A few years ago, Jennifer Jean’s poem “The Doors of Perception” impressed me through its masterful use of repetition and imagery, combined with raw emotional content. They say that reading other poets can give you permission, not just inspiration. That’s what it felt like. She and I share the experiences of a difficult childhood split between California and New England, and we remember the Jennifers of the 1970s – one of the most common names of our generation. As a young girl, it was a name I coveted for myself.
Her work appears in Poetry, Rattle, Mom Egg Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other places. She serves as the senior program manager at 24PearlStreet, the online arm of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She founded Free2Write: Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors, and has taught creative writing at Mass College of Art, Grub Street Writing Center, Salem State University, and elsewhere. Jennifer has received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, DISQUIET/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Her Story Is collective, the Academy of American Poets, the Kolkata International Poetry Festival, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Her poetry collections include Voz (Lily Poetry Review Books), Object Lesson (Lily Poetry Review Books), and The Fool (Big Table Publishing).
She and I had an engaging conversation about the practice and craft of poetry, her latest collection Voz, and the importance of the flow state when writing and revising.
/ / / / /
Frances Donovan: We’ve been orbiting around one another in overlapping poetry circles, and I finally got to meet you in person at AWP last year in Philadelphia. Even though we haven’t interacted much, I feel like I know you. There’s a lot I still have to learn though. How long have you been writing poetry?
Jennifer Jean: I’ve dabbled in poetry my whole life, thanks to great K-12 English teachers. Outside of class I’d write limericks for friends in middle school, and then angsty/doomer lyric poems in high school. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else as an undergrad, so I majored in English/Creative Writing after a short stint as a Psych major.
Donovan: It’s amazing the number of students who get turned off to poetry in school, so I’m glad you had teachers who were able to foster your interest in it. Did you move right into life as a “professional poet” then?
Jean: No. I just moved forward into the poetry arena figuring I’d teach it full-time eventually. Publishing was mostly a means to move that goal forward. As I’ve shifted from that goal, I’ve found that publishing marks a motion forward in my development as a poet, in the development of my craft. But tell me what you mean by “professional poet.”
Donovan: Lesley Wheeler once told me that poetry in itself was a money-losing proposition, and when it comes to book sales, she’s right. When you factor in the submission fees, the cost of marketing and conferences, you’re lucky if you break even. Most poets seem to either have non-literary jobs like me or work in academia. You mentioned that your own goals have changed over time. Can you tell me more about that?
Jean: As I began publishing more and more individual pieces, then chapbooks, and then finally my debut collection, I realized that the process of readying an individual poem or a manuscript was improving the quality of my work as well as my ability to express complexities in poetry. I realized development, exploration, and innovation were very satisfying experiences – and different from only writing because I felt compelled to express something random and poetry seemed a fitting container. This might seem obvious to some folks but it wasn’t to me! Anyway, it’s what’s driven me to continue to pursue translation work and to work on translation teams. That process compels me to hyper-focus on language. To develop, explore, and innovate even more. I risk more in my poems, now –- and I don’t mean content. I mean I risk new rhythms, transitions, references, realities, phrasings, start points, layers of meaning. Which means I risk failure more. I fail more. Which is fine.
Donovan: That more holistic way of thinking about the writing life is a much more optimistic approach than steeling yourself for rejection. I’ve had a complete mental block about submitting to journals lately. But thinking of it as an opportunity to continue to hone my own work — that’s a great reframe.
I want to talk more about your translation work, but I also want to hear about VOZ, your most recent collection. What can you tell me about it?
Jean: The word voz means voice in Portuguese. And these poems aren’t so much about what I’m voicing or the fact of voicing, but how I’ve decided to voice. In other words, it’s my answer to the lyric by Amalia Rodrigues that I use as an epigraph: Com que voz chorarrai meu triste fado? Which means: With what voice will I cry my sad fate? I decided on a voice of exploration that moves towards hope.
Donovan: Yes, I see that arc in the book and I also see how music is a driving force throughout it. Many of these poems are “saturations,” or poems written after immersing yourself in a particular song. It’s interesting that you chose a word from a Portuguese fado rather than one of the many classic rock songs featured in the book. What’s the connection between the two types of music?
Jean: These are the sounds of my formative years. The final foster care guardians I lived with were my grandparents who listened to fado and morna music. My grandfather played hand drum percussion in a band in those years. When I was seven, I moved in with my mother who listened to all the other music. So, my guardians dipped me into these sounds which, now, flavor me. They’re baked in. The saturations mostly came from recall but in some cases I reimmersed myself in the songs. Reimmersion made me wonder how much I really liked the songs or just resonated with the memory of the songs –- many of which are attached to the landscape of Los Angeles. In other cases, I found that -– on my own, as I am now -– I loved a song anew. This happened with Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” which is responded to in the saturation “I am traveling in some vehicle …” and with Amalia Rodrigues’ “Com Que Voz” which is responded to in the saturation of the same name. With the latter poem, I push back against this new love since it drags me too much into melancholia.
Donovan: There’s some overlap between us in terms of age and the music we listened to growing up. I have a special fondness for CSNY, Led Zeppelin, and their contemporaries because it’s one of the few positive memories I have of my own father — I’m from NorCal rather than SoCal, and we left when I was four years old, but like you California has had a deep impact on me. And we also have the bi-coastal connection. I grew up in Stamford, CT and moved to Boston in my early 20s. If I understand the chronology correctly, you spent seven years in foster care in Providence, RI before being reunited with your parents in LA — did I get that right?
