Shannan

Reading your poems conjured for me an old friend, a kind voice from the past, the kind of comfort a deep inhale of sweet tea might offer. Which is all to say, I loved living inside the tangible worlds created by your measured words. I noticed how the speaker in your poems carries a fluid point of view, melding into omniscience and then seamlessly transitioning to the intimate first-person.

       “The Park at Night”, for example, opens by describing the eponymous physical space as being “another country”. Something small resembles something large, and the large thing — a country — is contained within the small — the park. It is not until the end of the third couplet that the speaker announces herself, but even then the vision of the voice is directed outwards: “I see a woman...” I am drawing connections between these choices (and I’m curious to know if they are conscious choices) — if the intimate first-person speaker is the park, then the omniscient wise narrator seeing across time is the country.

JANE

I love the idea that “The Park at Night” lets the park's consciousness inflect its voice, and maybe I love it more because that sort of weird version of free indirect discourse (where the place dyes the speaker's words) isn't something that I was aware of when I was writing the poem. But I do think that the park's story is at the heart of the poem, that one of the things the poem wants to hold is the place's own knowing both in particular moments and in the way it exists in a broader expanse of time--how it has borders and citizens that work in shifts of daylight and dark.

       The truth is that I live right next to a city park, which is wonderful in all sorts of ways on almost every day of the year, but there are about three days at the beginning of July when sleep is difficult because of the many, many firecrackers that people set off into the wee hours. Anyway, I think that's where the poem started — with my thinking about the park's nighttime revelries and, sure, misdemeanors, but then also about the whole suite of stories that must take place over a fence after I'm tucked into my own spot for the night. I feel like I see just the littlest bit of those stories. So when I (really I) see a woman spreading out a blanket late in the day or a man stretching before the sun's quite up, I feel like I'm eavesdropping, almost, on what the park knows.

       I will also say that omniscience in a poem — well, of course, it's always imaginary (as in fiction) — it's something that I hope moves me past weighing everything only in the scales of self. In fact, I think to consider what human things might weigh in much larger scales than any of us earthlings have on hand is one of the indispensable things that gives me perspective (for writing, for being). In the realm of writing, I think I first noticed that trick of shifting everything to a vaster-than-earthly scale in Wisława Szymborska's poetry. So maybe what I sometimes try in a poem is not shifting, quite, between the first-person limited and omniscience but between holding things in the scales of self and then taking the longest view I can, maybe using a telescope the wrong way around or trying to see the world as an extraterrestrial would.

Shannan

I have often seen the term “poetry of place” used around literary circles. It has been hard for me to fully “get” what it means but when I read this phrase of yours — “the park’s story” — a little lightbulb went on in my brain. Just like people, a place has a story. Am I understanding this correctly? Is “poetry of place” the poetry of not, per say, the people of that place, but overarchingly, the place’s story itself which encompasses the people? A place is indeed omniscient, alive with all the stories that have played out there across space and time. 

JANE

I'm not sure that it aligns with the official glossaries, but yes: I think "poetry of place" must mean, at the very least, poetry where place is more than just a dimension of setting. And I don't mean, quite, that place needs to be one of the characters in a poem, which has, anyway, become something of a cliché. In the poetry of place, the place in question needs to have more sway on the poem's whole world than many characters have on the pieces of writing in which they appear. Or, to put it another way, it's not enough for the place to have its own agency or backstory or even its own consciousness. The place needs to hold — or, at minimum, bend — the poem's narrative perspective.

Shannan

Yes, and your poems create a conversation between both character and place, and something deeper — a merging, a coalescing. The most striking example of this crops up in “Poem Meant to Be Opened”. The second-last line beautifully breaks the spell wrought by the short poem with “Take my hand”.

JANE

I'm not sure quite what to say to this beyond thank you — such a huge and moving compliment. What strikes me about your connecting that "Take my hand" line in "Poem Meant to Be Opened" to the sensibility of “The Park at Night” is that I suspect they're doing similar things in opposite directions. “The Park at Night” wants to let the park's consciousness into the poem's consciousness (and maybe does, via the quirky free indirect discourse) and “Poem Meant to Be Opened” wants to let the poem's consciousness out, lending it to the reader (and maybe does, via direct reader address). It's funny because I never think about literary devices per se when I write, but then there they are when I read my own words from even a little distance: the same tricks of the trade everyone else uses, the same enchantments I underscore when I teach.

