I spoke with Jesse Nathan in a series of exchanges in autumn, 2023 just as first book of poems, Eggtooth, was published by Unbound Edition Press. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and The Believer. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, the Arts Research Center at the University of California Berkeley, Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Ashbery Home School, and the Kansas State Arts Commission. His translations have appeared in Poetry, Mantis, and Poetry International. Jesse was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. His reviews and interviews appear in the online McSweeney’s series “Short Conversations with Poets.” He teaches in the English department at University of California, Berkeley.
The layered, generative poems of Eggtooth range from formal structures to looser verse, and are lyric, sonic and sharply detailed. It’s clear that this confident and vulnerable debut has been in the making — on paper, in conversation, and in contemplation — for many years, and it also invites multiple readings, across the seasons of our own lives. — Mandana Chaffa
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Mandana Chaffa: Jesse, there’s a rooted brevity in many of these poems that I find transfiguring. Brief sentences like the wash of a watercolor — immediate, set on the page, and final. These gestures also suggest more breath between thoughts and a forward motion that doesn’t rest in any one place. Such as in the first poem of the collection, “Straw Refrain”:
Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,
only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hiss
the hiss of grasses hissing What should
What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,
my mind, you hardly
seem to be.
On days like these.
But then you swerve at the end, with the languor of hardly any punctuation at all.
You had a theory that the birds would silence
on a day like this. But the mocker’s keenness
and the kingbird and the vireos commence
to warble on as heat bears down a day like this
my mind.
Might we get word nerdy and talk about how you approach structure and syntax, and where and how you insert breath and space, refrain and sound? I’m especially taken with the sibilance of “silence” and “commence” and the repetitions of “days like this.”
Jesse Nathan: I think in this case it was mostly instinctive. I don’t remember consciously planning to dissolve the punctuation near the end of the poem. It’s a poem about crushing heat, and I think the poem, if it’s working, registers that pressure in various ways. I love language for its music, I love the slap and dash and rakishness of English, and for a while when I was beginning to write poetry that’s all I thought I cared about — the music that words could make when you brought them close to one another, close enough to kiss. The play of it, the miraculous and incidental beauty of this ancient tool we use every day, the erotic qualities of vowel sounds, the violence of fricatives—it’s all part of the way language, for me, is a sign of the fact that we live in bodies and have tongues and mouths and lungs and diaphragms. That we are more than minds. And even when I realized that the play of language of was only part of what mattered to me, that there was also, equally, the question of representation — of what I wanted to represent, what I wanted form to say — even after that deepening of my sense of what my art needed to be, I’ve never stopped needing poems that can sing, that can make the idiom dance. The poets I loved first were people like Paul Muldoon and Lorine Niedecker and Shakespeare. I love the idea of hearing a poem and loving it before you know what it means. Loving the rhythms of it, say, or the sibilance. A poem can speak to our ears before it reaches our calculating minds. As I compose I spend a lot of time listening to the poem. Sometimes I say it aloud in the bath or record it on a cassette player and lay it on my chest and let the rhythms enter my body as I listen. It’s all a way of inhabiting the sound. That’s how a poem starts for me, too. If I can find a way to inhabit a sound, I can begin to see the world that sound calls up. And then I might have a poem going.
MC: The title of the collection is spectacular — there’s the idea of being an active participant of one’s own birthing that is rich in imagery. In a sense, we’re born several times over in our lives, either taking the past with us or negating it entirely. At certain junctures, it does feel like we’re pecking blindly at what surrounds us, holds us back, or is no longer of use to us.
JN: Thank you for that, Mandana. I think you’re right. And I think we call on the tools we need to get ourselves born, and then once those tools have served their purpose they can — with enough therapy — be left behind, like an eggtooth. It’s a question of survival. If you aren’t busy being born, Dylan says, you’re busy dying.
MC: I’m a fan of your interviews — which gives me pause in asking my own questions — but talk to me about “Short Conversations with Poets.” How did you begin this project, and how do you decide on the one question?
JN: Ilya Kaminsky came up with the idea for one question during the pandemic, as a way to gin up conversation about books of poetry that were getting lost, the way so many books seemed to get lost especially in that first year of it. His wife, the poet Katie Farris, was battling cancer, and at some point Ilya couldn’t do the interviews anymore, and asked me if I would take over the series. And I had no idea, when I started, what a profound education it would be for me. I talk with each poet at length, off the record, and then marinate on that conversation before I send them a question or two. The conversation before the conversation helps me understand the context out of which their work emerges, and allows me to better understand what kinds of questions will be most alive for the writer. And it’s been a great gift to get to sit at the feet of so many amazing writers — Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Sze, Jorie Graham, Wendy Xu, Chris Abani — and listen to how they talk about their art. I’ve never studied poetry in an organized setting, outside of a few summer workshops here and there, so this interview series felt to me like rigging up a kind of MFA for the boy who didn’t ever find his way to an MFA.
