We sat down with Rodrigo Toscano to chat and reminisce about his time growing into a poet in his hometown of San Diego, CA. Much of the city's texture and geography is present in his first collection of poetry The Disparities, published by Green Integer Books in 2002. However, it was the people of the city and beyond who shaped, and continue to shape his practice and foundation. Rodrigo shares two prose pieces remembering his friends and poets Cole Heinowitz, born in San Diego, and Fanny Howe, who spent many years teaching creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
An Interview with Rodrigo Toscano
olga: What are you working on these days?
Rodrigo: You know, this book just came out, in the fall of 2025, the WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA with Omnidawn; and now, there's a new book of mine coming out this November called, Salvage Nation: 100 Sonnets. It's being published by Winter Editions. I've also been working on critical stuff, and working with some people on dialogues about poetics. You know that panel on American Poetry and Poetics that Alicia Wright, the editor of Annulet moderated in 2025 at the New Orleans Poetry Festival? With Dara Barrois/Dixon, Brian Ang, Toby Altman, Kai Ihns, and Laura Jaramillo? The panel was a piece of a bigger folio for the magazine, so I've been revisiting what they wrote, but also working with Kai on a dialogue. And hopefully that dialogue will elucidate more of my thinking on poetics at present.
olga: That's so interesting, you know, I've been thinking about current American poetics myself. I'm really curious what your take on it is.
I think the new avant-garde in American poetics is not place-based but rather based on labor movement and our labor within academia — instability is affecting our way of work and writing. Poetry is no longer of a place, but it's actually in this kind of wider scope. I'm thinking specifically about Hilary Plum's Important Groups: it's like the condition of accumulation, where she accumulates in the book, and then after the accumulation of a slogan or of a similar idea again and again, it has a new meaning. So it's an opposition to the slogan, or the slogan is repeated enough to where it's like a whole new image or idea. Or Zach Peckham is another example, who breaks his poetry and the line, specifically in Cycle Hum from Sistrum Books, and As If And from New Mundo Press — the words become spores and are no longer in the language that we have been given, in turn asking something else about syntax and the written word, and so I think that, both of them, as people who work and have worked in Ohio as adjuncts, or in public universities, there's something about that kind of accumulation and breakage that's also a reflection of our labor and need for movement. We're accumulating these jobs, right? Like, I'm teaching at this school, and this school, and this school, and I have all these positions, and at a certain point it no longer even resembles the thing that it started out as — which is a wider goal or idea for stability. And at the same time, since I am accumulating, I'm also breaking and moving apart, and so it's no longer within the traditional, stability framework, in turn recreating the type of possibility that I could potentially do as a job.
Rodrigo: I see, yeah, it's homologous to the kind of life one leads. The poetry has an itinerant quality of moving and distributing itself that might very well be related to the way that people are actually moving through social spaces, right? Not becoming regional poets, per se, or local poets, or any other kind of anchoring whether those are based on identity or particular thematic preoccupations, right?
olga: Yeah, totally, I definitely think that's a part of it. I feel like we're all spread out, but then we conglomerate in this one place in New Orleans, for example, for the poetry festival, and that move kind of reflects that idea a bit.
So, what are you thinking about poetics?
Rodrigo: I see a lot of people, such as yourself and others, who are doing poetry activism outside of the universities, and maintaining their practice completely outside of them. And though that activity sometimes meshes with university practices, it seems something completely divergent by now. It has its own value structures; like, for example, how particular works get evaluated, and how particular people grow in notoriety. If you were to turn the clock back, even like 10 years ago, you would see that a lot of younger poets are still trying to very much work the university system and hook into that kind of economy of circulation, you know, the kind of circuit that teachers actually taught the students to pursue. So yeah, I'm seeing a lot of commitment to practices and to forms of evaluation that are not university-based. And that doesn't mean that there aren't tons of professors and lecturers that are excellent, I'm just saying much of it now doesn't rely on their classroom practices.
