One Question with Jesse Nathan

Since 2021, the poet Jesse Nathan has been conducting very brief interviews, actually just a single question about a contemporary poet's work or new collection for McSweeney's. McSweeney's has recently gathered a selection of these interviews—including Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Jorie Graham, Raúl Zurita, Robert Hass, Ross Gay, and Fady Joudah—for publication in One Question: Short Conversations With Poets, three of which are reprinted here, as well as a question-and-answer with Jesse himself.

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POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA: Why just one question?

JESSE NATHAN: One question, one answer—it’s so simple. And yet it has this sense of immense possibility, like one life. The feeling, partly an illusion, that you can go anywhere with that one query. The hope was always to find a question that opened out onto dozens more questions, a multiplicity of threads, or to switch the metaphor, the kinds of deep wells that don’t run dry. One question, one answer—just enough constraint to make choosing necessary. But with great freedom implied in that choosing, in that constraining. Which is to say, we could point that telescope anywhere. So it’s about a kind of focusing, too. Taking a closer look. One thing I love about a work of art is the way it can isolate something, can create a place to dwell and linger and root into something. In that sense, I think of this kind of micro-interview as a little work of art. And it raises the stakes for me as interviewer. If you can only ask one, what do you ask? It better be good. It better meet the poet where they live. It better cut through the surface chatter and go right to the urgencies and vital currents. Then again, sometimes my “one question” turned out to be many entwined questions disguised as one. Many little questions under the umbrella of one gesture. And there’s also something to be said here about twoness, because one plus one is two, one question, one reply, one call, one response—and that makes a third thing, a relationship, a back-and-forth, a discovery that can only happen in that exchange. A relationship that lives in the electricity and resistance generated by the contained singular question-answer dyad. I also want to digress and note that this form confirmed my belief that there’s probably no such thing as digression. My friend says that’s because there’s nothing to digress upon. In that light, one question is maybe a kind of sampling. A tuning in to some larger, even cosmic, dialogue that’s far bigger than one interviewer and one poet.

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Q & A: CATHY PARK HONG, 2023



JESSE NATHAN: I wonder if you might dwell a moment on the difference between prose and poetry. What do you turn to prose for, as a reader—or as a writer? What about poetry?

CATHY PARK HONG: I don’t try to distinguish between poetry and prose too much, because I see myself as a bricoleur rather than a practitioner of one genre. In the past, I’ve approached poetry like a fiction writer (invented worlds, writing in the voice of characters) and I approached prose like a poet (resisting closure, writing sentences with a lyric sensibility).

I do see a distinction between my approaches to essay and poetry. In essays, I am more intentional about mapping out the arc of my thinking. I start with a question, which then bears fruit to more questions. I’m also aware that my voice is more “authoritative” because I am making an argument— of sorts—either with myself or with an audience that I might have in mind. But still, the process between poetry and essay writing overlap. Saidiya Hartman called her book Wayward Lives “beautiful experiments.” I see the essay, much like the poem, as an experiment. I permit myself detours, and I make associative leaps from paragraph to paragraph much like a poet would from stanza to stanza. What inspires an essay could be as elusive as an image, or a fragment of a memory—in my last essay, “The Indebted” in Minor Feelings, it began with a memory of swimming in the Red Hook pool, for instance, which—on its own—has nothing to do with notions of racial and generational indebtedness, which is what that essay explores. Drafting an essay is like talk therapy, but with a lot more agonizing over sentences.

I allow myself more play in poetry. I love to indulge in language and formal compositions, to follow the sonic friction between two words and see what narrative unfolds from it—strangely, I resist the personal in poetry. I prefer to throw my voice, to impersonate, and stretch language to its limits. I’ve always loved poets who’ve done that—Celan, Hopkins, Coleman, Kearney. Poetry allows me to “just be” on the page, to revel in the sensory, to camp up my phenomenological experience. I find poetry to be very freeing because the process can be so aleatory. But during the pandemic, I resisted writing the way I wrote before—which is to create these elaborate worlds—and to just write daily poems, because our sense of time and the daily was upended. Memories are carved when changes of space occur, but if you’re in the same space, on Zoom, how does that affect memory? So I wrote a suite of poems titled after Williams’s Spring and All—don’t know if I’ll ever publish it. The language is more lax than I allow my poems to be, and they’re more personal, and I’m also hesitant to publish anything pandemic-related, because pandemic literature was a cliché before anyone started writing it. But I will say that, whereas before I was really interested in integrating prose into my poetry, I’m now trying to stay in the lyric mode, see how far I can stretch it. Book-wise, I’m writing this new group of poems about a flood that takes place in a fictionalized village. I’m returning to persona in these poems. I’m also writing a novel—though I hesitate to call it a novel, I like the term “documentary fiction”—about a North Korean terrorist. As I said, I can’t stay in one genre.

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Q & A: YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, 2021



JESSE NATHAN: Every word in your poems feels weighed, has a heft to it, feels earned and chiseled out. But at the same time, the style and the voices in these poems often seem languorous, or to long for a languor. For a lingering, for something slower, something not so driving. Do you think that’s accurate? Why, for instance, do you favor the ampersand in your poems? And what does “efficiency” mean to you, in terms of poetry?

