Interview with IAIA Professor Jake Fournier, Poet and author of “Punishment Bag”

by Rey M. Rodríguez

Jake Fournier is a poet, scholar, and educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose work moves with urgency and precision across the intertwined terrains of lyric, history, and political imagination. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago, where his research specialized in abolitionist poetics and the interplay between rhetoric, resistance, and verse.

Fournier’s poetry has appeared in Annulet, Lana Turner, and The Yale Review, and his criticism—rooted in deep archival engagement and critical theory—has been published in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. This January, he published his debut poetry collection, Punishment Bag (University of New Mexico Press) (https://www.unmpress.com/9780826369222/punishment-bag/), a daring volume that pushes the boundaries of language and traverses strange lyric terrains.

In addition to his writing, Fournier teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, bringing his sharp critical sensibilities and deep commitment to justice into the classroom. Across both his creative and scholarly work, he asks what it means to write in the shadow of historical violence and unfinished freedom, and how contemporary poetry might inherit, revise, or refuse the formal and ethical traditions of protest.

In this interview, we speak with Fournier about why he writes, poetry, and the ongoing work of exploring the boundaries of language.

Jake Fournier, such a pleasure to have you at Storyteller's Corner, the blog for Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

It's a great pleasure to be here and to be hosted here.

How did you get into writing?

I'm from the suburbs of Erie, a small city in western Pennsylvania. That's where I was born, and that's also where I discovered that I'm a poet, or that poetry is something vital to my life. 

I put it that way for a reason, because it's not something one chooses to be so much as one discovers that one already is. I've been thinking a lot about this background lately, in part because it's been informing more of the poetry that I've been writing.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about my vocational and career trajectories for different essays that I'm working on, or thinking about how I went from being an academic to becoming a structural firefighter, which is its own subject.

But I was one of four children, and I grew up in what I would describe as a mixed-class family. My father has only a high school education, and he is a mechanical genius, self-educated in everything that he does. High school was something that he begrudgingly attended, but he taught himself how to do auto mechanics, how to build houses, how to lay foundations, pour concrete, you name it. He is a genius in his way, though I don't think he would ever describe himself in those terms. 

My mother did have a college education, and she was always interested in math and science, but didn't really have a direction for it, and ended up, almost by chance, choosing her major.

She was one of the very few women who studied computer science at Penn State in 1980.

Anyway, it was a time when it wasn't clear where the future of computer science lay, and she had offers from all different sorts of places, but she ended up taking a job with GE Transportation, which was the main employer in Erie.

As far as how I ended up in writing… If childhood is not a space of difficulty for us, then we're almost more disadvantaged than when it is. But for me, childhood was. As one of four, reading became this way for me to build the world that I was reading in the books, and it became this great escape. This way of finding my own place in the world.

What would you read?

I would read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and it was mostly because those were the books that were around the house. My brother was a big reader before me, and to this day is still a huge fan of fantasy. He's got a tattoo in Elvish on his forearm, and he and his partner of many years participate in various LARPing and role-playing events. 

Thanks to him, I discovered a series that I think was formative for me by a British author named Brian Jacques. It's called the Redwall series, and it's about different animals that take roles in a medieval fantasy world, where the heroes are mice and their enemies are the rats. I was hungry for some world not my own. But I was also casting about for something that could satisfy the immense curiosity that I had.

And the first books that I found that came close, once I was old enough, were Kurt Vonnegut's novels, which my mother had actually been a big fan of. Vonnegut had his own family connections to the massive General Electric Corporation in I want to say Schenectady, New York, or maybe Poughkeepsie. But my mother was fond of a book that was one of the less interesting ones to me, called Player Piano, about a machine that learns how to play chess better than human beings.

Anyway, I discovered some of Vonnegut’s novels, the most fascinating to me was a book called Bluebeard about the abstract expressionist movement, and a painter who used a sort of industrial paint that had a short shelf life so that his paintings were in a process of erosion at the peak of his fame, or I guess what would have been his fame if he hadn't used this paint that destroyed itself over time.

Hmm.

So that…that was...that book especially, I think, that set me down a path towards studying literature, maybe with a capital L. It was the bridge.

Vonnegut wrote things that sort of fit into this sci-fi world, where his books ended up in our house, but he was also much more than a genre writer, and laughed when people saw his books as science fiction at all.

