Humanity at the Margins of Capitalism: An Interview with Joshua Pollock https://ift.tt/gIrld1G
A spirit of protest floats through Joshua Pollock’s elegiac poems of humanity at the margins of capitalism in Narcan Incantations. These poems are fever dreams, spells, they are invocations, calls for the dead to guide the revolutionary heart through despair. The poems are an act of witness from the frontline of harm reduction among an ever-growing population of displaced people in urban centers all along the West Coast, across the entire continent. The poems are lyrical invocations of youth, of love, of grappling with middle-age as discovered in the nuances of resistance and labor.
Joshua Pollock is a translator who has recently published translations of Vicente Anaya’s Híkuri and Salvador Elizondo’s The Secret Crypt. Both Mexican novelists wrote experimental and beautifully strange books. Narcan Incantations is Pollock’s first poetry collection, published February 2025 by Garganta Press.
Talk to me about the poem “Narcan Incantations.” It is the longest in the collection, which makes sense because it wrestles with so many different themes, including the spectral memory of lost loved ones, as you write, “I’ll continue to live, to care, in the ruin of abandonment, my dear bastards of afterlife.” But this sense of grief is also paired with the struggles of strangers, as the poem acts as witness of “broken notes of music […] in the urge to intervene and the balance of risk and care in the midst of violence, in the giving of Narcan, in the familiar sting of chemical air.”
“Narcan Incantations” came about as a sort of serial elegy that just flowed out of me when I began to let myself start feeling all this pent-up grief that had been accumulating in my body for decades. I had been building out this harm reduction program as part of an outreach organization I work for called Street Books and while I was distributing naloxone (Narcan)—and at times administering it in response to overdoses I was present for—I became increasingly overcome by memories of all the friends I’ve lost in the same way. It started to feel like their ghosts were walking alongside me. I know that sounds woo, but my memories and grief and the conviction that all this death could have been preventable guided me, both in my material actions and in the writing. Of course, the poem overflowed that original inspiration and other themes cropped up: rage against the systemic abandonment I continue to see on the streets everyday, against the logic of capital accumulation and reactionary fascism, against the punitive responses I was seeing to poverty—but also a fortifying sense of collective love and solidarity in struggle, a feeling that leaning into that love was the best way for us to survive long enough to build something else.
Talk to me about “For U Who Will be 25 in the Year 2040” where you write “I tore the sweetest part out of myself and loaded you on a ship that I knew was taking on water,” which calls to mind so many aspects of fatherhood in the midst of our modern immolation, both environmentally and politically. It is an epistle, this poem.
Yeah, “For U…” is a deeply personal poem for me, and I reached a vulnerable place writing it. As you mentioned, it’s a poem to my son—I have two children now, and it may as well be to both of them—that comes out of a sense of despair for the future that they’re going to have to live in, a future that is looking bleak on numerous fronts. You know, it’s difficult to be optimistic about what the world will look like in 10, 20, 30 years, and it’s heartbreaking to love someone, to be so glad they exist, and to know that they’ll have to struggle for that existence in ways that are barely imaginable due to the accelerating pace of these overlapping crises.
As for the form of the poem, there are a couple other “after …” poems in the book, and this one probably should have been subtitled “after Brecht” because it began as a sort of riff on a Brecht poem called “An Die Nachgeborenen,” translated in English versions as “To Posterity” or “To Those Who Follow in our Wake” (a better title, I think). While my poem retains a number of parallels with the Brecht—our antifascism, our regret at not being able to achieve communization or at least a better life in a livable climate for those to come—“For U…” prioritizes the desire to maintain that spirit of struggle across generations over the desire for history to forgive the poet.
The title is also a riff on another work—the Alain Tanner film “Jonah who will be 25 in the Year 2000,” which deals with a group of folks whose revolutionary zeal from May ’68 has washed up on the rocks of daily life after the uprising has faded into memory. They sort of rediscover communal living and place their utopian hopes in the next generation. I guess this poem, and really the whole book, allows for the intensely personal while also acknowledging that art is collective, eschewing the myth of pure originality by way of intertextual engagement with the works that influenced it.
Each of these poems balance the political with the personal, but each is also grounded in the act of incantation, as the title suggests. I’m interested in hearing you discuss the poem “Defixio.” (I hit autocorrect to get rid of the red-squiggly and it suggested “deficit”—such a lyrical contrast to the poem itself.) This is a spell, of course, a curse. Talk to me about magical intentions within poetry.