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: I like poetry that invites contemplation, and not the false urgency of an ad for an emotion propelled by noise. I read first the protest sonnets by Claude McKay and ballads by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then ventured to poems by Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Many of those poems one could sing.

Now, I believe that there’s an uproar in our contemporary psyche that is attitude or disposition—a noise outside of sound that we ingest—even in poetry. In fact, I admire poetry that invites the reader in as a co-creator of meaning, atypical to the vertical plunge of some contemporary constructed poems of acceleration which does little for hearts and minds. Here, I think of Miles Davis when he began playing “fusion” gigs, trying to keep up with commercial zip-whang-doodle, saying that he stopped playing ballads because he loved them too much. So, yes, there is something to say about differences in the music of language; though I do not create much experimental diction, sometimes one has to follow the movement of one’s mind, even if it is not exactly the tonal reckoning in a Coltrane solo indebted to meditation.

When possible, I like to surprise myself, and I do that by improvising, but then one has to humble oneself and apply craft. In this sense, I learned a lot from my father who was a finishing carpenter who practiced precision. A sense of craft is not efficiency; it is often caring enough about one’s reader to keep working until a poem says what you want lyrically. Writing is work. I feel it takes an unhealthy ego to toss it out there or “spit” it into the air. I’m happy that’s not me. The idea of efficiency makes this sound like the journey of an antihero, someone who doesn’t have heart and soul to endure the daily grind.

I grew up doing physical work, and perhaps that has informed my need to get it right, my love for using tools, to trust raw passion to grow and hone the poem beyond any idea of languor. The ampersand has been with me since my first poems. I am a visual person, and I like the look of this symbol, and it seems to speed up a line. It isn’t exactly my temperament to play word-jive, but I embraced some of the Beats—mainly Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac—before I read modernists such as E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. In the late 1970s, the amper- sand appeared informal, and that’s what I wanted my poems to signify, but later I realized the symbol also appears in some classical writings. I never thought about reversing my choice, and lately I’ve noticed some young poets using the ampersand. It is one’s freedom, right?

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Q & A: SAFIYA SINCLAIR, 2023



JESSE NATHAN: Could you talk a little bit about how it was that you realized you were a writer, particularly a writer of poems? What awakened that in you, do you think?

SAFIYA SINCLAIR: It all begins with the sea. I was born in a tiny seaside village called White House, on the coast of Montego Bay, where the sea’s constant blue is an open question I keep wading into, plucking poems from the water, trying to answer. The sea of my birthplace is the thing that most inspires me to write. It is the rhythm I imagine lapping behind the line of every poem. It is the place I imagine in the background of all my poems, even before I can set down the first word, or the first line of a poem.

Often, I think of a poem as a red door on the sand of my sea village that I pass through, in hopes of capturing the beauty of the waves. This is to say, in some sense, I was a poet long before I had a name for it. Growing up surrounded by such natural beauty, such blazing color—the sea and the island’s lush green interior—it is hard to not live in a perpetual kind of awe. My keenest way to bear witness to this awe is through poetry.

This deeply attuned awe all begins with my mother, who was a lover of poems and prosody before I was born, and who first instilled my love of poetry through recitation. When I was growing up, she kept a book on poetics called Sound and Sense, from which she first taught me the different elements of poetry. My siblings and I would memorize and recite poems with my mother as a weekly practice, which was part of a unique after-school education that she crafted for us. These lessons also included nurturing a deep love and understanding of the green languages of nature. Appreciating all the bursting color and unruly hiss of the tropics. She taught me how to identify each tree, each flower, each creature we saw. How to populate the world of my poems with texture. How to be painterly. Here was the first awakening of my young poet—learning to distill a bloom into poem. It was this love of the landscape that first moved me to write my little nature poems when I was ten.

Music was also an integral part of this awakening, of course. My father is a reggae musician, so music was always a large part of my daily life. My siblings and I used to have a family band when we were younger, where we wrote and sang songs about saving the environment. Music was also a fundamental aspect of my mother’s after-school lessons. Every day, my siblings and I sang. We had a river song, a sea song, a song for nurturing a seed from the soil. Song and dance are an essential part of Jamaican ethos, rooted in our oral traditions and African history. So, alongside the instruction of my weekly recitations, I’ve always understood music to be an inseparable element of the best poetry.

Finally, the singular condition of growing up as a young woman in a strict Rastafari household made it necessary to nurture my poetic voice on the page. Rastafari are a historically persecuted minority in Jamaica, and I was ostracized at school because of my dreadlocks. The older I became, the more I began to feel like an outsider. When I was ten, there was a traumatic event at primary school, stemming from a friend telling me she didn’t want to be friends anymore, because I was Rasta. I was gravely wounded. But from that hurt, came my first real poem, when my mother handed me a book called Poems of a Child’s World and I discovered William Blake, a poet who also wrote intensely about nature and the nature of the soul. While reading Blake, I marveled at my discovery—that poetry could outlive the poet who made it. That poetry could, in many ways, unmake any hurt. It could transform a life into something else entirely.

Poetry is so intimately interwoven with my formative years, my selfhood, my love of my country, and the nurturing hands of my mother, how could I not choose it? Looking back now, it seems inevitable that poetry is what would come next. That poetry, in some sense, chose me. Nowadays my mother likes to say, “I can’t believe I have my own personal poet.” And I laugh. And then I write it down.