RLU: How do you describe your own poetic sensibility? Can you identify a queer or a gay sensibility in your work? It seems that others impose a lot of their beliefs or discomfort onto your work, even without reading the work. I'm wondering what the texture of your work is, and how you would talk about that.
JE: I have this romantic notion of a poem—how it can be read and taught. You don't have to come to a poem with a defined method of understanding it. The poem is like a little puzzle, in a sense. It could take you places where it wants to go and tell you what it’s made of. I go into my work with that understanding. A poet I really love, C.S. Giscombe, talks about writers of color as being unanticipated in the sense of there not necessarily being a place marked out for us. In the field of contemporary writing, we are the best spirits of literature; we don't necessarily follow directly from our predecessors and we're artists thriving despite the circumstances.
Something that probably comes from documentary filmmakers I really love is the idea of working on a shoestring budget. I really love the work of Chris Marker, who did Sans Soleil, and Marlon Riggs, who did Tongues Untied. Both Marker and Riggs worked with a very low budget and made something from nothing. They brought in a lot of different kinds of material into the work. Marlon Riggs kind of blew my mind. He’s a Black filmmaker talking about poetry in a documentary, but also talking about alienation, talking about the gay community, talking about horniness and sexuality. There's this imagery of him walking through the Castro in all-leather, talking about intimacy and friendship and what it means to be gay. That changed my life.
Being able to say a lot of different things in one place, like a documentary film is able to, is really cool. From Chris Marker, I’ve learned the importance of being open to the celebration of life. Sans Soleil is a travelogue between Tokyo, the Bijagós Islands, and San Francisco. It’s really cool how he speaks about life and what observations he makes. Even though neither documentarian necessarily wrote poetry directly, the power of observation is very important in their work.
RLU: Your hyper-visual approach to poetics is so rich. It’s exciting to be in the image with you. Film and poetry have a lot in common, and documentary films like these show what poetry's abilities are and how much poetics can stretch and move off the page.
JE: Chris Marker said there’s 1,001 ways to make something. He literally just walked around with a camera, capturing film on the fly. I thought to myself, you could probably do that. Both of us filmmakers and poets are united by the image. When I was at Berkeley, I learned from the language poets like Lyn Hejinian and C.S. Giscombe. I also studied Robert Hass and spent a lot of time at poetry readings. I was 18 at the time. The folks who ran the poetry center would tease me and ask, Why do you always come when you should be out partying? I just loved poetry. I came to Berkeley because I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and I wanted to be a Beat poet and intellectual. I wanted to talk about politics and have spirited conversations in cafes for hours on end.
One of the other poet-filmakers I love is Anaïs Duplan. They’re a trans writer and wrote a book called Black Space that’s about poetics and Blackness, and they have since moved onto making film as well. The image is really cool. Audre Lorde says it’s better than rhetoric. If you can persuade someone by having them imagine something, you don't need to tell them what to do because you're using the generosity and mystery of language to make your point.
I think about that a lot as someone who grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, which I describe as the industrialized scrub lands of Los Angeles. I love it. I'm born and raised there, but you know, at least once or twice at a poetry reading has an announcer been like, and now we have Joshua Escobar, who's from the Inland Empire, which is called Southern California's heart of darkness. The racial layers in that are just so bad that I'm not even going to touch it.
But in like literature, Southern California’s Inland Empire has been seen as the id of Los Angeles, as it's been called by one urban planner. It's this idea that the Inland Empire is where the dark machinations are brought together: Hollywood and the urban core in the desert, the glamorous desert, the last city, and the last metropolis of Los Angeles. The skeleton, bones, and blood of Los Angeles are actually in the Inland Empire.
