“Places with Terrible Wi-Fi”: Eight Questions for Josh Estanislao Lopez
Growing up in a world where we’re constantly surrounded by screens, from schoolwork to conversations, poetry has always felt different to me. It’s one of the few things that I feel remains isolated and pure in my mind, asking us to slow down and think, to feel something that isn’t filtered through technology. We text, post, and scroll through moments that pass before we can even process them. But poetry feels like one of the few things left untouched by all that.
That’s part of what drew me to the work of Josh Estanislao Lopez. His poems continue that sense of quiet and isolation in a world that feels like constant noise and distraction. Lopez’s work slows the reader down, often writing about intense moments including, “The waiting room of a hospital in which a doctor, thin-looking in his coat, shared mixed results” (“Places with Terrible Wi-Fi”). Yet his lines are deliberate and absorbing, allowing readers to fully engage and find meaning in every moment.
Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022), which won the 2024 John C. Zacharis First Book Award and was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robert Johnson Award. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, The Rumpus, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and currently teaches in the community college system in his hometown of Houston, Texas.
His poem “Places with Terrible Wi-Fi,” featured in Best American Poetry 2023, especially resonated with me because it turns the frustrating experience of losing connection in our screen-filled world into a space for reflection. It shows that being “offline” can be a return to stillness, to attention, and to the self.
In this interview, I asked Lopez about how his life and experiences shape his poetry, his creative choices, and most notably, his thoughts on how technology impacts the state of poetry today.
Since you grew up, studied, and now teach in Houston, Texas, how has your hometown influenced the themes or style of your work?
Having such a strong connection to one place influences my sense of stasis, change, and nostalgia. The houses of my grandparents, once part of a large working class neighborhood, now call attention to themselves as they’re surrounded by high rises and cashless shops. Spending decades in one place means that my sense of loss navigates more time than space. I often find this version of myself in the same spatial location as my childhood self, and those realizations often sting with the memory of relationships and people that reside now only in memory.
In your poem, “Places with Terrible Wi-Fi,” you mention “the tell of Megiddo,” which brings a historical weight to the piece. Can you take me inside your creative process, explain what drew you to include Megiddo, and how do you see it connecting to the personal and universal themes in the poem?
I always tell my students that the subconscious is many times more powerful than the conscious mind. I created most of that poem in one sitting, allowing free association to do the heavy lifting. The first item in the list sparked the next and so on. On a craft level, I knew that alternating between personal, mythological, and the abstract would create the richest reading experience, and one thing I love about that catalogue form is that you can cut away all the connective tissue of transition that might dilute the tension of juxtaposition.
Your poem also frequently shifts between very concrete places, like cemeteries and hospitals, and bigger ideas about time and memory. When you’re writing, how do you decide when to stay grounded in a physical location and when to expand into something more abstract?
Concrete and intimate details should outweigh abstraction for the typical poem, as they power the abstraction’s resonance through contextualization.
The poem moves abruptly between images and ideas, creating a sense of unpredictability. I’m curious, how deliberate was this rhythm, and what experience did you hope it would evoke in the reader?
When it comes to the rhythm, I simply use my ear. I read the poem out loud searching for the best cadence and trying to solve issues of extraneous or distracting syllables or sounds.
I’d also love to hear about your influences, who are some of the poets that have most influenced your work, and are there other artists, like painters, musicians, or filmmakers, whose work has also shaped the way you approach poetry?
Although I do enjoy many forms of art, I find it hard to articulate how or if that consumption has directly affected my writing. Certainly, it has, but, it’s likely best to leave those influences within the subconscious rather than become excessively self-aware. Charles Simic and Wislawa Szymborska taught me a lot about image and insight respectively. Of course, my writing instructors all had large influences as well over the course of my academic pursuits as well.
Some critics, like Robert Archambeau, argue that poetry is in a kind of “discursive situation,” that it’s dying out and that writing programs make poetry sound the same and less creative. As someone publishing and teaching today, what’s your perspective on this? Do you see American poetry as struggling, or do you think it’s evolving in new ways?
Most people who argue this point do very little research on the topic, mostly consulting the opinions of other critics for confirmation. Poetry readership was on a linear decline up until about 2012, then it exploded upwards, and is now headed downward again. The reasons for this have little or nothing to do with the quality of poems. Some terrible poems circulate far and wide; some excellent poems wither in neglect. As always, the issue comes down to technology. How are readers accessing poems? Today, the main way that readers access poems, for better or worse, is social media rather than literary magazines or poetry collections. Social media creates a free, easy way to access poems. There are always great poets, but those great poets are not producing the kind of reading experience most social media users are looking for. Poems used to compete for attention in the realm of literature; but that is not really the case anymore, unless one expands literature to include “content.” If poetry is declining, which I have doubts about, it’s likely more due to the fact that readers can no longer immerse themselves in the stillness of a poem as successfully as they once could, due to changes in media production and consumption. If critics want to assess the state of poetry, they must first consider the influence of publication technology, which always has the most profound impact.
On apps like TikTok and Instagram, poetry that’s short and quotable spreads fast. Do you ever feel pressure to shape your work in ways that could “trend,” or do you write with a different audience in mind?
As for social media’s influence on my writing, there’s no conscious effort, though I’m sure my subconscious has gotten some wires crossed by the online world. The audience I write for apparently does exist, which I am grateful for, but I have never required them to. I write because I am fascinated at the relationship between language, the mind, and that dark, little corner of the mind we call the self.
Finally, as a high school student, I’m still figuring out how to write about intense or personal experiences. When you write poems like “My Uncle’s Killer” or “Places with Terrible Wi-Fi,” how do you decide what to include and what to leave out, especially when it’s so personal?
My best suggestion is to write like no one will ever read it. Then, you can bring in whatever language will generate the most tension, dynamism, and depth. Afterward, if you want to publish the poem, then you can edit with people’s feelings in mind if you wish, though chances are that the poem will never reach their eyes unless you put it there. You must give your writer-self as much permission as possible, though, to understand its rhetorical strengths or weaknesses and continue your progression in the art. Good luck!