Jane Zwart : part five

Why is poetry important?

What a giant question to put in a mini-interview! Here is a very partial answer.

One reason for poetry (and perhaps for art generally) is this: it adjusts our grasp. My tendency is to want to hold onto everything and everyone I love so tightly. There are also times, though, when I am all hurry and let things slip by too unnoticed, not loved enough. And poetry (reading it but perhaps, even more, writing it) loosens my deathgrip on the things I am afraid of losing. And it keeps me, at other times, from letting beauties and wonders fall through my hands.

Jane Zwart : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I take this question to be about how you know when a poem is “done,” not a question about how you know where a poem’s ending is. 

First, to repeat what many writers have said, knowing a poem is finished often costs time. You have to set it aside and become almost a stranger to it so that you can come back to it as its reader as much as--maybe more than--as its writer. Time buys you the chance to fall out of love with your own whimsy or cleverness, for instance, and if you’re smitten again, that’s a sign. And if you’re put off, that’s a sign, too. Of course, coming back to a poem once it feels less familiar also makes you aware of its troublesome gaps and/or heavy-handed excesses.

But I’ll add this. Once in a while, I can trick myself into that kind of remove--that readerly approach to even my newest writing--by pasting the poem into the body of an email addressed to a writer whose work I love. I don’t send it to them; I just borrow the jolt from seeing their name after “to.” And, magically, presuming on what I imagine to be their consciousness, their angle of vision, is enough. I can tell where the poem snags or misses, and I can fix it.

Jane Zwart : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Very, I hope. But perhaps what I am after when I fit words into verse is something just shy of music. When I write a poem, there’s a lot of muttering the lines aloud; it’s how I test repetition, how I scoop out little hollows of assonance, how I arrive at echoes, how I figure out the poem’s tectonics. 

Muttering aloud is also the only way I can refine line length. Which must mean that rhythm does matter to me even though I’m terrible at scansion. Maybe it’s not feeling at ease with poetry’s music theory that makes me doubt my poems’ claim to music. 

Anyway: I do hope to keep learning, little by little, more about rhythm. And rhyme, too.

Jane Zwart : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Danusha Lameris’s Bonfire Opera. Michael Kleber-Diggs’s Worldly Things. Christian Wiman’s Survival Is A Style. Catherine Pierce’s Danger Days. Nicole Terez Dutton’s If One of Us Should Fall. And two ARCs of two gorgeous books out this fall: Dear Specimen by W.J. Herbert and The Thicket by Kasey Jueds.

Jane Zwart : part one

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Poetry, as well as other journals and magazines.

How does a poem begin?

A poem begins with a seed or a crumb or a grain of sand--that is, a poem begins in particularity, at least for me. It begins with the image or the object; with a gesture or words lined up, already, into a little train. That particular thing doesn’t always stay at the beginning of the poem, of course, but it’s what begins the poem. 

For a long time, I could only write poems that started with a seed, poems whose particularity was ready to germinate, already, before I even arrived. I did also keep a folder of “poem crumbs.” Sometimes a crumb will change into a seed if you’re patient. 

But only in the past couple years have I learned to build poems whose cornerstones are grains of sand. The poet (and novelist) Amit Majmudar pushed me to try that: to take a granular something and improvise a poem from it and, far more often than I would have believed, the poem does happen. I’ll always be grateful to Amit for that.