MC: Visually, the poems use the page in a way that feels like a languorous conversation early in the morning, or late in the evening. They move like memory through candlelight.
“How We Played” is a beautiful quadtych, for the content to be sure, but equally for the decision to have the seasons facing each other. 14 lines on each page, a kind of sonnet; the way the line at the end of winter bleeds into spring, a gorgeous manifestation of how the seasons themselves work. But beyond the delight of structure is the language and memory, which is distilled into something heady, lush, and cinematic. How in “Summer,” which feels like a long distance way on our hemisphere, we get a …
Corker of a day. Sunset melting on its pan.
I drink from the spigot by the well, and it beards me in a watery lace.
JN: To move like memory through candlelight — I love that so much. And I love the idea of a conversation in the morning, when it seems like the day is a gorgeous helping of time, or late in the evening when all the worries have gotten tired and the time feels sanded down, almost liquid again. There’s a candor possible in those moments, and I think that’s a candor I’m after.
MC: How long did you work on this collection, Jesse? I’m astonished that it’s your debut, and I’m curious about the timeframe in which these were written, and how you pulled them together in one book.
JN: In one sense, I’ve been working on it my whole life. Or my whole adult life, which is to say since I was in my early twenties. More than 15 years. Sometimes I wish I could move faster. I can worry a line for years. Or wait years for the right words in the right order. On the other hand, the manuscript that I first created, almost two decades ago, is entirely different from Eggtooth. Maybe a phrase or two survives. There have been so many versions and revisions, and it becomes hard for me to say whether those represent many different books — some probably are — or simply the same book changing and changing. I got a fellowship a few years ago that gave me a beautiful stretch of more than a year to write, and I thought I’d revise my book, once again. And then I found I was writing new poems, more and more, and those poems became the core Eggtooth. That was in 2018 and 2019. But I saw that though many of the poems seemed new, they were representations of gestures — or images, or longings — that I had tried to get into poems for years, in other forms. The repeated attempts were largely unconscious, something I realized was happening only later. Something was crying out to be said, and it took me a long time to say it. So long that I almost gave up several times. But I don’t know that I could give up even if I wanted to. I need to write to live.
MC: Beyond the bucolic settings are depictions of the brutality of life on farms or life as an adolescent who feels he doesn’t fit in. Your first-person speakers are ruthlessly vulnerable about their own flaws, a stripping away. There’s no sentimentality in the account of the lightning that almost destroys your childhood home, for example, and many of these poems reveal the indifferent impact nature and the seasons have on the environment, and indeed, the environment on us. How in “Pastoral”:
The anvil cloud, trundling away.
The smashed wet wheat, like a cat
ambushed by a bath. The baby
birds strewn about. I step in what
seems like a redwing
under the swing —
ants scramble out.
JN: That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it like that. Description is revelation, as one of Heaney’s teachers told him. To describe is to opine, even though it doesn’t at first look that way. I wanted to describe the world of my childhood, and the world I landed in as an adult, and let that description — if it worked — transmit the feeling, or recreate some version of it in the reader’s experience. I think poems are as natural as leaves to a tree. As wheat in a field. As bridges in a bayside city. I get tired of poetry that’s too ready to tell me what everything means. I found I wanted realistic poems about tangible realities. A far cry from the pure wordplay I used to entertain myself with as a beginning writer. If there is an ecopoetics to this book, which I think there is, it has to do with the local. The local as the only way to the universal. The local as the only chance we have to save our species and our earth. To learn about and love some corner of the planet. It’s harder to see how to do that when you can move from place to place so easily. I love Auden very much, but I reject his idea that a rootless poetics was the future of the art form. I think placelessness is sexy, in some ways, and certainly true to the experience of many of us. But I don’t think it’s the end of the story, only a beginning. And a tragedy if it’s all the farther a person gets in this life.
MC: Speaking of those settings, poems such as “The Well, Rural Route 1 Box 43” reinforce the layers of life and death in our rural landscapes, which aren’t as evident in cities or suburbs. There’s a beauty and power to such parts of a country, and a different demand on its inhabitants that isn’t often explored in the poetry of the coasts..
JN: I like that, “poetry of the coasts.” Poets have had to go to the cities to survive ever since the cities were invented. That’s how the pastoral tradition got going — country kids remembering their roots. Or people pretending to be country kids pretending to remember their roots. I of course resist very deeply the idea that rural parts of the world are devoid of culture or taste or wisdom or panache. A poet I know from Kentucky says anti-rural prejudice is the last socially acceptable form of prejudice there is. I claim both rural and urban, and I stand in both worlds, and speak both languages.
MC: I appreciate the formality of many of these poems. The deep and abiding throughline for me is an absolute passion for language — so many of these words are delicious, multisyllabic, internal rhymes as noted below in the poem “Footwashers.” What’s your process writing-wise, and what does more formal verse offer in terms of poetic opportunity for our modern times?
and there — there I am, turning over a word
in my head — catenary — for parabolas that fountains
form, word for the U a necklace makes, curve
an upside-down arch, as I towel off a sprouting
cousin’s fallen arches, anklebone,
all thirty-three joints known and unknown
that carry me away from home.
