WRITING

AD: You currently live in Fort Lee, NJ.  How has NJ treated you as a writer thus far?  Has it given you inspiration? Has it been a burden?

JA: Barring two months in Paris when I was a high-school senior, I’ve lived in New Jersey since the day my mother gave birth to me at Christ Hospital in Jersey City. I cut my teeth on the state’s poetry scene, beginning in 1997. The members of the N.J. poetry community were the first to respond to my work. They encouraged me, befriended me and offered me forums to present my poetry. My first readings all occurred in New Jersey. If I hadn’t been part of the scene, I wouldn’t have met Brett Rutherford, who runs The Poet’s Press. He heard me read my work a few times and in 1999 asked me if I had considered a book or chapbook. I hadn’t yet thought in terms of a collection or even publication, but as a result of his request, I developed a full-length manuscript, The Plague Psalms, and submitted it. I saw him a few weeks later and asked him if he had read it. He said he had started it. I asked him what he thought. He replied, “I love it.” The first editions of The Plague Psalms were beautiful hand-bound books. Brett is a serious student of the art of bookmaking and invested a craftsman’s care and aesthetic sensibility into producing those volumes. I’ve seen second-hand editions selling online for $60, $75 and even upwards of $100. I don’t know who’s buying those books, but I wish I had a box of them. The Plague Psalms is still available as a standard commercial paperback. The Poet’s Press also published my second book, Father Silicon, which the Kansas City Star selected as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006.

Would any of this have happened had I not been involved in the New Jersey scene? It’s never a good idea to say “never,” but I’d say it’s unlikely.

AD: Your first full length collection, The Plague Psalms, was released by The Poet’s Press in 2000.  Your latest, Thrum, was put out in March 2010 by Poet’s Wear Prada.  How would you say your writing has changed in the 10 years between these collections?

JA: Although my original ambition was to pursue the written word, I have a strong background in music. I’ve been a guitarist for nearly 40 years, written hundreds of songs and investigated many musical styles, not only American forms, but British, Celtic and even Indian traditions. The man who wrote the poems that comprise The Plague Psalms was someone who still thought of himself as a guitarist first and a poet second. Much of the language is informed by Anglo-American balladry. Many of the poems (e.g., the title poem, “Spanish Song of Mercy,” “Doxology,” “The Singer”) have an abundance of musical imagery.

As I developed as a poet, “writer” rather than “musician” achieved primacy, essentially because I determined that it was the route I was supposed to follow. Moreover, I’ve pursued poetry with far more passion and sense of purpose than I ever pursued music, which is a pretty good indication of what I was meant to do.

The work in The Plague Psalms was, at core, lyrical and conservative. The prevailing ethos, or so I’ve been told, was neo-Romantic. The poems deal with historical events (e.g., the Black Death and the Moorish conquest of Spain), my favorite literary character (the Phantom of the Opera), my Roman Catholic background, and, yes, music. Basically, they concerned anything that interested me. At the time, someone pointed out to me there was a medieval strain running through the work. It wasn’t intentional, nor was I even aware of it, but I can see it now. I imagine it was a consequence of all those years of listening to Martin Carthy and the Pentangle.

The poems in Father Silicon have a broader range than those in the first book. Father Silicon contains poems about Nico, 9/11, Julian of Norwich, the Hindu god Juggernaut and a fictional hustler named Billy. A recurring line in Wallace Stevens’ “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” inspired the book’s final poem, “Gabriel the Beachcomber.” I use a quote from his poem as an epigraph.

My interests still rule my work. Although I have written poems in memory of my mother and father, I tried to approach them from something other than the angle of pure memoir. The poem dedicated to my mother, “The Sea at Our Door,” is told from the point of view of a butterfly observing a beached dolphin dying on the shore (my mother loved butterflies; I’ve always been partial to dolphins). The influence was probably Latin American magic realism. My father, an engineer by training, had a series of patents. I wove them into the poem I wrote about him (Father Silicon refers to my father, although the poem in question is called “Anointing of the Sick”). I’m troubled by the contemporary obsession with poetry as blatant memoir or, worse, therapeutic salve. It betrays a dearth of imagination. I did a radio interview some years ago. The host asked me if everyone had a poet inside. My answer wasn’t curt at all, but my response was basically, No. If you ask if everyone has an inner poet, you have to ask if everyone has an inner novelist, an inner sculptor, an inner bassoon player.

