I Love Language It Doesn’t Love Me Back

KARAN

Jeremy, thank you for these poems that navigate desire, loneliness, and devotion with such wild tenderness. In “Oh My God I Miss You,” you write: “Boundaries, my own, can put their mouth on my asshole / & inhale with vigor” – a line that made me laugh out loud while also breaking my heart. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you start writing a poem? Does it begin with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

JEREMY

Karan, thank you and Shanan for making a space for my poems and for the work you do at ONLY POEMS for poetry (and for our shared rabbi, Leonard Cohen, may his memory be a blessing) in general! I feel incredibly privileged to be here. Any time I talk about my process I have to start with this Mary Ruefle quote from her book of lectures Madness, Rack, and Honey, one of the most important books I’ve encountered in my own journey as a writer:

“I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, 'I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say'; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”

I don’t think there’s a better description of my trajectory, and I have to imagine many poets have seen themselves in this passage as well. My process has changed a lot over the years and continues to change and hopefully will not stop changing until I stop being alive. At this moment in my life, my process seems to be a bit of a relic based on an old Facebook tradition of the early 2010s. Every April for National Poetry Month, alongside many other poets, some of whom became lifelong friends, I would write a poem a day and share the poem on my Facebook page—and then go and read (and often be helplessly envious of) poems that those other poets had written and posted. I did that for enough years that a process has grown out of it. I wait months and months during which I don’t generate any new material, where I just accrue by way of experiencing the world and reading and thinking (Toni Morrison, when asked if she writes every day, said, “No, but I think every day”), and then when I reach a sort of critical mass I’ll take a month and write a poem a day every day and then tool around with them until it’s time to stop and let them be, at which point I’ll submit to journals. By the time the poems are—as is mostly the case—rejected, enough time has passed for me to re-experience them as a reader, and to hear more clearly what they want. I don’t know that this is a very good process but it’s what I’ve got right now. I’ve also had to figure out how to balance writing poems with my other great love, which is acting. I find that I need both to retain some level of what could, on a good day, be called spiritual equilibrium—acting is how I scratch the community itch, writing poems is for solitude. Ideally I am able to strike an equal balance. In the last few years, however, I have been working more consistently as a theater actor, which is very demanding on the body and mind and clock, so I am constantly in the process of reevaluating what a writing practice looks like—especially a writing practice that has expanded to include playwriting and maybe a novel if I’m feeling especially masochistic. The short answer is, I don’t know what my process is! I feel that when I’ve tried to define it, I end up closing myself off to other possibilities. An old acting teacher of mine used to say, “Technique is whatever works.” I would add that what works is constantly in flux, as I and the world are constantly in flux. Though I wish I was, I am not one of those writers who can structure their life around a process; I find I have to structure my process around my life because of the unpredictability of my schedule.

As far as writing a poem goes, a poem might begin for me with any of the things you mention here—image, line, idea, or an experience, or a desire (probably this most of all), or a conversation with a friend, or a piece of music, whatever I’m “listening to”—so really, I guess, the poem begins with listening. When I sit down to write a poem, I try to begin from a place of receptivity, from nothing—which is really everything, as close as I can get to pure availability. When I’m working from that place it’s a kind of meditation. In his song “Going Home,” in which Leonard Cohen sings about Leonard Cohen, ostensibly in the voice of God, Leonard Cohen says, of himself, “He will speak these words of wisdom / like a sage, a man of vision / though he knows he’s really nothing / but the brief elaboration of a tube.” An efficient tube is an unclogged tube. The Ruefle quote describes the unclogging. What unclogs the tube, helped along by conscious work and practice, is time. Time, if one lets it, erodes the ego. I spent many years operating under the delusion that I had something to add—this is the sublime and necessary delusion of youth, of having not yet read widely or lived in the world (Toni Morrison again, when asked what advice she'd give a young writer, said, “Start at forty”). I don’t know of any writer who begins without this delusion. It is a critical delusion and must be embraced before it can gradually be let go of. What I wanted to add were the specifics of my own experience—of my suffering, my loneliness, my anger. I don’t know what I wanted to add them to, maybe some cosmic ladder made of poems (but who would climb it and where would it lead?). The thought was that if I could add them, and add them perfectly, with absolute clarity and precision, I would in some capacity be absolved or understood or loved. Most of my early years as a poet were spent writing poems at people—those I thought were somehow incapable of seeing me clearly (as if I was able see myself clearly), though I hardly ever showed them to anyone, let alone the people I was writing them at. I wrote because I wanted to be seen and heard. Now I know I have nothing to add, nothing to say, and try as I might I will never be seen as clearly as I want to be seen—because I am constantly in motion. When I try to see myself “clearly” I do so at the detriment of my work, not to mention my relationships and sense of self-worth. Hannah Arendt was once asked in an interview what impact she wanted her writing to have. She scoffed and said that she did not write to have an impact, to influence, she wrote to understand. Often if I have a line or an idea or an image it will serve as a jumping off point, then I just do my best to get out of the poem’s way—as opposed to what I used to do, which was have an idea for a poem and attempt, sometimes violently, to write that poem and only that poem. Now I do my best to let the poem write itself, even if it has nothing to do with the original impulse, to let it tell me what it wants to tell me. There are, of course, times when a poem will sort of appear in my head almost fully formed—this happens occasionally on long walks—so I try to be open to that too, and it’s very nice, but not something to be depended on. The short answer, for now, is that my process is to try to allow myself to be open to the surprise of what a varied and unpredictable thing a process can be, and to trust that no matter what I do, when it is time to write the poem, I won’t have any other choice.