Becca: When you say poetry activism what do you mean?
Rodrigo: So, poetic activity comes as a package. On the one hand, there's the description of written pieces, right? They get read, they get presented to people in live formats, and in these times, a lot more people are just posting their pieces on social media. Posts are like, "I'm gonna be reading in a such and such a place," and then, a month goes by, and yeah, they're reading somewhere else. Back in the day, it used to be that you're gonna read, say, once a year at St. Mark's Poetry Project if you were lucky, and just a handful of other places.
So, those are two poetic activities, right? Writing, reading, and then there's obviously publishing, getting your work out there. These are the sort of bread-and-butter activities, and they usually come as a package. But each of these components to one's practice are changing all the time. I see your age cohort increasing the number of readings they do. Therefore, influence and evaluation of each other's works is probably ramping up too. Everything is just faster. Five years now is an eternity. A lot of things can happen in five years. In the past, a lot of people would just be on cruise control. For five years nothing would fundamentally change in their trajectory and how they looked at their peers. It's getting faster, and the best practitioners seem to be the ones to catch up to that activity critically. Evaluating and trying to take key snapshots of the changing scene, and having all that influence your own work. I'd say that is a reliable way to grow one's poetics.
olga: There is a very specific way in which the current generation of poets is very quick to publish and to read, and everyone is publishing all the time, and everyone has 10,000 manuscripts. I'm also a part of this — I do 10,000 readings, I do a lot of things because I'm hungry and I don't want to be left behind. I feel FOMO.
But I wonder what that looks like in terms of coming up in San Diego as a new poet and what was your poetry life like in general?
Rodrigo: It's changed a lot, olga. When I was coming of age as a poet in the early 90s, let's say, to the mid-90s, you'd find out about particular journals through people that you were either corresponding with or you happened to meet while on the road. I'm talking levels of travel that were much lower than these days. Also, many people would write by hand and you'd send it off, and then a couple months later, you'd get an envelope back, and you'd get to know somebody through that correspondence. Things moved slower and so your conception of the development of poet peers was slower. You had more time to pivot off people's work. You also had time to completely switch modes and let that sink in, without the pressure of publishing right away.
Becca: It feels like there are connections to the poetics conversation too, in terms of saying the level of and the amount of readings that people do, and the kind of, the hurried pace of this poetic world now. That means there's all this exposure happening if you're reading all the time with a lot of different poets, all the time you're being exposed to other people's poetics and their work, and you said spores earlier, olga, and that is coming to mind in that way that there's all this kind of interaction and an ecosystem, a kind of exposure, cross-pollination. But then you're talking, Rodrigo, about having those connections be slower correspondences, and I'm wondering how did the San Diego scene in that slower pace affect the kinds of relationships you built with others?
Rodrigo: I'd like to make a distinction between just a grouping of people that you happen to know and what would be called a scene. So first, scene. I think it's fair to say that, for example, New Orleans has a scene. Philadelphia has a scene. New York certainly has a scene. Chicago, of course, has a scene. And one of the things that I think defines a scene is that, like you said, Becca, are people working alongside each other, but establishing creative lanes in an atmosphere of creative tension.
In San Diego, in the 90s, like in a lot of places in the United States, there were just some people you knew who were working on poetry and you'd get together. When I was coming up, somebody moving into town was a big surprise, like in a western movie, someone with a guitar around a campfire, regaling you with stories of other places they've been to. One of my good friends back then was Cole Heinowitz. She was an excellent poet and teacher at Bard. Another friend at that time was a very significant writer, who also just died recently, Hung Q. Tu. Hung published four books in his life, and all of them were very notable. Atelos Press did one. Krupskaya did another one. Actually, we were both editors for Krupskaya in the early days.
