Charles Jensen is the author of six
chapbooks of poems, including the recent
Story Problems and Breakup/Breakdown, and The First Risk, which was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary
Award. A second collection, Nanopedia,
was published in 2018 by Tinderbox Editions. His previous chapbooks include Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank
O’Hara Chapbook Award, and The Strange
Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). His poem “Tucson”
received the 2018 Zócalo Poetry Prize. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project
Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in
American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Copper Nickel, Field, The Journal, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is the founding
editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT,
which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He lives in Los Angeles.
1 - How did your first
chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your
previous? How does it feel different?
Publishing
my first chapbook was a shock. It won a contest the first time I sent it out. I
was also beyond thrilled; it felt like confirmation I was onto something good
in my writing. It’s hard to look back on older work with wiser eyes because I
can see clearly where I needed to develop, what my blind spots were, and I
think I’ve addressed the ones I’ve identified in more recent work. My poems
have become more personal in some ways, more political in other ways, and,
paradoxically, not about me or this world in other ways. I try to reinvent what
poetry is for myself every time I work through a new manuscript, so my hope is
that recent work will feel unique from older work—not an extension of it, but
informed by what it taught me.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I
was writing everything when I was younger. When it came time to specialize, I
just felt like my poetry was stronger, so I dove headfirst into that. It was
the area where I’d had the most mentorship and guidance as a teenager; my high
school English teacher worked with me independently all four years on my
writing, taking me to our nearby university’s annual poetry festival for teens.
I placed in the festival’s competition those last two years, from among
hundreds of young poets.
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?
Every
time it’s a different story, really. In general, I tend to write a lot of
drafts over a period of time, and then edit them for years after until they all
work together. But my current project is moving very slowly, and I’m radically
changing drafts from year to year. I usually have a curiosity about a subject
that becomes a kind of intellectual obsession, and I just write and write
around it until I have a shape of a collection. I also really enjoy writing
long poems and sequences, so that focused attention tends to help out with work
like that. I don’t usually work from notes; I move intuitively toward my
subject and I trust that what I’m writing will either pan out in a collection
or will just be another layer of sediment in my trash bin.
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
used to work on books—projects—from the first moment. The First Risk, my first collection, started out as a book about
hate crimes, but evolved to be a book about grief. In that way, the poems were
offshoots of the overall idea. Another manuscript I’ve written, Career Suicide, I gathered from work I
wrote over a year after leaving a difficult job. I hadn’t set out to write it,
but my internal concerns were very apparent in the work, and they unified
nicely into a collection. I would say a poem begins for me when I hear the
first line in my head. Poems have a different sound than regular thoughts—they
almost feel like they announce themselves!
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I
love reading, but I usually don’t like to read from works in progress because I
know how much they will change before it’s all said and done. I much prefer
presenting work that is complete and finalized, something that offers a
complete experience for the audience and the reader.
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
think my work seeks to answer the questions I have about living, about the
world, about myself. I don’t know that I can or should articulate them, but
when I am working on a project I do have a sense of seeking something, working
toward something. I honestly don’t want to make it more known to myself than
that.
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?
If
I had to boil it down to one major role (and please know I do not want to, but
perhaps think I can), it’s that the writer’s role is to give people
opportunities to develop empathy. The applications of that empathy are broad
and important. And I would say my most meaningful experiences have a reader
have been those that have helped me understand experiences unlike my own, and
I’m grateful to those writers for the opportunity they gave me to be a better
human.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Ha!
I love it. With poetry, I’ve been an editor and been edited. They are both
challenging, but it is so great to experience your work through someone else’s
eyes. It takes trust for it to work.
9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ve
been talking about this a lot lately, and I keep coming back to things C. D. Wright said in a brief workshop I took with her in grad school. My friend and
classmate Caroline asked C. D. how they should respond to people who wanted to
place them both in a “regional writer” box based on where they grew up and what
they wrote about. C. D. said, “Don’t sign up.” Her words have resonated with me
for so long that they’ve become general life advice. To me, she was saying two
really important things. The first is don’t let people define you or your work.
