cmpolitano interview[s]

“[T]here is not one unreadability but many”: An Interview with Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué — Rory Strong

In February of 2026, I received an email from Small Press Traffic saying there were just a few hours left to sign up for Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s four-week workshop Writing the Unreadable. Reading the description, I was compelled by the exploration of unreadability as a genre-spanning, nebulous but identifiable—and traceable—aesthetic that could be examined through both primary sources and generative creative exercises. In class, we examined disparate but rhizomatically connected works by Aram Saroyan, d.a. levy, Douglas Kearney, and many more. Then there were the prompts, which included things like “(hand)write a poem in an unreadable script” and “take a poem you have already written and make it illegible.” Not exactly standard fare for operative poetics, but that’s exactly what happened—the text began to operate. Ojeda-Sagué’s three-part essay series for Harriet goes deeper into the lineage of unreadability, but even after reading that, I wanted more. He generously took some time over the past few weeks to respond to my questions on unreadability—its histories, its practitioners and its role in futures and a present that radically diverge from fixed notions of sense-making and narrative grounding. The following is a transcription of our conversation.

Re Aram Saroyan’s “lighght.” Saroyan declares that it “doesn’t have a reading process,” Do you agree with Saroyan here? And if the unreadable means no reading process whatsoever, what does that mean for our experience of works like “M” and “lighght”? (Saroyan goes on to say that the one word poem is “instant.”)

Saroyan is part of a concrete lineage that devolves reading into its basis in looking—that is, we look at a piece like “lighght” or the three-humped letter, but don’t really “read them”—and therefore has an effect that is not based in temporality and duration the way reading a piece of prose is. That’s what he means by “instant.” Most of his pieces are one-word works isolated on the page, taking in a lot of white space as a field for the word to express itself in a full way. But a lot of the way these little poems become evocative depends on how we relate to the word in its connotative and denotative meanings. So for example, “lighght” works as a poem because the silence of the extra ghs illustrates light’s translucence or its dispersion in a space. We read “lighght” as “light” with a kind of shine within its letters. This is why I say when I teach and write about unreadability that there is not one unreadability but many. The three-humped letter is literally unreadable, no verbal or even semantic content available at all, whereas “lighght” offers us a base image but distorts and reshapes the sign that the image was supposed to come to us through.

There’s an argument to be made that the basis of poetry itself is the pleasure of the failure of metaphorical language…

How has this lineage evolved over time? “Lighght” was written in 1965. Where would you place Saroyan in the lineage of the unreadable? Does it have an identifiable “beginning”?

To the question of where unreadability might begin, since it is the shadow of reading as a technology, representing that technology’s failure, it is as old as reading itself, and likely older. Visual poetics are ancient, at least as ancient as the art of calligraphy, which expands the semantic meaning of any given letter/sign into visual pleasure and perfection. Just as there are many unreadabilities, there are many origins of unreadability. Another ancient one is the role of oral poetry cultures, which are still very much alive and take on some lovely forms of innovation in the 20th and 21st century, with artists like Edwin Torres, Jaap Blonk, and Tracie Morris. The kind of lineage somebody like Saroyan is into I think begins with Dada and Russian Futurism at the turn of the century, which took technological innovations in writing like the typewriter, the mass-printed newspaper, and the context of the First World War, and created work that emphasized the materiality of language and nonsense. Saroyan’s part of this big boom in the 60s of visual, concrete, and minimalist poetics in Brazil, Europe, and the US—but since his time so much has happened, and probably most important for unreadability is the rise of the digital.

I’m intrigued by the notion of unreadability as a failure of reading’s technology. How do you see artists harnessing failure and exploiting those fissures?

There’s an argument to be made that the basis of poetry itself is the pleasure of the failure of metaphorical language—that is to say, poetry is poetry because when you say “her eyes are diamonds,” you are, to some degree, just wrong. So much becomes possible when you are wrong in that way. But to the question of failure around reading I think there’s so much good work that exploits this. To speak to some examples you and I looked at together in our workshop: Douglas Kearney across all his books I think is interested in the incommensurateness of form to capture violence and tragedy. His miscarriage series in Patter seems to be all about this, but also his series called “That Loud-Ass Colored Silence” is largely about creating work that he is unable to read aloud, that he would fail to speak out. Jordan Scott’s blert is an amazing example here. It’s a book composed of words that trigger Scott’s stutter. So much of the book is about creating instances where his language fails, or where his palette hesitates to create language. The poem “Two Cheeseburgers and a Coke” exposes all the underlying linguistic difficulty, invention, and indeed failure, beneath Scott saying something as common as the order “two cheeseburgers and a coke.” For one more example, I’ve been really taken recently by Anna Anthropy’s game Queers at the End of the World, a romance story that you only have ten seconds to play because apocalypse is imminent. Playing it is anxiety producing but intimate and it’s such a powerful example of an interactive poetics.

