Jesse Nathan’s debut collection of poetry, Eggtooth, in the months following its publication has garnered several excellent reviews, won the 2024 New Writers Award, and gone into a fourth printing. Especially as Jesse’s editor, it’s gratifying to have a ready-made answer to the question, “so, how’s the book doing?”
There’s something silly about that question, though, isn’t there? Do we ever really know how a book is doing? Isn’t the goal for the book to have what Eugenio Montale called “the second life of art?” A book goes out into the world and reaches people in ways we’ll never know, and that’s the point.
But that’s also why I wanted to interview Jesse. Not only are there very few people with whom I’d rather discuss poetry: there are also few writers I know who are as cannily articulate and, at the same time, as willing to stand at the edge of their own knowledge. Here is a poet thoroughly in touch with the mysteries his art discloses.
Peter Campion: Jesse, when you read Eggtooth now, how do you see it differently than you did, say, a year-and-a-half ago when you and I were sitting outside in my backyard in South Minneapolis and looking over line-edits? Has the book been reading you?
Jesse Nathan: A friend of mine says books have an alley cat existence. They go out from your door, and you don’t know in whose yard or stoop they sleep or eat, who has what name for them, who gives them a tin of milk or shoos them away, what friends they have, what adventures they meet. The poems have a secret life, once they’re in the world. And that’s the way it should be. Incalculable refractions. Circulating in people’s lives. I’m trying to make something that lasts and means in that way, which I think is the opposite of a flash in the pan—maybe the opposite of social media. Mostly you don’t know what the poems are up to, once they’re out there in the wide world. “Our paintings see daylight,” wrote Tranströmer, “our red beasts of the ice-age studios.” It’s refreshing, after so many years of making in relative solitude. And I have the feeling that publishing a book is really a kind of long goodbye. Maybe like a jazz funeral. An end as much as a beginning, and sometimes a mourning as much as a jubilation, at least for me, who must let them go like children. But, to change the metaphor yet again, publishing a book also feels like a way to clear my desk, and for that I’m grateful. I read the poems and I still love them, and that was what I’d hoped for all my life, to make something that I don’t, after a short while, wince at when I see again. I hope that feeling holds. And though I feel slowly and increasingly closed out from these poems—as a creator, that is, as someone who could change them—there’s something in the work that still feels quite mysterious to me, depths I haven’t yet plumbed. May it stay that way. I’m a just another reader of them now. I take this fact as a sign they might live, as Montale suggests, outside their context. For as time goes on, as my context changes, as I become a different person and able then to write new poems, I keep seeing things in the Eggtooth poems I didn’t somehow see before, even in the thousand or more times I read them in the making. I noticed for instance the other day that ‘Dame’s Rocket’ ends in a slightly interrupted rhyme on ‘hedgerow’ and ‘Cicero.’ I never realized that. I’m glad the poetry works that way, that it has outwitted—like the flower itself in that poem—the conscious, willful mind, that the work outruns by miles my intentions and plans. It must be one of the reasons I write. To escape what I know, what I’m sure of, what I think I want. To be free of myself, to be free to be read by my poems. When I read them now I hear an element of distilled simplicity to the longings in the book. A directness in all the artifice, a consistency in all the music, a clarity to what I’m saying. Moving to me, but also of course there can be a certain horror at seeing yourself so clearly—like looking in a mirror or seeing a very high-definition photograph of your face. It’s good to get a little objective about it, to step back and look at that picture like a scientist might. Otherwise you might never look away. People read the work and tell me no one sounds like this. Which is, I realize, typically meant as a compliment. It’s an amusing thing to hear because of course I feel like the sounds I’m making are quite normal, if not inevitable then absolutely natural to my soul and self. But I’m told the book is, in various ways, out of step with the times. I suppose—someone else will have to tell me if this is so—that might mean the book is actually utterly of these times. A match for it.
PC: Don’t poems, great poems anyhow, exist in several time zones? One of these zones may be four hundred some odd years ago, located in the home of John Donne. Another may be last Thursday when something urgent or unexpected initiated some surprising phrases for you. And another may be three thousand and fifty-five years from now when one of your very best readers picks up the book for her first time. In any case, and speaking of the future, do your new poems, the poems you’ve written after Eggtooth, feel different to you in any way?