Joan Didion wrote an essay in 1966 that sensationalized a woman’s murder of her husband. Didion wrote about the Santa Ana winds and how the Inland Empire is this kind of lost Eden, or this ruined Eden. Rather than resisting these notions and conceptualizations, I embrace them, which brings me back to how I started writing Bareback Nightfall. It’s very feral poetry, explicit poetry. I use these traditions that have emerged in the Inland Empire, and play with using them as a lens or as an aesthetic and embracing them in a positive way. When I was writing it, I had these two ideas. One, no matter how sexual you are, there's no limit to how sexual someone believes you are. As a gay guy, if you're like, Oh, I hooked up with 70 people one weekend, we get defined by our sexuality.
On one hand, I love being queer, and then on the other, it's not anyone's business. It's weird walking into the room and being like, I'm gay, like I’m just a good fuck. That's the kind of politics I was working with when writing a book like Bareback Nightfall. The other idea I was working with was there's no limit to how stupid someone could believe you are. As I was writing, one of the things I was thinking about was how life will be in the future, where people are no longer educated about HIV. What would it be like to be like a young person who's maybe a little toxic and a little douchey, which for me, reflected a little bit about growing up in the Inland Empire, where there’s this racist culture that is highly segregated in some modern ways.
RLU: You’re getting into character a bit in discussing the world that you built for the collection. I’m curious about how persona allows you to enter the reading of your poetry, as well as the writing of it; for your readings, you’ve worn masks that your brother made. I think it’s rare to see a collection that is driven by character as much as it is driven by language. Can you talk about the role that the personal poem plays in Bareback Nightfall?
JE: I worked with Carmen Giménez, Suzi F. Garcia, and Anthony Cody to edit the collection and each had different ideas and suggestions. That’s when it occurred to me to break the collection into four sections, each with their own character. Having an aesthetic for every section was a way to get that volume without running through every word you know and having every word be there from the original draft. In one section there’s a haiku, in another there’s a haibun. There’s narrative poetry, in another I work with found language, like from medicine ads or textbooks. I use snippets of language from doctors and nurses I've interviewed. It was exciting for each section to be distinct and the characters are really fun because they were an excuse to go places where I don’t have to explain so much. C.S. Giscombe said that in an essay we don't often get more than one voice, nor do we often get a multi-vocla poetry collection.
The characters I wrote were a DJ and a doctor who were in a toxic romantic relationship, and they make up the first and the third section. The second and the fourth section are where I have the arias about the Inland Empire. The last section, the rave of the pinatas, was really intended to be glittery chaos and a fun way to end the book. I thought of this like a DJ set, so there are some poems explicitly mixed, cut, and put back together. There are poems with words on top of words on top of words. There’s one poem addressed to a drug dealer and feedback I got from a poet-friend was, wow, you really understand the desert. The desert isn’t just dirt—it’s sun and space and the vastness of those two things. The desert is also how people live, how people treat each other, what people do for fun, what they do for pleasure, and what their inner lives look like.
RLU: I’m so glad you brought up the palimsetic poems. That’s what it feels like when you’re at a set and the DJ mixes a sound with another that you don’t expect. At first it might feel contradictory, but hearing it all together it makes sense. The dance floor is this alternative plane where it becomes possible to demonstrate possibility and bring something outside our consciousness into collective consciousness. Sound permeates us all, deeply and simultaneously.
It’s from these marginal cultures, either regional, psychosexual, or political, these cultures that normative society doesn't know exists or doesn't want to condone, where culture ripples out from. The reverberations of queer culture are eventually felt by the heteronormative, straight, white, corporate world, even if it's years or decades down the line. It seems to me that the rave or the dance floor is where the future begins. This layering of words on top of each other in the case of your poetry, or the layering of sounds on top of each other in music, is demonstrating a future orientation: why not make something that has never existed before?
JE: I love raves. I love dancing. My friends actually make fun of me because I'm not a very good dancer. I actually promised them I would take dance classes and have not been able to follow through yet.
In Bareback Nightfall I was thinking about the difference between nightlife and the day to day, and I wondered, what if there was no difference? In the collection, characters come together because society has collapsed and people partied to survive. I read that Kingston, Jamaica has been called like the electronic capital of the world, and that there's free clubs everywhere, and one of the reasons is that it helps tune out and provide a kind of departure from political and social violence. Music can free you.
