Jacob Schepers is
the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Ground Swell Moss
(Carbonation Press, 2026) and A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders
Poetry Project, 2014), as well as the chapbook Connections &
Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck
Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). A Best-of-the-Net nominee, he has
published his writing in places like antiphony, Blue Bag Press, CAPGRAS,
Dialogist, Heavy Feather Review, Hobart, Indianapolis Review, MEMEZINE,
Psaltery & Lyre, The Shore, and elsewhere. With Sara Judy, he
co-edits ballast, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary journal. He received
his PhD and MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he is now the
Assistant Director for Outreach and Research Partnerships for the Franco Family
Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good. He lives in South Bend,
Indiana, with his wife and their four children. More at jacobschepers.com
and on Instagram @jacobschepers.2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction
or non-fiction?
I came to poetry through an ear for music
and a mind for analysis. I’ve committed poems to paper since I was ten, but I
found myself drawn to the philosophical and atomistic effects that different
word combinations might elicit. Coupled with some formative years in garage
bands scribbling lyrics and testing out the embodied stage presence of live
performance and readings, a surge toward poetry seemed rather inevitable. In
short, I was and am a big reader and have a broad appreciation for narrative
and world-building, but I have more of a tinkerer’s fascination with disparate
linguistic parts and a performer’s reliance on channeling voice and emotion to
a desired but unpredictable end. All of that led to my first book, A Bundle
of Careful Compromises, which emerged as a creative outlet for a master’s
thesis on contemporary elegy. I wrote that during my time in the University at
Buffalo’s Poetics Program under the direction of Steve McCaffery. It’s been
poetry, poetry, poetry ever since.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem begins as a cerebral pool of an
idea that I let coagulate and spread out. I’m not a “go out into nature” and
“recollect my thoughts in tranquility” Wordsworthian poet. I write frenetically
and neurotically while that pool gathers. I try to coast on that energy as
intensely as I can until the work feels as initially “complete” as
possible–sometimes that happens within a two-week span up to two months. At the
very least, I note and sketch out the gist of the idea so that I can build it
out with more precision and care afterwards. Regardless, those first drops in
the pool are the most crucial times for a creative project so I wait for them
with fervent anticipation and respond accordingly when they come. As a result,
I’m most definitely in the “book” camp rather than the “collection” camp. I’m
an adherent to Jack Spicer’s preference for the serial poem after his After
Lorca and find his description of a single, disconnected poem as a “one
night stand” to be quite apt. That’s not knocking anyone who does write single
poems bound together in a carefully arranged collection, it’s just not been my
creative experience nor my personal aesthetic preference.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I
adore poetry readings of all sizes, intimate house parties to large lecture
halls. I am, however, a rather infrequent public reader. I wish I could do more
of them, so when an opportunity comes along, I do jump at the chance. I don an
anxious and highly expressive affect for in-person readings. There’s a zaniness
I aspire to in my public readings and readily incorporate musicality and
theatricality amid the poems–be that as crooning Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome
Tonight” to a slideshow of Pet Rocks or singing John Denver with my banjo and a
prop arrow through my head à la Steve Martin. I thoroughly enjoy bringing that
as a multi-modal dimension to my writing which, on the page alone, can come
across as abstract, even aloof, and syntactically dense.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What
kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even
think the current questions are?
I have virtually only theoretical
concerns behind my writing. I’ve stated earlier I have a rather analytical
mind, but I don’t have a systematic one; I’d make a lousy philosopher, but I’m
fascinated with the questions that theory explores. What’s more: poetry lets me
get away with merely posing a question without offering a definitive answer. I
get to unearth one geode, hold it up to the light, behold it for a while, let
the mystery of the thing be, set it back down, and unearth another one.
Given
that preamble, I’m deeply invested in Joan Retallack’s “poethics,” in
ecopoetics broadly construed, in weaponized language, in sociotechnological
blackboxes and poetry’s encounter (and corruption and subversion and
repurposing) of such processes. I return over and over to Adorno to ponder
negative dialectics and the ethical position of indeterminacy and the tactical
refusal against instrumentalized reason. If I had to bundle all that up into a
central question, I’d frame it as follows: How does poetry in particular offer
a way to think of an alternative to the proposition that “humanity is the
measure of all things,” and how might poetic approaches to language construct
an under-recognized possibility for us to consider ourselves, encounter one
another, and experience the world beyond us.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should
be?
