Mark Jarman’s [photo credit: Amy Jarman] most recent
collection of poetry is The Heronry
(Sarabande Books, 2017). He has also
published two books of essays about poetry, The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry. His honors include the Lenore Marshall Prize,
the Poets’ Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship in
poetry. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University where he has taught since 1983. From 2009 until 2014 he served as an Elector
of the American Poets’ Corner at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NewYork City, helping to induct playwright Tennessee Williams, novelists James Baldwin and Katherine Anne Porter, and poets Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. He makes his home in Nashville
with his wife Amy Jarman, head of the Voice Department at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. They have two
daughters, Claire and Zoe.
1 - How did your first book
change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How
does it feel different?
My first
book, North Sea, which I published 40
years ago when I was 26, included poems that had an effect on my life, if by
life you mean career. The poems in my
first book helped to garner me a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry,
which in turn helped me to quit my onerous teaching job, and with my wife go to
live in Europe for a year. There, in
Italy, I wrote my second book, The Rote Walker, and Amy studied singing. I
would say then that my first book changed my life. But the writing of my first book was life
changing, too, since I wrote most of it once I had graduated from the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop and discovered two distinct sources of poetry for me, my
religious background and my childhood in Scotland and California. I’m still writing about those subjects,
though I hope I am writing as James Wright would have said, “the poetry of a
grown man.” I think the difference now
is that I can look back at a body of work by someone who increasingly knows
what he is doing, yet still wonder if anyone will read it in the future.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think I
always must have been in the presence of poetry – the poetry of the Bible –
since I am a son and grandson of ministers and they loved reading scripture
aloud and one of my early memories is of memorizing Psalms. But the first poem I wrote was in seventh
grade, for an English class assignment.
The experience of writing the poem, which unfolded over several days,
was--to quote an artist friend of mine--like living in a dream. I have been writing poetry ever since.
3 - How long does it take
to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
When I
met a teacher in high school who convinced me that simply responding to the
spirit was not enough, that you had to commit to practicing daily, I was able
to make writing a daily habit. So though
I have been writing since I was 11 or 12, I have been writing daily since I was
16 or 17. There have certainly been
times when a project has gripped me, but my own relationship to the page is a
daily one, in which poems slowly take shape.
I keep working until a poem gradually overtakes me and will not leave me
and when that happens I enter a period that, though slow, is engrossing. First drafts can come quickly, but the
progress to a final draft is always slow.
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?
I write
daily in a notebook that is a combination of diary, journal, commonplace book, and
drafting floor. I also collect phrases
that I either put in a small Moleskin notebook I carry with me or in my iPhone
Notebook program. I don’t think I’m much
different from other writers in this way.
Short pieces will begin to combine into a larger project, for sure, but
when I finally put a book together that process includes a lot of winnowing,
often with the help of friends and editors.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I have
learned to enjoy readings and I think I have gotten better at them. They are not part of my creative
process. To me they are a form of
publication. I do enjoy them, but it depends
on how I am connecting with the audience.
There have been times when I couldn’t wait to stop listening to myself
and other times when I was sorry to have to end.
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?
For a
long time I thought that a poem could find its form if it followed a narrative
and that a poem was the story of a feeling.
I still think a poem is the story of a feeling, but I don’t put as much
faith as I used to in narrative to convey the story. I think a poem should be clear, whether or
not it is in a traditional form like a sonnet or in blank verse. It should be clear to the reader I imagine,
who is someone who wants to read a poem.
For me the questions for quite awhile have been what is the nature of
faith and what does my own faith look like as it takes shape in words on the
page. These days the question for me is
a harder one, have I loved enough?
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one?
What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The
current role of the poet in larger culture is to keep poetry alive. That has always been the role and it has not
changed. That is what I think the role
of the poet should be. I think the role
of any artist is to keep his or her or their art alive.
8 - Do you find the process
of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have
been very lucky in editors, particularly my current editors at Sarabande Books,
my publisher. However, fewer and fewer
editors of magazines seem capable of conveying clearly what they might want, if
they think what you have given them has fallen short in some way. Most of them simply don’t have time. There are a couple who are excellent line-by-line
critics and I feel lucky to have them. I
do have a circle of friends I show new work to, especially as I collect it into
book form, but there are only a couple of editors of my acquaintance who will take
the time to help me make a poem better.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You have
to believe in your work, no matter what anyone else says. That was Donald Justice to me in Iowa City
in, I think, 1975. He was reassuring me
that he believed in my work, by the way, but he knew at the time I was going
through a profound loss of self-confidence and in that exchange he restored
it. I have never forgotten it. In case I sound sentimental here, I knew he
meant that you’re on your own.