I just have so much fun going to raves. I like the aesthetic, playing music for people, and just focusing on joy. Music is abstract, right? We can feel it, andd like you were saying, it makes sense to hear certain things together. But a DJ set is hard to talk about—it’s more felt. It'd be cool to get my poetry to that point.
RLU: What’s your relationship to writing these days? You’re working on a treatment for a pilot episode of a TV show. What have you been able to say in that writing process that you might not be able to express in poetry?
JE: Me and my mentor Tommy really believe that if you can write a poem, you can write a TV show. If you can write a book of poetry, you can write in any genre—my plan is to do exactly that. My poetry collection came out during the pandemic, and I was excited to see what others think about it. It didn't have the splash that I was hoping it would have, but what happened was that I found my people, and my people were the poets and the queers. So, with my second book, I was like, why don't I just write to them?
My second book was about a raver who's a nurse during the pandemic. Him and his friends throw parties because they're all essential workers, and they don't want to be emotionally destroyed by the pandemic. One of the main characters was named Elena, who's a goth chola. It was cool to have a protagonist be a woman who's a dropout from art school, who's this rebel artist. The TV show is set in Mexico City, the city of my dreams. The show is positioned as a sequel to the novel. In the novel, the goth chola helps everyone realize their best selves, and in the TV show the script is flipped and she feels like a nobody.
I wanted to ask in the TV show what it would look like to feel like a nobody in the city of her dreams. One of my favorite directors is the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. I read an interview recently where he said something like, as a filmmaker, I know so much about America, but Americans don't know shit about Mexico. I even tell my parents, I'm like, how is it that we've been neighbors for over a century, and we don't know anything about Mexico? Even what we call ‘Mexican culture’ in the United States is probably based on one or two states in Mexico, so you actually can't even get to Mexico culturally by being in the United States. It's really cool that my characters are going to try to break that. I'm really excited because there haven’t been a lot of narratives about women DJs and techno DJs, even within the music industry itself. I think a lot of people are going to like this.
JE: I have this romantic notion of a poem—how it can be read and taught. You don't have to come to a poem with a defined method of understanding it. The poem is like a little puzzle, in a sense. It could take you places where it wants to go and tell you what it’s made of. I go into my work with that understanding. A poet I really love, C.S. Giscombe, talks about writers of color as being unanticipated in the sense of there not necessarily being a place marked out for us. In the field of contemporary writing, we are the best spirits of literature; we don't necessarily follow directly from our predecessors and we're artists thriving despite the circumstances.
Something that probably comes from documentary filmmakers I really love is the idea of working on a shoestring budget. I really love the work of Chris Marker, who did Sans Soleil, and Marlon Riggs, who did Tongues Untied. Both Marker and Riggs worked with a very low budget and made something from nothing. They brought in a lot of different kinds of material into the work. Marlon Riggs kind of blew my mind. He’s a Black filmmaker talking about poetry in a documentary, but also talking about alienation, talking about the gay community, talking about horniness and sexuality. There's this imagery of him walking through the Castro in all-leather, talking about intimacy and friendship and what it means to be gay. That changed my life.
Being able to say a lot of different things in one place, like a documentary film is able to, is really cool. From Chris Marker, I’ve learned the importance of being open to the celebration of life. Sans Soleil is a travelogue between Tokyo, the Bijagós Islands, and San Francisco. It’s really cool how he speaks about life and what observations he makes. Even though neither documentarian necessarily wrote poetry directly, the power of observation is very important in their work.
RLU: Your hyper-visual approach to poetics is so rich. It’s exciting to be in the image with you. Film and poetry have a lot in common, and documentary films like these show what poetry's abilities are and how much poetics can stretch and move off the page.