Anyways, thinking about those two people, and a couple other people, we were pretty spontaneous back then. We'd just walk around Hillcrest, that's where we and all the-kings-of-wanderings-book-readers lived. I had a place on Bankers Hill on Albatross and Laurel overlooking the bay. You know that suspension bridge on Oak Street? We'd hang out there, all lined up in a row. None of us had a book published. We'd sit there and drink beer and talk about poetry. We'd hear rumors of things going on in the Bay Area, and then at UCSD there was an experimental music series that had a related series that was called the Experimental Writing Series. That series had a bunch of people come through. Shoot, anybody you would think of at that time, all of the Language poets, and some of the early post-language poets were starting to arrive.
Rae Armantrout was a presence in San Diego, in the avant-garde. She was always very generous with me. She lived in Kensington Heights, and I would ride my bike up there and we would sit down and talk about poetry. And sometimes Cole would come along. We had a lot of time to get to know not only the American avant-garde poets, but the worldwide avant-garde poets. It was very much a kind of training. The pressure of the first book wasn't insane like it is today. You were just training poetically to launch your first book.
At the time, if poets like Fanny Howe, who was teaching at UCSD, or Leslie Scalapino, these people would give you their time and their nod if you were lucky, then things would really open up for you after that point. I started going to San Francisco and hanging out in that scene. Just traveling at first, not even to read. Everybody seemed to be moving there during that time. Lee Ann Brown was there. Anselm Berrigan was there. Renee Gladman, Eleni Sikelianos. Basically my age cohort. I eventually just thought, I can't take it anymore, I need to be part of that scene, so I just packed up my bags with my then-girlfriend, who had just gotten her PhD at USCD, and just landed there.
Anyway, so how was it like in San Diego right before I left? Like I was saying, we had that cool experimental reading series. If you could just see the roster of people that came through. People like Tom Raworth, who I became friends with. We had lots of the Cambridge School of Marxist poets come through. Name anybody, like Alice Notley, anybody who you wanted to see, you would see in San Diego because of that series. If I'd lived in, like, Santa Barbara, without that series, it would have been completely different. Everybody was coming to us. We'd get to hang out with these older innovative poets. Back then, older poets saw it as their almost duty to make themselves available off campus. There was a cross-age collegiality to the whole thing. It was beautiful in that way. You felt like you were building lasting relationships, which, in fact, did turn out to be lasting relationships.
olga: How old were you then, when you moved?
Rodrigo: Let me do some quick math. I was, like, in my late 20s.
olga: Late 20s. Okay, so you spent most of your 20s in San Diego?
Rodrigo: Yeah, except for a period in my early 20s, like, 20 to 23, I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That was in 87 or so. I moved out there and I was a truck driver. I was based in Santa Fe and drove all over the southwest delivering grain sacks. I had a beard, a beat up Padres hat, the whole slacker deal. I moved out there to really hunker down on my self-directed studies in philosophy and languages, and just to be in the mountains. When I returned to San Diego, rents, in North Park, for example — for a whole place — were like $500 at the top end. Four hundred was pretty common. So you could literally work like two or three days out of the week. I worked at Seaport Village in a little coffeehouse twice a week. Another time, I worked at the Marriott for a little bit. Honestly, you didn't think about it. You were assured that you were going to be able to live practically in any city in the 90s. There wasn't that stress of how I am gonna come up with $2,000, $3,000 a month to pull the whole thing off. Obviously, neoliberalism eventually caught up to everybody by the early 2000s and monetized every nook and cranny of everyone's life.
olga: So, I grew up in Olympia, and by growing up, I mean as a child, but also I went to Evergreen, and so my coming up into adulthood was via Evergreen and Olympia. Rent was around $300 per room. We all bartended to get by. I bartended at a shitty dive...
