Jonathan Andrew Pérez : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

The best poets are distinct in their pain, either through joy or the architecture of building time.  In that sense historical revisionary works appeal to me.  Likewise, I respect Wallace Stevens for his projections into the subconscious.  John Ashbery for his weirdness. Gwendolyn Brooks for her ritual revision of belonging and epic status.  I am drawn to messing with form, too.  The most pertinent example for me are the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, who are architects of transcendental distinctions. I also enjoy the many personas of Pessoa, and the ballade quality and folk vision of Gabriel Garcia Lorca.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Not remembering the beginning.  How I got to the point in which the poetic architecture stops.  The capacity is something that comes out of workshopping, a surrealistic ritual that blows up one’s safety and assumptions, and mines the margins.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Status is an artificial construct of society legislating difference, legislating meaning and discovering binaries. But poetry simultaneously creates worlds through process, like synchronicity, or dreaming, and in that world, the details emerge, and the poem feels real but is in reality actually strange. 

Jonathan Andrew Pérez : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

The process is much like what I think whittling wood is like.  I engineer a framework, I delve into the dream, and I break it down as much as sound allows.  The end is the point that an internal logic crystallizes, and the subject (the writer) suddenly learns from the object (the writing).   Once that happens, there is space to think.

Jonathan Andrew Pérez : part one

Jonathan Andrew Pérez has published poetry in Prelude, The River Heron Review, Blood Tree Literature, The Write Launch, Meniscus Literary Journal, Rigorous, The Florida Review, Panoply Magazine, Junto Magazine, Blood Tree Literature, Cold Mountain Review, Piltdown Review, Yes, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Poached Hair, The Esthetic Apostle, The Tulane Review, Rigorous, The Tiny Journal, Muse/ A Journal, The Bookends Review, The Westchester Review, Metafore, Crack the Spine Quarterly, Projector Magazine, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Rise Up Review, BARNHOUSE, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Worcester Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Cathexis Northwest Press, Inklette, Rumblefish Quarterly, Hiram Poetry Review, Quiddity, POETRY, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and won Split Lip Magazine's Poetry Prize 2019, selected by Chen Chen.

Jonathan is criminal prosecutor. This March 2020 he released his first Chapbook: The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps from FLP Press.  This selection is from his work-in-progress, first full-length manuscript, A Historiography of Justice.

What are you working on?

I am working on a historical revision that starts off on the prison labor of Hart Island, and the nameless masses that have been buried there to COVID-19.  I find myself returning to the same history of justice and race and systemic inequity. Part of the ease of poetry is the ability to thaw out ancient concepts through subconscious references.  At this critical time, when communities are suffering as a result of an apex of long histories of systemic inequity, poetry can speak literally for the dead and those born in the prison of their identities and social position. 

The time we live in right now, poetry is critical to become the processing agent not just for things like grief but memory.  The act of remembering the long history of financial inequity, and slavery, as well as more complicated mechanisms such as housing policy resulting in the density-rich virus-rich public emergency we are in today.
This summer, I am teaching a class at Wesleyan University called Poetic Justice that marries specific criminal justice ideas and legal history with a poetics of civil rights.  With that said, language is not always linear – it collides with beauty, it is inevitably classical as well as architecture and mapping the cities that give us family, community, and ultimately, belief.