In the ensuing years since The Plague Psalms, I’ve read more widely and expanded my writer’s palette and palate, which is the way it’s supposed to be. I exploit a greater range of forms and materials. I borrow techniques from other disciplines: the essay, dictionary, encyclopedia, short story, interview, press release, newspaper article, film, the visual arts. Even writings on architecture have been an influence. I wrote two pantoums that consist entirely of pre-existing material. One, “The Belles of Grey Gardens,” is made up of lines of dialogue from the documentary Grey Gardens. The other, “There Happens to Be a Very Good Reason Why I Missed Work Today,” comprises extracts from a list of bizarre and purportedly real reasons people have given for taking a day off; the list appeared in an article I found on MSN.com. I thought, I can’t let this go.

Thrum, out from Poets Wear Prada, a New Jersey-based press, is a collection of poems, prose poems and brief poetic essays about musical instruments, specifically chordophones, which are instruments whose sound is produced by the vibration of a string. The chapbook employs some of the aforementioned techniques, especially a blend of prose poem and essay (this hybrid has earned my serious attention over the past couple of years; I’ve written a few such pieces since the publication of Thrum). Thrum also has a concrete poem, an acrostic poem, a Fluxus-style instruction poem, a cut-up and something I call “a haiku essay.” The last is on the Japanese instrument the biwa. The poem sounds like prose when read aloud, but the entire piece is segmented into three-line stanzas, each of which has the haiku’s five-seven-five syllabic division. Because I wrote about a traditional Japanese instrument, I decided to adapt a traditional Japanese poetic form to address it. The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges influenced the structure of the collection, as well as some of the content. Anne Carson was another influence on the content. William Burroughs, of course, gave me the idea for the cut-up poem. Throughout Thrum I mention people like Davy Graham, John Fahey, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Leadbelly, Memphis Minnie, Charles Mingus, Ravi Shankar and even Marcel Duchamp.

For an example of how my approach has changed between 2000 and now, read “Al’Ud” in The Plague Psalms and “Oud” in Thrum. They’re both about the same subject, the Middle Eastern lute.

AD: How do you choose the poems for your collections?  Do you write poems based on the initial idea for a collection, or notice a pattern in your writing that begins an idea for a collection?

JA: I conceived only Thrum as a collection, and it wasn’t even my idea. In 2006 I took an advanced workshop at The New School called “Crossing Genres,” which brought non-poetic forms (interview, definition, documentary, history) into the realm of poetry. I wrote a brief poetic essay on the guitar for the definition assignment. The teacher, Martine Bellen, and the class liked it. For the final class, we could choose whatever form we wanted. I chose the definition and wrote a short poetic essay on the oud. Martine said, “Why don’t you write a whole series on musical instruments?” That was the seed, and for the next three years, I worked on the sequence, read some of the pieces at readings and published half of them in journals. Early on, I told a poet friend, John J. Trause, about the series. He said I could probably get a book out of it, which had occurred to me, too. Great minds and all that. In spring 2009, Roxanne Hoffman, who runs Poets Wear Prada, said she’d like to consider the series for her press. I worked on it further and in September sent it to her. She wrote to me the next day to say she loved it and would be delighted to publish it. That was without a doubt the quickest acceptance I ever received. I thanked Martine on the acknowledgments page. Without her suggestion, there would be no Thrum. I personally think it’s my best work.

With The Plague Psalms and Father Silicon, I chose the poems based on what I perceived to be the book’s anchor poem. In the first, it was the title poem. In the second, it was “Anointing of the Sick.” I built the draft manuscripts around those anchor poems. Then I deleted some poems, added others and rearranged the order until I reached the final manuscript. Even when the books were at the galley stage, I made edits.