KARAN

Thank you, Jeremy. You’ve made ONLY POEMS a richer place with this wonderful answer, thank you. In “The Dipshit,” you create this hilarious and vulnerable persona who speaks of “dipshiterry” with formal eloquence. How did this poem come about? I’m curious about how you balance humor and vulnerability in your work – the way you can make us laugh and then punch us in the gut with a line of devastating sincerity.

JEREMY

It’s possible this was a shower poem—it certainly began with the voice, and I think that happens sometimes in the shower, which in many ways for me is a sort of chamber where I can go to be inside of my inner monologue. It’s certainly a poem that makes use of a dramatized self—the part of me that wants to feel fundamentally and formally unlovable. The part of me that is committed to maintaining, in Twelve Step parlance, my “terminal uniqueness.” Also I just think “dipshit” is such a funny compound word. Absolutely unhinged. Who was the first person to put that abhorrent little machine together? If I knew I would send them a fruit basket (mostly prunes). From there I think the actor takes over. Frankly, I’ve been to a lot of very boring, very dry poetry readings and I want to make sure that when I give a reading there is something of a range in terms of tone, of voice. What I most love about plays, the really great plays, is that you never leave having felt only one thing. This seems often to be lost in our increasingly “vibes only” performing arts culture. Go see a great production of The Glass Menagerie or Uncle Vanya or Topdog/Underdog and you will have laughed uproariously and wept bitterly, sometimes in the span of moments. A perfect poetry reading, for me, would mirror this experience—because poetry readings, in many ways, are plays. Each poem is a character in the play and they are speaking to each other. I’ve got an essay on my Substack about my thoughts on poetry performance should that be of interest. Over the past few years I have been working with the great Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov, now in exile in the United States at seventy years old, and it has been a tremendous lesson in terms of this exact thing. I consider him to be, in some ways, the David Lynch of theater—his blending of humor and terror is seamless, always destabilizing, and deeply gratifying. His shows are a balancing act on the thin thread separating the sacred and the profane—just when you think you’re settled into one, there’s the other. A woman gives a devastating, tearful confession to a train conductor about keeping her daughter away from the man she loves because she did not approve of him, and then wipes her tears and asks where the bathroom is, only to be handed a bucket. Recently I was speaking to him after a rehearsal and he said, in his thick Russian accent, “All good jokes come from symmetry.” I thought about it for a moment and was like, huh. Okay. Cool man, sounds good. And then I realized I’d misheard him. He’d said, “All good jokes come from [the] cemetery.” Mel Brooks once said “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” Humor is vulnerable. It is the other side of death. Death is funny. Jokes are serious.

