This interview was conducted by Advanced Workshop students and JFR Editors Samuel McFerron, Lauren Lotarski, Alyssa Khuffash, and Jovaughn Williams in the Spring of 2024.
Hello, readers! Welcome back to the second series installment of “Meet the Authors,” a series highlighting the visiting authors that grace Lewis University with their presence. On Thursday, April 11th, the University welcomed Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and Naoko Fujimoto to the Art Gallery where both authors read poetry and gave a Q & A afterward. For this “Meet the Authors” post, we will be focusing on Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and his wonderful poetry. Now for a brief introduction to Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and an exploration of his work and the thought behind it.
Biography:
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago where he works in the study of sexuality.
This interview was formatted by Jet Fuel Review’s Assistant Managing Editor, Samuel McFerron in the Spring of 2024.
JFR: How did you feel when you found out your collection, Madness, was being used to instruct a Creative Writing course?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: Well, first, very grateful! I don’t take my work being taught for granted; it’s a real honor. But secondly, I’ll say, I’m intrigued by what Madness would do in the creative writing class, as a book that is so explicitly interested in the craft and career of poetry. Madness’s primary formal gesture—before all of its thematic work around dailiness, mental health, environment, citizenship, attachment—is to distinguish between writing a poem that says “I love you” and writing a poem as the person who would write a poem that says “I love you.” It’s a distinction that at certain parts of the book is rather micro and at other parts is rather macro. This is partly as simple as saying it’s a book written in persona, but my hope is that that distancing gesture also creates the conditions for a metacritique about what the value of the work of poetry is for the author who needs, perpetually, to figure out a way to stay connected to the world he is already in. I hope this is useful for the students, insofar as they are all, while learning how to write, also learning if writing is any good for them.
JFR: What hardships did you face in creating Luis Montes-Torres? What were your motivations behind creating a fictitious re-discovered author?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: Madness came about from two things going on in my life around 2017-2019, one that sounds rather banal and one that sounds rather dramatic. The first is that I was reading a ton of selected and collected poems for various poets (Schuyler, Mayer, Spicer, Eigner, Kaufman, Russell Atkins, Reinaldo Arenas, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Stephen Jonas, Alfred Starr Hamilton, etc). The second is that I had several phases of what can only be described as a mental breakdown, which led to a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, medication, and an ultimately better life. I started writing about this second issue in various ways, but I became more and more interested in forms of distance and abstraction from what might be called a “confessional” mode. What I found really interesting, and often troubling, about the selecteds I was reading was how they gestured towards totality while being integrally partial and ruptured. They attempted to draw an arc both biographic and bibliographic, but did so without the inclusion of everything (selection, not collection). I became very interested in exploiting the potential of that form. So before there was Lu there were these two major things: the form of the selected, and the thematic issue of mental health. From some early writing, Lu’s particular character formed.
The biggest craft challenge for creating Madness was creating a stylistic arc for Lu. If Madness was to simulate a life in poetry, it would need to simulate the poet’s aesthetic development: changing thematic concerns, refining craft skills, moving attention, etc. For example, Lu’s first book posed a certain challenge to me, which was that I needed to create a work that simulated some kind of rawness—a sense that there was something being said and done in the poetry but that its particularities were sort of inchoate, unrefined. Figuring out a balance where his first book signaled potential but not maturity was really tricky to write, as it risked starting Madness on a note of kind of bad poetry.
What does the syllabus look like for a course such as Intro to Porn Studies?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: Ha, well, here you’re asking me to put on my other hat as a sexuality studies scholar. And I do think of it that way, as separate practices. It keeps me sane I think. The syllabus for that course, which I designed and taught for the first time last year, is based on an idea of teaching the students the various potentials in taking porn seriously and without panic. I start the class by emphasizing that the class’s point is not to make an argument for or against pornography in any moral, ethic, or legal grounds, but rather that I’m working from the assumption (an assumption I hope to prove to them is correct) that porn is worth taking critically, analytically, and seriously. In that, the class is mostly a survey of different ways other people have gone about doing this. We talk about various dimensions of the academic field of porn studies, the history of obscenity law, various landmark moments in porn’s genre history, changing forms of its technological mediation, the loose distinction between art and porn, the loose distinction between mainstream film and porn, how forms of difference like race and sexuality inform porn, etc. I see my task as their teacher in this course as revealing some of what they could do with porn if they approached it critically, rather than prescribing them some way through it or an opinion about it.
JFR: Did you have a moment where you thought “I made it!” In your writing career? Is there an award you’ve received that is particularly memorable?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: I think I’ve learned not to think in those terms exactly, and I’ll tell you why. There are very many levels of achievement in any kind of arts field that can feel like an “I made it!,” all of which can feel trumped by some bigger and better thing coming along in the future. My first reading, my first book, an awards nomination, a review in X or Y venue, a blurb from someone I respect, etc. can all feel like moments of recognizing that one’s hard work has paid off. But it’s also very easy to forget about those in the pursuit of whatever is next on the plate. I’ll say that I try to avoid getting caught up in the desire and pursuit of that next achievement and I try to remember and be grateful for what I have been able to do thus far…and I’ll also admit that sometimes I fail in that. But the other thing worth saying is that poetry, by nature, does not exactly create a “career” in the contemporary United States. There’s barely any money around and so much of the institution of poetry has contracted over the last 15 years into a few near-monopolistic presses, awards, agencies, and review venues. I think it was CA Conrad once said don’t step on anybody else in the name of your imaginary career—that’s been helpful to me. To think of the “career” of this poetic work as imaginary, secondary. I try instead to focus on my craft and on honing what I do—not to the standards of a deeply-biased and self-referential literary market, but to the standards of myself and other writers I care for.