SHANNAN

I was giddy to see you mention Wisława Szymborska — she was one of my original poet-moms when I discovered her work in the fantastic anthology edited by Czeslaw Milosz, A Book of Luminous Things. I can see what you’re saying about what is playing out in so many of her poems, but especially in “Love at First Sight”. I kind of love that she doesn’t much care about being subtle (she personifies “Chance” and “Destiny”) but then am also mystified in how she still ends up accomplishing a kind of poetic coyness, softness which I ultimately recognize as grace, rising, as you noted, beyond the earthly, the “scales of self”. 

JANE

I love this description of Szymborska's art. That "poetic coyness, [the] softness which [you] ultimately recognize as grace": absolutely. But I'm also mystified at how she does it! I know there's humor at work there alongside compassion, a form of forgiveness that's almost sardonic. But how she can trot out a couple of allegorical heavies like Chance and Destiny and then pirouette all over the stage, disrupting what had looked dangerously like a morality play in the making — that's a magic I can't even begin to figure out.

Shannan

“This world is made for joy” made me cry. Thank you for that. I see my daughter (she’s almost three) do so many inexplicable and delightful things every day and I can’t not feel this same truth reverberating within me also — that yes, this world is made for joy. But then the fears arise, the doubts, and the world sometimes feels made for anxiety. The worse, though, is when the world feels made for indifference, like a cut-off limb of a planet Stephen Hawking described as “orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Would you please respond to these shifts of perspective — whether you feel them too, how you divine, resolve, or elucidate them in your poetry. And why — why is it important for you? 

JANE

I love that Stephen Hawking quote, which feels so apt and so inadequate at the same time. I do feel the truth of our smallness deeply. The first time I felt it I was maybe 11 or 12, at sleep-away camp for a week, which generally I didn't much like. One night we slept in tents instead of cabins, and, as it was a Christian camp, our counselor sent us each to find a quiet spot in the dark where we could read a psalm by flashlight before bed. On my way to a semi-solitary spot, I tripped and dropped my flashlight, and its beam traveled up all the motes of pollen and dust and vapor in the night air, a defined beam that reached a long way into the atmosphere and then became nothing in comparison to the stars blazing away from the remote sky and remote past. I felt so small. And some of that feeling was akin to what Hawking names, so beautifully and so devastatingly, but — and I hold this close still — the crux of the feeling was wonderment: that we exist, that we were made at all, yes, but also that it must have been love that made us. I am (we are) the smallest speck of life, and I have (we all do) an immutable place in the heart of a God we could not see. I knew then — I know now — that the world was not made with or for indifference. Of course, I don't always feel that way, but there are truths besides the truths of feeling.

       So, yes, the world does sometimes feel made for anxiety, as you say. For my part, I spend a lot of anxiety — more than is good for them — on my kids. And I spend more anxiety than is good for me on all our kids. But I believe it's we human beings who have made the world for anxiety and, in no small part, we've done so by forgetting that the world was made for joy. Of course two (or twenty) things can be true at the same time: there are legions of reasons for fear and worry in this world, and this world was made for joy.

       The line "This world is made for joy" made me cry, too. Rhett Iseman Trull, who is a beautiful writer and the incredibly generous editor of Cavewall, posted the story of Cordelia and her older sister, Audrey, on Twitter, and I'm so grateful for their giving me permission to put it in my poem. But I'm even more grateful for the story itself, for its truth- — which is not only that this world is made for joy but also that we, not with the voice of a Creator who begins "Let there be Light" but with the blessings of Post-It notes full of runes, can call joy into being. Indeed, some of what we can create is a spell against indifference.

Shannan

You mentioned that you do not consciously think of literary devices when writing poems but that they are clearly there after the fact. I was wondering what you’d suggest for a new poet? Is it worthwhile to give into the mechanical and try and incorporate literary devices (and if so, do you have any favorites?). Or would you rather the poet fan that mysterious inner spark through a more cerebral process, something they make up as they go along? 

JANE

I try not to make advice-based pronouncements; luckily, in this case, all I have to do is repeat what a hundred earlier, smarter writers have said: the best practice for a new poet (and, really, for a writer of any vintage) is reading. And my guess is that while it could be instructive to play with literary devices by way of practice or experiment — improvising an epic simile just to see how long you can hold the note, for instance — for me studying other people's feats of metaphor and zeugma (those are my favorite literary devices) has been a surer route to becoming more adept at conjuring metaphor or deploying zeugma myself. I suspect, then, that if you absorb other writers' singing, you'll learn their riffs and chord progressions by heart, and they'll become forebears for your own writing. So back to the advice: if you want to write, read. Pay sustained enough attention to others' craft, and literary devices will eventually become what you reach for (unconsciously and without hesitation) when left to your own devices.