JE: Chris Marker said there’s 1,001 ways to make something. He literally just walked around with a camera, capturing film on the fly. I thought to myself, you could probably do that. Both of us filmmakers and poets are united by the image. When I was at Berkeley, I learned from the language poets like Lyn Hejinian and C.S. Giscombe. I also studied Robert Hass and spent a lot of time at poetry readings. I was 18 at the time. The folks who ran the poetry center would tease me and ask, Why do you always come when you should be out partying? I just loved poetry. I came to Berkeley because I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and I wanted to be a Beat poet and intellectual. I wanted to talk about politics and have spirited conversations in cafes for hours on end.
One of the other poet-filmakers I love is Anaïs Duplan. They’re a trans writer and wrote a book called Black Space that’s about poetics and Blackness, and they have since moved onto making film as well. The image is really cool. Audre Lorde says it’s better than rhetoric. If you can persuade someone by having them imagine something, you don't need to tell them what to do because you're using the generosity and mystery of language to make your point.
I think about that a lot as someone who grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, which I describe as the industrialized scrub lands of Los Angeles. I love it. I'm born and raised there, but you know, at least once or twice at a poetry reading has an announcer been like, and now we have Joshua Escobar, who's from the Inland Empire, which is called Southern California's heart of darkness. The racial layers in that are just so bad that I'm not even going to touch it.
But in like literature, Southern California’s Inland Empire has been seen as the id of Los Angeles, as it's been called by one urban planner. It's this idea that the Inland Empire is where the dark machinations are brought together: Hollywood and the urban core in the desert, the glamorous desert, the last city, and the last metropolis of Los Angeles. The skeleton, bones, and blood of Los Angeles are actually in the Inland Empire.
Joan Didion wrote an essay in 1966 that sensationalized a woman’s murder of her husband. Didion wrote about the Santa Ana winds and how the Inland Empire is this kind of lost Eden, or this ruined Eden. Rather than resisting these notions and conceptualizations, I embrace them, which brings me back to how I started writing Bareback Nightfall. It’s very feral poetry, explicit poetry. I use these traditions that have emerged in the Inland Empire, and play with using them as a lens or as an aesthetic and embracing them in a positive way. When I was writing it, I had these two ideas. One, no matter how sexual you are, there's no limit to how sexual someone believes you are. As a gay guy, if you're like, Oh, I hooked up with 70 people one weekend, we get defined by our sexuality.
On one hand, I love being queer, and then on the other, it's not anyone's business. It's weird walking into the room and being like, I'm gay, like I’m just a good fuck. That's the kind of politics I was working with when writing a book like Bareback Nightfall. The other idea I was working with was there's no limit to how stupid someone could believe you are. As I was writing, one of the things I was thinking about was how life will be in the future, where people are no longer educated about HIV. What would it be like to be like a young person who's maybe a little toxic and a little douchey, which for me, reflected a little bit about growing up in the Inland Empire, where there’s this racist culture that is highly segregated in some modern ways.
RLU: You’re getting into character a bit in discussing the world that you built for the collection. I’m curious about how persona allows you to enter the reading of your poetry, as well as the writing of it; for your readings, you’ve worn masks that your brother made. I think it’s rare to see a collection that is driven by character as much as it is driven by language. Can you talk about the role that the personal poem plays in Bareback Nightfall?
JE: I worked with Carmen Giménez, Suzi F. Garcia, and Anthony Cody to edit the collection and each had different ideas and suggestions. That’s when it occurred to me to break the collection into four sections, each with their own character. Having an aesthetic for every section was a way to get that volume without running through every word you know and having every word be there from the original draft. In one section there’s a haiku, in another there’s a haibun. There’s narrative poetry, in another I work with found language, like from medicine ads or textbooks. I use snippets of language from doctors and nurses I've interviewed. It was exciting for each section to be distinct and the characters are really fun because they were an excuse to go places where I don’t have to explain so much. C.S. Giscombe said that in an essay we don't often get more than one voice, nor do we often get a multi-vocla poetry collection.