KARAN

I love that. I’m interested in speaking more about humor — what role does humor have in poetry? In the last decade or so, American poetry has been full of sadbois and gals and though of course we love sadness in poetry, and it’s such a rich artform to explore one’s trauma — I feel a humor has been lacking in contemporary American poetry that is slowly coming back. Do you think that’s a fair estimate? Do you think humor will make a serious comeback? Or is poetry not the place for it? I wonder if the niche-ness of poetry is in any way tied to how dull and dry it often can be…

JEREMY

I don’t know that I can speak to the lack of humor in contemporary poetry very well. We only read what gets published, and only a fraction of that. An important distinction that I hope I can adhere to is that I want to take the work seriously but I don’t want to take myself seriously. I find, especially because we now have such easy access to the poets themselves via social media—often more access to the poets than to their poems—that many poets take themselves very seriously indeed. This does not leave a lot of room for humor, and if it does, that humor often comes from a place of moral superiority—look how stupid and unevolved these other people are for not seeing the world as clearly as I do (and you, by virtue of the fact that you have encountered my poems, which means you’re on the path to righteousness and will be further along the path to righteousness if you hit that follow button and purchase my book and maybe a t-shirt). Often this is a humor sourced almost entirely from the internet, and that has little if anything to do with that poet’s particular sense of humor. Or perhaps we’ve entered an age where everyone’s sense of humor will eventually be sourced from the internet, from memes, which have completely obliterated the concept of the “inside joke”—everyone is inside it; it has no source; it’s AI; it’s humor minus pain, which is pure formula. Sometimes I think it’s far less vulnerable to be sad than to be funny. To be sad in a poem is to be seen feeling, and it’s hard to disagree or criticize a feeling; to be funny is to be seen seeing, far easier to criticize or disagree with. Humor is a reflection. Pain plus distance and craft. I trust far more the response to a joke—laugh or no laugh—than I do the response to an open expression of pain, which only a monster would criticize, and the response to which, in the poetry world, is often just as much a performance as the poem itself. This is why every poetry slam gets a standing ovation, deserving or not—pain is foolproof.

I sometimes think of poems as jokes with no punchlines. It’s all set-up, and then where the punchline would be, there is, as was once said of Mark Rothko’s work, “…the unbearable silence of God.” This silence is what is funny, the silence that reflects the ridiculousness of the self. Ideally I am not trying to punch down—or up!—in my poems. I am trying to punch in. The truth that I hope runs through my poems, the thread of humor, is that I am ridiculous—or maybe more specifically, my “understanding” of myself is ridiculous. My desire is not to be taken seriously. My sorrow is not to be taken seriously. My anger is not to be taken seriously. My opinions are never to be taken seriously. Part of this comes from growing up as a fat kid. It eventually became a survival function to self-deprecate. I realized that I could save other kids the trouble of making fun of me by doing it myself—while at the same time turning them into an admiring audience. It made me palatable—even popular. This is not necessarily a good thing. It built up my ego while simultaneously destroying it, which led to a kind of self-obsession, a self-mythologizing, a cycle of self-aggrandizing self-pity very difficult to break out of—look at Chris Farley, John Belushi, etc. My work is to get out of that cycle—without losing my access to humor itself. It’s also about dismantling power—or at least can be. A lot of humor today seems to be used to create a kind of power. Self-deprecation, used in a certain, insidious way, as not-so subliminal advertisements for one’s goodness—“Aw shucks, I guess I’m just a big ol’ doofus who cares about the downtrodden a little too much!! Looks like I missed therapy ‘cause I was helping an elderly unhoused woman cross the street… again!”—builds up the myth of one’s own moral superiority to truly astonishing degrees, and once one believes that myth they have created about themselves (for which practice the internet is a tremendous tool) it can be used to leverage significant social power. Humor, the good stuff, resists power with everything it has. The court fool has no ambition to the throne. It’s genuine debasement. It keeps the throne humble—both the outer and inner throne. One of the epigraphs of my upcoming book comes from the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky—“I am God I was not God I am a clown of God.” It is that rapid de-inflation I’m after in my work, both as a poet and often as an actor—that acknowledgment of delusion, of the final helplessness. It’s political when used well, that kind of humor. It punctures the illusion of power.

KARAN

Another great human obsession that punctures the illusion of power is love, especially when unreturned. Many of your poems wrestle with unrequited or impossible love. In “Sitting in the Park at Dusk,” you write “I am not the love of the love of / my life’s life. Sometimes that’s just / how it goes.” What draws you to explore these asymmetrical emotional landscapes? What possibilities do they open up for poetry?