I’m not a prescriptivist when it comes to
the social and cultural function of the writer. I have very little standing to
be one anyways. So I can only speak for myself here. I’ll offer the role
that–if I’m lucky–I’m able to play: gadfly. Not some systematic Socrates
figure, mind you, but a legitimate annoyance for and disrupter to
business-as-usual. I want to be a gnat. I want my work to be a buzz saying
“Think otherwise. Do otherwise. Be otherwise.” That comes across as cloyingly
grandiose, but I assure you that I’m earnest to a fault.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. 100%. Now, that’s not to say
that writerly vision doesn’t play a part and that there’s a certain “wholeness”
that a writer might need to insist upon. That may especially be the case for
poetry’s idiosyncrasies (and perhaps for the librettists and playwrights)
compared to fiction or nonfiction. But after the initial execution of the work
in draft form–especially once an editor or press picks up that work–the
collaboration that follows is a process I find incredibly generative in a
creative sense and significantly meaningful on a human level at a time when
competition, siloing, and cutthroat paranoia seems to be de rigueur in
the corporate world and beyond.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily
given to you directly)?
I’m a big fan of David Antin and his talk
poems. This may not be so much a piece of advice but rather an articulation of
an aesthetic practice that I’ve run with: In a conversation with Charles Bernstein, Antin once shared his experience reading Simone Weil and his
struggle with understanding the seemingly commonplace and unchallenged terms to
which she was referring, words, he says, like “Loss” “Value” “Power.” But as I looked at them I found out I didn’t understand
them at all. So I started to write them down, thinking that by writing them
down, I could concentrate on them, ask them questions and find out what
meanings they might conceal. And I saw that my not-understanding could be a way
to go on. And as I went on with this writing down I didn’t think about whether
I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more
there was I didn’t understand.
His insistence on “not understanding” and the
generative uncertainty that poetry thrives on has remained a lasting influence
on me. That impulse runs throughout my latest book Ugly Ground Swell Moss
in which the whole engine of the work consists of an endlessly and obsessively
negotiated confrontation of relations, identities, and ethical consequences.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return
for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Boredom is, in fact, my preferred teacher
and guide. I like to sit with it, the restlessness of it, and feel my creative
energies churning out something on the other side. That said, I enjoy sitting
in academic lectures and talks–often outside of the subject of poetry–and see
what some infusion of interdisciplinarity might bring to the surface in ways I
would unlikely stumble over solely by myself.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’m dying to make it down to the New Orleans Poetry Festival (NOPF) one of these years. With four kids at home–two
of them quite young still–and a day job, I have to be rather selective with
traveling and conferences, but NOPF is at the top of the list. It always looks
to be a fantastic gathering, and New Orleans has become something of a
poetry-lover’s dream community.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would
it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you
not been a writer?
I
consider myself incredibly fortunate to end up where I landed–writing and
editing for the love of the game, teaching a selection of classes at the
University of Notre Dame, and supporting the liberal arts and higher education
through my work there in the Franco Institute. That said, an alternative dream
career could have been as a casting director. There’s something about the je
ne sais quoi of analyzing an actor’s “fit” for a role or how multiple
actors’ “chemistry” come together that I find fascinating.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great
film?
Last great book: Henry Goldkamp’s Balloon
Animal from Mike Corrao’s phenomenal press CLOAK. A riotous, punny, raucous
sendup of performativity and theatricality.
If I may, I’ll tweak the question from
last great film to last great album: Never Before Seen, Never Again Found
by Arm’s Length, a leading fifth-wave emo band out of Quinte West, ON. The
album came out in 2022 but has been on repeat for me ever since. Perhaps
unsurprisingly given my affinity for serial poetics, I’m a fan of the
album-as-unit, and anyone who’s got a spare forty minutes to sit with this
album straight through is in for a treat.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m hardly a “write every day” kind of
poet. I strike while the iron’s hot. That said, I’m fortunate these days to
have a few projects in various stages of development. I’m shopping around a
manuscript about the year following the birth of my fourth kid and my
subsequent vasectomy two weeks later–it’s a cheeky, confessional, bratty work
called Vasectomajestic that I’m pretty excited about. I’m also planning
out a kind of extended review/lyric essay on David Lowery’s A24 film The
Green Knight that also unpacks a nasty case of shingles I had last year.
I’ve also just started writing a series called Glitch Whelps that rages
against digital surveillance, AI and big tech shenanigans, privacy violations,
and all the usual late-capitalist horrors.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
