Alli Warren Talks Jazzercise With Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

For Fanzine, Alli Warren interviews Philadelphia-based poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, whose first collection, Oil and Candle, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2016; his new book, Jazzercise Is a Language (The Operating System, 2018), is "a long poem about Jazzercise, camp, racial politics, body politics, and feminine strength." A slant of light from this conversation:

AW: I’m curious how this process of engaging with Jazzercise and its language affected you? Did it excise something? Did the process of writing the book change you? Did it teach you something about your own nostalgia? Given what you say above, I wonder if the writing was a way of working through the past in order to think about your desired present or future?

GOS: Well, the book comes out of two parts of my identity I wanted to worry. I wrote this at a time when I was having an internal and mostly-private conversation around my gender identity and my relationship to womanhood. I don’t think there’s a term exactly that I can put on my gender identity, but I like genderfluid in certain contexts. Part of the book’s insecurity (the key term of the epigraph from Lypsinka: “‘Cause everything I have in the world has many, many insecurities”) is that dialogue about seeing myself as or not as a woman. And that conversation is also framed by a larger conversation about womanhood in relationship to my life as a gay man. The second part would be racial. A lot of my work deals with a category I disapprove of but live within: “the white latino.” So much of the book sets out to deal with understanding how I, a latino viewer, encounter white bodies on screen doing “samba” steps or “mambo” moves, etc. The book is narrated inside of that scene of me looking at a screen that has a white blonde skinny woman on it. And that’s where the writing and the questions start.

I think the book let me deal with a lot of those identity based questions, especially issues of jealousy and inclusion/exclusion, but whether I am any less or more confused about my relationship to those questions is unclear.

I said recently that I think the point of poetry is to make a climate in the mind where a question can be warmed, an anxiety cooled, or an apparatus bothered. I don’t know if I can say that the book changed me, exactly, but I set out to make that climate and I think my little cloudbuster worked.

Read on at Fanzine.