10 - How easy has it been
for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as
the appeal?
The
critical prose I write I think of mainly as practical criticism, the sort of
evaluative thing a reviewer does.
Otherwise I will occasionally write an essay about a larger issue in
poetry – repetition, devotional poems, the nature of metaphor – or the work of
another poet I admire, like Charles Wright or Mona Van Duyn. All of that sort of work I see as a service
to the art. It really has nothing to do
with the poems I am writing, or so I think.
So it has been easy. I have been
writing reviews and essays at least since high school, when I had an arts
column in my high school’s paper.
11 - What kind of writing
routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day
(for you) begin?
In the
morning I take out a file of drafts and see if anything there can be nudged
into further life. In the evening,
before bed, I’ll try to put something on paper while inhibitions are down. Often the evening genius is obliterated in
the sober morning light. But that’s my
routine. My habits for writing critical
prose are a steady, daily application of getting the pages written. I write poetry by hand, prose on my computer
keyboard, as I am doing now.
12 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
My
notebook. The Bible. An anthology of French poetry I keep nearby
(I can read a little French). Poetry by
others, friends and associates, whose books I have on my desk. Music. Nooks and crannies of memory. Then back to my notebook.
13 - What fragrance reminds
you of home?
The smell
of eucalyptus. Sea air. But also coal smoke, which takes me back to
my childhood on the Firth of Forth in Scotland.
I smelled coal smoke this morning as I was running along a greenway here
in Nashville. Very odd, yet bracing, especially since I was listening to an NPR
piece on the coal industry.
14 - David W. McFadden once
said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence
your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My latest
book, The Heronry, includes records
of a time I was living near a nature preserve and trying to preserve my sanity
by keeping a daily naturalist’s journal.
Some of the poems about that time are also included in my previous book,
Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. I am an amateur, a
very amateur, birder, and have many feeders around my backyard. My wife is a classical singer and her music,
both art songs and opera, has always influenced me, though mainly it is her
voice that has done so. I have more than
a few ekphrastic poems in my books, many of them about obscure but to me
important pieces of art. And the
language of science has made its way into many of my poems, though there are
real poets of science out there and I am not one.
15 - What other writers or writings
are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I love
the masters of the short story, from Maupassant to Hemingway, Chekov to Peter
Taylor, Jean Stafford and Alice Walker. I
am a very slow reader, excruciatingly slow, but I try to make my way. Nabokov’s novels have meant a lot to me,
especially Pnin, and I love
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Actually I think Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are the trinity of social
commentary in the 19th century.
I do love the writing of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and Sue Grafton and their renderings of the Southern California landscape where I grew
up. Reading Charlotte’s Web to my girls when they were little was an experience
that transcended much of what I have read.
I was lucky to study with Raymond Carver when I was in college and love
his stories. The writing that has been
important to me, whether in prose or poetry, tends to be writing I can quote. I travel with an anthology or commonplace book
in my head, from books, movies, operas, plays, Bible verses, poems, all sorts
of things.
16 - What would you like to
do that you haven't yet done?
And
probably won’t do? Write a great
children’s book.
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 would
have ended up as a professor of systematic theology in a divinity school. That’s sort of what my father wanted me to
be. I wouldn’t want to pick any other
occupation, though I would say to people who are thinking of teaching that if
you are going to teach successfully and happily you have to be called to
it. I was called to writing poetry, but
never to teaching. It has taken me years
to learn that this was the occupation for me.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was
good at it. It gave me pleasure. Some important mentors encouraged me. Eventually when I saw I was on my own, I knew
there was nothing else I wanted to do.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last
great book I read was E. O Wilson’s Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life. I reviewed it for The Hudson Review and I believe that my review can be found online.
It is not a substitute, however, for
Wilson’s masterpiece! The last great
film I watched was The Godfather. I watch parts of it regularly, and all of it
at least once a year. I own four DVD
copies of it. I try to have one of them with me when I travel. I have many favorite lines from the film, but
right now it’s Michael Corleone telling a nurse that they have to move his
father from his hospital room. “Do you
know my father? Men are coming here to
kill him. Now, help me, please.” Otherwise, I think the last great film I saw may
have been Argo.
20 - What are you currently
working on?
Poems
about being with my father when he died.
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