I went to Catholic school, and I remember…so Redwall…the covers of these Redwall books, these fantasy novels about mice. They were very bright, gilded, flashy mass-market paperbacks. I went to this austere Catholic school where many of the teachers were nuns. It was the school where my mother went to school. Some of the same teachers, some of the same nuns who taught her, ended up teaching me.

I was one of the rare, perhaps the only kid, or one of the few kids, who was reading books outside of what we were assigned, even from a very early age. And, instead of being happy and celebrating this, they told me I was reading the wrong books. They didn’t like these flashy covers! So I would cover the books that I was bringing to class in brown bag covers so that they would attract less attention from the nuns. 

Did you study literature in college?

I ended up going on to study literature in college. It came from this desire, this gift that these writers had given me. This escape that they offered me. This sense of the larger world.

It helped me to find a place of belonging in life. And I thought that there would be nothing better than to give that gift to somebody else. That feeling that they have a place.

It's funny, given what I've managed to write in my writing life so far, which I think more than likely is prone to disorient and leave people feeling like ‘wherever I am is not the place I thought I was.’

It seemed like both the greatest gift that I could give and the most impossible thing to do. I had no models for what it would mean to write books. I didn't know any authors. I didn't have any connection to the academic world. And my only sense was that this small, failing industrial town that I grew up in was not a place where I could pursue this dream. 

Again, following in my brother’s footsteps, I ended up getting involved in theater in high school, and as a part of that, I had been on a trip to New York City, and I remember being in Greenwich Village and seeing the banners for New York University. This is one of the few colleges outside of Erie that I had any sense of. And mostly what struck me about it was that it didn't have a campus. Like, these NYU buildings were just in the middle of the city. I wanted to skip college and have a life, or maybe feel like college was something I was doing on the side.

When it came time for me to apply to colleges, I applied to three schools: New York University, Syracuse, and a college in Erie that had the same name as the high school that I went to. I had visited my brother in Syracuse, and I knew that I hated it. I had spent my childhood in Erie, desperate for something more to do, driving around and hanging out in Walmarts with my friends, and I knew that I wasn't going to stay in Erie, so I left myself with this one option of going to New York University, which is what I promptly did. I got on the 48 Lakeshore Limited, the train that ran from Chicago to New York—it's a twelve-hour train ride—and I arrived with a printed-out MapQuest to get me from Penn Station to Washington Square Park for my orientation. Did I know at the time that I was going to study literature? No. I knew I had this deep conviction that I wanted to be a writer, and I thought if there was some way of doing that where literature is not the main thing that I study, that would be great.

I experimented with journalism. I had a pretty strong aversion, actually, to the notion of the creative writing workshop. I don't know where that came from, but there was something that unnerved me about it. Something that had to do with my own arrogance or my sense of literature with a capital L, but it brought things into the space of the quotidian and of group therapy or something that I was uneasy with at first.

Then, of course, I realized more and more how unlikely I was to pursue journalism. I studied anthropology, which I loved, but I didn’t really understand what I would do if I continued to study it. Eventually, I just took more and more literature classes, because that's where my fascination and interest were, and I ended up chancing my way into some fantastic writing workshops. I made some of my closest friends and encountered some of the teachers who had the biggest impact on me, and ultimately gave me the opportunity to study writing at the graduate level, which is what I went on to do.

Did you encounter poetry then?

Well, I first encountered poetry when I was younger. The nuns would have us memorize poems and recite them for the class. They'd give us poems by Rudyard Kipling and, at a younger age, Shel Silverstein. This is something I recognized not just personally, but also the nuns and the teachers recognized that I had a special aptitude for this. I had a phenomenal working memory. They'd give us all these poems, and 10 minutes later, I'd have the poem memorized and ready to recite.

So there was first this love of the performance of poetry, but then there was, around sixth or seventh grade, I had a wonderful teacher. She was a nun. Her name was Sister Marianne Perrone, and she ran a club at the school called Ink Spots. They put out a newsletter written by the students. This was a K through 8th-grade elementary school.

She taught me what meter was. I can remember they wanted us to write rhyming couplets about older students, and I wrote these rhyming couplets that were terribly disbalanced from a metrical point of view, like a long first line and a short second line. She was like, “Oh, you understand that there's this thing in poetry called meter or measure, and it's related to the stress of syllables?” 

