KARAN

Jarrett, thank you for these deeply moving and intimate poems. I’m struck by how you navigate heartbreak and healing through unexpected metaphors. In “Clam Theory,” you write, “I expected you to pull me / out of myself like a clam lodged / in mud, drowning at the bottom of a lake / built from my own burning.” (Ah!) Let's begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

JARRETT

Thanks so much for the kind words Karan! I would say my process varies, but the cycle remains pretty similar. When I return from a break from writing, I feel I have no idea what to say or how to write a poem. I sit in front of the page and do a sort of free-write, unencumbered by any poetic concern. From there, I take the free-write and delete anything I don’t absolutely love. I take the remaining lines and begin thinking: how do these connect to each other? What is happening, or wanting to happen, in the empty space between them? (This also feels central to my poetic practice, which is one of searching.) From there, what follows is almost like sculpting. These lines are the raw material and I shift them around, cutting and adding, throwing in different ideas, until eventually (hopefully) I begin to see the shape taking place. When I see that shape, it usually becomes clear to me exactly how to stitch these lines together and what their organizing principle (an idea, a conceit, a question, a musical structure or flow, or even a specific logic) is. 

To be quite honest, more often than not this process feels like banging my head against the wall. But I’ve come to understand it as a necessary part of my larger process. Like a sculptor might with their hands, by rearranging these different parts and thinking intricately about how they interact, I begin to internalize a muscle memory of the types of poems my mind is telling me I need to write at that point. Invariably, after a while of this shaping and head-banging (days, weeks, sometimes even months), I’ll reach a breakthrough point where the poems just begin to flow out. That’s not to say those poems that come past the wall don’t need editing, because I edit to death, but those poems usually come with their structure or central organizing principle already intact. In this period of the cycle, I very well might start with an image I see, a line that pops in my head, or an idea I get. But I always have to work very hard to return to that fluency. 

As for what drives me to write poetry, I could give an infinite amount of answers. I’m a real believer in the idea that poetry is never one thing, or for one purpose: it can be used in so many different ways. For me personally, as I mentioned earlier, I find my draw toward poetry is often one of searching. I do believe poetry can have an almost preternatural quality, and that in the process of focusing closely on language through the logic of poetics, a poem can reach a place, idea, or even question that the poet otherwise may not be capable of reaching. This isn’t to reify the idea of the poet as Absolute Truth Teller, or the bullshit ideal of “universality” in poetry, but instead to say that poetry is unique in its sense-making and can communicate feelings or ideas that were previously unknown even to the poet, or known in a different way than poetry is able to know. 

There have been so many times I have written poems not fully understanding them, where they were coming from, or why I was writing them — only to return months, or even years later, and see clearly that the poem was speaking to some feeling or experience before I was able to identify or speak about them. Even when I approach the page with a strong idea of my topic matter, or what I want to explore and even explicate, I find that the poem always reveals something unexpected to me. 

KARAN

Your poems often revisit memories to uncover deeper truths. In “The Whole Story,” you reveal how a childhood memory of violence was edited in retellings: “For years, before / I met you / I told this story on dates— / stopping at the capture / of the bird.” How do you approach writing about difficult memories? Does poetry help you access or understand these experiences differently? 

JARRETT

Wow, thank you so much for noticing this. The manuscript these poems come from is tentatively titled The Whole Story, for the exact reason you point out about revisiting memories. 

While there’s healing to be found in revisiting difficult memories in poetry, and truths to be uncovered, I think that process often requires crafting a coherent narrative about those memories. And narrative is something I’ve always struggled with. Lately I’ve been thinking about how our desire for (really, our need for) a clear narrative to hold together our understanding of things can be devastating. I’ve experienced how that desire can be easily manipulated in situations where someone else’s understanding of events becomes the dominant force behind how I understand the story of myself. I think when you experience that side of story-making, it’s difficult to trust any narrative. Even one you yourself are putting together. 

Writing these poems, and other poems in the project they come from, has felt like that. One way I’ve found to approach this difficulty is through the idea of memory as a form of revision. When I write a poem, I revise endlessly — sometimes for years (and sometimes even after publication) — but those edits are never visible to people who read the finished poem. I think the same thing is true of memory. I’m constantly going through life experiencing new things, taking in new information; as that happens, my understanding of certain memories changes too. But no one would know that except me. So, in writing these poems, it felt untrue to focus on the end-result — the revised understanding of those memories. Instead, I try to address the process of revision directly. For example, in “The Whole Story” I think the speaker’s understanding of the memory with the turkey actually changes after their relationship with the “you.” The violence in the memory becomes more important than the capture, and the speaker is now left with this new understanding, unable to speak it to the person who brought it about. In this way, I hope, the important thing is not so much the final understanding of the memory, but rather how the memory has been revised — and what that revision helps the reader understand about the relationship. 

This may be funny given the title of the poem, but I also think this approach takes the emphasis off of narrative or any one coherent “story” and instead emphasizes how easily a story can be changed, revised, edited. Perhaps this is one answer to your question about whether poetry allows me to access these memories differently — yes, it helps me to hold them in suspension, outside of linear narrative, in a way that can critique narrative and understanding itself. 