JEREMY

Here we are talking about self-mythologizing again. My favorite story in the Old Testament is Jacob wrestling the angel. Jacob is standing on the Jabbok Ford at midnight. A man/angel (elohim in the original Hebrew) appears, and they begin to wrestle. After wrestling for awhile the angel realizes Jacob is a pretty good wrestler and so he touches Jacob’s hip socket which wrenches it out of place (Jacob will forever walk with a limp) but Jacob doesn’t let go and the angel is all like okay pal that’s enough it’s almost daytime let go but Jacob still won’t let go and is like actually give me a blessing punk and the angel is like ugh what’s your name and Jacob is like Jacob and the angel is like ugh fine your new name is Israel (which means “to struggle with/wrestle with/strive with God,” depending on the translation) and you will be the father of nations and Jacob is like sick bro thank you and by the way what’s your name and the angel is like don’t worry about it and disappears.

The first poem I ever wrote was about a girl I had a terrible crush on who, if she knew that I existed, kept it a closely guarded secret. I was fourteen years old. Thus began my wrestling match. For many years, unrequited love, my absurd deferred desire—and what I considered to be its various symptoms (or causes): my fat body, food addiction, laziness—was my angel. The style of wrestling I used to wrestle this angel was called “language.” Over the years the angel changed shape—or new angels arrived. My father’s death; my love of but limited access as a rootless cosmopolitan to Big Nature; the imagination; my Jewishness; gardening; God; all these have been angels I have attempted to wrestle, using language. Which has led me, in recent years, to the understanding that language has actually been the angel the whole freaking time! And the aforementioned dramas were actually the modes by which I had been wrestling that angel! And if we really want to climb all the way into the metaphor, I realized I had not been wrestling, I had been courting the angel—or if we’re being honest, pining over, forgoing none of the pathetic and obsessive intimations attendant to that phrase. At this stage in my life as a writer of poems, I am interested in unrequited love not necessarily as it shows up in my life literally—that’s just a catalyst—but as it reflects my relationship to language. Every poem I write is a love poem to language, a plea for intimacy with language. And the answer had been and continues to be a resounding “I’m very flattered but no thank you.” I love language; it does not love me back. Or it loves me, but it is not in love with me. Something like that. In any case, it withholds its blessing. Sometimes it will invite me in, make me tea, even let me hold its hand, but it will not take me to bed. I have been friend-zoned by language, Karan! I will be forever on the other side of that door. Which is a long-winded way of saying I will never “get it right.” And thank God, because if I ever got it right, I would not have to write another poem—possibly no one would. So in the same way that in Leonard Cohen’s songs, it can be hard to tell whether he is addressing a lover or God (both?), I don’t know whether I am addressing a literal unrequited love—of which there have been plenty—or language itself, which, by the way, is in love with God, who will not give it the time of day.

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KARAN

Oh, Jeremy, I love that description of being hopelessly in love with language so much, and thank you for relating that Jacob story so humorously. I’m fascinated by your approach to the divine in poems like “A Power Greater Than Oneself” with its cosmic yak, and the biblical echoes in “The Song of Songs of Songs of Songs.” How do you think about spirituality in your work? What role does the sacred play in your poetic imagination?

JEREMY

At this point I think the sacred plays the primary role in my poetic imagination. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself more and more drawn to spiritual texts. I read Robert Alter’s translation of the Old Testament during Covid (maybe I wasn’t depressed enough?) and a very wise psychiatrist once wrote me a prescription, along with 60 milligrams of Prozac to be taken once a day with food, for the Tao Te Ching. I think it is a ridiculous assertion that a poet should always know what their poem is “about.” I think it’s a ridiculous assertion that a poem must be “about” anything. Spiritual texts have survived this long because they are confounding, because they abound with flagrant contradictions and generally confuse the hell out of us. Thus the Talmud. The Old Testament is a mess. It’s a sloppily cobbled together anthology of spiritual (and political) tracts and stories and poetry spanning centuries. I’ve not yet made my way to the New Testament, but the construction is similar. It’s been posited that the Tao Te Ching was actually a joke book of fake aphorisms parodying the confounding way the sages of the time spoke (Lao Tzu is Chinese for “Old Master”) and that it has survived as a very legitimate spiritual text. (For more on the bewildering, often absurd evolution of spiritual texts over centuries, I highly recommend reading, or seeing, if one can find a production, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn.) The poetic imagination is uniquely suited to engaging with the sacred, because the poetic imagination has some inkling that it can know precisely nothing. The old Jewish mystics would fast for days and sit in a room for hours at a time rearranging the letters in the name of God until they hallucinated—wild, vivid images of the Shechinah, God’s dwelling place, or throne room, on earth, populated by all manner of angels. They would chart the size of the heavens, the layers of heavens, that separated us from God, using absolutely absurd co(s)mic measurements. None of this was to be taken literally—it was meant only to demonstrate the impossibility of any practical knowledge of God, how foolish and futile it was to use language as a means of approach. At this moment in my journey as a poet, this aim of illustrating the (often funny) failure of language as a tool of spiritual apprehension is increasingly attractive to me.