And from there, I ended up writing some of my own poems. Sister Marianne recognized the talent I had, and one of the poems won a contest that was held by a local high school.

Then I had the great fortune of attending a high school that offered a creative writing class, and I had a strong enough conviction that it was something I was interested in that I took it with another great teacher, Terry Healey, in the ninth grade. I met some of the few people that I would still consider my great, dear friends from Erie in that class. 

Writing was on my mind, and the sense that I wanted to be a writer was there.

When do you get in contact with people like John Ashbery or Wallace Stevens and their work?

Let me start by saying I know that Ashbery and Stevens are mentioned in some of the advertising copy surrounding Punishment Bag, and that’s maybe why you ask. I don’t know if this is good marketing for poetry to say, ‘this first collection is like the first collections by these giants of twentieth-century American poetry.’ This way of thinking about literary inheritance and the canon, and who is in or not in it, is out of fashion. I loved these poets, and I’m sure something about their canonical grandeur is what attracted me to them or allowed me to find out about them at all. There was something in the music of their language that appealed to me, an interplay between melody and dissonance that I didn’t find—or haven’t found yet in some other twentieth-century poets like Hart Crane for instance—that seemed deeply wedded to what was hard for me to understand in the ideas in their poetry. That’s something also that I love in Emily Dickinson. I’ll be very flattered if people find that my first collection is anything like these books, but it’s a crazy comparison.

As far as reading them, I want to say it was pretty early on now. I fell in love, as I said, with literature and a model of reading a friend of mine, Chris Schlegel—an excellent poet—once described as “heroic reading.” Heroic reading is finding the most challenging, difficult, dense, impenetrable books you can and swallowing them whole. I fell in love with this in high school, and then I saw when I was looking at course offerings at NYU that there was a seminar for freshmen in the first semester where students would be asked to read all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in a single semester. It would require precisely the kind of heroic reading that I had already fallen in love with.

So we would be reading 350 pages of Proust a week on average, and that was on top of writing-intensive and reading-intensive courses I had, including Intro to Journalism. There were often times during this first semester at NYU when I was reading a thousand pages a week. Mostly prose, but I took, around that time, a survey, like an English 101 course, where we read Chaucer and that stuff, and I met Marcelle Clements, who taught the Proust class and who’s been an incredible, long-lasting influence in my life.

But I also met some friends who had the same relationship to heroic reading and literature with a capital L that I had been developing, one of whom was Joe DiGrigoli. He was a big admirer of Harold Bloom, which was sort of shocking, since Joe was a record store clerk from Boston. I think he introduced me to Stevens. He loved Stevens’ poetry and this sort of high romantic difficulty. I had fallen in love already in high school with John Keats, especially. 

I loved sitting around with Joe and some of his friends, and Joe would recite Stevens after a few beers or a few joints. I knew also, thanks to Joe, that Harold Bloom had described Ashbery as Stevens’ inheritor—the last great Romantic, or something like this—and right around then the Library of America issued a volume of Ashbery’s poems from his first collection Some Trees until A Wave. I think it was the first Library of America volume to be issued for a writer who was still alive. I managed to get my hands on that. Which wasn’t easy, by the way. Twenty dollars was a lot of money to me then.

So, was that the first spark for Punishment Bag?

It's a book that's built from the ground up. Which is to say, there wasn't a spark or a conceit or a project that I thought would become a collection of poems so much as a sustained practice over the course of 15 years of writing poetry and of experimenting.

All the attendant swings of the pendulum that came with it, the disillusionment, the delusions of grandeur, the self-exploration, the desire to push language creatively to its limits—I mean, this is what was at stake for me in this kind of reading, where I recognized when I was reading James Joyce at 17 that I understood little of what the hell was going on in his novels. But there was a sense of, ‘Okay, the first time I read this, I'll understand twenty percent, and the next time maybe I’ll understand twenty-five percent.’

There was also a sense of growth that came with that. Of an infinitely expanding horizon. That's what attracted me and what was at stake in my getting on that train and leaving Erie in the first place.

