A Conversation with Joshua Garcia
BY JIM WHITESIDE
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
***
Jim Whiteside: Thanks for taking some time to speak with me about this fantastic new collection, Pentimento. Congratulations on the debut! I’m really taken by how these poems hold so much in the same hand – queer sexuality and desire, the body, religion, chronic pain, mental health, art, modernity and technology – sometimes in the same poem. The poems feel both capacious and intimate. How did you find yourself bringing so much into them?
Joshua Garcia: First, Jim, let me say that I’ve been an admirer of your poems for years, which makes the opportunity to talk with you about Pentimento especially delightful for me. I wrote these poems over the course of about six years, during which I experienced significant changes in my life—spiritually, physically, relationally. When I first began writing what is now Pentimento, I wasn’t sure if there would be a book. But I knew if there ever would be, I would need to write toward the crux of faith and queerness because these were always at the forefront of my mind. In the earlier years, I was trying to figure out how these two complimented each other, believing both my queerness and my Christian faith to be truths that held great consequence. I wrestled for most of my life with how to live in the world as a queer person of faith. To seek a relationship with a man, which I deeply desired, would have been to go against what my churches taught me and to sever myself from those communities. It was when I began to reject this heterocentric theology that the poems really began to take off. I was no longer writing poems as a kind of apologetics but to seek understanding for myself. Because of this, there was an urgency as I wrote—I was building a framework that I needed to live. Maybe this is why the poems hold as much as they do.
JW: Fascinating! Yes, in many ways, the poems feel like they’re building a world of sense for the speaker, they populate a personal landscape on their own terms. What was the process of writing the book and assembling the poems in a collection like for you?
JG: Assembling the collection was more difficult than writing the individual poems. Through the writing process, my view of the earlier poems and of myself changed entirely. How do you present poems in a collection that are true to who you were when you wrote them but are no longer true of the person assembling the manuscript? In the end, I decided it was important for the book to include poems from every stage of the journey I set out on at the start. Looking at them now, I think they’re all true, and I feel proud to have written them as well as to have survived them.
JW: I love hearing about how the process of writing a poem transformed from Christian-theology-based apologetics to the seeking of personal understanding. The pursuit of understanding – of the self, of the self in relation to others, to faith – are such universal, infinitely-mineable themes, and they make the poems so rich and relatable for the reader. They help us arrive at that capital-t Truth, the universality of experience in a poem, even if we have some distance from the time and place of the poem’s creation. One thing I would imagine as both exciting and challenging in assembling the manuscript would be the book’s visual elements – properly incorporating them, making them feel well-paced. Can you speak to how the book’s visual elements (self-portraiture, the combination of text and image) found their way into the book and into your writing process?
JG: Maybe more terrifying than exciting—or perhaps thrilling is a better word. For those not familiar with the book, it includes sequences of poems that are accompanied by photographic self-portraits. Photography first found its way into the manuscript through “Faggot,” a lyric essay that addresses the six “clobber passages” the church uses to condemn queer people. As I prepared to begin writing that piece, I was thinking a lot about the biblical notion that “the Word was made flesh,” meaning Christ was language incarnate, and also about how anti-queer theology is a physical violence. Most obviously this prejudice manifests as physical attacks against queer people, but this violence can also manifest from within queer bodies as suicide or suicidal ideation, self-harm, and other potential health implications. When I began writing “Faggot,” it was imporant to me that my physical body was a part of the conversation, so I interspersed the piece with photographs of my body superimposed with the “clobber passages.” I wanted to explore how anti-queer theology has a direct, tangible impact on queer bodies. And in a way, I wanted the people who have used these passages against me to have to look me in my literal eye as the language is spoken. Which is thrilling in the way confrontation is thrilling — I can feel my blood racing through my arms as I talk about it—but also in many ways terrifying.