KARAN

I love thinking how myths come to be and also know in my heart of hearts that language is the cheapest way of speaking with God, and yet we try, so just be way of that enterprise, there’s love and honor in the attempt. Before we speak more about god, let’s speak about music because it’s certainly a step, or many steps, ahead of language, or any other art-from in its capabilities of communicating wiht God, or the deepest parts within us. There’s such a gorgeous musicality to your poems, especially in “Alexandra Leaving with Her Lord,” where you build these cascading catalogs of desire. You write “I want your mercury, your nose, / your vaulting astonishing hungry mind— / your anger.” Tell us about your relationship with sound and rhythm. How do you think about the music of your lines?

JEREMY

I found my way into poetry through music. My first favorite poet, who I spent almost ten years trying to sound like, was Bob Dylan. The musicality of his lines struck me with an almost religious power, his freedom in putting words next to each other that seemed to have no business being next to each other. Bruce Springsteen famously said this about the first time he ever heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”:

“I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.”

I too was in the car with my mother the first time I ever heard Dylan. She put on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and when I heard Dylan sing, “Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand…” I had what I imagine to be a very similar response. The doors of my imagination were flung wide. You can imagine what happened to my puny, horny, hormone-ravaged teenage body upon first encountering “Visions of Johanna” and hearing the line, “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” I became obsessed with putting words next to each other, as much for the sounds as the images they might make. I spent many late night/early morning hours in my teens fooling around with pages-long nonsense poems that read like someone put a dictionary in a Vitamix. I think this constitutes my early training when it comes to sound. Some years later I discovered Leonard Cohen and that was that. My first favorite poets were songwriters. And then I discovered that poets also wrote books! Which is when the real suffering began. Something that I think helps me here as well is that I’m a natural mimic. I’ve always done impressions and accents. This has certainly found its way into my writing practice. One of the best pieces of advice I got when I began really taking poetry seriously was from an early mentor, the wonderful poet Mindy Nettifee. She told me to find the poets whose work was so good it made me want to quit writing poetry, and then try to copy them. Inevitably I’d fail, and by failing at copying the voices of so many poets, I’d stumble, eventually, onto something like my own voice. This is a practice I still adhere to as I believe the “voice” is one of those mysterious metaphorical destinations that can never be arrived at, that is always changing and moving—for me, to attempt to define my voice would be like performing an autopsy on something still alive to discover the cause of its death. I think much of the “sound” in my poems is a result of whoever I might be reading at the time of composing the poem. Recently I revisited Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book, The Art of Syntax, and it has reminded me to think a lot more deliberately about the music in my poems—meter, rhyme, etc—and I’ve found myself lately experimenting with a higher degree of formalism. I think whether it’s deliberate or not, sound and rhythm find their way into all poems because they are natural byproducts of language. To be perfectly honest, I think, in my own work, it’s very often a happy accident, or at least a thought that I’m not always consciously aware of. I like when my poems do things in secret, without my knowing—this might be, more than anything, what compels me to keep writing them.

KARAN

I resonate with you very strongly, Jeremy. Mr. Tambourine Man is still my favorite Dylan song. And that thing about mimicking and voice and autopsy - aaargh, we should jump on zoom or start a podcast. Obviously, the Leonard Cohen references in your poems aren’t lost on me. I know how much Leonard Cohen means to you in your artistic and spiritual journey and I guess by now you know I feel the same way about his work. I wanted to congratulate you for being an honorable mention for the inaugural Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize and welcome you to speak about your relationship with him/his work at length — though these interviews are read by thousands of our wonderful readers, this question I ask out of my own desire to indulge/engage in any and all conversations about Leonard Cohen, our true master!

