Jared Povanda : coda

I’m still so new to poetry, and I still have a lot to learn, but one thing I do know is that poetry is a beautiful art form that challenges and inspires and gets to the heart of humanity in such strange and true ways. I hope I can keep writing poems that resonate with readers, and I hope that poetry will always allow me to keep learning about the world.

Jared Povanda : part five

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

100%! By reading other poets, I find my own poetry rushing to catch up to the brilliance around me. I never considered myself a poet. I started with fiction, then nonfiction, and I didn’t begin seriously writing poetry until last year. Slowly, I’ve begun to convince myself that I’m not a complete hack, and that poetry isn’t some incomprehensible world of strange rules and line breaks. I can tell a story in poetry, too, and once I made that realization, I stopped letting my fear of failure get in the way of my writing. I oscillate heavily between confidence and self-doubt, though, so ask me this in another year, and I might say that poetry is as dense and thorny as it was before I started writing it. 

Jared Povanda : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is vital to my writing process. I have such a hard time writing in silence. I need music to act as a funnel. Art directing art. Sometimes that image I’m struggling with doesn’t cohere until I hear that perfect song. And when I find that perfect song, I’ll listen to it on repeat, sometimes hundreds of times, until I get the poem down.

Jared Povanda : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

This is a really interesting and varied question. No two poems are the same, and sometimes what I think is an ending is actually the launching off point to somewhere better. There will be times that I think a poem is finished. The final image or line seems to lock into place, and I get excited at the prospect of submitting it. When numerous rejections come in, though, and I return to the poem, often I’ll see that my ending is actually standing atop a false bottom. I get to a poem’s true ending when I no longer have the urge to tinker with it. The pieces balance as best as I can balance them, and there’s no way I can describe that feeling other than an innate rightness. 

Jared Povanda : part two

How does a poem begin?

For the most part, with an image or a question. Something I want to explore or probe. In a poem I currently have out on submission, I imagined a mapmaker with hands made of wind. I had no idea where he was or where he was going or why he had no hands or why he even wanted to draw maps in the first place, but that image spread through me like wildfire and I knew he was my entry point into a new poem. Of course, sometimes I just think of a ridiculous line, something that doesn’t make any sense, and I see where it takes me. 

Jared Povanda : part one

Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. He has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and Best Microfiction, and his work has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals including Wigleaf, The Citron Review, and Milk Candy Review. You can find him online @JaredPovanda, jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com, and in the Poets & Writers Directory

What are you working on?

Currently, single poems. I find myself getting drawn to a few images I can’t get out of my head: mainly, people alone in nature. People reckoning with nature. This reckoning can result in rebirth or in destruction of some sort, but regardless of where the speakers of my poems end up, I’ve been having a lot of fun writing poems that require people to confront their own smallness within a much bigger world. Sometimes the isolation nature provides is a curse, and sometimes it is a gift, and it’s great to explore both sides of that dichotomy.