Jamie Townsend : coda

How does a poem begin?

I’m not always sure and tbh the idea of poems beginning and ending has always challenged me. One thing I really love about John Wieners is that he continued to work on his poems ever after they were published, so you can look through his various selected/collected and sometimes find different versions of the same poem. This has definitely alleviated a certain anxiety of the “finished” piece and has led to a more honest and less fraught life in reading/writing.

That being said, I think that a lot of poems start themselves – an overheard phrase, an odd line that appears in your head, an itch that can’t be scratched. I feel like I’ve conceded to the fact that poems have their own lives and pace outside of my desires and that I can’t force one into being; I’ve never been a disciplined writer in the sense of scheduling time to write, I just need to be ready to write. But, in another sense, I’m always writing or at least trying to always stay attentive to what’s happening outside my own head. The mystery of writing a poem and the journey of working through one, the give and take, the oscillations of clarity and opacity, and listening and speaking, still thrills me even after doing it regularly for the last 20 years. 

Jamie Townsend : part five

Why is poetry important?

I think poetry has perhaps the most freedom of any art form because it is least beholden to the system of predatory capitalism that runs all our daily lives. Obviously there are tons of issues around cultural capitalism, gatekeeping and lack of representation in the poetry world, but with such low economic stakes poems are more open and less accountable to validate their abstract worth. In my experience, this had always led to a sustained and joyful relationship with poems and the people who write them. Also, externalizing anything internal, whether it’s narrative, conceptual device, lyric, or visual arrangement on the page, or any combination of, presupposes an audience, even if it never gets published. The intention is relational. Poetry is very intimate and wound up in our complex relationships with other people, as well as maybe most importantly our multiplicity of selves. 

Jamie Townsend : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I never walk away uninspired after reading anything that Bob Gluck has written. His novels are the clearest emotional models for my poetry – intimate, simultaneously spiritual and profane, and gorgeously arrayed with sensual detail.

Jamie Townsend : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

My current poetry reading habits are varied and sporadic (I’ve actually been reading a lot of queer theory and sci-fi/fantasy over the last few years). Current favorite poets who working today that I didn’t mention in my previous response are: Marie Buck, Vi Khi Nao, Chris Nealon, Lisa Robertson, Steve Orth, Lindsey Boldt, Gracie Leavitt, Brandon Shimoda, Aisha Sasha John, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza.

Jamie Townsend: part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I start first as a reader and in fact didn’t start a regular writing practice until I was a senior in High School. Reading poetry is still the number one fuel for writing my own, so I am seldom in a moment of sustained writing without also reading a variety of things at the same time.

Poets who really changed my conception of what poetry could do started with reading people like Charles Olson and George Oppen. Discovering these writers lead me to apply for the writing graduate program at Naropa University, where there were an abundance of classes were specifically focused on contemporary experimental writers (I love their commitment to teaching poets who were/are still actively writing, younger writers with a sometimes slim publishing history, and supporting underrepresented individuals and communities within poetry world). Naropa introduced me to New Narrative writing, which has subsequently become a central influence on my work. Also, while I was a student there I studied with Bhanu Kapil, Anselm Hollo, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins, among others, who introduced me to the New York School and the Berkeley Renaissance. Today I still read a lot of writers within those eras, particularly James Schuyler, Tim Dlugos, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, etc. 

Moving to Oakland 6 years ago helped me immensely in connecting with a group of younger writers, among whom are some of my favorite contemporary writers: Ivy Johnson, Sara Larsen, Wendy Trevino, Lauren Levin, Laura Woltag, Angel Dominguez, Ted Rees, Oki Sogumi. I tend to like writers who start from personal inquiry/narrative and use that to connect to larger systemic social issues or concerns; a lot of Bay Area writing fits this mold.

If I were to pick one poet who is my main source of inspiration as a writer it would have to be John Wieners. If I were to pick two I would add Kevin Killian. 

Jamie Townsend : part one

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet living in Oakland. They are the author of Shade (Elis Press, 2015) and Sex Machines (speCt!, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

What are you working on?

Late last year I had a perfectbound book “Sex Machines” and a chap “Sad Boi Merzbau” published, both of which were collections of discrete but thematically interconnected poems, mainly concerning gender essentialism, commodity culture, and queer resistance. Some of them are surprisingly funny. 

I am currently writing a book length poem titled “Glamor,” a section of which is being published as a chapbook later this year. Over the last several years I have also been doing a series of occasional interviews with other poets. Since 2013, I’ve designed and edited a quarterly creative commons literary and visual art magazine called Elderly with my friend, the brilliant poet and artist Nick DeBoer.