to me in a blazing flash, as if summoned by the crisis of the moment of the pandemic, and that flash just electrified everything around me, moving me very quickly into and through that book. In contrast, the book about the baroque that I presently finalizing—Caravaggio’s Americas: Travels in the Colonial Baroque—began as a collection of prose poems about the painter Caravaggio and his apparent implication in scenes of violent contrast across Europe and the Americas. I wrote hundreds of these prose poems—which were sort of sharded meditations inspired by the writings of Alphonso Lingis, N. Scott Momaday, Annie Ernaux, John Keene, Roberto Calasso, and others (maybe also importantly Davenport’s Balthus Notebook and Stach’s Is that Kafka?)—and I posted many of these prose-poem meditations on an Instagram account that I created for this project, trying out ideas alongside images, adding to my collection of prose poems, just gathering up the work until I realized, after so much writing, that I actually had an argument to make about the historical structure of the baroque as a problem of sovereignty amidst the proliferation of sources of authority (i.e., the colonial Americas). This realization in turn prompted me to rewrite the entire book as a combination of travel essays of sorts—analytic journeys through the colonial baroque. I am still wondering what the relation of that first ghost manuscript is to this new version. But then that too is a baroque poetics: superimpositions, contradictions without resolution, and crises in authority and authorship. The book’s temporality and forms appear to be suited to the spirit of its objects.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I work by way of larger projects. The bigger formal problem or question must be visible to keep me going. Sometimes I can see the whole thing, but not clearly. If it is a hallucination or mirage, that’s ok, but the sight of something must be there to keep me going. There have of course been projects that haven’t panned out, but I also haven’t given up on their ideas (or those projects—maybe their moment of realization just isn’t here yet). I feel like even those works are still in the making. And this is a way of just keeping my attention active. Of course, I’ve also written short poems and things that aren’t part of a project and those are valuable for me too. But if they aren’t integrated into a bigger question or idea that can keep me going, I rarely end up doing anything public with them. I’ve published only a very small amount of these short, one-off poems in journals and magazines.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings and performances are key to how I write and how I conceptualize writing. I wrote a lot about the dynamics of oral performance in my first monograph, Signs of the Americas (especially in relation to non-alphabetical sign-systems like pictographs, hieroglyphs, khipu, etc.)—but it really came to life for me when I turned my energies to bringing my own work to life off the page. Not too long ago this desire brought me into collaboration with some great people in theatre and musical performance. These energies all sort of catalyzed one another. I was working a lot with my voice and its projection by way of the kinetics of my body in a room when a friend, Shonni Enelow, brought me to different theories and practices of acting of which I could never on my own become aware. I’d already been thinking about Grotowski and stuff like that because of my conversations with Rodrigo Toscano, who has long worked with such kinetics of performance. But this was a different pivot into thinking about the structure of address. I especially liked a phrase I read in Meisner actor training: “dropping into language.” I did a couple small instructional things in this regard and, though I’m definitely not in training, I did derive a lot of interesting ways of thinking about address. The drop into language is a prioritization of action over words; when acting is a set of behavioral responses among actors rather than, say, a planned script or even a preconception of the script. This was pretty liberating for me. I realized that, just as I had to literally address someone in the room in a scene of performance, I had literally address people in my writing. The aim wasn’t to write for some abstract sense of the public or even whatever I imagine my own discrete publics to be—but instead to actually write for a person. And it must be a person—living or dead, real or fictional, human or animal, whatever—but it cannot be an abstraction. Shonni calls that structure of address “private theatre,” and I found it very compelling not just for the action of a performance but really also maybe more strikingly for the work of writing poems. She incorporated some of my writing on the Popol Vuh into an adaptation of Ibsen’s Wild Duck that she collaborated on at Tisch and she invited me to come and meet the actors. That was a trip because then I was on the other side of the stage, showing them some Mayan bird songs and watching them unfurl it in their own kinetic structures of address.
As a further catalyzation: around this time I also was contacted by a composer Keir GoGwilt to ask if he could adapt some poems from Skins of Columbus to a musical performance. I was thrilled of course and, as we discussed it more, I became increasingly implicated in his ensemble named Zarabanda Variations. The work is a musical performance that develops from an interpretation of the zarabanda, a dance with a mixture of Indigenous American, Spanish, African, and Arab roots. Because it is both structured and improvisatory, on stage I became sensitive to dropping not just into language but music too. We cut an album at Tiny Panther in Brooklyn and one funny story was that I was so enthralled by the radical possibility of the retake that I kept reinventing the poem’s delivery in drops into the sound. In putting together the album Keir did a stellar job of layering those takes to give the recursive performances a shared presence. That album is forthcoming by way of a chapbook that will include the album to be published by a collaboration of Wesleyan University Press and [NAME] Publications, an affiliate of the Institute of Contemporary Art-Miami.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
One overarching question that has motivated my work is: What is the relation between crisis and creativity, between world historical emergency and the emergence of other worlds?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
People write for all kinds of reasons and having a role shouldn’t necessarily be one of them. But for my own work one motivating purpose has been to take history in its total mess of catastrophe and possibility and do something with it; to ingest, as I’ve said, the historical poison and sweat Atlantean gold. This is no doubt a hard ask. Histories are hard but they never behind us; they stand, like the ancestors, in front of us always, staring at us, wondering what we are going to do, what will our responsibility to them be, where will we take them, how will we confront or embrace them, and in what ways will we move forward through them. And I don’t see how you can get around them. Sometimes even the absences are more palpable than the presences. A lot of people don’t even get to decide to walk into the darkness. They are pulled into it. I feel it in just about all the poetry I read—that darkness and fire—but also the walking through it. It is not an abstraction and if it is it isn’t right and we know it. And we know it because it is there in front of us all the time, watching us watch it. And if sometimes I’ve had to retreat, I’ve also learned that there are elements there to guide and help. Rather than stay in just the darkness and fire, I’ve tried to amplify those elements of world creativity that have outlasted unimaginable disaster, to foreground the spirit of generous creation.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have found editorial engagements to be helpful—both in seeing a book from its inside and its possible outsides. We all get stuck in our books sometimes. Outside eyes are usually helpful, if sometimes just to help the work of revision be an effort in revisioning.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
That some objects—literary, cultural, and otherwise—are not inert. There are some things that, when you touch them, they touch you back; and they might not touch gently. You must be ready for that because it can be powerful and enthralling but also dangerous or at least exposing. You must be careful. I’ve heard versions of this advice from a few people throughout my life and, when I listened, it always proved divinatory—like they saw something coming toward me
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays/critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The challenge for me hasn’t been the movement but the diagnosis. Different tools do different things; different tasks require different tools. Although I wrote Skins of Columbus and Signs of the Americas at the same time—and so the reading and patterns of thought were continuous across the two—the dreamwork of one needed the poetry while the analysis of the other needed the argumentation. I think the former still has argument and the latter is shadowed by the dreamwork, but I needed to do different things in each book. In turn, I think that the arguments I made in Signs helped me to understand what I wanted to do moving forward in a book like Emergency, whose poetics is analytical and whose analysis is poetic. Coming around to Cantares, I wanted to split the two up again to resonate with the poetics and philosophy of parallelism that inspired that book. And Caravaggio’s Americas is also split in two but because the baroque tends to do that to its querents: the more you look at the baroque the more you end up looking like it (mirrored, superimposed, shadowed). The new project that is on my horizon is a collection of fictocritical short stories that I hope will test literary and historical possibilities that are just plausible enough to be necessary, if not true.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I do not have a writing routine. I write in bursts of enthusiasm that take over my life; and then I go fallow for stretches of time. Things are still happening in there, but I am just not pushing the plough through the field.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read a lot of Wikipedia articles, especially ones that are far afield from things I know anything about: plate tectonics, eternalism, the Bronze Era Collapse, anesthesia, the Younger Dryas Event, the Scythians, just very random things to me. That kind of reading reminds me of the formal effects of reading encyclopedic works like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Leopardi’s Zibaldone, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or anything by Thomas Browne. Those works have always inspired me—the wild range—things that click my brain over into some new intersection of ideas. Also, I can sometimes be a poor sleeper and when I cannot sleep, I find an arcane topic to chase on my phone, and if I then do fall asleep, sometimes this topic chases me into my dreams.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smells of my children.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I want to say Wikipedia again, but I can think of another, salient answer too. Another major form of influence for my work are the friends and presences with whom I text regularly, whom I see and talk to regularly, and with whom I have ongoing collaborations. And not just humans, and not just the living. Birds, for instance, are a regular source of insight and inspiration.