Photography is also a part of the “Self-Portrait as Archetypal Media Image” poems. These are written after the photography of Hal Fischer, whose Gay Semiotics documents gay life in San Francisco in the 70s and also uses text to explore queer embodiment. For this series, the poems came first, and then the thought: What if I recreated Fischer’s photographs to accompany the poems? This was particularly scary because the photographs are nude, but I told myself I should take the pictures and decide whether they belonged later. At the time, I was beginning to feel safe in my body again after a couple of years of chronic pain, and the process of taking the photographs was very healing. It also felt like a way of reclaiming my body and sexuality from the church. And I do believe the photos enhance the experience of the poems. In some ways, the photographs helped determine the manuscript’s overall arc. In my mind, the book has three movements (though it’s divided into more parts), and one archetypal media image falls into each movement, growing in a kind of emotional strength with each one. “Faggot” appears at what I think is an emotional turning point in the book: calling out those bible passages, naming them as violence, and giving them a body I could walk away from.
JW: “Faggot” also feels like a real moment of clarity and coming together of themes for the collection – as well as “Homecoming” and “Waiting for the Annunciation.” Is there something about the lyric essay that draws you to it or makes you feel like something can be achieved through it that isn’t as easily accessed in a standard lineated poem?
JG: I think I was drawn to the lyric essay because I was trying to connect all these disparate threads that were related but not in a way I knew how to make sense of in a lineated poem. I worked on the three pieces you mentioned back-to-back as I was experiencing chronic pain and other health issues. I would go to doctors who couldn’t identify what I was experiencing and would suggest that it was psychosomatic — infuriating when you’re in the throes of real physical pain. But the suggestion got me thinking about how my emotional self was connected to my physical self in a way that is difficult to communicate. How do you explain that what the church taught you is connected to pain in your body, which is also connected to your relationship with God, which is also connected to your sexual desire?
The process of writing these lyric essays was new and tactile in a way that helped me through that time. I’d print out pages of vignettes and single lines that felt intuitively like they belonged together, and I’d cut the pages up line-by-line and put them back together in a way that made sense to me. My body, which I had felt was betraying me, was able to become a part of the writing process — using my hands in a new way, getting up and moving pieces around a table or a room — and this puzzle work also helped me understand some of the mysteries of what I was going through. The thematic braiding of the lyric essay gave me room to explore all of these things together in a way that revealed the connective tissue.
JW: The “Self-Portrait as Archetypal Media Image” poems become a sort of self-ekphrasis, the image created by the poet framing further work by the poet. It’s interesting to hear that the images came after the poems! I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the potential of ekphrasis. It’s an interest we share in our poetics, and I’ve been thinking about the ways in which the ekphrastic poem opens us to further possibilities in poetry. What do you make of how poets use ekphrasis today, and what about these “self-ekphrastic” moments you have in Pentimento?
JG: I’m so glad you asked this question as I’ve recently read some of your ekphrastic poems, and ekphrasis has been on my mind since. Something I realized from reading your poems is how much I enjoy seeing art activated in our lives through ekphrasis. I think you and I sometimes share a similar approach in that a poem may start with or return to an encounter with art, and then the poem moves out of the artwork and into the world as we ruminate on that encounter and how the artwork is actively shaping our experience. I used to feel uncertain about calling some of my poems ekphrasis because I worried they went too far beyond the artworks. The classics from which we first “learn” ekphrasis, like Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” or Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” exist almost entirely within the artworks themselves or in generalized notions of human nature. (Of course Rilke’s “You” famously shatters this barrier.) I adore both of these poems and return to them often, but I think the potential of ekphrasis can be so much more expansive and lived.
Jim, you recently shared your poem “Bed,” after Robert Rauschenberg, on social media with a photo of you standing before the artwork. The caption read “Returning to the scene of the [poem],” which is an interesting notion in itself — the poem as place — but the scene of the poem was also a messy bed in a hot apartment, a professor’s notes written on a paper, and a present interiority reflecting on past love. This movement through time is one of the gifts of ekphrasis. Your poem ends: “In those days all I wanted from love was a mirror.” Like love, ekphrasis achieves fuller potential not as a mirror but as a window. It offers us a throughness we can use to bypass linear time and explore shared histories and perceptions in a rich, potent way that is hard to achieve without the intertextuality of experiences and media. Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Pentimento” and her subsequent revision “Repentance” are beautiful examples of this throughness. The poems explore Vermeer’s painting A Maid Asleep, Vermeer’s own revision, a daughter’s relationship to her father, and the poet’s revision on the page and in life—a pentimento, which allows the past and the present to appear at once, as well as a self-ekphrasis.
