Brooklynite Jordan Davis and Hoosier J-T Kelly are
acquainted by the magic of the internet and a shared love of poetry. Davis’
CCCP Chapbooks published Kelly’s debut chapbook. Here, Kelly interviews Davis
about his newest book of poetry. Kelly in italics.
There's no New York School of Poets right now. Alice Notley is still writing, Ron Padgett. But you write in their shadow, don't you? You studied under and worked for Kenneth Koch for example. You have other connections. Do you consider yourself a product of the New York School—a result? How does Yeah, No—your latest book of poetry, which you dedicate to New York—build on, argue with, relate to that tradition?
Oh! The “school”... New York has been through a lot but it’s still here, for now — there are a few other poets from Ron’s and Alice’s generations around and publishing … Maureen Owen and Charles North come to mind, and Johns Godfrey and Yau, for example. I wait patiently for new work from Tony Towle and David Shapiro, and while I wait I reread their books, and Kenneth’s, James Schuyler’s, Bernadette Mayer’s… I like poetry to be flexible and irascible, to have a little bite to it. That’s what I want my poems to be like, and early on I got the idea it would be easier for my poems to be like that if I went to live where people’s poems are like that. It was a silly idea — for it to work I would have had to move to New York in the sixties or seventies — but it wasn’t totally wrong, and besides, I was born here, and most of those poets weren’t. If you hear some New York poetry in my poems, that makes me smile.
Here's "Poem" from Yeah, No.
Poem
The ink we dignify
what camera-heavy
dictaphone as
charged up
framboise wolf in
shine
jabber consolable
macaronis
floozy-letch
totally system
it vacuums spurious
cantatas for local
script
nunchuks, clack
farms
for fat-fingered
readiness
photographs in
certain
horizontal pause
swans
reading the grid
portends
is arbitrary pouts
for mix of toggled
triplicate gurney
gaga
soon lessen the
toro
fabulous snowdown
The title comes across almost as a dare. It spouts questions as you read it. What is a poem? How is this a poem? Why such regular stanzas? It sparks observations and suggests patterns. Look at all those -u's in line 7! All the -g's in the 3rd stanza! Is there a syllable count? No. Some kind of twisted abecedarian structure? No. —So here's my question. Is everything the reader needs on the page? And how do you think about what the reader needs?
I think the reader needs to relax and not be so anxious to know what’s going on right away all the time. I like to read poems that fall in the Goldilocks zone between “I don’t get it” and “I get it,” at least for a while, which is probably why I get restless when I write too many examples of a kind of poem I’ve already written. But what do you think about what the reader needs, do you have an ideal reader?
I think there's an invitation the reader needs. Sometimes, it's “Look at this.” Sometimes it's a dare. As a reader I feel aggressive toward poems that are opaque. But I usually find a way in. I thought I hated L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and then I read Rae Armantrout. I enjoy that Yeah, No has many different kinds of poems. I can hop back and forth, and eventually I feel good enough to look at the more difficult ones with curiosity. If I have an ideal reader, they are more patient than I am, more willing to be delighted or intrigued while still saying, "I don't know."
Many of the poems in Yeah, No are geographically specific. Sometimes seasonally specific, too. Do you make notes on the spot? How strong are the ties to the places and times you mention? Could you go on a walking tour of the New York of Yeah, No?
I don't know whether the reader needs an invitation or a dare. I know I wanted to feel like part of a group when I started reading poems. Then, when I found out what being in groups was like, the kinds of behavior they tolerated or encouraged, egged on, I thought maybe it would be ok to let groups have their natural lives, and just find friends to accompany and possibly help survive. Sometimes those are friends who live nearby, and sometimes they're in other states or countries. New York has an advantage of being enormous and unknowable and also famous and (until you know too much about it) attractive. It's possible I'm relying on its faded toxic glamor a little. I try to wring it out of the poems.