JN: Sometimes a formal feeling comes, and sometimes something less formal overtakes me. I’m of two minds, I’m of many minds. It’s like the idea that when someone goes out walking and sees a beautiful full moon, they may want to sing and shout an ecstatic hymn. Or they might want to describe with tremendous calm and precision the details and facts of the luminous gorgeous sight they’re seeing. And both are forms of praise, both are styles of praise — it’s almost as if one response is the basis for an ornate style and the other is the basis for a plainspoken style. What’s interesting to me is that I can’t, in any general sense, choose. Sometimes I feel ornate, sometimes I don’t. That’s a little to the side of your question about form, but I think it’s related.
In the case of the eggtooth stanza, as someone has taken to calling them, once I found my way to that form — it was a little like falling down a trapdoor, a rabbit hole, some kind of slide or groove that carried me away — once I found my way into that, I kept writing mostly in that form, for many months, until the vein was exhausted. I don’t know if I’ll ever find my way back into that particular stanzaic shape.
I’m too restless to stick to one mode for more than a while. But I do love to find a mode that solves for the needs of a particular moment. And often I find that restriction, or constraint — limit-setting — is immensely generative. For me it’s salutary, in our seemingly unrestricted times — in a time that tells us there are no limits, in a time that feels wilder than fiction — to lean into constraint. The problem for me is that I don’t like games. I don’t like restrictions that feel random, chosen without any real or inherent urgency. I have a hard time with prompts, and it’s probably one reason I’ve stayed on the edges of the workshop world. I think I’m not good at them, too lazy or something. If it feels only arbitrary, it’s hard for me to care.
Of course, any form or restriction — like life itself — is finally arbitrary. And any act of writing is constrictive because you’re choosing this word and not that word, in this order and not any other. But I have to find my way to those limits from the inside, by way of necessity, so that there’s an urgency to them. I need them to be limits that I can really live inside. To set some rules and then live under them awhile, not because they seem like they’ll be good but because they are necessary conditions, somehow, for a thriving, in poem-making or in living life. I still don’t know quite why the seven-line Donne stanza that I use in this book came to life for me. I still don’t know quite why its particular kind of restriction has been so life-giving and energizing for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. But it has.
One thing that is constant, I think, is that I seem to need to induce poems. My process is a kind of deep listening, a hesitating, a holding back as long as I can — sometimes I read around loosely and intuitively, or look up words, or listen for the language or the happenstance of thoughts and feelings passing by — and then when I can’t not write any longer, I pounce. Or I slowly lay down the words. But the poem comes after a long process of induction — sometimes I make pages and pages of wild notes, just for a single line of poetry to emerge. I filled half a notebook before I found my way to the language that composes “Footwashers.” I recreated a footwashing in my living room with Irena. The physical act was a powerful way to get out of my head and into a sensual language of being, of experience. And by induction I mean a process of creating the conditions out of which I must speak, need to speak, can’t stay silent any longer. Needs must, my friend always says. And usually that’s when the voice comes. And I transcribe the voice. I become an amanuensis. And sometimes, to get that going, I find I have to lay down harder limits. Other times I want to slip out and roll down hill like water.
MC: These poems are also deeply engaged with relationships, with the self, with others, and to my mind, as much about the silences that hold so much more than language could ever describe. That’s a conflicted and gorgeous intersection for a poet — how to describe what isn’t language, in language. I could point to many poems in this collection that do that, but I keep going back to the anchor poem, what you chose to end upon, “This Long Distance.” What is home for you? And as someone who is both an educator and practitioner, what do you continue to learn about language and all it can and can’t do?
JN: I think poetry is the last stop before silence. I think of a train line, like those ghostly trains in Miyazaki. And if a poem is a stop on that line, after poetry there is only silence. Veronica Forrest-Thomson says poetry is precisely the place where silence is impossible. So it is, to my mind, right up against silence, not only the silence of the inarticulate, but the silence of the unsayable. The vast unsayable. What you couldn’t say but also what you wouldn’t. Poetry is ambassador to all of that. I’m routinely amazed at the paltriness of words. Try sometime to describe a color. Or a facial expression. But words are what we have. “This Long Distance” is about home but also about the way we carry home inside of us, the way we can’t go home and we can’t leave home behind. It follows us, but when we turn our shoulder — or pick up the phone — it’s gone. Invisible. Like a ghostly presence we can sense but never see, a figure on the road to Emmaus or in the depths of our delirium, like Shackleton lost in the frozen wastes. And even though language is a crude tool for getting at the suppleness and subtlety of consciousness, I’ve come to feel that my home is language, my homeland is in the words. That’s where I feel most alive and most myself. That’s where I am. In the great city of language. Or on the sea of language. On the prairie of words.