That seems pretty basic, but sometimes you need permission to do that work on
your own behalf. The second meaning is deeper. Don’t let people define how you
see yourself. As a queer writer, that permission was really important to me.
I’ve let her words give me permission to evolve freely, to chase my own ideas,
and to concern myself with only what concerns me.
10 - How easy has it
been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction to essays to
humour)? What do you see as the appeal?
I
think this is all rooted in my basic belief about writing: every story chooses
its own vessel. Form, for me, is one of the most meaningful aspects of any
writing, and I love exploring the limits and opportunities in form. Some things
can only be told using poetry, while others need extended prose. In that
regard, it has been easy to take risks and try new things, though of course
there has been a lot of failure. But every failure is an education.
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?
Well,
that touches on the practical advice I love. I make time for writing every Monday-Friday.
I wake up at 5 am, go exercise, and then set aside an hour to write, edit, make
progress on my work—whatever that means. The hour is always there. It frees up
a lot of my anxiety about getting things done, and the routine of it helps me
buckle down and get to work right away. I only focus on that hour—not the
entirety of what I need to do. I have a full time job, so that hour becomes
very sacred. And my brain is mostly exhausted after dark, so working at night
doesn’t really turn out well for me. I’m most alert in the morning, so getting
to use that time has been a real gift. I also find that my creative
mind/subconscious mind continues to do work on my writing throughout the rest
of the day. Writing in the mornings keeps things present for me.
12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
I
usually have so many projects going on at once that this isn’t a problem for
me, and the routine of my writing keeps me moving. There’s always something to
edit if I can’t write! But I do find reading to be very inspiring, particularly
a book that does something I haven’t seen before. Recent books that have stoked
my creativity are Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Jos Charles’s feeld,
and Chase Berggrun’s RED. I just love
it when writers blow my mind.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
I
don’t know if I could name just one, but some triggers are cut grass, evergreen
trees, and cornfields. Corn plants have such a unique smell to me, and I grew
up in a house surrounded by fields, so it was just a constant. We had over 100
evergreens in our backyard, which my family planted when I was a kid. And a
huge yard. All of those smells I love.
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?
I
owe a lot to film. I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was younger, and I majored
in film studies in school. A lot of film theory has shaped my poetics. I still
find film inspiring. Again, movies that play with form stand out to me: 21 Grams, Pulp Fiction, Memento,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The films of Pedro Almodóvar are
particularly important to me too.
15 - What other writers
or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?
Mary Gaitskill and Jennifer Egan are two novelists whose work always makes me a
grateful reader. I’ve also been reading The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Spider-Gwen
comics because I love re-envisioning a familiar world like that.
16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
My
goal is to write a book that isn’t bound, but still tells a story.
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
know I am supposed to be a writer because almost every other career sounds
interesting to me, and by being a writer I can experience (or imagine to
experience) all of them. But honestly, if I could go back in time and start
over, I would have studied dance. I just love watching it so much, and the
classes I took in adulthood were so amazing. I really wish I could have
dedicated the right years to it.
18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
I
had no choice, or surely I would have chosen something more lucrative.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
Jos Charles’s feeld was the last great
book. Truly exceptional, unlike anything I’ve read, and in this really amazing
way it displaces the reader from language, which for me tied into the theme of
the book as a whole. The last great film was Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. It is perfect, and it has some of
the most unique and innovative animation I’ve ever seen. More than that, it
tells a powerful story, and it does it at an adult level while still speaking
to kids. I was just blown away by it.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
I’ve
been working on two novels, one in the 11th draft and one in the
first draft, and making progress on poems exploring the impact of dating apps
on how gay men relate to each other. The portion I’ve done examines how apps
become a “human vending machine” that turns gay men into a both a consumer and a
commodity, and the ways that affects physical and emotional intimacy. I just
started work on a really big erasure project as part of this, trying to pare
back a text to see what it has to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment