Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric
cultures of the Americas. His most recent book is a collection of poems, short
essays, and adaptations of the mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language Cantares
Mexicanos titled Cantares (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). He is also the author
of Skins of Columbus: A Dream
Ethnography (Fence Books,
2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics
of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University
of Chicago Press, 2020); Infinite Regress (collaborative work with Eamon Ore-Giron, Bom Dia Books,
2021); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh
in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago
Press, 2022). A book about the baroque titled Caravaggio’s Americas is also in final stages of
completion. Most recently he has been collaborating with the Zarabanda Variations on adaptations of these writings, which have
performed at the Clark Art Institute, Peabody Essex Museum, Fordham University,
and Lincoln Center; with an upcoming performance at the end of this summer
(2026) at National Sawdust. He is faculty in the Department of English and also
teaches in the Program of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.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;
