Future Archive: A Conversation with Roberto Tejada

ROBERTO TEJADA IS a poet and interdisciplinary scholar of art history, critical theory, and literary studies. His poetry includes Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), and Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010). Originally from Los Angeles, Tejada lived in Mexico City from 1987 to 1997 and was an editor of Vuelta, the influential literary magazine published by Octavio Paz.

In our conversation, I chose not to focus exclusively on Tejada’s new book of poetry, Why the Assembly Disbanded, but to incorporate a discussion of it because it’s so integral to his overall trajectory. While we do discuss the poems in this new book, I structured the interview as an introduction to his work in various fields.

As a poet and thinker, Tejada moves with facility from the Conquest to midcentury North American poetics and current debates about Latinx aesthetics. As he mentions in our conversation, he is very much a historical thinker and is clear about locating his own positionality: “The 16th-century colonizing encounter and subsequent cultures of contact between the United States and Latin America are fundamental to my understanding of a US Latinx aesthetics,” he states. Like some of the poets, writers, and visual artists who “haunt” him — Walter Benjamin, José Clemente Orozco, Octavio Paz, José Lezama Lima, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Graciela Iturbide — Tejada’s voice, whether lyrical, theoretical, or a syntactical neobaroque extension of both, is hemispheric and at the nexus of various cultural contacts. His literary and scholarly practice is consistently rooted to history and material conditions, a politics of inclusion, and a resistance to the uneven exchanges and exclusions of neoliberal cultural economies.

The poems in Why the Assembly Disbanded locate a border we thought we knew, only to displace it with uncanny, queer resemblances and an image repertoire that includes many eras. I conclude the interview by asking Tejada to comment on Lezama Lima’s “eras imaginarias” (imaginary eras), because the great Cuban poet is a persistent “aesthetic phantom” in Tejada’s poetry and interdisciplinary studies.

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RAMÓN GARCÍA: I want to start not with your latest book of poetry, Why the Assembly Disbanded, but your previous book, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness, a book of essays. I was very taken with Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness — its vast literary, art-historical, and theoretical scope, especially with how it erases national boundaries and locates surprising historical connections. The book’s form and design seem to reflect the themes and concerns of the chapters. Could you speak a bit about the form of the book, the design that includes typographical and visual material, and the footnotes that at times become small essays in themselves?

ROBERTO TEJADA: I’m grateful that you’ve linked the new collection of poems to the earlier book of essays. Both works dwell on the histories and cultural imagination of the Americas. Why the Assembly Disbanded relates back to Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness in its double vision — the colonial past superimposed onto the current climate of US geopolitics, oppositional art and writing, and the prospect of a shared future in relation to Latin America, most urgently along the US-Mexico border. The poems also tell of castaways, settlers, migrants, exiles, and tourists across time, adrift in the hemisphere, lost in the mirage or unbearable intensity of the neighbor. Rehearsed in both of my books is a commitment to experience and experiments in conflict with modernist grammars that overlook the exceptionalism of US American culture and the uneven distributions of modern life.

All those typographic marvels are the genius work of poet Douglas Kearney, who has crafted the visual program for the Infidel Poetics Series published by Noemi Press. Each chapter heading energizes a field for the matter and method at hand. Kearney’s vision aligns with the book’s aim to subvert the supremacy of the colonial enterprise by reordering the relation between figure and ground in a system’s relation to itself. That is, even design elements can sabotage or frustrate the authoritative grip of the past. In a few of my essays, the main text is suddenly overwhelmed or undercut by commentary while the authoring persona retreats into annotation. I meant this to embody the ways persons from one realm of society often behave as guests in another — the question of the host, as Michel Serres reminds us, blurs the distinction between hospitality and hostility.

I especially liked the chapters “The Logic of Elsewhere,” on binational modernist practices, and “Strategic Dissolutions of Identity,” which covers Latinx poetics. In these chapters you connect actions, site-specific work, and visual art practices to Latinx poetics. I’m thinking of the way you frame the poetry of José Montoya and Harry Gamboa Jr. and point out the historical significance of their visual art practices. I heard you speak about Ronnie Burk, a queer Chicanx poet/visual artist, still absent from the scholarly record. What do you think is the significance of these poets who also engage in specific visual art practices?

The 16th-century colonizing encounter and subsequent cultures of contact between the United States and Latin America are fundamental to my understanding of a US Latinx aesthetics. It seems related to me that poets who sustain a parallel visual practice achieve a metabolism of speech arising from liminal knowledge and nonverbal scene structures. The works of José Montoya and Harry Gamboa Jr. obtain a defiance of disciplinary borders in their respective multimedia encounters between visual expression and the language arts. Their work informs my own practice along the borderlands of poetry and critical thought, in essays that serve as autobiography by art-historical means.