Unfortunately, Queers at the End of the World seems like it won’t run on my browser. Still, from what I’ve read, it seems to bring about an urgency—ten seconds is not a long time to make decisions. I’d contrast this with the format of the book or the PDF. How does temporality influence unreadability? I can go back and re-read traditional text; Queers forecloses that option.

Gah! This is the problem of digital poetics, isn’t it? The annoyance of software that is far beyond our control. And there’s another form of unreadability—digital decay. So many incredible pieces of internet art have been lost due to dead links, old versions, updated software, etc. I worked with Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford recently to get his incredible piece Diana Hamilton’s Dreams updated for the new Mac OS. They promised us the internet was the forever archive but turns out it’s the worst archive of all. Anyways, I love Queers at the End of the World and I do like to sell it to people as an interactive poetics, though some (including Anthropy) might describe it differently. Yes, the piece describes two lovers (you play one of the lovers) at the final ten seconds of the world. You have a choice of options of what you can do in those final moments (like kiss your partner), but you can only access the consequences of those choices for ten real-time seconds, at which point the game resets. I see it as being in line with an art of deferral or denial that is at least as old as Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning. But it’s also melodramatic and intimate in a way that makes its interactivity and denial feel embodied. Your temporality question though points us elsewhere. Much unreadable writing rejects the durational aspect of most reading—that is, something like the Saroyan is an instant experience rather than reading The Count of Monte Cristo which requires an investment of some amount of time under your control. An oral poetics will have a duration that is not under your control, but under that of the performer. However, there’s also an interesting temporality to a work like Melnick’s PCOET, a book of nonsense poems, which invites certain kinds of repetitions and rereadings. One might linger on a line because it seems almost meaningful, or aurally pleasant, and one might skip a line entirely because we know it’s all just nonsense.

[U]nreadability is an aesthetic stream that tries to call out for orality (“sound it out”), but the performance of the unreadable poem seems iterated differently among different readers.

In this reading of “That Loud-Ass Colored Silence: Protest,” Kearney delivers the piece with movement, variations in timbre, pacing, ranging from sing-songy to shouting. I wonder how the orality of unreadability—the stutter, the shout—changes the experience of the audience or reader. Is this another failure of technology—what we hear in our head is never the same as what someone else reads aloud? I know some would say the magic of reading is being able to hear the words in our mind and let them inhabit our world, or us theirs. Kearney’s work seems to be doing two different things depending on whether it’s heard or read.

Yes, you’re right that hearing and reading Kearney are two different experiences and he’s a good thinker for tackling precisely that issue, as many of the poems in the Loud-Ass Colored Silence series were written to be in some way unreadable aloud. In his Optic Subwoof, he describes the series this way: “In my work, I’ve meant to mess with this marvel; being a Black poet bid to sing. To hush, without voicing “Hush.” To forestall a death varietal by way of a silence. Which is to say, I’ve tried to compose poems I cannot read aloud. To re-rig a visual poetics into legit, loud-assed colored silences.” I take his performances and visual pieces, what corresponds between the two and what does not correspond between the two, as being formulated through an anxiety about surveillance, about Black visibility/visuality, and about the history of performed Blackness (he’s really interested in the long history of minstrelsy, for example). So the changes and adaptations that we get in these versions seems a reflection of that and of Glissant’s call for opacity. This is maybe less a failure of a technology and more an adaptation to violent technologies. In the more general version of your question, I think unreadability is an aesthetic stream that tries to call out for orality (“sound it out”), but the performance of the unreadable poem seems iterated differently among different readers. For a good example, take something like the performance script vs performance audio of Jackson Mac Low’s “Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore.”

On Jordan Scott: the deliberate deployment of words that trigger a stutter seems to raise issues of (dis)ability and what the functionality of the poet is. In this case, and not unlike Kearney, it seems Scott is using deliberately challenging arrangements of words to invite the reader to embody disability, to the extent this is possible. What does this mean for a practice of poetics that bridges gaps of experience between different groups of people? How far can a text take a reader into the experience of another?