JN: They feel different. I don’t know what I’m doing yet, so it’s hard even to make a comparison. I can say only that I hope they come. I’ve made some headway, but only recently got a glimmer of what I might be after next. A few times I’ve tried, mostly maybe out of a perverse curiosity, to write new poems in the eggtooth stanza. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t find my way into that style and space anymore. They’ve shut me out of their world. Which may be a way of talking about my own restlessness.
PC: How do poems tend to start for you? Is it the excitement of sound on the minute level of syllables rubbing up against each other? Or sound as a tone of voice, a register of speech, an attitude? Or something entirely different?
JN: I don’t know. It’s a little bit mysterious to me, and not very predictable. I want to say that a voice, one way or another, overtakes me, or invades me, or happens to me. Begins to happen, if I’m listening. But maybe that’s not the whole truth, either. My poems begin, I think, under the pressure of an image or phrase or word I can’t shake, or some combination of these. But the will alone is never enough. Turns out to be mainly an empty drivingness. A poem, on the other hand, emerges as a matter of the condition of the spirit. Not so much a product of diligence and resolve but need and nerve. The will is diligent, the spirit fickle. But the spirit, what I’m calling the spirit, for me sustains feeling. Willpower gets me to the desk sometimes but feeling—and the force of the voice—is what gets me past the inertia of the blank page. Some bit of language or image gets stuck in the craw, and the poem, you could say, is a record of my trying to reckon with it, swallow it or spit it out. Often I don’t know for awhile if I’m writing a poem or just hearing voices. And when it does become clear it’s a poem, I sometimes don’t know if it’s any good until it’s done, or nearly so. Which can make for a very inefficient work habit. Lots of dead ends. But also, sometimes, discoveries. Wishes. Invitations to keep listening.
PC: The dead ends and the discoveries, driven by the need and the nerve—it occurs to me that this whole journey has happened for you not only with individual poems but with the whole book. How did Eggtooth begin as a collection? How did it develop? What were the major turning-points along the way?
JN: One major turning point was first running across the seven-line stanza that Donne had used in a handful of poems like “The Good Morrow.” I was a young poet, an apprentice to the traditions. And in a fit of intensity I wrote a poem in that stanza, and then largely forgot about the effort. It was a turning point but I didn’t realize it was a turning point for almost a decade. And then I remembered that attempt, and I tried writing in the Donne stanza again. And that second time seemed to trigger the core of this book, and out of me came one after another, poem after poem that used this stanzaic shape. But before that I had written many other versions of a first book. It becomes hard now to tell whether it was all one book, remade and remade, or a dozen different books. It’s like a multiverse of variations. As different as whole lives are different, and as similar. I was trying to find out which poet I am. But I think what’s fascinating, and something I only realized later, is that there were certain gestures—formal movements, psychological patterns—that recurred in one way or another across these many efforts, right down into what became Eggtooth. Images, too. And by formal gestures, I guess I mean things like an attempt, in language and spirit, to bury something, or marry something, or open it, close it, or burn it. This was unconscious, this groping, this reattempting in different words. But whatever essence I was writing toward and out of seems like it was unchanging. The need was unchanging, constant, and so was the thing it wanted to say—it was like I was trying out the different keys, for years, turning them in the lock, trying another, waiting at the door like in the Kafka story. Waiting to pass through. And so the book took almost two decades to come together. On the other hand, there was a tremendous run of about eighteen months when I had a generous fellowship, which is to say time and space, and most of what now appears in the book appeared to me in that period, which was one of the most wonderful stretches of time in my life.
PC: I’m taken by your description of the entwined “formal gestures” and “psychological patterns” that poems enact. Those phrases get at the way ritual underlies lyric, the way that poems perform necessary actions. And I’m left curious: at the center of Eggtooth is your marvelous long poem “Between States.” How do you understand the gesture or pattern of that one?