JEREMY

First of all, let me just thank you again for this tremendous honor. Leonard Cohen has influenced my own work and thinking more than anyone else—it’s not even close—and to have my work recognized as being in any way in conversation with his is extremely gratifying. I discovered Leonard’s work (we’re on a first name basis) when I was considering giving up poetry altogether because I was under the misapprehension that I could not balance being a poet with being an actor. I was at that time studying in an acting class, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, to which I devoted the bulk of my time. There was, of course, a girl in that class who I was hopelessly in love with, and who had a boyfriend. We were very close, she and I—we’d spend the days and evenings together, and then she would go to him to do what lovers do. This went on for a good long while. The theater the class took place in was attached to a bookstore. One day before class I was perusing the poetry section and I came across Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing. I bought it and that night at home, sitting on the toilet, I read his poem (which I now know is essentially a translation of C.P. Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony,” which Cohen cites) “Alexandra Leaving,” which includes the line “You who had the honor of her evening / and by that honor had your own restored / now say goodbye to Alexandra leaving / Alexandra leaving with her lord.” As if it were not enough that this line perfectly described my hopeless situation, the girl in question was named Alexandra. I felt that Leonard was speaking to me from the past—that time had collapsed, that he was reaching out to me and me alone from his place on Hydra years before my own birth. He knew. Years later I read his poem that ends with the lines “I learned to write / I learned to write / what might be read / on nights like this / by one like me.” I was that one! I was like him! And then the line, “O Friend of my scribbled life / your heart is like mine / your loneliness / will bring you home.” This became a sort of ethos for my work and is one of only two lines of poetry I have seriously considered getting tattooed.

The other is the last three sentences of his sublime poem “I Should Not Say You,” which seems to be an account of one person’s ultimately futile quest to know God. It’s a prose poem in three sections. In the first section he establishes the suffering. It’s a sort of prayer, an acknowledgment that he is far from God. “I should not say you. I should say O.” The use of O here, the emptiest letter—the opening of a tube!—or the lips pursed in silent wonder—and, maybe ironically, the sound of realization, of a sudden understanding—expresses this unknowability, his distance from “the Name” (HaShem). The second section seems to be a catalogue of the modes by which he has sought—and failed to apprehend—the Name. Rituals, objects, history—none have brought him closer to the knowledge he is after. The last section is a surrender to this inevitable truth, and ends with the lines, “Without the Name I bear false witness to the glory. Then I am this false witness. Then let me continue.” This, I think, is the journey of every poet, whether we like it or not. We are, at best, false witnesses, passing everything we see through the ten thousand filters of our own experiences, our own understanding of the world, of being alive, of love, of terror. We offer up these little photographs, clouded with self. And all we can do is do it again. And again. Until, like the poem, we stop. We don’t end. We stop. There is no ending.

Leonard’s last album, which he recorded in his early 80’s, mostly while sitting in a medical chair, attached to tubes (there they are again) and electrodes, stops with the line “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.” Would he have had more time, he would have sought more and failed more. He never would have arrived. He died in a state of numinous confusion. Elsewhere on the album: “A million candles burning for the love that never came.” The candles are the path one works to build, a path for that love to reach them. Whether or not the love chooses to go down the path is not important and not up to us. What’s up to us is lighting the candles and making sure they stay lit.

There’s a lot of talk about confusion in the poetry world, the importance of confusion. A lot of this talk feels to me like some sort of elaborate grift, again coming back to a strategy for accruing Instagram followers. It’s not real confusion, it’s the performance of confusion in service of an ego. “Look how confused I am! And more importantly, look how evolved my confusion, and my willingness to cop to it, makes me.” Follow this confusion far enough and you will find a concrete certainty—certainty that one is doing/has done “the work,” and more distressingly, knows exactly what “the work” is. It’s very attractive to publicly admit to confusion—it makes one appear humble and trustworthy. Leonard’s confusion does not feel like a performance. He really was that “baffled king composing hallelujah.” He suffered for it. He lost everything. He was grateful.

One day I was walking with a friend in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles when we passed an old man in a fedora, strolling on the sidewalk with a cane. We made eye contact and nodded at each other. I stopped my friend when we’d passed, grabbed her arm, and said, “Do you know who that was? That was Leonard Cohen.” She said, “Are you crazy? Go talk to him!” I couldn’t. What could I say? To have said anything to him, even hello, would have taken the rest of my life.