Poets contribute to the debate around what art historian Michael Ann Holly calls “visual captivation” — that is, when viewer and viewed become one. For her, the encounter is a melancholy meditation about the relative permanence of material things and the certain impermanence of human life. For others, like poet and scholar Michael Davidson, verbal reckonings of the visual can convey unease, insofar as “verbal play” exposes the “instability of the object” and the implied persona of the poem who serves as a subject of language and the active participant in scenes of looking.

I’m eager to share my excitement about the uniquely iridescent poetry and prescient collage work of Ronnie Burk (1955–2003), whose contributions to art and activism deserve much wider acclaim. Thankfully, his memory is sustained by a circle of friends and fellow artists. Garrett Caples pointed me to brothers Todd and Tate Swindell, who led me to Mia Kirsi Stageberg, all of whom are working to preserve the many facets of Ronnie Burk’s extraordinary creative life. Todd Swindell relates how Ronnie was among the first students at Naropa University in the mid-1970s, where he interacted with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Anne Waldman, whose The Iovis Trilogy incorporates one of Ronnie’s letters to her.

Ronnie Burk hailed from Sinton, Texas, and his trajectory began with participation in La Raza Unida Party, then contact with Chicana poets Lorna Dee Cervantes, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and novelist Ana Castillo, continuing with subsequent interactions in New York City art scenes around Kenneth Anger, The Living Theatre, and David Wojnarowicz; with the Nuyorican Poets Café around figures Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero; and in San Francisco poetry circles that included Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Diane di Prima, who became one of his mentors. There’s an excellent recording­ — Ronnie Burk: A Man of Letters (Unrequited Records, 2016) — that features rare audio of Ronnie reading his own work, as well as radio interviews and taped segments for ACT UP/San Francisco’s pirate radio show. These capture his rage at the neglect of lawmakers and pharmaceutical companies as the AIDS epidemic took its toll and HIV-positive citizens were deprived of proper care and affordable housing.

Ronnie’s first chapbook, En el jardín de nopales (In the Garden of Prickly Pear Trees), published by Lorna Dee Cervantes (Mango Publications, 1979), reveals what for both European and Latin American surrealists was the “superior revolt” of the verbal image as a machine that integrates worlds of possible meaning in relation to the visible realm. This is especially evident in his collage series The History of America (1998), which serves as a profound antecedent to the current reassessment of the nation’s ignominious past.

In your chapter “Avant-Garde in Crisis,” you offer a critique of a Euro-American–centric avant-garde, a critique from the South, so to speak — one that resembles Lezama Lima’s idea that vanguard work in the Hispanic world does not represent a rupture from the past but a simultaneous coexistence of disparate eras. Your critique, however, seems to update Lezama Lima’s, in that it also criticizes the neoliberal way in which a Euro-American avant-garde utilizes Latin America’s avant-garde. Can you elaborate on this?

You’re right: Lezama Lima and others endorsed the entanglements of historic time, an agnosticism as to the necessary progression of cause and effect. Later avant-garde tendencies he inspired, broadly defined as neobaroque, deployed immersive qualities, techniques of juxtaposition and high contrast, the pleasure of artifice and citation, the mood of paradox and disenchantment, and a poetics of lateral thinking and displacement, all to circumvent official discourses, often under social conditions of surveillance and censorship.

In Latin America’s avant-gardes, surrealism and the long baroque have served in concert to confront issues of aesthetics, the neoliberal economy, and questions of class conflict with counterhegemonic understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitical location. Poets in Brazil during the 1950s and ’60s looked to break the spell of an emerging national culture industry and newspaper media ecology; they constructed visual poems that equated the sensorium of urban neon lights with the material shape of words, and so managed to mirror embodied experience in the market-driven processes of abstraction, division, and alienation.

The Euro-American avant-garde and its attendant criticism, especially in the United States, have often looked to Latin American poetic writing to satisfy, at best, what literary historian Harris Feinsod has called a desire for “intercultural belongings” and “geopolitical feelings, both institutional and self-expansive.” Poet and scholar Peter Ramos recounts how Deep Image poets in the United States (James Wright, Jerome Rothenberg) turned to César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda in their wish to uncover a national unconscious. Contrary to the techno-utopianism of certain US avant-garde poets, however, it’s unlikely the concretistas would have deemed the internet a medium to celebrate uncritically as the culmination of their efforts; rather, they might have adapted their practice and visual forms to side with the ethics of those engineers who seek to upset the determinism of our digital tools and our algorithmic complicity with the extractive designs of neoliberalism.

