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.