KARAN

I’m joyously envious of that anecdote, and love how deep your relationship with his work is. I recently spent an hour standing outside the house he inhabited in LA, weeping, hugging the trees he must’ve stared at sitting outside. Kissing the ground he must’ve once walked on. It was a surreal experience. Especially because I’m usually so shy and reserved and easily embarrassed. Anyway, here’s a staple question — I’m always surprised by the range in everyone’s responses: 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?

JEREMY

It seems to me that my work has moved through and between these frameworks, and if I were to adhere to one, even unconsciously, it would mean I’ve stopped listening well—or am only listening to a part of myself. Having been in recovery for an eating disorder, I am wary of the ways in which I separate body from mind from heart from soul—this division has historically caused me a lot of distress, and I think the poems I love are bridges between these categories, linking them, displaying the absurdity of the idea that there is a separation at all. I also think it’s fascinating that all these ways center the “self.” I want to add another category, which is what I think I’m trying to do now in my own poetry. It might be called “poetry of the doppelgänger” (I recently rewatched Twin Peaks) which I’d describe as poetry dictated to you by a you you meet who hovers between you and not-you, who knows things you do not know—both about the world and about you yourself—but who speaks in a language specific to you alone that you must translate into the ultimately inadequate language you’ve been socialized to speak.

KARAN

What are the odds — I just started watching Twin Peaks the other day and I love how weird it is! Much like in the show, I love, too, how your poems move between sincerity and absurdity, as in “American Idol” where the speaker performs a three-note song about “a specific insect eaten by a more beautiful insect.” Could you talk about the role of the surreal or absurd in your poetry? What does this mode allow you to express that more straightforward approaches might not?

JEREMY

There’s been, for a long time now, conversation about “the role of the poet.” What is the poet’s “job”? How can one write about that when this is happening in the world? Frankly I find these conversations—or more specifically the conclusions that often get drawn from them—not particularly useful. The role of the poet is to write poems. That’s it. It’s not to be a revolutionary. If you want to be a revolutionary, great. But the role of the poet is to be a poet. The role of the revolutionary is to be a revolutionary. Be both! But it’s dangerous to mistake one for the other, just as it’s dangerous to mistake art for therapy. Czeslaw Miłosz’s book The Captive Mind and certain of the essays of Joseph Brodsky that look at the enforcement of socialist realism on Soviet artists are tremendous examples of what can happen when revolutionists decide what is and is not acceptable in the writing of poetry. It’s the other side of the Trump Taking Over the Kennedy Center coin. Both are the products of dictators. Both are against poetry. The danger in these conversations is that past a certain inevitable point they dictate that a poet must come to their work with their political imagination fully formed—but poetry is one of the places where one builds and refines, through fantastic trial and error, that imagination.

We’ve once again reached a moment in history where having an imagination has become a radical act. The various systems that keep us in lockstep are threatened by the imagination simply because the imagination, if allowed too much unfettered growth, can envision alternative systems that will topple the existing ones. There is no guarantee that these systems will be better than the existing ones, but they will certainly move the centers of power, which is a terrifying possibility to the currently powerful, who will do whatever they can to stop it happening. Hopefully that movement, when it inevitably does happen, is toward kindness and equitability—but because power is still power, it’s hard to be hopeful. But maybe, if allowed enough room to grow, that imagination can move beyond power—or at least towards an expression of power that is not as brutal as its current expression. I think poetry is one place where this imagination is built.

When we write poems we are in some capacity building gym equipment for the imagination. I find that surrealism and absurdism make good gym equipment. When we talk about power in this moment in history we are talking about information. The centers of power have moved with greater and greater speed into the realm of the technocrats. The human world has moved increasingly online, which is a receptacle for information without all the inconvenience of the world that is the source of that information. It is information upon information. That information, for the most part, is stored in the form of language. This creates a situation where the ultimate goal of engaging with language is the accrual of information. If I read, we think, I ought to know more than I did when I started. Poems ask the opposite. They ask us to know less than we did when we started. They do this by creating connections in the mind, which announce themselves first as empty space. This emptiness makes us feel stupid, and we don’t like feeling stupid because it makes us feel poor. Confusion is only lucrative if it requires a solution—the solution can be sold, confusion by itself cannot. If we sit with this “stupidity” long enough, our imaginations will begin to grow. It’s the same as lifting weights. It hurts, it’s difficult, for most of us it is not necessarily fun, especially at first—it’s humbling!—but after we do it for a while things start to change, the body grows stronger, one develops a kind of craving for it. This is how poetry works on the imagination, and the imagination is the primarily political instrument—it has created every empire and every revolution in history. In this way all poetry is political, no matter what, because it engages and grows the imagination—it’s a sort of internet of the imagination that we have been building for centuries.

The surreal and the absurd are lies, the kind of lies that point to larger truths behind the lies we accept as reality. Also, it’s just fun! I think poetry can also be fun. Can be playful. Even as the world burns—maybe especially then. What I think is interesting is to imagine that there is (because of course there is) a poet in a terrible, brutal, untenable political situation who is in fact writing poems about flowers—flowers that don’t exist. Would we tell that poet they must not write that poem, must only write poems about the bombs and the people starving in the streets? I hope not. I hope we would allow them the dignity of their imagination as refuge. When we have the conversations I mention above, I think we are mostly talking to poets who live in situations of privilege—myself included. But this creates a performative and dishonest poetry written to appease… who? Certainly not the people suffering, who I have to imagine are not reading the poems, and certainly not the people causing the suffering, who I struggle to imagine reading the poems either. I love overtly political poetry (Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK is one of the best books I’ve ever read and there is certainly no lack of the surreal there) but only if those are the poems that that poet is organically drawn to writing, not forcing themselves to write. I equally like poems that feel like a refuge, like a tiny contained reality, a pocket universe to enter when this one gets too painful—but which simultaneously allows us to see our reality more clearly. Sometimes it takes a great distance to do that. Sometimes I can only see the world as it is from the vantage point of a world that is not.

KARAN

I can thank you endlessly for these answers, Jeremy. And cannot wait to read your forthcoming collection Belly God! Congratulations! Tell us about putting this book together. How did you think about organizing these poems? Has your approach to writing changed over the course of your three collections?

JEREMY

Thank you so much!!! Belly God is about thirteen years in the making. It tracks my (still in progress) recovery from a binge eating disorder. Right now it’s separated into five chapters. One focusing on the food, one on frustrated desire, one on the body/body image, one is a twenty-five sonnet crown about the sitcom Frasier, and the last is centered on spirituality/recovery. Over the years the book has taken many forms, there are hundreds of poems that were written for the book, the vast majority of which will never appear anywhere. To be honest, the process has thoroughly exhausted me. Ordering poems for a book is maddening, it sucks ass, I hate it, I never want to think about it again. My training as an actor can be a bit of a hurdle here because it has caused me to think in a very linear fashion and try as I might, all my collections seem to want to follow some sort of narrative arc, especially one that trends toward some sort of personal growth. I did my best to resist that in this collection but I don’t think I was fully successful, and have at this point surrendered to that structure, but have vowed that it will be the last! That said I am very proud of the book—in many ways it feels like my first. And I am forever grateful to Orison Books and judge Ellen Bass, one of my all-time favorite poets, for accepting it. I do have vivid fantasies of ordering my next collection (tentatively titled Without Accompaniment and in which most of the poems you’re publishing here will likely appear) by printing all the poems out, throwing them into the air, and arranging them in whatever order I pick them up. I’m confident that were I to do that, anyone who might review the book would mention the care and deliberation that was clearly put into the organizing of the poems.

As far as my approach to writing, I think the major change happened between my first book, Slow Dance with Sasquatch and my second, Dear Sal, which was actually begun after I’d begun work on the poems that would become the impetus for Belly-God. And that major change was that I started reading far more widely and far more often. For every poem I write, I have to imagine I read around a hundred. Certainly something I look forward to in future books is moving away from the idea of a book of poems being “about” something, but that could change tomorrow. So could every answer I’ve provided here. Please don’t take me too seriously. I am this false witness.

KARAN

I love that outlook of surrender, Jeremy, and could speak with you for many hours as we have here. This conversation has warmed my heart. We always ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help them kickstart a poem?

JEREMY

I am not a huge fan of prompts but I will do my best.

Translate into the language of your choice a poem that does not exist.

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. Outside of Leonard Cohen, of course, because everyone should certainly be experiencing everything he ever put out.

JEREMY

Network (1976, directed by Sidney Lumet; screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky).

Songs from the Wood; Heavy Horses; Stormwatch.

Mid-70’s triptych by flute-based prog rock band Jethro Tull that tracks the industrialization of England and is ridiculous and perfect.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.