In the above-mentioned chapter, you draw, for example, on José Lezama Lima’s nuanced idea of “difficulty,” an idea that he does not reduce to formal innovation (as is the case in the canonical US or Eurocentric avant-garde). It reminded me of Borges, who I’ve heard writers here sometimes refer to as an “experimental” writer, whereas I don’t think he would have defined himself as such. In some of his essays, Borges locates the origin of poetry in the epic — primal oral narrative — as in Homer, and he is critical of formal innovation and the idea of “originality” in literary production. Could you elaborate on the differences between a Eurocentric avant-garde and the avant-garde in Latin America?

Your mention of Borges calls to mind “The Aleph” (1945). I suppose it’s experimental insomuch as the central character, named “Borges,” blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. From a basement in Buenos Aires, Borges gains access to an Aleph, “one of the points in space that contains all other points.” Earlier, in 1935, the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres-García, had published a treatise, Estructura (Structure), where he articulates the visual thinking that drives his influential upside down map: “[O]ur North is the South. There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South.” To view Borges and Torres-García together is to resist the facile view of “experimentalism” that relies on the originality of form to measure the so-called colonial difference of Latin American cultural production.

Cultural historian Esther Gabara has looked at the ways Latin American avant-gardes “fuse meditations on ethics with experimental aesthetics,” a specific awareness around the compulsion to repeat the errors and errant condition of settler colonialism. In Latin America, modernization inaugurated new forms of human relations, but it also yielded further disparity in what were already profoundly unequal societies. So “modernization,” “modernity,” and the ensuing cultural avant-gardes uncovered questions about the unsparing effects of colonization and its racial hierarchies as a contemporary legacy. This dialectic differs from mere formal novelty and the rhetorical rejection of the past that European and US-American modernists overestimate.

Now, let’s talk about your new book of poems, Why the Assembly Disbanded. I find it difficult to categorize the book or its poetics, and that to me is a sign of its strength. I do, however, identify some influences, or certain writers and artists that seem to haunt the poems. In order to get you to talk about them, allow me to quote Yves Saint Laurent: “Everyone, in order to survive, must have, as Nietzsche said, his aesthetic phantoms. Life is not possible without them. I think I found them in Mondrian, Picasso, and Matisse, but also, above all, in Proust.” So, who are your aesthetic phantoms, the ones who haunt Why the Assembly Disbanded in particular?

By “phantoms,” I take it YSL did not mean conscious models of influence. In Why the Assembly Disbanded, I use epigraphs to signal such guides: Michael Palmer’s meditations tarry in the unbreachable divide between the spell of proper names and the atrocities that disabuse language of its orphic aspirations. Gloria Anzaldúa invites us into the “uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another,” the shifting ground of class, race, or sexual position, or of present and future identities. Jayne Cortez models the incantational force of embodied experience to reflect the abjections of a divided self in a society prone to gaslight. Buckminster Fuller evokes the circulatory and respiratory systems that organize life into pattern and process. Chon Noriega, in a reference to Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, speculates on the translation effect needed to redirect causality. Ann Lauterbach submits an understanding of human time and its attachments pulled between belatedness and the meanwhile.

By “phantom,” I understand rather a kind of unacknowledged presence. And for me that may be the underground swell of Mexican visionary José Clemente Orozco. During my years in Mexico City, his were the murals I returned to most often, especially his walls at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (1924–26), and I spent a year writing what would become my book National Camera in the proximity of his mural program The Epic of American Civilization (1932–34), at Dartmouth. Orozco foregrounds in the image a world devoid of moral or ethical certainties, but he implicates himself in the dehumanized madness wrought by violence. I’m haunted by the carnivalesque method that offered Orozco a framework for history as a spectacle on the dividing line separating economies of brutality from the pleasures of bodily affirmation. It’s the “exacerbated” expressionism that Octavio Paz viewed as Orozco’s “powerful and passionate” negation that animates “living forms, anguished and anxious.” These are characteristics I aspire to — owing in part to one remainder of my Catholic formation: hope in the regenerative principles of grace.

The interest in the visual arts is not new in your poetry. In your book Full Foreground (2012), you have a poem, “Flatlands,” based on a project by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide conducted through the US American South. Why the Assembly Disbanded includes the work of several artists, including Betye Saar and Connie Samaras, among others. Can you discuss how the poems incorporate or address the work of the artists included in the book?

I studied the work of Graciela Iturbide to emulate her method. She destabilizes the authority of her camera as she engages the logic of reverie to gain insight into Mexico’s ethnic, social, and sexual differences. Her images are indebted neither to anthropology nor the function of fantasy. Rather, she evokes dreaming or dread gleaned from such uncanny self-scrutiny as to synthesize “what you are with what you’ve learned of a certain place.” Why the Assembly Disbanded includes poems that rehearse what I understand as the drive that led to the assemblage works of Betye Saar — the thought process underscoring the medium of collage and the material conflicts enacted in her foundational work. I took related cues from Connie Samaras’s Edge of Twilight series to craft sentences whose syntax mirrors her “lesbian time-travel” narrative in unsettling nighttime images of desert trailer homes: an objective correlative for the “intersection of desire and the supernatural.”

