12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ben von Jagow

Ben von Jagow is the author of Goalie (Guernica Editions 2025). His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Queen's Quarterly, EVENT, and the Literary Review of Canada, among other publications. For more of Ben's work, visit benvj.com.

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 familiarized me with a feeling that, I suspect, is integral to becoming a writer. I was living in South Africa, and I allowed someone to convince me that unless I was making money off my writing, I wasn’t a real writer. So I put together a collection of short stories, which I self-published. And though that process taught me a great deal, it also felt rushed, as though I had introduced something into the world before it was ready. They say you only get one chance at a first impression, and I sort of feel like I botched mine. I stood up, grabbed the mic, and riffed well before I deserved those privileges.

Goalie felt different. I finished that collection in 2022 and began sending it out. It was accepted for publication in 2023 but wasn’t published until 2025. During that time, I worked with a great editor – shoutout to Elana Wolff – and together, we worked through every poem, every line, every word to make sure it served its purpose. Learning that I had to wait three years until my book would hit the shelves felt like agony, but looking back now, I’m incredibly grateful for that time. Between the shotgun blast that was my first book and the glacier melt that was my second, I much prefer the latter. It turns out good things do, in fact, take time.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I dabble in all three, but I feel like my temperament is best suited to poetry. Though I love crafting sentences, I don’t quite have the patience required for long works of fiction or nonfiction. In my opinion, a poem feels more immediate and can capture a fleeting mood, a feeling, or emotion far more effectively than a drawn-out story. I do hope to write many great stories in my career – both true and fictive – but for that quick-hitting, crack-pipe release, I will always choose poetry.

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?

It depends. I know that’s not a sexy answer, but when it comes to poetry, some poems I nail on the first or second shot, others take weeks, months, sometimes years to complete. I have drafts saved on my computer that are five or six years old, which I still very much believe in – though maybe I don’t yet have the words or the wisdom to finish them. Yet. Always “yet.”

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?

When I’m at my best, I write from all aspects of my life. Sometimes those areas coalesce and begin to form a theme, at which point I start considering a book. I find that if I write with the goal of filling a book, the poems turn out a bit too formulaic and forced.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

No, I’m too shy. I prefer a reader’s attention over the attention of a large room.

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 don’t really begin with theory, but I’m aware my work will inevitably start circling a set of questions – like earth orbiting the sun. I’m interested in identity. How we figure out who we are in a world full of expectations and inherited ideas about masculinity and success.

In Goalie, a lot of that came through environment. Having lived and played abroad, I’ve seen how locker rooms, teams, cities, and countries shape what feels possible or permissible, especially for men. I’m often asking how much of who we are is chosen and how much is trained into us.

I also keep returning to questions of self-actualization and adversity – whether strength and introspection can coexist, and what it looks like embracing our true selves when deviation from the norm isn’t always rewarded.

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?

Put this beautiful life into words. Make art. Paint.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Again, unsexy, but both. It can be disheartening to have someone discard or dismiss a line or a word you thought was literary dynamite, but there was also typically a method behind the madness. I was fortunate to work with a great editor while polishing Goalie, and many of Elana’s notes helped clarify lines I’d glossed over. I suppose there are few greater gifts to the young writer than a good editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I’ll give you two, both of which have made an impact on me.

The first is trite but valid: read. A writer who isn’t also an avid reader has a difficult road ahead of them. Reading, to me, is practice. And having spent the majority of my life playing sports, I know just how critical practice is when it comes to development.

The second is to treat the creative process as a job. I’m aware many people might disagree with me – many people, in fact, have – but for me, writing is work. I don’t wait until the mood or the moment feels right to craft sentences. I force myself to sit down and clock in, much the same way I would any other job. That single act, of sitting down to write, has paid more dividends than all of my “epiphanies” combined.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I like to write first thing in the morning, though with work and sports, I can’t always afford to do so. That being said, there are very few days in the year where I go to bed not having written anything at all. I seek out moments in the day where I can block off a chunk of time in which I write. I’m not too picky as to what I write or for how long, just so long as my keys clack.  

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Exercise. Music. Travel.

Exercise is the quick fix, the daily dose. It gets the blood and the creative juices flowing. I’ll go for a run or hit the gym, and when I come back, I’m almost always in a better mental state.

Music is soul food, and writing, as you know, requires soul.