JN: I’m a little bit hesitant to weigh in on this. I don’t want to overdetermine the poem. But it’s also an intensely fascinating question to me, and tempting to try to answer. One pattern I’ve been conscious of in that poem is the weaving of roads and creeks, of the idea of roads running into and through the idea of creeks. I have an image in my mind of a gridded road system, all those straight throughways that cut across the prairie. A latticework, laid by relative latecomers to that land. You can drive for hundreds of miles without a turn. A powerful and efficient system, and it has its functional beauty. And, it’s a latticework that was laid over another much older system of movement, the meandering ways of water. All those veins of rivers, creeks, cricks, and waterways. So the poem, like the land, seems to me a collision between these two possibilities—the idea of these two patterns—a quarrel or debate between them. Between two forms, really. On the one hand there’s an attempt at representing the determination of the roads, and on the other the winding insight of water. By the way, I like the word ‘ritual’ here very much. “Between States” might be a ritual act of constitution. An attempt at countering the emptiness of the page, which is to say the soul, but even more the emptiness of those very metaphors, page and soul. Maybe it’s no more than an attempt at a clarifying benediction upon what is to me a bounteousness.
PC: The voice in this book seems totally original. And yet you appear to remain receptive to other poets’ work—if not merely as influence, then as inspiration. I wonder: who were poets you found yourself returning to while writing this book? Or writers and artists working in completely different forms?
JN: I do think I can learn from almost anything I read, and not just the poems and books I read, but the worlds I try to read. There’s a poem in Eggtooth where someone “reads the air.” When it comes to poetry, sometimes what’s very valuable is learning what I can’t stand or what I’m bored by. A strange thing to me about influence is the way something I’ve read decades ago suddenly seems to erupt into my present work, shaping it, and sometimes it’s a process I’m only dimly conscious of. Eggtooth in many ways reflects everything I’ve ever read, everything that’s ever influenced me. By the time I was in that eighteen-month period of fluency, when the poems were really coming, I can’t remember if I was reading anything especially, though I’m sure I was doing lots of browsing, grazing, dipping in and out of everything from a textbook on the workings of lightning to the poetry of A.R. Ammons. I was reading the circulars put out by the Kansas Geological Society. Looking at a lot of pictures of bridges. Also paintings by Joan Brown. Mennonite quilt patterns. Chopin. Nina Simone. But mostly in that stretch it was as if I was too deep in my own sound to hear anything else. I think the way the air smells in Kansas influenced me as much as, say, the work of Sappho or Theodore Roethke or Miyazaki. And as you say, there are other ways of being shaped—inspiration, inspiriting—and I find I’m interested in the lives of artists, even people making utterly different kinds of work, because I’m looking for reference points. Not something to imitate, necessarily, but something that might give wind to my sails. I’m looking for signs of how it’s been done, as a way of remembering, again and again, that it can be done, that something beautiful can be made from chaos and pain and ordinary life.
PC: That’s such a compelling concept, reference points, and it reminds me that, though I’m interviewing you at the moment, you are one of the great interviewers. I’m thinking of your marvelous “Short Conversations with Poets” in McSweeney’s. How do those interviews happen? That is, how do you go about them? Do you ever find those conversations affecting your own writing?
JN: Interviews have been a major part of my education. I didn’t set out for that happen, but over the years I’ve found myself drawn to talking with some of the most interesting minds at work, in all walks of life, but especially in poetry. I have a drawer full of cassette tapes from interviews I did years ago, many of which never got published. One is with a scientist whose job was to invent psychedelics. Another is with a former prison volunteer who fell in love with an inmate and helped him escape so they could run off together. I interviewed the wife of a rapper who’d been recently murdered. I didn’t get around to doing an MFA in poetry. At times I thought I wanted to, but I didn’t end up applying. So the interviews I’ve done with poets in the last three years have, in some ways, felt like a series of master classes for me. A true and incredible gift to get to talk for a while with, say, Yusef Komunyakaa or John Burnside or Alice Oswald. I typically begin by reading everything I can by the writer, and then we have a long off-the-record phone conversation. Occasionally those calls run quite long, and occasionally they lead to more phone calls. And after that I send the poet a single question via email for them to respond to, usually somewhat expansively. And often the single question is several questions all knotted up together. And I invite them to pick it apart.
PC: One motif I notice in Eggtooth is homecoming. This homecoming often feels affecting for being partial or temporary—I have in mind the moment that concludes the book, the ending of “This Long Distance,” and also the last lines of “Footwashers.” Is writing for you an act of returning? Setting out into the unknown? Both?