I had another fantastic writing teacher, Bruce Ditmas Bromley III, at NYU, and I remember he quoted—perhaps still the only sentence from Wittgenstein's Tractatus that I can pretend to have any understanding of—but he gave the one quotation from it, which is, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

I love Wittgenstein. That's great.

And I think that there's something there, that there’s always been something there for me. Especially in what I was doing with the poems that became Punishment Bag, which is trying to extend the limits of my world by extending my control of language, whether that's syntactically, whether that's on the level of diction, or whether that's on the level of paratactic juxtaposition. Putting unlike things together and seeing what happens. The sorts of jump cuts and tonal shifts that I fell in love with in Ashbery's poetry, especially.

And, let's get into your book a little bit. So, you divide it into three sections, “Your friends… Poets,” “A Rift,” and “Effortlessness.” What was your thinking behind this categorization, and in general, how do you come up with the titles of your poems?

Having built the book from the ground up, writing 500 poems, and then eventually having fifty that felt like they belonged together, that became the book, there was some shaping that still had to occur. And I don't want to overemphasize the way in which the book is shaped, but I do feel its shape means something.

The suggestion to divide and to give titles to the sections of the book came during the review process with UNM Press. One of the people who read the book suggested that it might be beneficial to readers to have some more structure to the groupings, and that maybe dividing the sections up slightly differently and giving them names would make sense.

And the titles that I ended up settling on actually come from the last poem in the collection. Each of those titles is excerpted from that final poem. The poem itself… 

I'm looking at it right now. Is the poem you are referring to “Love”?

Yes, that's the poem.

“If you forget your friends, even if you forget them all, and insult poets, God forgives that,” is how I ended up translating this beginning of the Hölderlin poem. So, “Your friends… Poets” is—this is to some extent, I realize now as we're talking about it, an Ashberian technique of first, treating language as material. And then once treating it as material, you can play with it on its level of abstraction, so I think there was a poem, I remember, of Ashbery's that originally had the title, “Flowers Bloom.” Ashbery, in his incorrigible aloofness and wryness, massaged the language into “Flow Blue” or something like that. The name of the poem became “Flow Blue” instead of “Flowers Bloom.” 

So, taking even one's own language, which, there's some sincerity, even in a translation, to an expression, and then effacing it, and finding…discovering within it a kind of materiality. I mean, the effacement here is slight; it’s more excerpted, but it’s this distancing that I like in titles, something that abstracts the poem slightly away from its content and maybe suggests completely other possibilities, but still resonates, even if just musically, with the language in the poem.

I think the title “Your Friends… Poets” gets at something of the construction of the lyrics of the first part and their relationship to friendship, or a longing for friendship and belonging, even literary belonging, that’s talked about, if not explicitly, in the poems. I think it's implicit in a lot of them, and explicit in a few of them. Anyway, this kind of relationship to the materiality of language that I was describing informed this way of writing. 

And then, of course, the next bit that ends up becoming a title from this is “Some rift in reality lets this one plant scatter its seeds from heaven…” The plant being love, but I felt like this middle section of the book was an opening, or could work at least as an opening out of this dense, compacted lyric modality that informs most of those first shorter poems. And then opens up into the long dialogic poem that ends that first section, which is called “Ghosts.”

And then, I felt like, in some Hegelian way, I mean in the process of dialectic work where two things work together and make a third thing, that something else emerges in the final section of the book. That felt to me like the “effortlessness that radiates out of work's core,” like some real… fuller realization of the style. And maybe a different avenue, a narrative avenue, into some of the power of the more effaced lyrics.

I see the long narrative poem, “Punishment Bag,” which is probably the most direct, parsable one in the collection, as participating in some of the same strangeness and effacement that the lyrics do, but it arrives at it through narrative rather than through material effects on the surface of the language.

Clearly, “Punishment Bag [II]” (https://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/jake-fournier ) is the one that you mean. There is this sense of a story that the reader can follow. I liked what you wrote in the notes that you were encouraged to expand “Punishment Bag [I].” Tell me a little bit about “Punishment Bag [I].”

Well, you know, “Punishment Bag [I]” comes out of that first mode as is described and narrativized in “Punishment Bag [II],” and even what I've been saying in this interview of…trying to reach through language to something beyond language. Or to a new language that's on the horizon of the language that one already feels comfortable in.