Travel is probably the most obscure point on this list, and I don’t necessarily mean I jet off to Quito when I get stuck. But for me, changing my setting has always been fruitful. New sights, new sounds, new smells – a writer could do a lot worse.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

This year, Halloween coincided with Game 6 of the World Series. I dressed up as Harry Potter – cloak, wand, scar, everything – and went to meet some buddies at a bar to watch the game. I opened the door to a sea of Blue Jays jerseys. There were about three hundred people in the bar, and no one else was wearing a costume. In the end, I saw two other people in costumes that night. A witch, and another Harry Potter. Oh, and the Jays lost.

13 - 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 find inspiration in art as a concept. Goalie wasn’t necessarily influenced by a specific song or a captivating vista, but the desire to create something of my own was very much at the forefront, shaped by the music I listen to and the art I appreciate.  

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Poetry: Selina Boan, Kayla Czaga, Alden Nowlan, Lynn Crosbie, Ellie Sawatzky.

Fiction: Ocean Vuong, Mary Lawson, Min Jin Lee, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Diaz.

Nonfiction: Bill Bryson, James Baldwin, David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, Jon Krakauer.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to finish the novel I’m working on and find a home for my collection of essays.

16 - 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’m pretty blessed to say that I have three jobs, all of which I love a great deal. I play American football professionally overseas, I’m the Marketing Manager for a Canadian distillery in Perth, Ontario, and I write.

There’s a song by Luke Combs that starts, “Someone asked me once in an interview…what would you do if you weren’t doin’ this?” He goes on to say that he’d be “singin’ them same damn songs like I am now…I’d still be doin’ this if I wasn’t doin’ this.”

That song really resonates with me. I feel like I’m following the right path, and that I’d follow it regardless of the circumstances.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’d love to be a country music star, but I have no stage presence or musical talent so…this.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – a $6.99 pickup at Value Village. The last great film I watched was Rush.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve got a novel in the works, a book of poetry, and an essay collection all competing for my attention. I’ve also got a Q4 Report to run and a knee to rehab. Busy man.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Noah Ross, The Dogs

 

Have to be a pretty large wolf to snap own spine the force can you imagine

Something that out of control in your vocabulary

It’ll heal

If you lick or please especially, one question, if on the way back

The blood left a bad idea

If we know what the game is, if we promised a rite

Somebody’s promise, somebody’s bait

After moving through Noah Ross’ chapbook The Holy Grail (Wry Press, 2025) recently [see my review of such here], I’m attempting to catch up with the rest of his published work, finally moving through his collection, The Dogs (Krupskaya, 2024). As you might already know, The Dogs is Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross’ second full-length title, following Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. In both The Dogs and The Holy Grail, there is something curious about how Ross works through each particular subject thoroughly, completely, and from multiple angles (this new title, providing, in its own way, an echo of Sawako Nakayasu’s classic title The Ants, a poetry collection recently afforded a new edition). As well, both projects were prompted and structured as response-echoes of other works, overlaying his own take over the bones of another. Whereas the structure of The Holy Grail follows Jack Spicer’s own classic sequence, this new project, The Dogs, follows a structure of a source material I’m not familiar with. As he writes as part of a note on the text at the back of the collection:

            The Dogs is the outgrowth of an illicit project—an affair with language that multiplied. Many affairs. A series of unofficial, say, “creative,” engagements—Hervé Guilbert’s Les chiens, dialogue from the 2010’s soap drama Teen Wolf, Marie de France’s “Bisclavret,” that, in their cohabitation, brought to the fore other texts, other pack dynamics, other images and languages of queer love, power, devotion to monsters. What began with Guilbert found itself seeded with Auden’s unauthorized poem “The Platonic Blow” (“The Gobble Poem”), Dom Orejudos’ leather dom comics, my own packs.
            An affair with a question, a question around translation. How to work with a text that will likely remain untranslated (Les chiens)? This plaquette pornographique—dirty, autofictive, bodily, juicy, disturbing, awkward, biting. Personal. Guilbert’s life, Guilbert’s sex, Guilbert’s work. What methods of engagement translate, retranslate, expand, disturb a text until it’s no longer an author’s, an author’s sex, an author’s work—could it ever be mine? Ours? Is it that my desire is heightened by the impossible, the unrequited? Or that a moment of assimilationist legacy making, where monsters are refashioned twink saints for sanitized worship, brings out my own inner wolf? The drive to bite the text, turn it, make it transform. To cut it up, to be cut up, to perform acts of violence, to reflect acts of violence.