JN: I’ve had the thought that my only real homeland is language. Any language, but the one I know best is English. I love the sounds of French, Spanish, Hebrew, Q’eqchi’, Japanese, Bulgarian, and others. It’s in the sound of words that I see myself most clearly. In language I feel clarified—I almost feel like I become the language. Almost. For a moment, arrival. Northern California is the physical place where I feel least weird.. That’s my present home, and the place I’ve now spent more of my life. I might never leave. It’s tricky, trying to afford it. On the other hand the default place of my imagination, the place it goes first, without thought, is rural Kansas. The Turkey Creek watershed in a prairie flatlands edging the Flint Hills. And even more specifically, my imagination goes to the farms, both the one I grew up on, and the one a mile away where my aunt and her family live, a farm with wonderful woodlands, and which my mother and my aunt grew up on, and which the family has called home since the nineteenth century. So I live in several places, some more imaginary than present, some present and imaginary. Those are the places I travel from, on my feet and in my lines. And the feeling of being split comes I think from the sense that there are deep wells in all of these places, but that physically you can only be in one at a time. Only one brief life. And I like rootedness. I like to get to know one corner of earth for many years. So choosing one home can mean losing another. Which brings me—apologies—finally to your question. Is writing for me an act of return? I love that idea. I want to say yes. Often yes. But a return to what? I’m not sure. Maybe a setting out into the unknown in order to return, by way of language, to a place in music, and thus in imagination and life, where I can imagine or even experience rest or clarity. I think of home as a place to let down your hair. Though home is not all peace. It must be said that home is always struggling with the brutality of some of the feelings it engenders. The feeling to find it, the feeling to leave it, the feeling to fight for it.
PC: I’m interested in questions of the personal versus the impersonal. How much daylight is there between your actual life and the life represented in Eggtooth?
JN: More daylight in some poems than in others. Some there’s virtually none. Others might be half described as fiction. As a genre, I’m not generally drawn to memoir. I find it tends to the tedious. With great exceptions of course. But I feel that even though my work is intensely personal, I’m after an impersonal element in poetry, some conversion of the trivialities of one person’s existence into scraps of a universal song, an ancient song that has us all in its web. A song we’re all singing a verse of, as Whitman had it. I’m certainly not a reporter. I tried that and wasn’t very good at it. Too distracted, I think, by other questions. I can’t say I could call what I write nonfiction, though fiction isn’t entirely accurate either. My experience is my material, but there’s not necessarily a literal relation to how it’s represented. A lot of things in my poems did actually happen to me. But some happened to someone else, maybe someone close to me, and some things are more imaginary than that, things that could have happened, or would have. An interviewer asked Leonard Cohen if one of his lines was true and he said, “True enough.” Lyric truth is a kind of willing suspension of the actual. But the work, I think, should leave you feeling as if it happened. That’s what it means to believe a poem. I want to make a world on the page, with every poem. In art I think the moral compass––and the question of whether it’s there or not—is what can distinguish something from propaganda or mere irksome deception. The point of the invention in a poem is for the power of the aesthetic effect, not the power to mislead or delude you—not to obfuscate truth but to draw up an image of it. I like Octavio Paz’s idea of “the other voice.” That a poem is spoken in the other voice that is our voice, the voice that makes us human, but isn’t exactly our own. I tried in Eggtooth to hear and represent an actual voice, actually many actual voices. Are they mine? Yes and no.
PC: Do you think about poems as needing an action—i.e. does a poem represent some sort of action or journey, as Frank Bidart put it? I’m curious also how you think about narrative. What’s your relationship to narrative, in your writing or reading of poems?
