Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been a bit behind on my reading of new books, as I’m reading a lot of collecteds/selecteds. Here’s some things from recent days: Reinaldo Arenas’s selected poems, Hart Crane’s collected poems, Orchid Tierney’s Ocean Plastic, Zach Ozma’s Black Dog Drinking from an Outdoor Pool, Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ selected poems, Federico Garcia Lorca’s collected poems, Ronaldo V Wilson’s Lucy 72, Adrienne Rich’s selected poems, Sor Juana’s selected poems, and some recent Carmen Gimenez Smith books.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué : part four

What are you working on?

I’ve just recently finished my fourth collection, tentatively titled Madness. It’s a book about exile, mental health, attachment, cultural rejection, and forms for living. In many ways, it is a continuation of my work in Losing Miami to understand the conditions of cultural shift under threat of global ecological collapse. Since I’m working on sending that around, I’m on a bit of a poetry break, and I am focusing on my graduate study at the University of Chicago where I research the way gay people hone their identities through the media they consume.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

When I need focus, as in when the world and my feelings about the world are so jumbled I can barely get a sense of what to think anymore, I turn to poets in whom I find organization of experience: John Ashbery and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge especially. They are phenomenologists as poets. Ashbery’s “Three Poems” helped save me from the most debilitating patterns of thought I’ve ever had.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I try to not let a poem finish “at rest.” What I mean is, I don’t think that a poem should end when its constitutive parts come into some nice and satisfying relationship with each other, or when “conclusions” have been made. I am not trying to induce catharsis in readers; I’m not interested in “moving” readers. I’m interested, more than anything, in the moment where it feels the poem has put its hand into the world and dislodged something, but the something is unclear enough that there is a moment of panic. A poem of mine ends, I hope, with a feeling akin to the feeling that you forgot something, but are not sure what, or the feeling that you are being watched, but are not sure from where, or the feeling that you are anxious, but are not sure what there is to be anxious about. I know a poem is finished when I’ve torqued its parts into that kind of surprise.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué : part one

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a gay, Latino Leo living in Chicago. He is the author of Losing Miami (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019), Jazzercise is a Language (The Operating System, 2018), and Oil and Candle (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016). He is also the author of chapbooks on gay sex, Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. He is currently a PhD candidate at the /University of Chicago.

Photo credit: Nash Jenkins.

How does a poem begin?

In the spot of least resistance. Anywhere where the real and an imaginary model of the real seem out of joints enough to produce a third space, like the center of a Venn diagram. I try to begin poems with a phrase that won’t leave my head. Here’s a recent opener that I never made into a full poem: “Simply put, …”