This to me relates to almost a Proustian sense of habit. Like, the grooves that we've plowed into our own mind, our day-to-day actions, how do we get ourselves out of those and into new grooves? What we end up calling poetic difficulty, which is a sense of disorientation, or multiplicity, unmeaning that is housed within meaning, and meaning that topples into unmeaning.

It's hard to discuss one's experiences directly. Experiences are constantly becoming just linguistic material.

Many of the things that then become the narrative subject of “Punishment Bag [II]” were in my mind as I was much closer to those events writing “Punishment Bag [I].” I was just writing “Punishment Bag [I]” in this alternate modality. In this lyric modality, as opposed to a narrative modality, and I think even these dichotomies break down.

I have many questions about what the lyric is. It's historicity, or lack thereof, and this became a subject of my doctoral studies, but in an earlier version of the poetry manuscript, which went through many versions at, say, 3-5 year intervals that were sent out there and were considered by different presses and so on.

I did title one of those versions Punishment Bag, and it did not have the long narrative poem that I think really does much to shape this collection, which I think of itself as a punishment bag. And I, in the cover letter to that version of the manuscript, I explained briefly where the title came from. I gave some account of this “pedagogical device.” I shared that with my friend Dan Poppick, a great poet whom I met during my time in Iowa. He said, “Oh my god, that's the poem.” 

I want to say that was in maybe 2019. And then, four years later, I attempted to write that poem. So it wasn't until the end of 2023 that I had written some notes about it. That poem was really ten years in the making, once I moved to New Mexico, and I finished it.

I started writing poetry in a Catholic grade school in a club led by a nun, and I finished the poem that finally gave a full shape to my collection in a Benedictine monastery in the desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, called the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, which my wife had spent some time visiting with her father. The Benedictines have a mission of hospitality, so most Benedictine convents and monasteries will offer a donation-based stay where you can participate in monastic life for a short period, and you can eat with the monks, and you can sort of live in their… in their holy walk of life, if that's how you see it. 

I spent a good week there, and the main thing that came out of it was bits and pieces of “Punishment Bag [II].” While I was there, I was finally able to give it shape and finish it. 

How did you come up with the idea of the punishment bag, where you had students who spoke French in your English class reach into a black bag and describe the different objects you put in there? It is contrary to the way you teach, because I've been your student. It was ironic to me, this concept of the punishment bag.

Well… let's keep in mind a few things. One is that this discipline was itself a joke within the context of the class. It was both for the students and for me a source of great fun and a way of breaking things up.

I was never really mad at any student for speaking French during my class. But it is different in the context of a lycée or a high school, right? When students really don't want to be there, versus in a graduate school context. 

But I will say this about language teaching and the teacher that I have become, or am becoming, in the time that you've known me. Language teaching really freed me up to become someone who inhabits a pedagogical persona that is closer to who I feel myself really to be. When one is teaching a class, it is always a role that one is playing, and it's a role that, when students support it, is a great gift, because it's also helpful for them, the fiction that somebody has something to teach them.

Having started teaching so incredibly young—I was 22 when I led my first writing workshop, and believe it or not, my ideas about heroic reading and the amount that students should read, given their level of engagement with literature, were not very well accepted. Most were coming to these classes with the idea that this will be an easy A, a fun elective, and I was like, okay, read Sebald's Rings of Saturn by next week. Which is a dense and difficult genre-defying book.

I love to be challenged in this way, but I don't think this is what my students had signed up for, and it probably also stemmed from a lot of insecurity about assuming that role of a teacher, and accepting that responsibility that's conferred on the teacher by the students. 

So, when I did find my way, by chance, into English language teaching, this was an enormous relief to me. I struggled, and probably still struggle, with the Socratic method of shaping a class, which is asking the right questions where the students build the class themselves.

I was always trying to do this but not getting very far with it, but I wasn’t putting in the work to lecture either. A lecture is really like a prepackaged essay that students can learn from—and that also has its merits. There are phenomenal lecturers out there. Probably fewer structurally than there should be, which is to say that this method of teaching has been de-emphasized for reasons both good and ill. But I was never taking the full steps, and also, that kind of teaching is not supported structurally by the modern-day academy.

Those lectures take time to build.

Yes! They often come at the other end of a book, of having done the work, and then the book gets reprocessed into the lectures and spaced out. They also come from teaching the same class for many years in a row. The lectures get perfected, seminar to seminar, year in, year out.