JN: Frank’s emphasis on this is salutary for me. I do think something has to travel across the poem. Some change or changes, some representation of an action, of forces acting on one another, or a representation of the irreversibility of time. Something done to someone, some violence or counter-violence, some restoration or ritual of transformation. And the action need not be heroic. It can be hesitation, like in Hamlet. But I’m tired of poems that to me amount to mere records of someone’s random thought or opinion, or worse, their brain-chatter or mind-stew at a given moment. I can get that on any number of social media feeds. That’s not to say the meditative genre isn’t very important to me. An image of the mind-stew can be the image of a journey, if it’s worked into a piece of art. I think the best meditative poems always involve some act, some setting and activity—Coleridge writing and thinking while his newborn sleeps and the snow falls. Wordsworth thinking and hiking across the Alps, mulling his way through revolutionary Paris. Brenda Hillman thinking about—and traveling across—her own anger in a poem. These are meditative works that also are inextricably involved in some sort of narrative action, or are rubbing up against it, not only evoking it but embodying it. Some piece of a story, a fragment or—Pound’s idea—some dramatic turn in a narrative, broken off and caught and framed at its lyric peak. Frozen music. Narrative poetry per se can be quite tedious. I don’t often agree with the novel. But I don’t have much patience for parataxis for the sake of parataxis. Even the best Ashbery poems, like “North Farm” or so much of Some Trees, are poems built around or out of—assuming—some kind of concrete action, built on some bit of narrative. I love the work of Megan Fernandes in this regard, the rolling parataxis that is also always a travelscape, mirrored by the poem as journey. I associate pure parataxis—which can be a delightful, drunken kind of game—with what Wordsworth and Coleridge called “fancy.” A kind of skimming, charming associative dance. It can be a lot of fun. But the poems I’d take with me to a desert island are the ones that catch a coherent image of the changing world as it’s changing, as it’s staying the same, as it’s being acted upon and as it’s acting. Like Miłosz’s “Bypassing Rue Descartes” or Emily Dickinson’s “Zero at the Bone” poem. Miłosz proposes “One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.” Those lines themselves are a little structure, a bridge, the weight traveling across, over and over, every time I hear the lines. The lines carry something, not just Miłosz’s opinion, but the image of an action that represents that opinion. And lives it.
PC: Do you write a lot?
JN: I don’t think of myself as writing a lot. I go through painful stretches where I don’t seem to produce even a single good line. But then when I look back over the months, over a year, say, it seems I’ve written quite a bit more than I realized. Suddenly some time passes and there’s a pile of drafts. I think to protect myself from myself I have to pursue the writing like—how can I say it?—like something I’m watching out of the corner of my eye. Or in a kind of distracted daze. I need that “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” that Elizabeth Bishop describes. Of course she’s talking about while you’re writing, and it’s very important to me then too, but I’m speaking about how I forget, sometimes, that I’ve made a draft of a new poem, almost right away. I sometimes have to rediscover it. It can be a disorienting way to work, as if I’m dependent on a passionate inner compulsion—an urgency—punctuated by bouts of amnesia and, also, a waiting around for the next lightning strike. Still, there’s nothing like being in a poem, caught up in it, over weeks or months or however long it runs its course in you. More often, I’m sad to say, I feel like I’m outside the magical place, waiting. But I’m always scribbling bits of language. I’m always thinking about poems, hearing lines, hearing echoes of voices. Is that writing? Maybe all of it is writing, and the putting down and shaping of words into a poem on the page is only a more visible and therefore more reassuring stage of it.
Beyond a certain point, I’ve never been good at enforcing a definite routine on myself. I like some structure, but I also have to be free to throw out my routine. Otherwise I feel I go into autopilot, and start trying to produce for the sake of producing, which always leaves me feeling a little disgusted. I need to feel some pretty profound urgency, some pressure drawing me into the poem, some raison d’etre beyond routine. Even if it’s just the feeling that I haven’t written poetry in too long. Life for me is not a pretense for art. I cringe when I hear someone say, after having this or that experience, “Well, at least I got a poem out of it.” Art must spring from the same place that gives me inspiration to cook up an interesting meal or read a book or try to solve some small but necessary problem around the house. Not the other way around. The other way around seems too mercenary. I don’t want to live a mercenary’s life for a variety of reasons, and one of them is that I think it dulls the spirit.
But I try all kinds of inducements. Sometimes I have to trick myself into a poem by not trying to write it. I’m restless. I’ll write on paper or the computer. On a typewriter or my flip phone or the back of an envelope. I wrote “Aubade within Aubade” as prose first, and then slowly massaged it into the rhyming stanza. That was the only one I made that way, and the way it was made gives it, I think, a certain wild energy, born of the meeting of narrative sentence and lyric structure. For whatever reason, I was driven by something that found it could only speak, in that case, out of that particular jerry-rigged process. Every time I write it feels almost like I’ve never written a poem before. Which is thrilling and scary. And if it does happen to feel like I’m writing a poem I’ve written before, the air usually leaves the balloon.
