{ in this interview, jae newman discusses naming the muses and slot machines… }\
when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?
My reader certainly isn’t the same one Ted Kooser has in mind. I don’t think about many specifics of an ideal reader, but I tend to picture someone who doesn’t like poetry—yet. I strive to create work that offers something quietly powerful. Something capable of bringing someone’s whole day to a halt at mid-bite of a sandwich on lunch break. For me, this starts with creating work intimate enough that the reader senses their own engagement.
how do you use poetry as a practice for spiritual exploration, discipline, or growth? can you offer any practical advice or sure-fire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their spiritual discipline?
There’s a tradition in poetry of poets naming their muses. It came as a surprise to me one night to realize that I felt like I had a direct line from God to create poems. I don’t feel special in that regard. I think that’s accessible to many folks.
Writing poetry and praying are both practices that require balance: silence and language, boldness and meekness, and questions and answers.
If you want to commune with God, to glean access to the “golden thread” of inspiration, then you’ve got to engage with the flexibility of metaphorical language via the inflexibility of prayer that has nothing to do with asking for growth on your terms. That’s scary for us. It should be.
when you approach your desk, journal, computer—where ever it is you tend to create—what are some of the processes you use? what’s going through your mind? tell us about your habits of writing, no matter how quirky, mundane, strange, or small.
Writing poems has to be one of the most idiosyncratic activities imaginable! I used to picture myself as a sailor or sorts—the awkward recipient of a sudden gust wind, breath (ruach), or presence of the Spirit literally casting me off into the poem. I’d pray for the idea and then launch out unsure where I was going. Before I start any poem, I note a series of usually three images that will vibrate around in the pin-ball playground of my mind until they manifest in a kind of glory I recognize as not my own. That’s when it feels like all the world aligns. It’s like getting three cherries synced on a slot machine. You can’t believe it.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
Get lost. If you’re not lost, you’re not trying to revise. You’re trying to follow the Hansel & Gretel course of creative writing whereby you can control the terms of what you will say by sending little sentences into the waters to pull forth samples of where you’ve been. If you want to be authentic, to strike that intimate chord, you have to be surprised yourself at what you discover. You have to find it in the middle of a hedge maze without no idea how you’ll get back.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
Writers instinctively work until they have no one to read their work. When we’re not seen or heard from, it’s over. Isn’t that how we feel? Every writer needs at least one person he or she can trust to read it and allow for that genuine moment of being recognized for what you can create. One of my mentors told me once that I would write my poems no matter what lie ahead of me after graduation. I told her I was afraid of having to work and student loans, etc.
I was afraid I wouldn’t have time. She looked at me and kind of prophetically reaffirmed what she had just said. “You’re going to write these poems.” And I did.
Sometimes really early in the morning. Sometimes during lunch breaks. Sometimes in the middle of the night.
would you like to share a poem you’re working on or have recently finished and comment on how it was written in light of the comments above?
When I was nineteen I was in love and in a long distance relationship. I had no car. I had no cell phone. I had a lot of time though. I wrote over 500 poems that year of college and most were pathetic, but one was not. One had something real about it. I took that poem to grad school and wanted to dress it up as I sought to be seen as the guy who wrote long love poems. I turned my fourteen line poem into a ten page mash up of other poems. Finally, I took it through another 14 revisions to arrive back essentially where I began. Eliot says something about arriving back where we began and still being stunned by that initial impulse. That was my experience. Here’s how that poem ended up:
ORANGE SLIVERS ON THE NIGHTSTAND
Once she peeled an orange
and offered it to me
not because I said I was hungry
but because she knew I was.
She whispered love
into my ears, and somewhere in this
I was consumed by the scent
of an orange lingering on her hands in reverie.
Everything I do, a reply
to the scent of her fingers upon the fruit I won’t eat
unless she peels,
the love I can’t understand without my heels
upon her ankles
like broken stanzas that will never be written.
Resting between her thighs, fingers brush my hair,
comb through my anxiety of hidden statues
emerging from the Yellow Sea.
Deep within the wood,
I am polishing my sadness for her
and she is so patient. For the labors we have fought for,
for our love that has grown upward,
facing the sun
I can see tiny orange slivers on the nightstand, sitting still,
waiting for me,
while she runs her orange soaked hands through my graying hair.
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Jae Newman, author of COLLAGE OF SEOUL, lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife and two daughters. He teaches writing courses at Roberts Wesleyan College. A graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University, his poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently finishing up a Master of Arts in Theological Studies at North Eastern Seminary.