Rodrigo: The Brotherhood?
olga: The Voyeur, the punk dive. That's where we were fed, you'd go to the coffee shop, your friend would give you free coffee, and you lived on $16,000 a year, which is an absolutely insane number — that's wild to me now. But, anyways, at the time I felt like I was wasting it. I wasn't working professionally, I didn't have a career, I had all this time to travel, and I would travel in and out of the U.S., but now I feel like this was so important. It was an education, and it was that training you keep on mentioning. I learned to be a person, and I learned to interact with others through a lens that's not transactional. You were just making friendships and kind of hanging out, and that in itself, I think, creates a really fertile ground, a really important ground for poetry and art and any kind of life outside of what is expected of us.
It's interesting to consider the similarities.
Rodrigo: Yeah, it's like coffeehouse hangout culture. I mean I think my first actual reading was at the Gelato Vero. So that area right there, that's kind of where we hung out. That was the epicenter of all the young people, essentially.
olga: With the upstairs by the Washington Street trolley station?
Rodrigo: Upstairs, yeah, that's where I wrote a lot of my early work. A good amount of The Disparities was written enjoying the breezes off the bay. There was a little reading series there that Cole Heinowitz ran called Aphasic Reading Series. You had these coffeehouse rats, and they would be like, "okay, next up is," and it'd be somebody from San Francisco or New York who had a bazillion books published. And then you — I guess you were asking me about the townie thing at some point in the email? Well, that was the divide, right? The townies were people who lived down in Hillcrest or Little Italy. I lived in all those places, including Normal Heights. And then there were the university people. People pursuing degrees and then leaving. There was a special anxiety and also joy to being a townie.
Becca: I think there's still that divide, in a way, actually.
Rodrigo: Still at UCSD?
Becca: I mean, there's a divide in the sense of when we were going to school at UCSD, there were the people who lived on campus and the people who lived in the city. olga and I both lived in the city, for really our whole time in the program, but a lot of people didn't. And it really did change their connection to the city, or lack thereof, how they felt about this place overall. I felt like there was this big divide, and also a big divide in how much time we spent together, because La Jolla to the city is a significant distance, you know? Especially if people don't have cars and in a place without really great public transportation. So it's interesting to hear that, because I felt that divide even within the university, and it really affected the relationships that I made in my grad program, in that I didn't actually spend nearly as much time with other people in my program as I thought I would, and I think that had to do with a physical distance, which became a relational distance.
Rodrigo: That's interesting, Becca. Do they still have that shuttle? You know that shuttle?
Becca: Yes, so they had it from the Hillcrest Hospital my first year, and then COVID lockdown happened, and I don't know if it was running during that. Anyways, they extended the trolley to UTC and to campus. So they stopped the shuttle because of the trolley.
Rodrigo: Shoot, that one sucks, that shuttle was so cool. You would just get on. It was, like, direct, door-to-door, basically.
Becca: Yeah, that's how I used to get to campus my first year.
Rodrigo: That's funny, I used to do anything to get out of work. Like, the whole goal for if you were growing up in the 80s and 90s was to not work. To not have a career. You'd do anything to avoid it. Anything that you would do to just have a backpack with a bunch of books in it and somebody you could talk to in the evening, that was the goal. Everything was second to that. I would load my backpack, and then I would take the shuttle to UCSD. I'd sit in the Special Collections. I would sit there and right behind me was Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. They were working on those big anthologies, The Millennium Series, and then one time they asked me, like, hey man, why are you always here? I was trying to figure out where to publish. All you had were these little boxes, and you'd pull out a journal, and it'd be like Sulfur or whatever, and you're like, I'm gonna send this bloke a letter. And so I became friendly with them. And they asked, well, let's see your work. So I said here's the manuscript that Douglas Messerli at Green Integer just accepted, and they were like, whoa, really? And then I got an invitation to read with Rae Armantrout. That was my first reading at the university, at UCSD.