Why the Assembly Disbanded, at a surface level, addresses the border, a geographical location. But these are not poems, as I read them, about a geographic location as such. The representation of place seems to be put into question. The social and cultural field seems unfixed, and what I see is a kind of archive of the future that cannot leave the past, a border zone overdetermined by tourism and the history of labor. For example, in the poem “Lost Continent,” after Rubén Ortiz Torres’s photographic images, there is a playful baroque quality that collapses into a Chicano futurist no-man’s-land.

That poem draws from the formal and thematic layering captured in Rubén Ortiz Torres’s series The Past Is Not What It Used to Be. Your picture of a “Chicano futurist” landscape fits the transpositions of perspective in “Lost Continent.” With adjustments from high to low contrast — in salt, cyanotype, silver gelatin, platinum, and digital prints — Ortiz Torres provided patterns to draft a poem, enhance the sonic register, and catalog the elements of action staggered between the poem’s present and a time on the far side of its imaginative location. Reflecting the violent colonial and present-day realities of syncretism — cultural, material, geopolitical — his photographs are visual puzzles that speak to the effects of globalization, frictions between the United States and Mexico, and Chicano inventiveness in Southern California. My poems seek as well to dismantle myths about the nation, while registering a clash between the rise of conceptualism in poetry and — yes — a kind of future archive along the US-Mexico borderlands.

Lastly, I wanted to ask you about Lezama Lima. You are one of the few on this side of the border or continent who uses him as a “precursor,” to use Borges’s term. Why is he not better known in the English-speaking world? I think that in your poetry, as in Lezama Lima’s work, “difficulty” is valued as much as pleasure, aesthetic excess, sensuality, and plenitude. Baroque language is lyrical but not subject to party-line constraints. Has Lezama Lima’s wonderful theory of eras imaginarias (imaginary eras) been of use to you in your poetry and prose?

I’m happy to have Lezama Lima as a forebear and encouraged that you see a family resemblance between my work and his “difficulty,” which you aptly describe as something closer to sensuality and plenitude. It’s been a very slow process translating his posthumous collection Fragmentos a su imán (The Fragments Drawn by Charm). I’ve completed all but the complicated poems in décima stanzas and octosyllabic lines — it’s not an impossible task, but I have yet to find a satisfactory solution. His poetry is at once astonishingly radical and classical. He inspired an entire generation of poets from Mexico to Argentina to Brazil who mined the neobaroque for all its potential, in that it deemed self-determination not as a condition of stability but as an uprising of sensation, renewed excitements. With all of this I feel a great kinship. I’m not exactly sure why he isn’t better known among anglophone readers — there’s an excellent volume of his work selected by Ernesto Livon-Grosman in the Poets for the Millennium series established by Jerome Rothenberg for the University of California Press, with excellent translations by James Irby, Nathaniel Tarn, Suzanne Jill Levine, Carol Maier, and others.

My sense is that the lineage for US American experimental writing tends to be dubious of the qualities you’ve identified in Lezama Lima that couple surrealism to the baroque: the inclination to excess, to transcultural contact and syncretism; an openness to unresolved curiosity and marvel, what Walter Benjamin proposed as a “vividness of emphasis” in language “constantly convulsed by rebellions among its elements.” But maybe the suspicion goes deeper. The Ecuadorian-born Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría viewed the baroque as an alternate way of being modern. It’s an attitude whose expressions reject capitalist modes of production and consumption; that is, a baroque ethos recognizes but refuses to accept the transactional as inevitability. That’s an irritation in the zero-sum game of poetry’s current US literary economy, the symbolic capital at stake in hierarchies of value for the major and so-called minor publishing industries today.

As for the imaginary eras, Why the Assembly Disbanded also includes a photographic sequence I curated in the picture gallery that constitutes the center of the book. My photo essay comprises historical black-and-white images housed in digital archives at the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library, and NASA. The time travel begins with a photo of an electrical storm in the hours preceding a 1983 space shuttle launch; it moves back to the spatial design by Marcel Duchamp for the 1938 surrealist exhibition in a photograph by Raoul Ubac, with a flight forward to an electron microscopic image of an isolate from the first US case of COVID-19, and back again to a 1682 diagram of the solar system. Though never explicitly stated, the photo essay is meant to reflect the retrofuturist world-building of the book, perhaps especially in the modular helix configurations of the extended poems “Mortar & Method” and “Indivisible Continuum.” I side with Lezama Lima in that he envisioned an openness to imaginary eras as the condition of possibility for ecstasy and justice in the present.

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Ramón García is the author of two books of poetry, The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), and a monograph on the artist Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).