Illicit, Ross offers, although this sly intention might underplay what he has accomplished: an ambitious and incredibly playful work, stitching together an array of propulsive language and collaged reference across the bones, presumably, of Guilbert’s original work. One would suspect this a work not purely translated but reimagined, utilizing translation but one of a handful of tools towards constructing an entirely new work.

As if the presence of the text excites me [as if behind this room another where the bodies lapping in] Defiance of this room and the contractions of my ass. [His, His, Theirs, and the letting of a fall to the ground, the barely] Perceptible sound of bellies in motion [just beneath me, somewhere behind me, above this bed] Impossible to even imagine the very thought of falling [asleep the thought of finding positions elongated in the reach across] Walls that I lick, as if to taste our texts, [the bodies heckle, the buzzing of horseplay, as if to taunt me, as if like children] Messing around in the text, throwing bricks where the bellies connect [rooms hitting where my head rests against this wall, letting the juice pour into my mouth, my] Sleep, taking it from behind

The Dogs is structured as a sequence of collage-accumulations, offering lyric prose structures, paragraphs and fragments, across six sections: “Teen Wolf / How Beautiful People Hurt Together,” “The Dogs / Every Hallway Somewhere Else Start Over,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Water He Enters,” “Swaddled In Lint The Cloth Pure In Dye / Less Swaddled In The Juices,” “A Dream Within A Dream Of Garwolf / Oh Bisclavret” and “A Liquid Sky / Some Night Again.” The collection holds as a kind of book-length suite, an accumulation of stitched reference, movement and playful enterprise, writing around elements of love and violence, human and animal capacity, werewolf/wolf man legends, and language twists. “A string being pulled,” the first section offers, “people whispering: // Remember this absolute Hair of the dog // Take a deep breath and tell me what you feel // Any riddles, are you magnetized, superstitious // Who are you, getting colder, who are we freezing [.]”

 

even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, eds. Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt and Daniel Benjamin

            But for our purposes, Spicer’s description of letters that are “experiments in a heightened prose combined with poetry” does much to explain his own work, and the importance of this volume in Spicer’s larger oeuvre. The more than 300 letters in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared constitute a significant addition to Jack Spicer’s published works, not merely for the light they shine on his life and contexts, but also because many of them have as much reason to be classed with his poetic works as the texts in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer or Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer. Indeed, Spicer’s letters to James Alexander appear both in My Vocabulary and in this present volume. In Be Brave To Things, editor Daniel Katz printed a draft letter to Russel FitzGerald from one of Spicer’s notebooks at the Bancroft Library that we are also including here.
            Beyond these liminal texts that produce problems for editors, Spicer frequently included letters that were unmistakably part of his book manuscripts. That practice is inaugurated with Spicer’s first book, After Lorca (White Rabbit Press, 1957), which he began composing at the time he was studying Dickinson’s letter-poems. Intermittently throughout the book, we read letters from “Jack” to “Lorca” on the differences between poetry and prose, the translation of reality into language, and the necessary loneliness of poetry. Certainly, these letters are works of poetics, and Spicer selected one of them to be printed in his “Statement on Poetics” in Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry. But why put forward these statements in letters—and what’s more, in letters that would require a mystical connection to reach their addressee, given that Federico García Lorca had been dead since 1936? (“Introduction: The Real Jack, The Half-Real Jack, and the Miracle of Communication,” Daniel Benjamin)

I’ve come to appreciate volumes of letters by and between writers over the years, having appreciated the multiple volumes in the correspondence between Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, the many volumes through CUNY’s Lost and Found series—delighting in catching American short story writer Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) referring to Richard Brautigan as “Asshole Brautigan” in “Let Us Hear About Your Progress”: Letters Between Lucia Berlin, Edward Dorn, & Jennifer Dunbar Dorn (2024), ed. Megan Paslawski—or the wealth of information through the recent volume The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 (WLU Press, 2025), ed. J.A. Weingarten, through no small measure due to the fact that I’m actually included within. It was lovely to hear the late John Newlove’s (1938-2003) voice emerge so clearly through these letters, offering a broader appreciation of his life and his work. I’ve even two volumes of letters, if you can believe it, by and to Groucho Marx that are delightful, including an ongoing exchange between Marx and TS Eliot: most of the letters articulate plans or appreciations for when they will have dinner in a month during a visit, or when we had dinner last month, during a visit, but the best is the acknowledgment by the famously proper Eliot, who finally admits that he can’t bring himself to refer to Marx as Groucho, but only by his given name, Julius.