Our conversation could go in two directions now, and I’ll let you choose which one. We could talk more about music and its relationship to poetry, or we could flesh out the narratives that your book touches upon. I enjoy getting to know the poet behind the book, but it’s also fun to geek out about poetry theory and craft.
Jean: I think it’d be fun to geek out about craft! Though in the meantime, I’ll answer your clarifying question about chronology … Yes, I was in foster care from seven-months old to seven-years old. It ended with a brief “kinship care” stint with my paternal grandparents in Providence, RI. My brother and I were reunited with just my mom after that, in Los Angeles. I didn’t interact with my father until after I was eighteen – when I sought him out.
Donovan: Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like a rocky childhood. I’m glad you’ve been able to turn some of those experiences into kick-ass poems.
So let’s go back to music and poetry. Some people say that poetry is a kind of proto-music. And music — repetition of sounds and meaning, is one of the great rhetorical devices of poetry. What do you think the connection is? And is music something that you strive for in your poetry?
Jean: Music is proto-poetry. Let’s take music created by a voice. We can sing without language and still communicate. We hear this with hummed lullabies for infants which mean “go to sleep.” Or with scatting in jazz which can mean so many things. Once we add language to the song we’ve a different medium because more can be communicated. If that language’d song is unaccompanied by additional instruments, and its cadences are less reliant on the reach and quality of the instrument that is the sound of the voice, then we’re approaching contemporary poetry generally. If that language’d song can also live on the page and still communicate, then we’ve arrived at contemporary poetry generally. And, yes, I strive for musicality! I usually write free verse but there is still a core of music that I revise towards when I work on those poems. Each core is completely unique – which is the beauty of free verse. As well, I listen for music in the poetry that I read — and yes, listening is part of reading.
Donovan: Tell me more about how you revise for music.
Jean: I either create multiple lineated versions of a poem and read each one aloud to hear which version has the most compelling musical core which also suits the poem’s content. Or, if I’ve lineated a poem from the start, I find the section that has the most compelling musical core and I revise the rest of the poem to reflect or be in conversation with that core by reading the poem aloud and making changes accordingly. These revisions towards musicality can’t mess with any layers that appear if the poem is experienced only on the page. Words as they are constructed and connoted should look good next to or near each other. I do my best not to sacrifice the layers of meaning gleaned from reading to the music that’s gleaned from listening. But I’m an impatient writer! And this is a long process. So, sometimes my poems try to make their way in the world before their musicality is fully realized. Luckily editors know to say no to these poems. Small favors, right?
Donovan: So it takes a long time for your poems to “grow up” and go out into the world? What’s the longest you’ve ever spent on a poem, and when do you know when it’s done?
Jean: Yes! They’re slow to grow. Especially because they’re often heavily researched. Sometimes I’m attached to keeping all the interlocking layers in a poem – which means one change during revision needs to work on multiple levels. Which often leads to more research. Particularly if I’m tackling esoteric or philosophical content. I’ve spent more than seven years on several poems. At different stages I thought they were complete. But then I’d send them out, receive journal rejections, and realize they’re not ready for the world. Other times, I’d work on a draft and know there was something wrong with the poem but I had no way to dive deep to get at the various wrongnesses. So the draft would languish, waiting for me to tinker with it. If it suited a manuscript, I’d stick it in and keep tinkering hoping its new neighbors would transform it. Sometimes the way in was through relineation, or applying a new formal element or structure to the content, or — and I resist this — stripping away a layer in the poem and leaving it a little more stark. But I often know when a poem is done if I’m at the tail end of the revision process and I feel a well of laughter coming up from my gut, or when I read it aloud and I’ve an internal click. An “Ah, yes!”
Donovan: I’m interested in this gut reaction you seek. How do the more intellectual or theoretical parts of craft fit in with this gut reaction for you?
Jean: At a certain point – and it’s different with each poem and each book – I let go of every aspect of craft or conscious intellect and just trust my instinct. What I’m saying is that in those moments I’m revising in a state of flow. Whatever’s added in or edited out during those moments is usually evident when the poem is completed – even if my great workshop group recommends otherwise. I do this on the foundation of having practiced/practiced/practiced and studied the craft and the conscious intellectual side of poetry – through reading and writing and teaching and learning and talking it all out.
Donovan: How do you get into that state of flow?
Jean: I need a huge block of time. I need to read a stack of fiction, nonfiction, poetry collections, and journals in short spurts. I need to listen to one kind of music or one artist or one song over and over – to catch a groove, to start a wave on which I’ll ride when I revise or write new work. I need to ride that wave before it curls into the rest of life. This urgency is probably why I revise poems in groups and start several new poems at once.
Donovan: I want to ask you something I ask every poet I speak with. What do you wish someone had told you when you were first starting out with your poetry career?
Jean: Hmmm. I guess there is something I do now that I wish someone had told me to do, so I’d have started earlier. That is — have fun! Let yourself be “at play” in your writing, in your readings, heck even in your marketing and networking. Play and have fun! Joy is the best foundation for the best art and the best life.