Most teaching now in the university is conducted by adjunct workers who are lucky to have the same class twice. Let alone a stable enough position to teach the same class or to have a curriculum that remains stable enough to teach the same class within it for ten years.

Anyway, when I started teaching language, it was incredibly freeing for me. I thought to myself, “Okay, as long as I'm up here speaking English, then I'm doing my job. That's most of my job.” And in fact, especially in France, where I was mostly there to model English as a native speaker, that's what the administrators wanted. They wanted me to model English, so I could talk, but that also meant that the students had to at least try and speak some English with me. So I did lots of things to make that fun, different games, and I would say that the punishment bag was a sort of game amongst many games that I devised to play with the students that I had over there.

So, is it fair to say that when a student puts their hand in the punishment bag, and they have to describe what's in it, that it is similar to the experience of someone who reads the book? They have to read the book, and they describe for themselves what they are feeling. When people read your other poems, they're forced to explain what they're reading in their own words to themselves. Is that fair to say?

Well, I think that's fair to say. I'm not sure that that's exactly the spin that I would give to it.

Oh, what would it be?

Well, there’s the version of the metaphor where the different poems in the collection are the various “texturally and contextually distinct objects” that have been placed into the bag, and the reader flips through, or opens the book, and maybe, yes, as you’re saying, they try to feel what the language feels. I’m not sure that they’re forced to redescribe the poems. They might just enjoy reading them. I would say that the analogy is close to what we were already describing, which is, the poems are trying to reach a place beyond, past the limits of their—or maybe my—world. So, beyond the container of what we can presently say. And this is, to me, more related to the act of composition than interpretation, but I think it also is related to what we inevitably construct out of a poem or out of any piece of writing, and what I was doing when I was constructing the world of Redwall or the world of Narnia with C.S. Lewis when I was a child. How our senses inevitably and effortlessly construct the world around us.

The thing that unfolds on our internal movie screen, from the fictive dream of realism, is an extension beyond the language that's on the page, right? So that whatever I'm imagining when I'm seeing the closet that transports the children to Narnia is not the same as what you see, however precise the language may be or not be. And this is to the extent that the lyric is a form intimately wedded to image. And the construction of image, and what we see, or having language that makes us feel as if we've seen a thing, which is deeply a part of Japanese and Chinese poetic traditions—what Arthur Sze brought to his teaching at IAIA—that's also a projection beyond the language, right? So, yes, there's an interpretive act.

But I'm trying to de-emphasize the way in which it seemed to me in your account that that interpretive act is wedded to the difficulty of the poems. I'm not sure that it is, or even that the poems ought to be understood as difficult. I’m trying to acknowledge and appreciate that experience of the poems and maybe of poetry in general while pointing out its contingency. 

When it comes to reaching beyond the limits of your present language, you keep playing that game long enough, and your horizon gets fairly wide. Doing something with the surface of that language that feels new and interesting to you—it's an asymptotic relationship. How far can you take that method? And I think that the book represents a break from that way of playing with language, not necessarily a lifelong break, but a temporary break from it.

Debra Magpie Earling talks about the magic of writing letters on a page. It is a form of conjuring to this other place. Your poetry forces the reader to conjure whatever they want, in a sense. Or whatever they connect with, or don't connect with. And there is a bit of discomfort in that.

Yes, I think there’s something there. “Whatever they want” might be taking it a little far. When we use language, we are part of a community, and part of the history of language, on its utmost edge, or on one of its utmost edges. This is like language with a capital L where every individual language is its own wave in a vast ocean. There’s a lot of forces acting on us that are beyond our control. Think of a surfer. It looks like they can do whatever they want when they’re on the edge of a wave, but they’re subject to big forces that are beyond them. So I guess I hope people more like surf the language that’s in the poems, and have a lot of fun in the force of the language as it’s laid out. But, yes, there can certainly be some disorientation that comes with what we end up calling difficulty. 

Yes, and that's where you grow, in the difficulty, right? That's why it's really interesting to read your poetry, because it causes the reader to question what poetry can be. After reading your work, the reader must expand their notion of poetry and language and grow from the difficulty or disorientation. I am curious as to what you've learned from your book.

I'd say I'm still learning from it, which is maybe a good sign.