I’m not sure if I read Scott exactly as inviting the reader to embody the disability of the stutter, at least not in a kind of mimetic way, though I understand what you mean about the way it seems to translate or explain something about the stutter. I think of that project almost as a disability glossolalia; that is to say, Scott is taking both a pleasure and pain in reveling in the less-than-sensical language he creates in blert out of words that trigger his stutter. In “Two Cheeseburgers and a Coke,” populating the space between “cheese” and “burger” with things like “sea cow, sea lily, seamy seamstress, sea lion….beef bur, Burberry, burb” marks language as a field of difficulty and a field of possibility, making the stutter seem more like a surfeit of language than a deficit. Because the words in blert are largely connected by associational logic and image collage more than syntactical norms or ideas, we readers have a similar kind of ecstatic relationship to it, but not precisely in a mimetic or empathic way. Your question strikes me as being largely about empathy and poetry as a form of accessing subjectivities other than our own. It seems to me that much of the history of unreadable is precisely doing the opposite, generating opacity (in both the literal sense and in the way Glissant used that term), reveling not in the thing the signifier points to but in a too-muchness to the signifier. An unreadable poetics that was also empathetic in that way is a challenge, but an interesting possibility. Maybe Dictee is a bit like that.

Circling back to my earlier question on the evolution of unreadability, can you see a clear lineage between historical movements—Dada, Russian Futurism, Language poets—and contemporary digital unreadability?

I do think there’s a lineage between something like Dada and internet art. The first thing they share is an interest in new technologies. The typewriter and newspaper art of the Dadaists was very much an expression of and rebellion against the interface in the same way today’s digital artists are doing. Danny Snelson, an old teacher of mine, also always emphasized this link between Dadaists, Oulipians, Surrealists, and today’s online conceptualists. The second thing they share is a context of World War. Though we may not claim to be in a World War today, the global conflicts, economic instability, distrust of the government, and plague conditions of the modern period are pretty parallel to what we face now. What I think makes a clear difference is the role of networking and of interactivity. Work like Nanette Wylde’s user-generated randomized haiku project, Dennis Cooper’s “novels” made of remediated and decontextualized Tumblr and Myspace gifs, GaussPDF’s entire catalogue—these just weren’t possible in the modern period, but their aesthetics were certainly hinted at there. What I find really interesting specifically about unreadable internet art is how the interface and network become challenges to the prospect of readership rather than access points. In my Harriett essays, I used Tan Lin’s HEATH as a key example. The plethora of information available about Heath Ledger’s death in the tabloid ecosystem made the event actually more opaque, less understandable; writing about Ledger on the internet made him more unreadable.

It seems to me that much of the history of unreadable is precisely doing the opposite, generating opacity (in both the literal sense and in the way Glissant used that term), reveling not in the thing the signifier points to but in a too-muchness to the signifier.

With HEATH in particular, it seems an exercise in defamiliarization. The tabloid is so omnipresent as to render any attempt to find fact an overwhelming enterprise. There is just too much (mis)information to sort through. How does HEATH take a real world event — the death of a celebrity — and challenge readers even more than the deluge of tabloid journalism does already? Or rather, is there an unreadability baked into public text that Heath seeks to exploit? The same could be asked re Cooper’s gif works.

I think you’ve put this issue well about HEATH. The relationship that HEATH draws to Heath Ledger is one where so much ambient information is collected from tabloids that the person and object we know as Heath Ledger completely disappears under the weight of stories about “Heath Ledger.” Ironically, all of this discourse about him and his death makes him inaccessible, ungrievable. The internet is a bizarrely unreadable set of interfaces, and in some ways HEATH in 2007 presages the kind of “fake news,” “dead internet,” “misinformation,” and “AI” anxieties of the 2020s internet, all of which imagine the internet as being full of information but empty of truth. This is an operation I think found text poetry is kind of the best at, revealing what is not said or what is obscured by speech.

My friend and I told my brother we’d written a collaborative poem, and he asked us “What’s it about?” I don’t think I’ve been asked that before. I didn’t have an answer and still don’t, but my collaborator and I started to think that maybe it’s not so much what a poem is “about” as it’s about what it does, or how it operates. In your essay for Harriet, you write that the unreadable “devolves the process of reading to its roots in looking.” What else does unreadability do? How else does it operate?

You’re almost moving from one question into another here. Are poems about anything? Well yes and no, but mostly no. I like to say they put things together. My book Madness is about madness as an ordinary state of political being in the United States, but it puts things together—mental health, the publishing industry, a couple odd end rhymes, climate change, hydrangeas, immigration, days passing, love, boredom, diaries. Maybe a way of fusing your questions is to ask, what are unreadable poems about? I’d say they’re about the way signs are both immediate and infinitely deferred.

As we touch on greater politics at play in unreadability, we brush up against the memetics of covfefe, 67 and 4chan nihilism. Zooming out, how can the works we’ve discussed inform how writers can move forward in this moment? What is the response of the experimentalist to a culture that has (some might say) become fully simulacrum,  image divorced from its material source? Then again, perhaps some vestiges remain—“a trace of the true self exists in the false self,” as the meme goes.