Recently, I’ve been going through the remarkable volume even strange ghosts can be shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, eds. Kevin Killian (1952-2019), Kelly Holt and Daniel Benjamin (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025). This is collection seemingly in the works for some time, given Killian’s untimely death more than half a decade earlier [see my review of his recently-published volume of collected poems here], so kudos to those editors able to continue and complete the work that Killian had been part of starting. Killian, of course, had been a prominent scholar on the work of the late San Francisco renaissance poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), having co-authored, with Lewis Ellingham, Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). As one of the footnotes in the collection also offers (a fact I hadn’t been previously known, referring to, as Benjamin writes, “In 1958, he [Jack Spicer] began drafting what he hoped would be a popular novel satirizing the Beat poets. Many letters detail Spicer’s attempts to place his chapters before a sympathetic agent, but the novel was never finished.”), “Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian edited the extant material and published it as The Tower of Babel: Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel (Talisman House, 1994).” Obviously, volumes of letters allow for a continued research into a broader context for an author and their work, especially for Spicer, who saw an overlap between personal correspondence and literary output, seeing the two as intricately connected. “By the way,” Spicer writes to Allen Joyce on July 16, 1955, “I hope you show other people these letters I write you. They are personal letters for you and they are also public letters. I measure their success by how well I can succeed in being deeply personal and deeply public at the same time. Like my poems.”

These letters by the famously difficult Spicer also articulate a sense of personal distance he maintained, even with those he wished to be close to; how the letters articulate a kind of connection that wasn’t always possible in person, but could be romanticized or perfected, through that particular distance. As Benjamin furthers, through the introduction:

[…] The Jack of the letters, too, might be something more than the “half-real Jack,” and he can pursue a romance of correspondence in the way that the “half-real Jack” in person could not. On the one hand, the imagination is nourished by the visit of the real Graham: “On the day after I’ve seen you it always seems I could write a letter to you that could go on forever,” Spicer begins. But the endless letter is also an endless deferral. The imagined togetherness continues, delaying any return to actual togetherness. The reality of imagination triumphs over the reality of what can be seen and touched.

Spicer’s letters in this volume are organized extremely well, numbering letters to particular individuals, with letters grouped into particular periods—“Los Angeles, Redlands, Berkeley, 1943-1950,” “Minneapolis, 1950-1952,” “Berkeley and San Francisco, 1952-1955,” “New York and Boston, 1955-1956” and “The San Francisco Renaissance, 1956-1965”—each of which hold their own introduction for larger context. There are elements of these letters that frustrate, slightly, given the one-sidedness of certain conversations, although fully aware how that would have been a far larger editorial project (presuming, also, that responses to Spicer’s missives even still existed in searchable archives), especially given the levels of personal chaos and mood-swings and grudges depicted. As the final section’s introduction by Benjamin acknowledges:

            Perhaps these feuding letters paint a one-sided picture as most of Spicer’s interactions, during these years, were in person, and Spicer picked up his poison pen only to make his anger public and permanent. Spicer’s last years, nonetheless, included increasing estrangement from the world and even from those he loved the most. His drinking—always significant from his first Berkeley days—escalated seriously in the 1960s, and his health was in shambles.

One might already be aware of the huge impact Spicer’s work has had on subsequent literature, a ripple effect on Canadian poetry and poetics as well, in large part due to the three infamous lectures he gave in Vancouver in Warren and Ellen Tallman’s living room in June, 1965—collected by Peter Gizzi in the house that jack built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), a volume recently re-released in paperback—a series of informal talks attended by multiple writers from Vancouver and beyond, including, as Gizzi lists from his introduction to the volume, Dorothy Livesay, George Bowering, Judith Copithorne, Jamie Reid, Angela Bowering and Gladys Hindmarch, among others. What do, one might ask, these letters specifically offer? Much as do the published journals of the late Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986), these letters provide insight into the concerns and the language of one of North America’s essential poets, providing the good and bad both, and the threads through which he and his writing engaged.

To James Alexander #15

{1959}

            Dear James,
            Measuring the volcanic quality of rock if one sparrow beats against it it is as if nothing has ever happened.
            What I mean is that volcanos like Greeks knew their own limits and sparrows didn’t.
            Christ’s dying was no excuse.