Jacob Strautmann : part five

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

When I started I had specific and selfish expectations of what poetry would bring.  I made poems to try to be original, to attract a love, to grow famous, to make my mark. That’s the biggest change. Today, the poems are just for themselves. Like trees. I know I feel better when I’m building poems. So I keep doing it. Somewhere under it all I’m sure poems are witness and transformation, and always a two-way street.

Jacob Strautmann : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When I think it’s finished, I read the poem aloud. I append to the last line a word like, “Fucker”—as if the whole poem were addressed to some fucker over there.  If it feels true I’m done. If it feels forced, it needs additional revision.

Jacob Strautmann : part three

What are you working on?

I quickly grow obsessed with an idea for a writing project (‘25 poems that are also magic spells’ or ‘40 poems for 40 years of the Voyager mission.’) and write towards those ideas until they dead-end, but I accumulate a large batch of poems in the process. I divide those poems into mini-books of 5 or 6 each. I have 14 mini-books in my current project. I go over each mini-book until all 5 or 6 poems are of the same family. I’m halfway through this process right now, and the title is ‘Burr and Pearl.’ It will be a book about lost friends.

Jacob Strautmann : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

In middle school, I thought I would be a musician. When I gave that up, I thought the poems could be my songs. The analogy broke down as I’ve grown less sure of the separation between the genres. Now, I don’t write poems to be songs, but I write poems with songs underneath them. I have a trio of songs built to tunes by the electronic composer Dallas Campbell. Tom Petty plays in the background of a poem in my book. Currently, I’m trying to crowbar The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’ into a poem of Norse myth. I think my first hero was Beethoven, and when I write a poem that surprises me, I remember that.

Jacob Strautmann : part one

Jacob Strautmann’s debut book of poems The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business was released in March 2020 from Four Way Books. He is a recipient of the Massachusetts Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His poems have appeared in the Boston Globe, Agni Magazine, Salamander Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Blackbird, and other magazines. Strautmann is the Department Manager of Economics at Boston University, where he also teaches playwriting. He lives in Belmont, MA with his partner Valerie Duff and their two children. www.jacobstrautmann.com

Photo Credit: Kalman Zabarsky

How did you first engage with poetry?

Deceit. I was required to memorize a poem every six weeks (out of the same packet of about 50 poems) every year of high school.  I didn’t trust poems, and I was bored with it.  I remember asking my English teacher how we were the authority on what a poet intended. “How do we know Emily Dickinson isn’t talking about real giants?” was one of my insightful questions. Ultimately, I asked if I could memorize from a collection of Greek poems in translation I found in the library.  After a couple successful memorizations and sensing the teacher didn’t know if I were word-perfect or not, I started writing my own poems to memorize, but I craftily used the names of the Greek authors as my cover.  I think I made it to age thirty before I realized there was no way I had her fooled.