Becca: Can I ask you one more San Diego question? Well, you talked about leaving San Diego because you wanted a scene. The way you described what you had here, of having this group of people that you would sit with on the bridge and talk, and then you had people that sounded like maybe they were mentors —
Rodrigo: It wasn't enough, Becca. Remember, there wasn't social media. So, if you had to do poetry, you had to move there, you had to be part of the mix. So yeah, I was traveling to San Francisco and I would go to these readings in the Lower Haight, and I would turn around and see like 30-40 young poets who were grinding in San Francisco, meanwhile I was hanging out with 2 or 3 or 4 people hanging out at the foot bridge. And then, not only was San Francisco happening, but there was a transmission belt between San Francisco and New York. That was also a cross-generational thing. There's a danger these days of young people only wanting to hang with their same age. That's fatal. That's a fatal move. You will not recover from that, because I can't imagine not being challenged. You need a hard challenge. Later on in life, I somewhat got to know Amiri Baraka in New Jersey. I would go and visit him and talk. Just imagine if the only thing I wanted to do was "post-language" shit with people my own age. That would have been a terrible decision. So, that was my way of saying, let's hunker down here, let's think about our own practice.
olga: I really like that sentiment. Let's think about our own practice but remember lineage.
Cole Heinowitz, Boon Companion
"We grew up together," Cole and I would tell people, tracing our bond back to our shared roots in San Diego. We met in the early 90s, two relentless wanderers discovering a city — and a friendship — that would define us. Ours was a particular tribe, fueled by dog-eared small press books of poetry and a shared mission: to calibrate our burgeoning intellects to somehow match our level of wilding.
None of us had any cultural literary pedigree for the simple reason that literary culture in San Diego was extremely sparse or transitory. What we did is hang out in parks, coffeehouses, and our sunny apartments courtyards for hours on end, discussing matters of poetry, art, and music. For a few golden years in the early 90s, hundreds of young poets hadn't yet to picked up their bags to have a go at metropolitan centers like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
But I should say there were also people who made themselves available to us in San Diego, people like Jerome Rothenburg and Rae Armantrout. And due to the presence of the "experimental writing series at UCSD", we got to hang with people like Fanny Howe, Michael Davidson, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, and Tom Raworth.
I was a 'townie' (someone who lived in a university town, but didn't attend), and Cole was a student with a townie soul. This is key. Cole was always getting into the dirt of early urban living in San Diego. We both knew dozens of flaneurs who wandered downtown at all hours. They figured into our way of looking at the world. Our early poetry attests to that. And even though Cole became very well formally educated, she always retained those 90s street smarts.
One place a lot of local young poets in San Diego would hang out is the Spruce Street Bridge, a walking suspension bridge that wobbles wildly over a deep canyon. Cole and I would hang out there and have intense talks about literature and languages. We would slide seamlessly between English and Spanish.
After those halcyon years, our paths diverged geographically — Cole to Brown, me to the San Francisco poetry scene — but never in spirit. Through moves to Brooklyn, where Cole would visit from Bard, and later to my home in New Orleans, which she'd grace us for a conference or reading, our connection remained seamless. It was as if we were still ducking into those decrepit sailor bars, a part of us forever lingering in the deepest canyons of Balboa Park. We knew, even then, that a salve for the world's maladies — especially the capitalistic-compressive ones — could be found in the company of fellow "nobodies." We're talking $500 rents, a world before social media, and the raw, self-governed art of simply being alive.
The last time I saw Cole was six months ago at her workshop in New Orleans. She was on the verge of a whole new poetics of The Living, leading us to smell random weeds in a small garden on St. Claude Ave. Her passion, like a hard Louisiana rain at noon — steam rising — washed over everyone. I remember thinking, That's my Cole.
Later, she joined the throngs of poets bobbing in Festival pool party. For fifteen perfect minutes, she told me of her recent breakthroughs, intellectual and interpersonal. I was so happy for her, so lit by her light. That joy is what I will hold onto now.