JFR: How does Madness relate to the other work you’ve done? Are there certain topics or themes you find yourself maintaining throughout your work? How do you find your voice has developed over time?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: I think all of my work tries to put pressure on the representation of the affective and social dimensions of Latinidad and queerness. I always try to approach that representation from an experimental ground, from a slant, with different levels of abstraction, alienation, and disjunction built into the text. My work is basically trying to make possible new thoughts about being Latino, about being gay, about living in the 21st century United States. Madness is most related to my last book, Losing Miami, in that it treats environmental crisis as a stage on which those identities are put under particular kinds of pressure. The other similarity with Losing Miami is formal: both books are essentially made up of a group of poetic series, held together by one overarching series that chains through them. In Losing Miami, this is the four-part long poem called “Losing Miami,” which is interrupted by the other series of the book. In Madness this is the editorial frame of the book, which enchains various shorter poetic series (disguised as “selections” from Lu’s “books). I really like the pace of this kind of structure and I’m imagining my forthcoming work fitting into this structure relatively similarly.
JFR: What challenges have you faced navigating the literary landscape? Any advice for emerging writers looking to dip their toes in?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: There’s plenty and I think getting list-y would be tedious. But let me say something about the biggest one: there’s really no money in it. The bits of money that there are allocated to a repetitive series of about 100 writers and 5 or so institutions. When I was a bit younger, I didn’t bat an eye at this. I did the whole impoverished artist fetish act, the whole I-do-this-for-passion thing. But that gets tougher to hold onto as you get older and have to deal with the very real structures of the cost of sheer existence in the US, which feels like it has ballooned ridiculously in my lifetime. This is actually a key theme of Madness, as its part of what is “mad” about living in this country. Some people do “make” a “living” in this, but I feel it only comes at the cost of a real sacrifice of an enormous part of your vision, craft, and frankly, health. Balancing the economic has been one of the great challenges of continuing to do the work of being a poet. Poetry is worth it, but one must figure out some way of keeping themselves fed in a way that doesn’t terribly impede on one’s poetry.
Now that’s just terribly downer advice for emerging writers that you mention, so let me say some more useful things. Go to other people’s readings. That’s the first, last, and most important thing about being a poet. People always say “read widely,” which I agree with wholeheartedly, but as a poet you need to know your contemporaries by their face and voice. You need to hear people read, meet them, share space with them. Caution: I’m not telling you to “network.” God forbid. I’m telling you to understand the poetic ecosystem of your city/town/social circle so that you can learn from them, so that you can understand the kinds of work people are making now. Doing this in Philadelphia, where I “grew up” as a poet, set me on the course I am on today. If such a scene doesn’t exist where you live, start it. Seriously! Just call up any local establishment with something akin to a stage (bookstores and bars tend to be favorable) and ask them if they allow people to host events there. A major reading series in Philly used to be in a pizza place, another in an oyster restaurant. Can’t find one of those? Pick a warm day and do it outside. Don’t have warm days? Do a house reading. Some of the greatest poets of the American 20th and 21st centuries read at house readings.
One last thing. Be less precious about it. Submit even if the poem isn’t perfect; read something you’ve only just written; let people see the process. The desire to arrive into writing as the perfect version of yourself is a recipe for never publishing at all. Remember, thousands of masterpieces remain “works-in-progress.”
JFR: How do you decide that a poem is ready to be sent out for publication? What does that revision process look like?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: I wish I had something more programmatic to tell you, but I really think it is just a question that I ask myself: is this poem achieving the goals it sets out for itself? Does the poem enact what it seems to want? Often the answer is yes with very little revision. Often it takes many rounds of revision. But each poem—and of course this is decided partly by if the poem is meant to be standalone, to fit into a series, or into a book—is its own microworld, its own aesthetic construction. To follow the same path of revision for each would be treat the process prescriptively, which I try not to do.
JFR: What are you currently working on?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: Well the most honest answer is that I’m working on finishing my dissertation and doctoral degree, a 6-year endeavor that is supposed to get wrapped up in the next couple months. That’s taking all of my time. I have a couple ideas for new poetry projects, but they’ve been somewhat on hold. The most developed of these is a poetry book I’ve been conceiving about panic (in various senses of the word). It’s tentatively titled And So I Present Myself to Panic and a long poem from it was recently published by Bæst journal.
JFR: If you could’ve co-authored or re-written one novel, which one would that be and why?
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: Oh, this is interesting. Two novels that I really appreciate that share a lot of my own interests and stylistic concerns, that also have a poetic bent would be Jack, the Modernist by Robert Glück (just about the best novelist of sexuality, in my opinion) and The Young and the Evil by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Both are fascinating queer novels. If you want something canonical, I’ll go Moby-Dick, if only because it’s the best book written in English (just my opinion!).
Another special thank you to Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué for visiting us at Lewis, taking the time for this interview, and becoming a friend to everyone at Jet Fuel Review!
To learn more about Gabriel and browse their work, you can visit their webstie.