Rae’s an interesting point of reference. What I liked at first in her poems was the angular syntax and how the apparent non sequiturs resolved most of the time, but what I found I related to in her work over time was more the pointed affect and investment in making a paraphrasable point in each poem. She seems to go back and forth in her work between investigating subjects and waging campaigns, though I suspect she wouldn’t agree at all, which is also something I like about her.
I know what you mean about feeling aggressive toward opaque writing. At the moment I’m harboring intense anger for the poets who hold up theorists of opacity as models of social resistance — like Glissant, for example. I probably just need to read more Glissant and less of those poets (don’t ask me to name names). But, and I think this is to the point of your question, I think what not knowing is good for in poems is for figuring out how the poet feels and how I feel about that in return.
A theorist — would she call herself a theorist? I don’t know — I admire, Jade Davis (no relation) writes against the ideology of empathy, and how it intensifies the disparities between the empathizers and the objects of their pitying observation. I sense that most MFA poetry cultivates this kind of abject display of the poet’s suffering for the pitying comprehension of the reader, and while I get the pleasure of understanding the narrative arc and turn in a well-made poem, I can’t avoid anticipating the resentment that has to follow anyone’s performance of a generalized version of their pain.
But I got off the subject of poem as travelogue. The collected poems of John Betjeman I think has an index of places in the poems, and I could show you some times and places where many of the poems in Yeah, No were sketched — I think that McDonald’s in midtown closed, though.
How do you categorize kinds of poems? Do you come across a poem you really like and think, "I'm going to write one of those." Do you think of something like a poem with really long lines, or a poem without any grammatical connections between words—and think "that's a type of poem?" Or maybe, "there's a feeling I haven't tried to put into writing yet." When you think about the kinds of poems you want to write, what are you thinking about?
When I was a baby poet I was crazy about the lengths of the lines of CK Williams — he had these spectacularly long lines with line-overs that looked like short lines. I thought he was making a long-short music, and I imitated it for half a year until somebody pointed out that it was basically the same as Allen Ginsberg with different typesetting. So yes, I think there is a monkey-see attraction-imitation aspect to it for me.
But one of the other things when I was a baby poet was a terror of categorizing, classifying, as a substitute for experience. There was a lot of Foucault in the air, and we were led to believe classifying was bad for you. I wrote a poem then called “Gangster of Categories” that was going to rescue experience from the tyranny of social knowledge… until I realized this character was actually also me, and that to not be a gangster I simply had to not go around collecting protection money and shooting people.
Anyway if I see somebody doing something that seems like fun, or challenging, I want to try it. Don’t you?
Imitation is a lot of fun! Even when my imitation falls apart, I learn new things—one of them usually being “Oh! There's more going on here than I realized!”
Your first full length collection of
poetry came out 20 years ago—ish? What're some differences for you as a poet
now versus when you were a baby poet? Are you driven by the same things? Have
some interests fallen away? Do you still love your first poet-loves? Are you
now writing the kind of things you dreamed of writing back then?
A lot has changed in my life in those twenty years. I still read O’Hara and Ashbery, but more now as special cases and less as available examples. I still write with the people I care most about in mind, but that includes some new people since then, new to my life, or to consciousness (my older son was two when my first book came out), or to the earth (my younger son is barely a teen now). I don’t make a living in anything directly connected to poetry anymore, though I did like teaching in public schools when I worked at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. I know as a baby poet I admired poets who integrated special specific knowledge into their work — a poem I wrote just before leaving T&W predicted a life of governance all day and context in the evening, which came true, but really I just liked the sound of “governance” (I read a lot of business periodicals before I started a big company — now, who has the time).
The main thing that has changed for me since then is that I’ve tried to get better at listening to my own poems the way I listen to others’, to allow a period of not understanding if I have a reasonable hope of getting to something worth the work, not stuffy or important-in-quotes, but real and usable in my life. Kenneth makes a great sincere/ironic attempt at examples of one kind of knowledge in his poem “Some General Instructions”; he was a good example of someone paying attention to his own experience and trying to learn from it to be better with other people. I don’t think I need to write an advice poem like Kenneth’s or like Alice Notley’s in “How Spring Comes,” but I like the impulse. The late Noah Eli Gordon made fun of it when he saw me engaging in it — “ok, Polonius,” was I think how he put it. I wish I’d worked harder to cultivate that acquaintanceship.