Fanny Howe, Secret Ingredient to My Poetics
My intention was to make sure she wasn't there, before slipping a manila envelope with a bundle of poems under the door, "for Fanny," but my gentle knock pushed the door wide open. Pre-internet, 1991, eve of the First Gulf War. I must have wandered the halls looking for her room in the Literature Department at UCSD; I wasn't a student there.
"Townies", especially those furiously inclined toward autodidacticism, are a special breed. During those years, I was grinding at a computer circuit board factory during the day and flaneuring just as precisely by moonlight. The monthly Experimental Poetry Reading Series at University of California, San Diego, was an event I really looked forward to. I'd catch the 30-minute shuttle from Hillcrest (just north of downtown) to the campus and settle anonymously into the auditorium.
As the door opened, there she was — on her back — on a divan. The three-second silence seemed to last forever.
"Is that for me?" she said.
"Um, yeah."
"Thank you, you can just lay it there," she said. Then: "If I had a fatal disease, I'd take out Bush myself. I've seen you at the reading series."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. See you in a week."
"Yup."
By that time, I'd been devotedly reading Fanny's poetry for two years, mouthing it, word per word, in parks under giant eucalyptus. Fanny's northeastern images of darting birds in snow, stone walkways, and her always conversing with what seemed to me like ghosts, kept me rapt for hours. From Robeson Street (1985):
The snowflakes whirled, miniscule,
and three-story tenements
seemed to eat what was due
to the children in windows: pink lips
open on glass and frost . . . No sky
upstairs, but a wall surrounding
walls and a woman . . . Like this
I finally moved up to the "Greek-Restaurant" level of the after-reading in-crowd: Rae Armentrout, Jerry Rothenberg, David Antin, Michael Davidson, presiding, along with whoever happened to be in town for a semester or two (Tom Raworth, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Leslie Scalapino). Though I had no formal affiliation with the university, I felt more than fully "enrolled" in a rigorous research program.
After establishing a poetic-political connection with Fanny, things changed, for better and worse. Better was that I'd found a trustworthy older friend whom I could rely on for offroad insights and impromptu advice whenever it struck her. One night, midway through a reading set, I clumsily apologized for one of my poems.
"Don't ever do that ever again!" Fanny told me, with a half-smile, bugged out eyes.
I never did it again. And years later, I'd go on to admonish a younger poet for the same maneuver.
The downside of meeting her was that the author was now a living person, instead of a ghostly companion as Donne or Neruda were to me. What followed were long spans of time between seeing her when we'd run into each other in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia. Whenever we'd find ourselves in the same room, it felt to me like that door creaking open. Fanny there, with that same "Irish Up," ready to meet my inner cabrón, toe to toe. I could use another round about now.
Over the years, I mailed her my new books, never knowing what she thought of them, but assured that my flaws would glow in her mind, as her flaws glowed in my mine. The Fanny Howe way. It's an underground. To speak from Way Down, which indeed, is an Up Here, one we can hardly bear.
Fanny believed me when I blurted out at a dinner with Lyn Hejinian and Anne Waldman that Trump was going to win. That was 2016. A blustery Boston October. My union, the United Steelworkers, had a frightening grasp of the shifting sands beneath our feet. It stilled her, as if she was listening to somebody in her head. Everyone who's known Fanny knows the look. Lyn and Anne said something like, "My god, Rodrigo, no, that's terrible!"
Back in 1999, at the tail end of my reckless burn through the San Francisco poetry scene, Fanny provided a cover blurb for my second book, Partisans:
From the beginning Rodrigo's poems have emerged as serious, serial shots at the dark, and in this collection the alarms are coming from all directions, but a song is floating through. What is the song doing there? "Is it commemorating resistance?" Yes, but in a completely unsentimental way. The lyric necessity behind these poems is the elastic and quixotic form that resistance takes.
I'm quoting it here only to contextualize "shots at the dark," as that was our common bond. Hell, Fanny had steeled me for the strange practice of shooting in the dark.