That’s so funny that autocorrect wanted to change “defixio” to “deficit,” that latter word being a sort of barbarous name or charm currently weaponized against us by a couple of powerful charlatans to justify austerity and further enrich themselves—the exact types that the poem “Defixio” seeks to bind, to drown. The poem is formally and conceptually based on defixiones, or curse tablets from the ancient world that were usually sheets of lead inscribed with appeals to spirits or gods to bind or harm someone, often, but not always, as a form of justice. This one lays out my discontent and appeals to “Balaclava Prometheus” to ignite a revolt. “Balaclava Prometheus” isn’t any sort of canonical deity, of course—the balaclava is metonymy for the guerrilla, the insurrectionary, the rioter, and in this case I’m not thinking of Prometheus as the bestower of civilization but rather as a revolutionary, willing to risk imprisonment and torture in order to seize and redistribute the means of production. When I wrote it I had been reading about curse tablets and set out to write one as an experiment, then I fell into a rhythm that sort of drove it forward.
Your question about magical intentions in poetry is interesting, though, because I do believe that poetic language should do more than simply describe, more than signify familiarly within the logical order of our society or culture. I think—idealistically, sure—that the effects of poetic language can transfix and transform, awaken a feeling or act as a counter-spell, breaking the trance of a “common sense” that tells us that toiling through our diminished lives is the only option imaginable. If “magic” is the belief that certain chants or utterances can actively intervene or participate in the construction of reality, then I aspire to write magical poetry. I think this works best when poems are spoken aloud, preferably around other people, since a lot of the poems in this book rely on their sonic elements as much as their content, which is another thing that connects them to the language of magic. The incantations, of the titular poem, of “Defixio,” of poems like “Impulse/Expulse” are attempting to conjure several things: a certain fiery energy, the memories and voices of the dead, repressed emotions, etc., and while it’s fun to imagine awakening some supernatural force, I’m too steeped in the material to want that. Really, my hope for these incantations is that they might carry a charge of energy and help me and the reader identify and connect with potential like-minded friends and comrades.
I’ve read your translations of both Anaya and Elizondo. Do you mind if we switch gears and talk about translation and, in particular, pitch these two novels to potential readers?
Yeah definitely. Translation—as a practice, as a concept—influences my poetics in an essential way. I think of translating literature as the closest act of reading one can do, of getting so deep into a text that both you and the text infect each other; for better or worse, my own writing carries traces of Anaya and Elizondo, and of course my own sensibility is all over the versions of their work I brought into English. And many of the tactics that I learned to rely on as a translator became essential to my poetic style—trying to recreate certain rhythmic or sonic effects of a text, any syntactic quirks, everything that makes up a style beyond the individual diction, because the words are necessarily different in a translation. I also like collaboration, and translations are inherently collaborative works. José Vicente Anaya was a friend of mine, and we corresponded all through the translation of Híkuri (Peyote)—unfortunately he passed away while the book was in production. He was a true badass. I never knew Salvador Elizondo, but nonetheless my translation of his novel, The Secret Crypt, was a collaboration; to keep with the theme of your last question, maybe translating the dead is something like a séance: the medium/translator tries to bring the spirit of the author to life in language. Of course, both those texts are Anaya’s or Elizondo’s respective texts, but they also end up being something different in translation. There could be endless versions—an uncomfortable fact that I find incredibly liberating in my own poetry… Anyways, before I get too lost in the weeds, I’ll talk a bit about these two specific books:
Anaya’s Híkuri (Peyote) is a book length poem that came out of his experiences living in an indigenous Rarámuri community and partaking in traditional peyote ceremonies. He had been in Mexico City where he participated in the movement of ’68 and, along with Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago, founded a literary movement called Infrarealism. Anaya hit the road as a sort of vagabond after the first iteration of Infrarealism fell apart, and ended up back in his native Chihuahua, where he wrote Híkuri. He claimed that the book came to him whole during the peyote experience, and it’s an interesting mix of ethnopoetics—cut through with chants in the Rarámuri language—and his beatnik sensibility, an intertextual engagement with poets like Mayakovsky and Pound and Artaud, and an anti-colonial and anti-civilizational critique. I think of Anaya and his book often. It was published by The Operating System in 2020.
Elizondo’s novel The Secret Crypt is a whole different beast. Elizondo was considered one of 20th century Mexico’s avant-garde innovators and this book is primarily linguistic experiment, looping in on itself in a metatextual spiral. There’s a sort of plot about a secret society who know they’re being written and want to seize control from the author, an idiot god named Salvador Elizondo, but the heart of the book lies in the ecstatic rushes and abject failures of trying to write, to put a word down and build on it to create a structure, and then undermine it and try again over and over and over. It’s a wild and difficult book. This one was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2022.
Thanks for talking with me, Joshua! Congratulations on Narcan Incantations. I’m excited to see what you do next.
POETRY Narcan Incantations
By Joshua Pollock
Garganta Press
Published January 2025
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