PC: How would you characterize your relationship to words?
JN: I don’t remember falling in love with words. Which is to say I don’t remember not being electrified by them, aroused and awakened by their possibilities. Made by them. Words have always had the effect of spells on me, opening my imagination. A lot of my parents’ work as union and constitutional lawyers involves writing briefs and studying language. They are writers working in a different genre, but they savor words, especially words that are both beautiful and potent, or beautiful because potent. And they know what it means to make a text. But I’ve also always known—and been fascinated by—the way words are such paltry tools, really, for getting at experience. It’s impossible to describe the color of the sky, let alone the exact and strange fluctuations of a profound emotion passing through me, an emotion to which we might assign a word like melancholia or happiness. Paltry. But more effective at getting something down, in my case, than oil paint or the sounds of a cello. I wish I could speak in those media. For me, words have eyes. There’s a reason Orwell’s fascists in 1984 are removing words from the dictionary. Fewer words means less consciousness. More unnamable morass. In my life words have led me where I need to go. Putting vast amounts of time into waiting for—searching out—the right word has, for me, paid off spiritually if not practically. As has getting the rhythm of a sentence right, obsessing until I do. Not only because there’s a big difference between a lightning bug and lightning. But also because words have helped me see who I am, or who I could be. Not only my poems but, just as often, the poems of others. Like rubbing away with a quarter’s edge the rubbery surface that covers your pin number on a calling card. I want to know my number. I want to know all my numbers. And of course self-knowing is not the same as making a poem. But words are involved in both activities.
PC: You were born in the city, but in some ways you grew up on a farm. What has that meant to you?
JN: What’s the saying? You can take the kid out of the country but not the country out of the kid. As an artist, the fact that I got to grow up on a farm feels like a great gift. It may have connected me, at a very open moment in life, more directly to many of the sources of things—not only all that production of vegetables and chickens, but also things like water and wind and sky. Our water came from a well a few feet from the kitchen sink. When it went dry one winter, we had to dig another. We raised chickens, collected their eggs, and sometimes slaughtered them. We canned our own peaches, preserved our own green beans. Burned our own wood. We were aware of things like the water table because it mattered to our well. We measured rain in hundredths of the inch. On my grandparents’ farm there was still a soaphouse where you could boil up soap in a big vat. We had our own sewage system, like many Kansas farms. So our waste—what we rejected, you could say—was there, on the farm, decaying and dissipating in a controlled (and quite innocuous, non-smelly) way, in our midst, not swept off somewhere to a treatment plant. There’s an elemental quality to life on the farm. We had the tank to swim in and the fields to wander with our dogs, who were free to roam—which they loved, and which also gets them killed sometimes when they find the open roads. Life and death—when you grow up on a farm, you’re steeped in that, maybe more closely than in most parts of a city. Not, I think, in the poorer parts of a city. The city has its own intensity and violence, its own natural beauty. And I find life itself quite elemental, wherever I am. But even though I lived the first ten years of my existence in Berkeley—which is not insubstantial, that takes you through the fourth grade—I do feel like something in me grew up there on the prairie. It’s both where my childhood ended and, in a sense, where it really began. And it’s important to say that on my mother’s side, my people had lived on that land—some of the same land I was roaming with the dogs—for more than a century. So when we moved back it was like I’d stepped into a much bigger tapestry, from a family point of view, than I had in the big city. I have now, at this point in my life, spent more of it in an urban environment than not. But those fifteen years in rural Kansas, from the time I was ten until I was twenty-five, are infinite in their effect on me. And I had in a sense been there in Kansas for several generations, in that one corner of the world, and my grandparents, and their parents, have an enduring relationship to that land. I was born into that relationship, and though home is urban California, the paradox of my life is that my imagination still lives among dirt roads in Kansas wheat country. The revelation of someone like Seamus Heaney for me was the revelation that there could be a poetry both nonmetropolitan and contemporary.