       Although when it comes to sonnets and sestinas and villanelles, the formula is not just voracious, studious reading; you also need dogged, prolific practice. So I'm told, anyway, by my best poetry brother, Amit Majmudar.

SHANNAN

In your essay “On Questions and Answers” published in Ekstasis, you use Gulliver’s Travels to emphasize the role of empathy in tempering the space between seeking and satiation. You note how “Gulliver has moved from incredulity without discernment to incredulity without charity.” And then, my favorite bit from the excellent essay (seriously, I wish you were my professor!): 

“…cynicism isn’t the opposite of naïveté. It is, in fact, a form of naïveté—but one we’re a little quicker to find attractive than goofy credulity is, because this version comes with an angsty sense of superiority attached. But that sense of superiority is still folly, at bottom, and it moves a cynical Gulliver, for instance, to assume that any question he cannot answer must not have an answer; consequently, he can see no further than the worth of his questions.”

Would you say you write from a place of inquiry? And in this context, I do mean poetry specifically. Because your poems are self-assured in the best way, and because they have made me feel safe, feel hopeful in the simplest and loveliest of ways — I want to jump in myself here and answer on your behalf that “no, of course Jane Zwart doesn’t write from a place of inquiry, she writes from a place of wisdom!” But then, I think, are they both not undeniably enmeshed? I really am curious about how you feel about this line of thinking. 

JANE

I think you're also right about wisdom and inquiry being "undeniably enmeshed." Everyone I admire as wise is full of questions, only some of which they have answered. And I'm more than willing to say that I have a lot of questions, and even that some of them are my own. As for the wisdom, it's all borrowed. From scriptures, from the way I've seen other people move through the world curiously and gently and bravely, from novels and poems and essays, from songs, from paintings, from salmon and trumpet vines.

       But I do want to say this: when you say that my poems have made you feel safe and hopeful, that fills my heart right up. I don't feel especially self-assured; I'm better at self-consciousness than self-assurance. I suspect that assurance, like grace, is something that it's easier to give someone else than yourself. Still: if I've managed to write something that assures someone else, that's more than what I could have asked for. So thank you.

Shannan

To refer back to what you said earlier, I love that for you the feeling of smallness inspires “wonderment”. I am reminded of the amazing Brian Doyle. Late last year, Karan imposed on me his very marked up and read-through copy of One Long River of Song. I cried and smiled throughout the book. I’d never quite read something like that before. I also thought of Mary Oliver, of course, when you said this. Major Jackson, in his interview, when discussing the political as it relates to poetry, mentioned: “…the folly of existence has to always be in sight; we must laugh at ourselves as we cry for freedom, justice, peace, and revolution…” I feel that this ability to allow yourself to be the fool must essentially arise from wonderment too. And humility must be the bedrock of it all. I’m throwing around such big abstractions and realizing now that I am rarely humble and that makes me laugh and now I’m wondering — hey, maybe it’s good that I can laugh at myself for not being able to always laugh at myself.

JANE

Major Jackson and Brian Doyle and Mary Oliver: what a gorgeous trio! And I am just enamored of the way your mind works, Shannan — even as I'm not quite sure what to say in reply here.

       I guess I'll say this: your comment about second-order laughter (laughing at yourself for being unable to laugh at yourself) does remind me how versatile laughter is: how it suits disbelief, for instance, whether at some awful blow or some great good luck; how quickly it follows embarrassment; how even grief can't keep it out of the house. I'm reminded, too, of the many times I've been unable to sift mirth from heartbreak when watching some mishap befall one of my sons.

       There is so much absurdity in the world that just won't come unmixed. Because how unfair things are, yes, but also there are so many ways they are unfair. For instance, so much of what we experience as cruelty and so much of what we experience as mercy are inexplicable and undeserved.

       So hearing Major Jackson on "the folly of existence," and hearing you on the daring humility that it takes to play the fool, what I wonder is whether there is a folly without real foolishness in it. I would like to think here is. I would like to think that maybe this is the folly my favorite poems embody: a folly that is absurd in the way that wild, stubborn, unfulfillable hopes are, a folly that is absurd in the way that love is.