J-T Kelly has been reading Jane Zwart’s poems since he first encountered her on the old bird app. Now he follows her on Bluesky @janezwart.bsky.social. Kelly in Italics.
Jane Zwart, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. I've admired your poetry for a while now. Maybe the first poem of yours that caught my eye was "Washing the Corpses," (https://bhreview.org/articles/washing-the-corpses/). Here's a few lines from it:
...More convincing is the kohl
that these bright-eyed corpses
have daubed at their blinking, rehearsing
the dark sockets that they will age into
and sleeplessness deepen, until its ash
sets, a pall more permanent than
embalmers’ glue.
I've said before that I find reading your poems like walking through a garden — a new scent at every step, and the winding path gives us a longer walk than we would have guessed looking at it from outside. How do you think of your poems? What do you think you're doing when you write a poem? And is what you are trying to do in writing the same or different from what you look for in the poetry you read?
First let me say thank you — for asking me to do this interview, for your kindness to me and my poems, and, specifically, for this lovely simile comparing my poems to gardens (an epic simile, maybe, on a domestic scale). And for these questions.
Usually when people ask me what my poems are like, I joke that all my poems have the same basic structure: "Everything dies. But look! A shell!" As with any joke, there's some truth there, I think. Sometimes, when I write, mortality is the poem's subject and other times its unspoken assumption. And sometimes the shell is a shell (or a katydid or gravel from the baseball diamond or an orchard) though often the shell is the language itself, the breakable, provisional shelter that the words make.
When I write a poem, a lot of what I'm doing is trying to figure out how to construct that shell. I'm trying to figure out what shape the poem should be, where its chambers should open and end, maybe what color it should be — and for sure what sounds should echo inside it if you hold it up to your ear. The answers to those questions, of course, depend on which tiny life form the poem is supposed to accommodate. But I hardly ever begin a poem knowing, for instance, "Oh, this poem will be a home for the animal of worry or the animal of my brother or the animal of gratitude." I need to experiment my way into finding that out. I have to test the shell as I go, to feel for the places where my syntax is inelegant or too brittle, where the ad hoc house that it is needs stairs or an addition or tidying. I only know how to build a poem by trial-and-error.
And when I read poetry, I do look for poems that feel like small shelters. But the poems I want to spend time inside don't need to be calcium carbonate. I love a seashell, but I love jam jars and bus shelters and cocoons and awnings, too.
How do you think about words? One characteristic of your poetry is the vocabulary. You often include uncommon words — kohl in the "Corpses" poem above comes to mind. But you also have other ways of using a word to catch attention, or to draw the eye, maybe away from the other hand that is scooping up the coin. Here is a bit from "I volunteer for the shit list." https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/jane-zwart-2.html
anything, really, that elbows, unexpected, stem
from dirt; any shit that takes root and turns out
blossoms. When I say I volunteer for the shit list,
picture the squash that does not wait for the rot
to finish...
Shit catches the ear, but by the end it's volunteer that's got the melody.
I love words: their precisions, their ambiguities, their sounds. I love the hodgepodge of the English language, how it lifts from other languages — kohl is a good example — and how the oldest, earthiest Anglo-Saxon stuff in it survives — shit is a good example. I love finding out that words I thought I knew, like volunteer, have depths that are new to me: the specific reference to a plant that you didn't sow; it just shows up, a raised hand where you weren't expecting one. I have my parents to thank for this. Our house was full of books and puns, we spent a lot of time at the Yankee Clipper Library just down the street, and my mom would make these amazing vocabulary lists for me to master in the summer when I was in elementary school: they were based entirely on whether she got a kick out of the sound of the words: chicanery, jejune, calliope. She still sends me words she thinks I'll love (and she's almost always right): apricity, perihelion.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a whole geeky history to the range of words in my poems. But I've also learned a lot of new words by writing poems, names for things that I've hunted down. One of the funny side effects of these quests is the ads that the internet sends me because it thinks I quilt or fish, that I'm an architect or spelunker.