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I teach the Popol Vuh every year in multiple settings. It is a key text and context for my thinking. It is certainly a text specific to its own historical contexts, yet it is also a text that asks its reader to take it along, into new contexts and critical complications. It calls itself ilb’al saq (instrument for seeing clearly), and in so many ways it shows a reader how to see; to look with it, and not just at it. I’ve learned a lot from this book, but one of the most important takeaways for me has been the historical dynamism of that gesture. Put to paper in 1702, amidst colonial crisis in the Guatemalan Highlands, it does not deny that context—“here in the times of the teaching of Christ, here in Christendom,” it begins—but rather absorbs it into a K’iche’ Mayan spirit of creativity—it goes on to say, “we will bring light out of the eastern sky, we will bring the sun into existence.” This is a creation story that does not begin in primordial darkness but instead in the darknesses of colonialism, in history, and that affirms in history the ongoing ability for its indigenous authors still make a world, to bring the sun into existence. That dynamically creative (because critical) relation to history inspires me profoundly. And it has shown me that such a text has lenses by which to see the world formations around it—and not just the tremendously diverse intellectual worlds from Aotearoa to Mesoamerica, from Nunangut to Tierra del Fuego—but also worlds beyond a contained conception of the “indigenous.” To see indeed this world in its critical complexity—colonial, capitalist, contemporary, and otherwise. So, I read a lot of indigenous works and Mestizo works and works of the Americas. But people are also sometimes surprised (maybe scandalized) to learn that I also just like to flip through a Norton anthology to see anew the strange pleasures of canonical (if sometimes also overlooked) authors like Herrick, Blake, Crabbe, or Beddoes.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to try to learn an Asian language and travel to Asia. I also paint (the cover of Cantares is a painting of mine) but I’ve primarily worked in oil and acrylic. I’d like to do more sculptural work with canvases, to build them myself in weird ways, to add that layer of dimensionality to the painting. Maybe to work more deliberately with sculpture too.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I was fascinated to learn that Michael Taussig was trained first as a physician; and to think about how some of that training might poke through in Mick’s writings about shamanism, healing, colonialism, terror, magic, and whatnot. Ditto with Keats and Schiller. I wonder how my writing would be different with that kind of shadow vocation. I have an old copy of Henry Gray’s book of anatomy that I sometimes peruse and use for language and physical figuration. And a few years ago, I was doing night classes for emergency response training (CERT), where I learned a tremendous amount about bodies in physical distress. But I am too squeamish about blood to really pursue that stuff. And I cannot actually imagine not writing.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Both Barbara Mor and Alan Moore (and Crowley before them; maybe Burroughs too) have described a relation between spells and spelling; that is to say, between the work of magic and works of linguistic art, or really art more generally in its symbolic grounds: changes of consciousness by way of letters, signs, symbols, and messages. Cognitive capture in art and literature. Something akin to this happened to me in my first experience of poetry with Shelley. I was ensorcelled and wished in turn to learn to ensorcell. This is a common experience even if people don’t always think of it in terms of magic, shamanism, divination, or possession. I’ve met many people who are clearly possessed, working the magic that has been worked on them.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I keep a copy of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in my bathroom. Whenever I kill a bug in my home, I open this book at random and recite a stanza for the dead bug, then alongside the stanza I write the time and date that I killed the bug and what kind of bug it was (as far as I can tell). I call this my sortes insectorum. In their martial chivalry, the stanzas never fail to solemnize the bug, sometimes in eerily evocative ways. A couple days ago upon my act the poem read: “Risking a thousand deaths, they would pursue/A noble course, more chivalrous than war is;/But if a message came, how could then they/Their lady rescue who’s so far away?” I don’t watch too many films. I watch a lot more TV. And when I do watch movies, it is usually with my children. But the last good movies I watched were Terminator and T2. Recently, though, I was at the New Orleans Poetry Festival from which I came back with beautiful new books by Jose-Luis Moctezuma (Hiding in the Milpa), Steven Alvarez (Tonalamatl: El Segundo’s Dream Notes), Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez (Tsitsokgo talhtsí: kamaxanatliw papa’ [Red Seed: Poems for Luno/Semilla roja: Poemas para Luno, translated by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos]), and Rodger Kamenetz (Seeing Into the Life of Things).
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am finishing the book on the baroque Americas (which I argue is a tautological phrase; just as the European baroque is oxymoronic). And of course my work with the Zarabanda Variations. But I am also at the beginnings of a collection of fictocritical short stories. They are fictocritical insofar as they take place at border of the improbable and the possible, each meant to test a literary idea in its aesthetic, if not actual, capacity and even necessity to be. For instance, one of these stories tells of how the late Romantic English poet and physician Thomas Lovell Beddoes did not in fact commit suicide by poison at Basel in 1849 but faked his death to exchange identities with a wealthy but wasteful derelict haunting the taverns of Paris by the name of Charles Baudelaire. Beddoes will therefore be seen as the first Modernist that he, as the last Romantic, in fact was. I have other such stories in mind about a cast of characters that includes Tlacaelel, Hernán Cortés, Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, St. James (Santiago), Cab Calloway, Rosalia Castro, Carlos Merida, Robert Duncan, and others to test the limits of what is literarily possible and maybe aesthetically necessary. I will be working on this project in the fall at a residency at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, whose spiritual and intellectual gateways will be a welcome context.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