JW: I love the idea of thinking of ekphrasis as a window! I often think of it as a prism or a refraction – but perhaps all of my life’s windows are somewhat slanted in that way. I’m glad that you invoked the book’s namesake concept – the pentimento – which I wasn’t familiar with until encountering it through your work. When we encounter the term – which is an instance in painting when an earlier composition can be seen through the final layers of paint – in “Salvator Mundi” at the beginning of the book’s final section, we’re familiar with this speaker and a bit of his journey. I think it’s really nicely timed, how we get this poem about a claiming of the self, of the speaker finding the agency to revise his own story as it is being written. Revision is so often a thing we think about in writing, but perhaps less so in painting – but of course it happens in painting. For our lives, is it this reclamation of the self, a shunning of the past life and past choices, or perhaps how past traumas are “edited out” but still carried in very real ways by the mind and body? Is each body, each life, an instance of pentimento?
JG: I think I like the image of ekphrasis as a prism so much better! I’ll continue thinking about this idea of art as a tool for refraction and redirection. . . . As for the concept of a pentimento, your question about whether each body and life is a pentimento is really interesting. Of course we are all changing all the time. Even if we’re not looking for change, aging and circumstance force it on us. I think where I may distinguish our ever-changing nature from a pentimento is that a pentimento, in my mind at least, requires intention. If a painter, Vermeer for example, decides to remove a man from a painting and turn that man into a mirror on the wall, that is a choice that reshapes the experience and potential interpretations of the final painting. But maybe I’m being too much of a stickler about what intent and authorship of our lives looks like. You mention how traumas are edited out but still carried in our bodies. The brain is making editorial decisions even when we’re not conscious of them, isn’t it? And I’d agree that our bodies hold onto things we intend, consciously or not, to let go of. That’s what makes us such complicated beings. And now I’ve just talked myself out of my point—a pentimento in action! Which is to say, I suppose we are all, simply by living, engaging in revision and carrying forth with our pentimenti.
JW: Constant editing and revising for sure – of a life, and of a life’s work. Would you say the concept permeated the writing of the collection and these poems?
JG: I didn’t consciously intend to infuse the collection with the idea of a pentimento (I decided on the title later in the process), but I was consciously re-evaluating my life and moving toward change as these poems were being written, which is why they have that thematic cohesion. In many ways, this book is a record of that process. Some of the poems are difficult for me to return to, but I’ve grown to look back at them with tenderness. They remind me that I’m strong enough to enact positive change in my life — something I hope the book’s readers will recognize in themselves as well.
JW: Is it trite to say something like “We’re all our own stories, writing them as we live them?” Ha! Seriously, though, the concept of transformation and reinvention permeates the collection. The believer might call it “rebirth,” the artist “editing.” The collection is also filled with characters – lovers, family, doctors, etc. – but there is a concept that appears on four occasions that stands out to me: loneliness. I remember seeing you read at an event for Brooklyn poets some months ago, and the last poem you read was “I’ve Been Feeling a Lot Like an Edward Hopper Painting Lately,” which ends with this curious and beautiful line I’ve mulled over dozens of times since: “my loneliness is not unique but it is the most precious thing to me.” Amid this crowd of people, how does loneliness fit into the poems, how much is the act of reinvention done alone and how much is it the village raising the child? What role does loneliness play in the life of the poet, especially in our age of constant connectivity, where we’re constantly called upon to share our poems, to speak on social issues, and to be a voice, not just a poet?