And I've written poems in order to spend time with a word. In some ways, "I volunteer for the shit list" is an attempt to think about that new-to-me meaning of the word "volunteer," which you so wonderfully say "has the melody." It was also a poem I wrote on a dare from my university's provost, to whom I made a joke about a certain committee assignment being tantamount to volunteering for a shit list. "Dustsceawung" is another example of a whole poem sprung from a single word. The poet Maya Popa posted on then-Twitter about that middle English gem, so I have her to thank for it, and of course I'm grateful to the folks at Massachusetts Review for giving it a spot, too.
You mention a house full of books, the local library, and a mother entranced with words — did your formal education include poetry? Creative writing? You teach creative writing now. How do you think about education and creativity? How do writers learn? What do you consider it is that you teach? And how does the profession and practice of teaching affect your own writing? What do you learn from teaching?
My formal education included reading poetry and all sorts of other books, too, and it included a lot of academic writing but very little creative writing. But I do teach creative writing now, a sort of smorgasbord of an undergraduate course called "The Craft of Writing." I always feel like a bit of a poser teaching the fiction third of that course because I don't write fiction. I think that what saves me from full-blown imposter syndrome is a belief that so much of the craft of writing — and maybe even more of the craft of teaching writing — is the craft of reading, and that craft I know.
Of course other smarter people have made this point: a huge portion of how writers learn to write is by learning to read. To learn to write a story, you need to read hundreds of stories. Good writers of their own fiction have taken in other stories' bone structures, their joints and hints, their seams and omissions. Some writers have done this work subconsciously, but I think paying deliberate attention to the structure and engine of a good writer's writing speeds up the process of learning to build and drive your own prose. So investigating how good narrative prose works, that's part of what I do alongside students when I teach creative writing, shifting a little from a question that emphasizes interpretation ("What does it mean and how?") to a question that emphasizes craft ("Does it work and why?").
We also ask how poems work and why. Obviously there's some overlap in what makes prose work and what makes poetry work. But a poem usually has different dimensions than an essay or a story. In one way, poems are often smaller in scope; what fits inside the frame of a poem is almost always less than what fits in the frame of a piece of prose. Many poems are the width of a moment, not a plot. A poem can get by on a single image, whereas a story needs a setting. And, although I'm not sure I agree with this entirely, someone recently suggested to me that poems aren't populated by characters but contain, instead, figures. A poem does, though, have more scope than a piece of prose, almost always, when it comes to sound. I would also argue — though this is very abstract — that often a poem has a larger halo than a story does, the halo of any piece of writing being where all the invisible, unsaid stuff hangs out.
As to what I've learned from teaching, I could go on and on. But here's what I learn about the craft of writing more deeply every semester: even as it is, in fair measure, the craft of reading, the craft of writing is also 1) the craft of paying attention and 2) the craft of being brave and 3) the craft of rewriting.
Would you talk a little bit about the poets you love? Who were some of the first poets you loved, and do you still love them? What poets do you use in your teaching? What poets are you reading now that you're excited about? What books of poetry are coming soon that you are already looking forward to?
The first poets I remember reading in large quantities are Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes and e.e. cummings. They don't make an especially likely trio, I realize, but they sat near each other on my parents' shelves, and they were the first poets to win me over. Hard to say exactly why, but I could tell that each of them had a different relationship with language than most people did, than I did. I could tell the words they used belonged to them more than any word I had ever written belonged to me, even my own name, and I could also tell those words belonged to them for reasons that had nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with love. I was in awe of their transgressions against syntax and punctuation and convention, in awe of the way the most ordinary utterances — "This is my page for English B" — could, in a poem, be deep enough to drown in. And I do still love them. I still love the strange, sad consolations of the poems I copied into my notebooks in college: Anne Sexton's "With Mercy for the Greedy" and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones's) "Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note" and Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night." Those were some of the first poems that made me think "I want to do that." And if I could choose anyone to share some poem-DNA with, which I'm not at all sure that any of us can, it would be Wislawa Szymborska (even though I've only read her in translation).