What are you learning?

In the section of notes that I was invited to write by the press, I felt some danger of over-explaining. Eliot himself had a great deal of fun when he was asked to write notes for The Wasteland, right? His own difficult, modernist, lyric poem of epic proportions, maybe.

The notes themselves talk about this, but the idea that one could explain the poem is, in some sense, a rebuttal or a refusal of the magic that the poem wields. If the poem could be explained in language that is not itself, then why wouldn't that then be the poem?

Yes.

So, I would say that there is this sense of instability, or this destabilizing quality in poetic difficulty. It's something that I continue to question the value and uses of, which is not to say that I have grown to distrust or dislike it, so much as to say our other ways of pushing language creatively to its limits are appealing to me right now. I mean forms that are more engaged in sustained narrative, and extended description, creating more stable places or environments within poetry and language, where a reader can kick their feet up and at least feel like they're comfortable for a second before the rug gets swept from underneath them, poems that are a bit less proximate to experience and more a vista onto experience.

Yes, that's great.

To Earling’s point, it is a phenomenal and ceaseless miracle that these things that we group into words as syllables or as letters of the alphabet, phonemes, ideograms, and so on, seem to make sense beyond ourselves.

It is a miracle, right? I don’t know. Do miracles have anything to teach us? I guess not. It’s more like nothing special. That’s a big concept in Zen. The miracle is nothing special. 

I could see how some people who read this book will, you know, they'll read one of the poems, and they will be so disoriented that they will give up. And I could see that there are others who are going to be curious about it.

And I think that practice, that curiosity about what the author is trying to say, or how he would want me to read this poem? Or this exploration of, there must be some meaning here, instead of giving up on it, is a wonderful practice, I think, that you can apply to all sorts of things. And it's something that only your poetry can teach because you are pushing the boundaries of language.

Again, we are meaning-making machines. We find meaning everywhere in an arbitrary and chaotic world. We're desperate for meaning. We're hopeful for meaning. It is difficult to disarrange syntax to the extent that our brains don't reassemble some sort of meaning from it. This is a game I've played with students in thinking about the relationship of the sentence as a sort of meaning-bearing or completed thought.

Pick any sentence. The cat jumps up. It is a simple sentence. And try to rearrange the syntax in such a way that no meaning can be derived from it. The up cat jumps. Cat up the jumps. However you do it, there's still some part that your brain clings onto there. In that last one, it’s like “cat” becomes a verb. Throw up your hands. Cat up the jumps.

Which is not to say that playing this game is valuable in and of itself, and certainly my impression in writing these poems is that they're deeply about things, and deeply meaningful things, and that they sometimes maybe deemphasize, or don’t really care about what I want. I mean, I’m not sure anyone should be concerned with what I wanted to say.

But… there is a risk in this kind of experimentation, right, this pushing of language creatively to its limits, that it will be encountered as arbitrary, or might really just be arbitrary.

A space where you can’t continue to engage curiously and derive something that you have no use for. For me, there's an excitement just in a novel juxtaposition of words, or a powerful, sleek, musical progression, right, or arrangement, sentence, whatever. That to me is its own reward too, but I hope that’s not the only reward in my poems. 

And my book is certainly not alone in engaging in these kinds of linguistic play. I’m thinking of active contemporaries like Ed Roberson, Callie Garnett, and Emily Skillings, and Zan de Parry and Sasha Debevec-McKenney, who I had the great pleasure of reading with around the release of this very strange, powerful book by Jessica Laser called Planet Drill. These are just a few other poets who are engaged in this kind of stuff, not to mention dg [nanouk okpik] and Layli [Long Soldier], who are teaching right here at our school.

That was fantastic. Is there any advice as a teacher at IAIA, any advice that you have for up-and-coming poets?

Advice is something to be jettisoned as much as followed, I hope. But I would say be omnivorous. Be infinitely curious. I've given this advice before in classes, but there's a quote by the Roman, Pliny the Younger—another lawyer. It’s the only thing I know that Pliny the Younger said, but it goes, “Never have I read a book so bad that I did not learn from it.”

And I think that there's great solace in this as well, if I’ve accidentally managed to write a book that's terrible, it still becomes something that people can learn from. 

I love that. Thank you so much for your time and wisdom.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.