This seems to me to be a question about sense-making in the current political sphere, whether we want sense-making or want to get rid of it, especially in what many call a post-truth world. “Stop making sense!”, the Talking Heads famously put it, but we may not want that today. The liberal politics of covfefe hopes that sense making can be redeemed and defended from incompetent and exceptional leaders, that there is a sense to fix, that the problem is this presidentrather than the president. Yes, Gen Alpha leans into absurdism and the stupidity of digital graphics, but it’s a rather softhearted absurdism, more “stuplime” than any violent rending of the fabric of sense-making. They don’t get much farther than 67 and a shark with shoes on called Tralalero Tralala—okay, it’s the pleasure of nonsense, but not quite the form of nonsense, and certainly not its revolutionary potential. We’re in an increasingly image-driven world whose images separate more and more from the real but continue to determine the real—“fake news” with real effects, so to speak— so I think it can be difficult to trust any artist who tells you to break totally with sense making. Dada was one of the first confrontations between writing and a simulation driven culture, and the Dadaists wanted to break language to rescue something from it, but the conditions of Modernist Europe were so different than today. What we see today is that unreadable work struggles to center only the breaking of language because there are so many different central social institutions today in which language breaks down and produces violence through its breakdown. John Cage thought that making English less sensical was a non-violent act; I’m not sure that is true today. I see writers like Tan Lin (and I might throw in others like Danny Snelson or Joey Yearous-Algozin or Sophia Le Fraga) to be doing something different, exposing how language under the pressure of a networked world can be read not for meaning but for vibes, for energy, for atmosphere. So do I want to say up with unreadability? I’m not sure. Maybe instead I’d say the unreadable shadows our engagement with the sensical at an always already political and technological level.

The Language poets were an entry point for me into unreadability. Where do you see them fitting into the lineage between early 20th century and early 21st century unreadability?

They were my entry point into all of this. I never quite got poetry until I read the Language poets and until I studied with Charles Bernstein. I do think they are the key hinge point here between the schools I’ve been discussing. I think what they most contributed was an absolute eruption in the possibilities of syntax. You read Scalapino and you just can see that no-one before her had ever quite done the things she did with syntax. The New Sentence is often phrased as an operation in meaning—associational logic connecting grammatically proper sentences. That’s sort of right, but I’d say it’s more like a syntactical operation. Reading My Life, which is intensely readable by the way, just shifts everything you think you know about grammar. They’re also the clear historical hinge—they read the Dadaists, Imagists, Concretists, Beats, and Objectivists and applied their experiments to the social politics of their moment, and then they were read by the Conceptualists, Postconceptualists, Internet Artists, Sound Poets, etc. An essential piece of Language poetry that people seem to forget nowadays—Money by Henry Hills! Go watch it now.

On the Language poets: Joanne Kyger has stated that she finds them to represent a “sterilization of poetry” while also calling it a “house-cleaning from confessional poetry.” (San Francisco Beat, ed. by David Meltzer, p. 128) Similar criticisms were levied against the Modernists. What would you say to Kyger’s comments?

I certainly don’t think of it as a sterilization, it’s far too dynamic for that and trust me there’s nothing more sterile than reading WD Snodgrass if we’re talking confessionalism. But she’s not entirely wrong about it as a reaction to confessional poetry. There’s a Rae Armantrout line that I think about a lot that for me is a philosophy of Language poetry in contrast to confessional—“A sense of self starts in the mouth and spreads slowly.” Well, that’s a hell of a loaded line for somebody like Jordan Scott, and that’s exactly what Language poetry sets into motion. It really brings in the way that the self is constructed as an effect of language, not transmitted through it in some kind of packageable way that the Transcendentalists or the Romantics or the Confessionalists hoped for. And it fucks with that construction and tries to figure out the wounds present from the moment of construction. The Confessionalists are poetry as Freud and the Language poets are poetry as Lacan. I’m not sure I’ll be willing to defend that analogy in a year’s time, but here it is now.

We’ve talked a lot about unreadability leading up to this moment. Where do you see the present moment of unreadability—and its future?

I’m not much for prognosticating, but I will say this. In an era of AI writing which is merely readable, structurally coherent but substantively flat, we are in a key era for outsider art. With that in mind, I think forms of unreadability specifically from outsiders will thrive. I’ve been really into Mary Magdalene’s work recently, who passed not so long ago.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Rory Strong is a writer and musician living in Maine. Their most recent album, Catholic Guilt, was released in 2023 by Oliver Glenn Records. Their interviews and creative work have been published in Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, Feral Dove, Burial, and elsewhere. They are an editor at American Ontology.