I love a lot of living poets, too. I also try to apprentice myself to those poets by reading them, by copying down their verses in order to know them better. It's difficult to make a list because you always forget someone that you could kick yourself for forgetting. So I'll just say that in the past few months, I've been studying, in particular, Jane Hirschfield, Patrick Rosal, Amit Majmudar, Catherine Pierce, and V. Penelope Pelizzon.
As for books I'm excited to spend more time with, Blade by Blade by Danusha Lameris and The Parachutist by Jose Hernandez Diaz and Boxed Juice by Danielle Chapman are stacked next to my bed as I write this, so naming them is probably the easiest way to answer that potentially enormous question.
Boxed Juice is a great title! Danielle Chapman was not on my radar, but she is now. Thank you for that!
Jane, you have your own first full collection of poetry coming out soon, right? Tell us about your book, but also — what has been your experience of putting together this collection? Have you put out chapbooks before? You're a fairly prolific writer — how did you go about choosing the poems to go into this collection?
Yes! I have a book coming out with Orison in fall 2025. It's called Oddest and Oldest and Saddest and Best, partly after one of the poems. The story in that poem is about one of my former students; in the summer, he worked on the grounds crew of a cemetery, and people sometimes asked him to point out the grave markers he thought were weirdest and most poignant and so on. As I'm telling you about him, I'm wondering if my book resembles a churchyard, part-green space, part-potter's field. I think it probably does. Anyway, I'd like to think it's the kind of book you could walk through wanting someone to steer you toward the oddest poem, the poem with the longest memory, the least consolable poem, the best one.
I want to add here that it's taken me a long, long time to get my foot in the door, book-wise. I know that's not so unusual, but I also know how disheartening it can be waiting outside closed and narrow doors, so if there's anyone reading this interview that's waiting their turn, I want to tell them not to give up. Of course if a writer wants to quit getting back in line for a while, that's okay. But if they keep finding that the words are there, and a little music, they shouldn't give up on those.
Back to your questions, though: no, I haven't published any chapbooks. And because of that and because it did take me so long to get a book accepted, I had, as you intuited, a surplus of poems from which to choose when putting this manuscript together.
No doubt I would still be shuffling and dithering if it weren't for Christian Wiman. I've loved Chris's writing for years. I think I've read everything he's published, and reread a lot of it, which is not something I can say about many writers. I've also gotten to know him a bit: once I was lucky enough to interview him at the King Institute in Bristol, Tennessee, and I've written about his work. Along the way, he's been inordinately generous to me and my writing — so much so that I have him to thank for this book. In April at the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin University (where I teach), Chris asked me when I was going to have a collection of poems come out. And when I laughed and told him "Hopefully not posthumously," he told me to send him a big stack of my best poems, so I did, after which he read them and gave me the quickest, most brilliant feedback. Luke Hankins at Orison, too, is wonderful; I'm so grateful to him for helping me refine the book, for seeing its gaps and excesses, for knowing which poems to swap out.
Jane, it's wonderful to hear about your book coming out. I'm looking forward to it! Could I ask you to close out our interview by sharing a poem from the book? And alongside it, would you share one of the poems you mention copying out by hand in order to understand more deeply? Perhaps there is a pair of poems there that might speak to each other?
Thanks so much for this interview!
J-T, thank you for being happy about the book along with me. And I love this thoughtful question (although they've all been thoughtful).
Here's one of the earliest poems I ever copied out, Marilyn Nelson's "Mama's Promise," and a poem from my book, "Shroud," which first appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic (thank you, James Diaz!) this past July. I do think Nelson's poem and mine come from similar apartments in the heart, if nothing else. And that's one of the many things for which I'm grateful to poets: they've helped me name my own heart's rooms. Sometimes even to find them.
It's not so simple to give
a child birth;
you also have to give it
death,
-from “Mama’s Promise”
before the biopsy, my
therapist asks
me to tell a story about
the next day.
from “Shroud”
Jane Zwart [photo credit: Otto Selles, www.ottosellesphotography.com] teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025.
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