Have you read any Proust yet? This is his beat.
I'm listening to Remembrance of Things Past here and there—while driving, before sleep if my wife is up late working. So, in the background I'm cultivating this experience of a thing resurfacing, and you recognize it, but it appears different now.
I want to ask you about this collection. Yeah, No. My favorite poem in here is "Think Tank Girl," possibly because my wife worked at a think tank in her youth but certainly because it expresses something of my experience finding my way in a world that tells you to get along to go along, while you can't help but wonder where everybody's going and whether or not they really care if you come, too.
...Don't think about it, think tank girl,
you have the right idea: can't be a free agent
until you've starred on a team.
What are your favorites here? When did these poems start to coalesce into a book? How do you think about books? [Relatedly, do you prefer books as they entered the world? (Or do you prefer chapbooks?) Or do you like Selecteds and Collecteds? Do you look forward to or dread a Collected of your own?] Can you describe the good feelings for you of pulling a book together and defining a group of poems as a collection?
I’m glad you like that poem — I started writing it around when my first book came out, while I was at a panel discussion on the future of social security. I saw all these ambitious well-put-together young people carrying cartons of pamphlets and setting up folding tables, and I must have seen the comic Tank Girl in a store. What organization was your wife with, can you say. I was moved by the problems of making a living and feeding my young son and trying not to destroy the world while I saved for retirement, and my marriage was collapsing, and I was in a suspended, perplexed state.
How I think about books keeps changing. I tend to think poets take greater risks and include less filler in chapbooks, that books are treated more as prerequisites for grant and tenure track job applications than whole experiences of perplexity and devotion. When I was a regular reviewer my second wife and I would call the books I would never get to that had to be sold to bookstores so we didn’t drown in books “ham sandwiches” — stores paid about enough for lunch meat and bread for a month’s surplus mail. I don’t get that many review copies since I let go of writing a column, and for that matter I stopped eating ham a while before I married again last year. I think books have generally gotten a little better since 2010, actually. But it’s rare for me to find a book where I want to reread more than say 40% of the poems. That’s obviously true of collected poems but also of selected poems — I think everybody ought to make their own selected poems of every poet they love, as many poems as staples will hold. As for me and a selected, I had better publish a few more collections before I think about that. (I might have another new book coming out later this year — I don’t want to jinx it so I will say no more.)
Jordan, I'm really enjoying this, and I hope you are too. I think I want to take it in for a landing with a couple final questions.
How do you describe what it is you like when you really like a poem? And what's one poem, or one part of a poem, that you love that you can quote here to close?
It’s more of a family resemblance of experiences than a litmus test — I used to say that a good poem read quickly will slow the reader down to focus on each word and every part of the experience, and then a popular poetry podcast started using a similar idea for its title and I felt a little like one of the many simultaneous inventors of the zipper. But I think it’s still about right — an indifferent poem rolls off the mind but a poem with something to it will attract someone looking for poetry sooner or later, and they will have a different experience of time while they’re reading it.
I’m part of a group planning some events to celebrate Kenneth Koch’s 100th birthday next year, and one of his short poems keeps coming to mind:
Poem
The
thing
To
do
Is
organize
The
sea
So
boats will
Automatically
float
To
their destinations.
Ah,
the Greeks
Thought
of that!
Well,
what if
They
Did?
We have no
Gods
Of
the winds!
And
therefore
Must
use
Science!
Jordan Davis is the author of three collections of poems and several chapbooks, including Noise (above/ground, 2023). His prose has appeared in Fence’s Constant Critic, Boston Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, and he was Poetry Editor of The Nation from 2010 to 2012. A long poem titled Involuntary Memories of the Road will appear before too long.
J-T Kelly is the author of the chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). His poetry appears in The Denver Quarterly (upcoming), Bad Lilies, and elsewhere. He is an innkeeper in Indianapolis.