KARAN

The geography of Miami appears in several poems, particularly in “Couples Therapy” where you capture its summer heat and lizards against the backdrop of relationship struggles. How does place inform your poetry? Does Miami’s landscape and culture influence your imagery and themes? 

JARRETT

That’s a great question. Very recently I moved out of an apartment I lived in for a long time. When I was leaving for the last time, I found myself completely overwhelmed with emotion. I called my dad to talk to him, and while we were on the phone, he said something fascinating. He said he's always understood humans’ attachment to place as being related to the predicament (paraphrasing here) of our souls being housed in the geographic location of a body. I’m not religious like my father, but what he said opened up an understanding for me. Call it a soul, consciousness, or whatever else, but the essence of what makes me a person feels so much larger than my body, yet I’m unable to move beyond the physical place where my body is. We’re constantly feeling that tension, pushing against the edges of ourselves. I think it makes sense to me, then, that the places which are meaningful to us become almost an extension of the body, or an extension of the body’s containment: physical locations for the soul to rest and make a home in. 

For this reason, and because I so often write about loss (hopefully less in the future), place is especially important to my poetry. Loss changes our experience of places, and that change can feel like losing the piece of our soul we’ve left there. Or at least losing the respite the place once offered. Anyone knows this: it’s the same reason we avoid the walking path we used to love, or restaurant that was once our favorite, when we’ve lost someone who that place reminds us of. Yes — because we’ve lost that person, but more so because we’ve lost who we were when we were there, with them. That deep attachment to place is necessary for me to explore in my poetry if I want to reach into the depths of that sort of loss. 

KARAN

I’m fascinated by how you use natural imagery to explore relationships. In “Lassos for Clouds,” you write, “The words / I offered you / like lassos for clouds. / Throwing the rope / over and over. / I could not pull them / closer, only apart.” I love that. How do you approach crafting these metaphors that bridge the natural world and human emotion? 

JARRETT

In most cases, metaphor for me is incidental to the search for language. When I’m writing, even when I’m intentionally trying to write a metaphor, I’m not usually trying to create a comparison between two things themselves; instead, I’m using the structure of metaphor/ comparison to place words or phrases alongside each other, and the meaning that comes from that juxtaposition of language is either a happy accident, or an accident which I then run with and edit into something more clear. 

So, for example, with the poem you mentioned: I was looking at clouds one day and that phrase just popped into my head — lassoing clouds. I thought it was kind of funny, but then I thought there’s also something heartbreaking about it. I sat down to write a poem and titled it “Lassos for Clouds.” What came out was the metaphor of trying to appease or please someone with language, but being unable to. That wasn’t my intention when the phrase came into my head, or when I began writing, but I guess this is where having clear topic matter is helpful in the sense that if I know what I’m trying to explore, the linguistic structure of metaphor becomes a tool of that exploration — no matter what two things I place in the structure, something will be revealed. It’s almost like putting different colored shades into glasses to look at the same object. 

Looking back over these poems, I think you’re definitely right that my metaphors are concerned with bridging the natural world and human emotion. While I wasn’t conscious of that, it makes sense to me why. Part of it has to do with my answer about place in the previous question, but also, I’m a person who gets lost in my head. I think about 1,000 things at once, and I’m overly analytical, which means when I try to process intense feelings I sometimes detach completely from the physical world and isolate within myself. Regrounding myself in nature is almost always my way back. I need to feel connected to clouds, plants, cracked sidewalks where moss grows through, wind, and trees — especially trees, which I will one day write a whole book about. That I would be most interested in metaphors that allow me to ground feelings I don’t fully understand to the physical world seems par for the course. 

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

JARRETT

That’s interesting. I haven’t heard this before. The first thing that comes to mind is a quote from Ross Gay’s essay “Grief Suite” from his book Inciting Joy. About grief, Gay writes
“It is an emotional and bodily process that call to question the ridiculous notion that ever the two are not one. This alert to the body and mind being one and the same (which is also called the heart) is one of the wisdoms the griever offers us . . .” I think I have a similar notion — that there’s not really any untying these four aspects of poetry (body, mind, heart, soul). In order to fully reach one, it’s usually the case the rest will be present as well. Perhaps this is my natural disposition as someone who has experienced a lot of grieving in my life. 

That’s probably not a very interesting answer, so I’ll also say my second thought: heart, body, and soul are probably the three aspects that I’m most often trying to enact in my poems. I’m also concerned with the intellectual aspect of poetry, and how poems convey information to the mind, but even when I’m intentionally writing a poem toward that aim, my main concern is how to use language to engage the heart, soul, and body in a way that reaches the mind. My poetic practice has changed a lot since I’ve been writing, but this has pretty much always been true for me. 

KARAN

In “Dispatch From the Future We Never Had,” you explore an alternate timeline of a relationship, writing “Looking / at each other from across the room / was like looking clouds. We each felt / we could imagine any shape / for the other.” How do you approach writing about possibilities and might-have-beens? What draws you to explore these alternate realities in your work? 