JG: Ah, loneliness. I feel like I just read or heard someone say that loneliness is how we get to know ourselves, and I’ve been thinking about this lately and how I don’t feel lonely enough! I used to feel so much more lonely, and I kind of miss it. Of course, there’s a balance, but I do think loneliness is important for a writer—and here I’ll distinguish loneliness from aloneness. As you mention, the book is populated with people. I wasn’t alone as I was writing it, and many of these people held my hand through extremely challenging times. In this way, the act of reinvention and writing is communal. I could enter that space knowing there would be friends waiting for me when I returned. But to be lonely — to wrestle with questions that no one else can answer for you, to have a hunger that cannot be met outside of the self — is important for the poet. It’s important for all of us. That loneliness is a space to sort things out, it’s the flame under our feet prompting us to think, pursue, and create. In that sense, maybe loneliness is a kind of Eros.
How to make time for that loneliness is another question and one I don’t have the answer for. You mention our age of connectivity, and I’m constantly wrestling with this. In many ways, our phones and apps really do facilitate meaningful connections. Through them, I’ve found a community of writers and queers and discovered poems, ideas, and opportunities that have shaped my trajectory and growth. But it’s tricky — those little dopamine hits. I might go on social media for one reason and half an hour later I’ve gone down a spiral of Chicken Shop Date videos. For me, picking up my phone easily becomes a reflex that fills the space I need to ruminate and create.
Your question about the poet’s responsibility to speak on social issues, to be a voice and not just a poet, is another one that I don’t have a perfect answer for, but I’ll say I think it’s our human responsibility to speak up about social injustice, and it’s the poet’s responsibility to write about wherever the loneliness leads. That doesn’t mean these are necessarily exclusive. I’m not trying to write political poems, but I think my poems are political because we live in a world where public expressions of queerness are being legislated. Another poet’s loneliness might lead them to write about war. Another’s might lead them to write about trees. And as Carl Phillips has said, leaves fall even in times of war. Another question worth asking is when does a poem become relevant to the social sphere? As it’s being written? When it gets published, if it gets published? What about poems that have been censored or buried by the algorithm? There are a number of factors and barriers that determine whether our poetic voices are heard at all, and we can’t be beholden to them. Our responsibility as poets is to the loneliness. Our responsibility as humans is to each other.
JW: As much as that feels like the best possible note on which to end an interview, I have just one more question: what excites you about the contemporary poetic conversation, and what’s great about what’s being written today?
JG: Mmm. That’s a good question. It’s interesting because the conversation seems to shift so rapidly with our online forums it can be hard to keep up. But a recurring question I’m noticing is: “Why write poetry in times like these?” Why bother with poetry when Trump is running for re-election and there’s a U.S.-backed genocide going on? What can poetry achieve in the face of hunger and violence? Last week at The Poetry Project, Dana Ysabel Dela Cruz shared that they have been asking themself similar questions and then proceeded to read stunning poems about the Filipino struggle against imperialism. It’s true that poetry won’t save us from these forces against the body, but it’s important that we ask what it can do. It can fortify the spirit, facilitate connection, and help us persevere. It can educate us—I knew nothing of the Filipino fight for democracy before hearing Dana’s poems—and it can hopefully change some minds.
Your question also reminds me of something the art critic Jerry Saltz said—that today’s -ism (i.e. cubism, impressionism, etc.) is identity politics. Of course, he was talking about the visual arts, but it’s equally true of poetry. We’re seeing more poems exploring individual identity in relationship to the culture at large, whether that be race or queerness in America, for example, or diasporic identities in our globalized world. I’ve heard the criticism that identity writing is individualistic or navel-gazing, but I think it’s actually about our interconnectedness. Poems about one identity can teach readers of another identity about their experience of the world, too, and their social impact on their neighbors. In this way, poetry does have power. It might not feed someone who is hungry or stop a bomb, but it has the cumulative potential to shape our culture over time. It’s pretty exciting to think that identity writing today, in the same way Dadaism was born out of World War I and abstract expressionism was born out of World War II, can reveal something about our moment and move the bar of possibility forward, in life as well as in art.
