10 QUESTIONS for Jim Whiteside

- By Amal Zaman

"these hands, their roughness
            if you tell me what to swallow, I'll do it

                        sheathed in ice, brittle as glass
another kind of groping in the dark

            a blue note fills the room
                        climb on top, again and again..."

—from "Goldberg Variations" which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written

In 4th grade I wrote a poem about sitting in a treehouse in the woods with my hair the color of corn. Looking back, the images weren’t as fully-realized as they could have been.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?

The summer before I started graduate school, my friend Jacques Rancourt loaned me his copy of Richard Siken’s Crush. That book—and my nearly continuous reading of it over the next few years—changed and influenced the way I wrote. On one level, the immediacy of Siken’s work was unlike anything I’d seen before, the way the emotions in his poems sit so close to the surface. More than anything, though, reading Crush was a validating and encouraging experience for me. The poems in Crush let me know that it was okay for me to feel the way I feel and write the poems I needed to write. It gave me the permission I would not give myself to write my truth.

I’ve also been very fortunate to have some excellent teachers. In my undergrad, Mark Jarman, Beth Bachmann, and Rick Hilles helped me see that poetry is a worthwhile pursuit and a way I could make sense of the world. When I went to graduate school, my thesis advisor David Roderick taught me to approach my writing process with sincerity and to revise with intent and precision. My mentor Stuart Dischell encouraged me to be on the side of my poems, to believe in them.

What other professions have you worked in?

I currently work in residence life at a boarding performing arts high school—I’m kind of like a professional RA. It’s like I work at the high school in Fame except it’s real and on a college campus in North Carolina.

I also worked in specialty coffee for a couple of years after grad school. There was something really nice about being in a café environment that really suited me—the sense of community, a focus on craft, being around interesting and creative people.

What did you want to be when you were young?

Race car driver, chef, hardcore band front man (which would still be pretty cool).

What inspired you to write this piece?

I see my manuscript-in-process as a meditation on the nature of power—how power is granted or taken, what methods are used for claiming power, and, most centrally, the power that is held by the object of romantic desire, the powerlessness one feels in the presence of the beloved, the allure and danger of that release. I realized at a certain point that the beloved is spoken about and spoken to throughout the manuscript, but rarely is given the chance to speak. “Goldberg Variations” is an attempt at developing two voices simultaneously, the italicized and standard-formatted lines giving a chance for the powerful and powerless to speak to one another and for that dynamic to develop more fully.

I wrote the poem while listening to and thinking about Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the layers of complexity and variation on theme, the way Bach plays with pacing in the Variations, I think it’s all delightful, and I used as a guide for composing a highly lyric poem that develops several themes simultaneously.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?

The (very real) place that shapes so much of my writing is the American South. As a queer person born and raised in the American South, my experience with power has been partially shaped by the kind of love I experience and the place where that love has existed. I’ve long seen the South as a landscape characterized by violence, where outness is sometimes a gamble. I write about the body so much because I often fear that my body is not enough to protect me. The South is a place that is sometimes difficult to proudly call “home,” but at the same time so many of the people and things I love are here, my fondest memories, the most inspiring art and artists. It’s a kind of double-bind. The speaker’s connection with place is vital to my writing, the power of one’s place of origin, and the speaker’s grappling with what it means to love a place that refuses to love him back.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?

I listen to a pretty narrow grouping of artists while writing: Pelican, Braveyoung, Explosions in the Sky, mostly instrumental bands that can drown out people talking around me in cafés. For editing I go with more high-energy music like Tycho or Crystal Castles.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?

I’ve always been interested in performance art. I write so much about the body, but using the body to produce art, to become the art itself, has always been fascinating to me. I’m fortunate to be able to see a lot of dance performances as well, and I love those moments when the lines between contemporary dance and performance art are blurred. I think about the work of Chris Burden and Maria Abramović, and choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Marie Chouinard a lot, and I find them inspiring.

What are you working on currently?

Mostly my full-length manuscript, which I’m sending out here and there, and I’m also trying to see how some of those poems might coalesce in to a chapbook.

What are you reading right now?

Lately I’ve been enjoying Dana Levin’s Banana Palace, which I think is such a prescient collection. Each poem is so precisely heartbreaking because each poem rings so true. I’ve also been reading Vievee Francis’ Forest Primeval and Monica Youn’s Blackacre, both of which are third books that make me want to go out and buy their authors’ first and second books immediately.

Jim Whiteside is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others. Originally from Cookeville, TN, he now lives in Winston-Salem, NC.