JARRETT

The reason I’m drawn toward alternate realities is most likely the same reason I’m drawn toward revisiting memories: being able to understand the narrative of oneself is not just about understanding what has happened, but also about understanding what could happen. It’s like reading a novel or watching a movie — the story is only coherent if you have a sense of what might happen next. That sense may be wrong at each turn, but it’s the imagining of possibility that keeps the story whole: seeing the past, the present, and the possible futures. These poems came from a place of feeling unstoried, or incoherent as a person, so imagining alternate realities or futures was probably a direct attempt to put the story back together. Because poetry can hold narrative contradictions without falling apart (and in fact, is often held together by those contradictions), it’s a unique medium through which to explore those possibilities. 

KARAN

Relationships in your poems often carry an undertow of violence or potential violence, as in “Couples Therapy” where a missed green light saves lives, or in “Sacrament” where “Heartbreak is a little priest / hiding in a lake.” (Arghh, so fucking good!) How do you balance tenderness and danger in your exploration of love and relationships? Do you care about balancing them?

JARRETT

Well, I do think real tenderness opens one up to the possibility of danger, or even violence. In terms of relationships, that danger could be something as fundamental as the possibility of heartbreak, or it could be something darker — manipulation that takes advantage of that tenderness, that opening oneself fully to another person. This is of course true also of our relationship to the world — to be tender to the earth and its people is both to fully experience the beauty of them, but also to feel heartbreak (and anger) at the violence and horrors: colonization, capitalism, genocide, eco-destruction. But I think it’s necessary to be tender, to open oneself, in that way because the connection that results is a catalyst toward change, or at least toward contributing to change in any way possible.

I’ve gotten away from the question now but I’ll bring it back. For me, I’m often interested in elucidating structures of power via the sensation (in a literal way, as in poetry’s ability to make us sense or feel something that is otherwise abstract or intellectual) of poetry. Much of my work writing about addiction and recovery, especially my chapbook, is toward that aim. With these poems in which I turn my eye toward heartbreak, love, and relationships, I hope to capture what it feels like to be tender, the visceral sense of danger that can be felt when opening oneself to another person — and also, what happens when there is imbalance. The two poems you’ve mentioned are good examples. In “Couples Therapy,” the lines where the car barrels through the intersection is a moment in which two people experiencing tenderness together literally prevents violence. In “Sacrament,” though, the balance is different. The idea of heartbreak being a priest hiding in a lake is revisited at the end with “I wanted to confess everything to you even after I had no breath to do so.” The speaker’s willingness to take part in confession is almost religious, and as when confessing to a priest, there’s a sense of surrendering power and being fully open while knowing you will not receive the same — and the result is literally losing one’s life force, the most central thing: breath.

KARAN

Congratulations on your chapbook Gratitude List from Bull City Press! Tell us about it? The title is of course reminiscent of Ross Gay. Is he an influence? How did you approach putting together this collection? Has working on a longer project influenced how you think about individual poems?

JARRETT

Thank you! I was thrilled when Gratitude List was picked up by the wonderful people at Bull City, who have been a dream to work with. The chapbook is a series of interconnected narrative prose poems about recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. The poems follow a group of friends through sobriety in reverse chronology — starting with the speaker already being sober for a while, and moving backwards toward their early sobriety. As someone who has been in recovery for a while, this chapbook was very important to me. I think, first, because most people don’t understand addiction or recovery, which contributes to the stigma around it. But also, our prisons, government, and healthcare systems — and the people who run them — have institutionalized the death and incarceration of addicts. It’s my hope that Gratitude List can be a document of humanization for addicts like myself. 

Ross Gay is a huge influence on me. Although, funny enough, that didn’t really become true until after most of the poems in this chapbook were already finished. So in terms of Gay’s work, and its relation to Gratitude List, I think it was more like finding someone whose writing was saying exactly what I had been trying to say — and saying it in different ways than I would have ever thought to. One thing that’s definitely parallel is an idea Gay writes about in his book Inciting Joy (second mention today!): the idea that joy (and gratitude) comes from sharing one’s sorrow with others. All of the gratitude in Gratitude List, all of the joy, comes from forming a community with other people in recovery with whom I am able to share a common sorrow. 

As for putting together the collection: the project started as one poem (originally published in HAD) I wrote while taking a screenwriting course. We were doing character sketches for our protagonists in this class, which basically means condensing all the information you can think of about a character into one document — then placing the character in different situations, moments, etc, and seeing how they would react. I wondered if I could do the same with a poem. From there, the form and logic of the poems became clear and I just kept writing until I had this whole story. I chose to reverse the order chronologically because the story seemed too put-together for how I’ve experienced recovery — which is an ever changing, always adapting, up and down experience. Gratitude List is the most complete project I’ve written, and I definitely think the process of putting it together has made me consider how individual poems will fit into a greater framework. 

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem)  — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

JARRETT

Mention number three! — Ross Gay’s essay “Grief Suite (Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement)” from his book Inciting Joy. This essay changed my life.