10 Questions with Jane Zwart
- By Franchesca Viaud
Jane Zwart
After I persuade
my students there is
a name for everything,
for days I mull on what
to call the kind of kind
dissembling I've done.
—from "Dustsceawung," Vol. 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Once I read an interview where Shane McCrae talked about reading some of his earliest published poems. Years had passed, and McCrae’s style and voice had changed, and he noted that, of course. But what I loved was how he regarded those early pieces without embarrassment. It felt like, in fact, he looked on them as sweet, bemusing reminders of the way he used to write. I would like to have that relationship with my oldest poems.
Instead, I am a little embarrassed by some of the first pieces I published. What I notice, mostly, is how I used to bunch curious images together in a poem, but the poem didn’t hint broadly enough at why those images belonged together. There wasn’t the structure of a net underneath the lines to hold them–or, maybe, it’s that there wasn’t adequate string to dangle them from the poem’s thought or plot or question. For example, early on, I published a poem called “The Shape of the Wind in Silk.” Its three or four stanzas are full of images, and, mostly, I still love those images. But looking back, I’m convinced that I didn’t really understand how or why they hung together, that the aphorism in the first line of the poem (“Sometimes defeat and plenitude also look alike”) is a miscue.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
So many, I hope. The first poets I read a lot of were Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings, which might say more about my parents’ library than anything else. The first poem I copied out by hand in order to get to know it better was “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). And the first “selected poems” whose spine I broke with rereading was Wisława Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Clare Cavanagh.
Of contemporary poets, there are several whose poems I covet, which is one kind of influence: Jane Hirschfield, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Danusha Laméris, Catherine Pierce. There are others whose poems I want to spar with–Amit Majmudar, Alina Stefanescu, Christian Wiman, Natalie Diaz–which is another sort of influence.
And maybe I’ve read more fiction than poetry, on balance, which makes me cross my fingers that Vladimir Nabokov and Marilynne Robinson and David Mitchell’s voices echo somewhere in what I write, too.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I wanted to be a reader, and I suppose that one way or another any work I pursued would have accommodated that. At various times, I wanted to act or to teach or to write. I thought about being a lawyer, and I thought about being a pastor.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Someone I follow on Twitter (I think it was Maya C. Popa) posted the definition of the Middle English word dustsceawung, and, I’ll tell you, that is the kind of amazing lexical gem that makes me think, for a second, that there’s a word for every single thing. I know that’s not really true. And so does the poem. But it is true that there are names for a staggering number of things: for tailors’ scraps (carbage!), for the thin ring of light that an eclipse leaks (halation!), for the seed pods that helicopter down from maples (samaras!). I spend a lot of time, in fact, looking for the names of such things when I’m writing, which is why the internet is continually trying to sell me a bizarre array of drawer pulls and vintage bustles. I want my students to get into that habit, too. I want them to understand that so much of language springs just from someone paying exquisite attention to something and wanting to do that something–the provenance of dust or “the shyness of the crown”--the reverence of naming it.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
A lot of the geography of my poems is the geography of my childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which has been layered over with my adulthood in the same city: the house I grew up in and the neighborhood my sons are growing up in, the midwest as seen through car windows.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
When I write prose, music helps. Most of all music without words or with words in a language I don’t know. Depending on what I’m writing, music that canters and builds might help (I listened to a lot of the band Do Make Say Think and when I was writing my dissertation). Music that swells but has no paragraphs is the right fit more often, these days: Sigur Ros, Rachmaninov, Dvořák.
When I am writing a poem, I cannot listen to music. It interferes with the poem’s song.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
No, not rituals or traditions, quite, but I do make it a habit never to keep a poem (or even a sliver of a poem) waiting too long; they have short half-lives. So I keep a portfolio of “poem crumbs,” images and phrases that feel like hints; I carry a small notebook in my bag because if I have a poem brewing and I drive without the radio on, I can often summon bits and pieces; and I stow a piece of paper and a pen in a drawer by my bedside in case a string of words comes to me in that quiet before or after or within a night of sleep.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Amit Majmudar has been the first reader of more of my poems than anyone else. This is largely because he and I occasionally “mirror-write” poems, to borrow his phrase. We take turns conjuring up titles and then each of us writes a poem to suit the title within 24 hours, sending it to the other person; we only read the other person’s poem on completing our own. This started as a dare, sort of. I retweeted a painting of a very tired looking angel with a remark about preferring my angels sleep-deprived, and Amit fired back “Writing prompt: a poem called ‘The Sleep-Deprived Seraph.’” I laughed. An hour later, his poem of that title was in my email inbox. It was beautiful, and he ended the message with the words “Your turn,” which unnerved me in the most salutary way. Of course it felt foolhardy to try to keep up with Amit, who is ridiculously brilliant. But we wrote poems back and forth for a month after that. And we’ve done smaller stints of mirror-writing several times since. If I dwell on it in the wrong mood, it still feels foolhardy. If I dwell on it in the right mood, it feels miraculous. In the midst of it, though, mirror-writing with Amit feels like play, like a long, wonderfully risky volley in a game of tennis.
What are you working on currently?
I am writing poems, one at a time, as they turn up or as I shake them loose. I have a couple of manuscripts going the rounds at various contests and open-reading periods, and that they’ve had some near-misses makes me hope that maybe one will land in the right spot at the proper moment. Soon I will have the poems for a third.
I’m also, with Timothy Liu, the co-editor of book reviews for Plume, which gives me an excuse to do reading I already want to do and to write about other people’s poems, which I love.
What are you reading right now?
I am reading a lot of Nigerian novels, in anticipation of a class I’ll teach in the fall. Today, I’m in the middle of Chigozie Obioma’s amazing debut The Fishermen. I am also reading my dear friend Jennifer Holberg’s generous, insightful Nourishing Narratives. And I’m reading Jared Beloff’s Who Will Cradle Your Head? with more gratitude than I can say. Finally, every Sunday I read Devin Gael Kelly’s Ordinary Plots because I feel like having Devin as a reader and interpreter is one the best things that could happen to a poem and because his substack has set my heart to rights again and again.
JANE ZWART teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have appeared there as well as in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
