NAME: Joey De Jesus
AGE: 28
ISLAND: Puerto Rico
CRAFT: Poetry
HOW HAS YOUR BACKGROUND AFFECTED YOUR WORK/LIFE?
My ancestry exists
as a pantheon of whispers;
therefore, the wind
is my ancestry. Far off
sounds in my memory—
ni de aquí, ni de allá
—500 years of colonial rule,
enough generational distance
to be distant now. I work
hard. I work harder. Never
enough. For the product
of colonialism to be present
in the skin, is a thing I think
abt sometimes. I outlive each day
storm-fit and unsouling
myself. Loss. Lostness. Lost & list
-ening. Enemy, animate
my background—the noise
-scape of each triggered thought,
each iteration against oppression
a bone carved into the likeness
of my face—a pedagogy
of my own design—a murmur
of shadows
to which I must return.
& Thaz it.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR YOU?
I open the eye toward heaven and see ample time to work on the projects that sustain me. I open the eye of scrutiny, however, and doubt my life as a maker. So I don't really know. I’m applying to NYU for my second Master’s degree in performance studies with the intention of getting a PhD… because, even though I been had Master’s degree for years now, I have to work twice as hard for half as much.
Right now, I adjunct composition classes for an offensive and unsustainable wage; although, I love working with classes predominantly made up of working POC adults, many of whom are immigrants and parents. Aside from this, I’ve been poetry editor at Apogee Journal for the past two or so years and the copy editor of Façadomy: Gender Talents. Through Apogee, I get to champion poets, writers and artists of the margin so loudly and it has been pretty rewarding to see the influence of the journal grow. Façadomy is an incredible journal dedicated to self-determined gender that investigates intersections of gender, art, poetry and architecture; it features Kim Drew (@MuseumMammy), Andreas Angelidakis and Juliana Huxtable. I’m very proud of this work~
I've finished one full-length collection of poems about bewilderment, alienation and loss, and am currently at work on HOAX, a collection of concrete poems, astrolabes, sound poems, free verse poems, lyric fragments, calendars, incantations, sigils and erasures. I’ve incorporated loop pedals, vocal synthesizers, video projection and MaxMSP into the performance of this manuscript and consider this performative element central to the work. I’ve also begun work on a collection of lyric and academic essays. Who knows? A lot of the newest work deals with the identity damage caused by living in the cis-hetero-patriarchy that might at any moment vanquish me in its governance. And I’m just trying to keep it cute.
Photo: Dan Gutt