The characters I wrote were a DJ and a doctor who were in a toxic romantic relationship, and they make up the first and the third section. The second and the fourth section are where I have the arias about the Inland Empire. The last section, the rave of the pinatas, was really intended to be glittery chaos and a fun way to end the book. I thought of this like a DJ set, so there are some poems explicitly mixed, cut, and put back together. There are poems with words on top of words on top of words. There’s one poem addressed to a drug dealer and feedback I got from a poet-friend was, wow, you really understand the desert. The desert isn’t just dirt—it’s sun and space and the vastness of those two things. The desert is also how people live, how people treat each other, what people do for fun, what they do for pleasure, and what their inner lives look like.
RLU: I’m so glad you brought up the palimsetic poems. That’s what it feels like when you’re at a set and the DJ mixes a sound with another that you don’t expect. At first it might feel contradictory, but hearing it all together it makes sense. The dance floor is this alternative plane where it becomes possible to demonstrate possibility and bring something outside our consciousness into collective consciousness. Sound permeates us all, deeply and simultaneously.
It’s from these marginal cultures, either regional, psychosexual, or political, these cultures that normative society doesn't know exists or doesn't want to condone, where culture ripples out from. The reverberations of queer culture are eventually felt by the heteronormative, straight, white, corporate world, even if it's years or decades down the line. It seems to me that the rave or the dance floor is where the future begins. This layering of words on top of each other in the case of your poetry, or the layering of sounds on top of each other in music, is demonstrating a future orientation: why not make something that has never existed before?
JE: I love raves. I love dancing. My friends actually make fun of me because I'm not a very good dancer. I actually promised them I would take dance classes and have not been able to follow through yet.
In Bareback Nightfall I was thinking about the difference between nightlife and the day to day, and I wondered, what if there was no difference? In the collection, characters come together because society has collapsed and people partied to survive. I read that Kingston, Jamaica has been called like the electronic capital of the world, and that there's free clubs everywhere, and one of the reasons is that it helps tune out and provide a kind of departure from political and social violence. Music can free you.
I just have so much fun going to raves. I like the aesthetic, playing music for people, and just focusing on joy. Music is abstract, right? We can feel it, andd like you were saying, it makes sense to hear certain things together. But a DJ set is hard to talk about—it’s more felt. It'd be cool to get my poetry to that point.
RLU: What’s your relationship to writing these days? You’re working on a treatment for a pilot episode of a TV show. What have you been able to say in that writing process that you might not be able to express in poetry?
JE: Me and my mentor Tommy really believe that if you can write a poem, you can write a TV show. If you can write a book of poetry, you can write in any genre—my plan is to do exactly that. My poetry collection came out during the pandemic, and I was excited to see what others think about it. It didn't have the splash that I was hoping it would have, but what happened was that I found my people, and my people were the poets and the queers. So, with my second book, I was like, why don't I just write to them?
My second book was about a raver who's a nurse during the pandemic. Him and his friends throw parties because they're all essential workers, and they don't want to be emotionally destroyed by the pandemic. One of the main characters was named Elena, who's a goth chola. It was cool to have a protagonist be a woman who's a dropout from art school, who's this rebel artist. The TV show is set in Mexico City, the city of my dreams. The show is positioned as a sequel to the novel. In the novel, the goth chola helps everyone realize their best selves, and in the TV show the script is flipped and she feels like a nobody.
I wanted to ask in the TV show what it would look like to feel like a nobody in the city of her dreams. One of my favorite directors is the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. I read an interview recently where he said something like, as a filmmaker, I know so much about America, but Americans don't know shit about Mexico. I even tell my parents, I'm like, how is it that we've been neighbors for over a century, and we don't know anything about Mexico? Even what we call ‘Mexican culture’ in the United States is probably based on one or two states in Mexico, so you actually can't even get to Mexico culturally by being in the United States. It's really cool that my characters are going to try to break that. I'm really excited because there haven’t been a lot of narratives about women DJs and techno DJs, even within the music industry itself. I think a lot of people are going to like this.