A volume of poetry is not just a random collection of individual poems. At least, it’s not supposed to be. There has to be a progression, an arc, if you will, an overall scheme. There has to be a beginning, middle and end.

AD: Your most recent chapbook, Thrum, fuses together poetry and the wonder of instruments that one must strum.  How much do you feel music has an influence over your poetry?

JA: Poetry is the literary form that is closest to music. That’s one of its chief attractions for me. It originally was sung. Right now, I’m looking at the anthology Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams. Toward the front of the book, before Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Blake, Poe, Whitman, Eliot, Dylan Thomas and all the others, are “O Western Wind,” “Lord Randal” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” They’re songs. I opened one reading in 2009 and one the following year with a recitation of “Corpus Christi Carol.”

Music influenced the language and rhythm of my earlier poems and provided imagery. It has since evolved into a specific subject. I noted earlier that I used to write songs. Some of my poems have been turned into art songs, but not by me. Frank Ezra Levy, a cellist and classical composer whose work is available on the Naxos label, wrote two wonderful song cycles based on my poems. Music is never that far away from my stanzas.

AD: You seem to do a lot of readings of your work in both New Jersey and New York.  How important are they to you personally, and how do you think the tactic is received in our general locale?

JA: Public presentation is extremely important to me. If I’m engaged for a reading, I prepare a set list. I think about the opening and closing poems, the pacing, which poems work well together. I even prepare and rehearse my introductory comments, which become fixed for particular poems. I practice hand gestures and head movements. I basically regard a reading as a 15- to 20-minute theatrical presentation, which is not at all synonymous with performance poetry. I seldom read from the page, preferring to recite from memory. In November 2009, I took part in a tribute to Daniel Berrigan, whom I’ve admired since I was in high school. The next day, the organizer informed me that Father Berrigan was impressed with my ability to present my work from memory.

The page can become a straitjacket. When I do read from the page, I approach it as if I’m delivering a lecture. The page becomes a prop. For example, I use the page when I read “Anointing of the Sick” from Father Silicon because my father’s patent names are long and employ technical terminology, most of which I frankly don’t understand. I have most of the poetry itself memorized, but not the names of his patents. In this particular case, I present the poem like a scientific paper.

I currently devote a lot of time to the work in Thrum because it’s my most recent collection. My general rule of thumb has changed over the years when it comes to the contents of a reading. I now usually restrict myself to poems that have been published, either in my books or in journals, or are forthcoming.

To be completely candid, readings are a marketing vehicle. I sell the lion’s share of my books at readings. Even if you hope someday to make a lasting contribution to the canon, if you’ve published a book, you have a product to sell.

From my observation, too many poets fail as public readers. They stare at the page and basically read to it instead of their audience. They don’t know how to modulate their voices. They don’t inhabit the poem they’re reading. They don’t work to engage the audience. When you’re facing an audience, you have to imagine that the people in those seats are transmitting a tacit communication: “I’m here to listen to you. Make sure it’s worth my while.”

AD: Lastly, do you think New Jersey and its community of artists could be doing more for poetry?

JA: Let’s remember that the country’s largest poetry event, the Dodge Poetry Festival, takes place in New Jersey. There’s a monthly New Jersey Poetry Calendar. Pick up any issue. You’ll see listings for reading after reading after reading. The Dodge Foundation funds a program to send poets into New Jersey schools. I’m involved with a group called the North Jersey Literary Series that has been running monthly readings since the ‘90s. The Poet’s Press last year published an anthology of poets who have read in the series. There are poetry presses based in the state: Poets Wear Prada, Cavan Kerry, Marymark, We Press. The Poet’s Press was in New Jersey before Brett Rutherford relocated to Rhode Island. There are respected journals here: Raritan, The Literary Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet.

And let’s not forget the enormous contributions New Jersey has made to the poetry canon. Walt Whitman. Stephen Crane. William Carlos Williams. Robert Pinsky. C.K. Williams. Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka.

New Jersey has an extraordinarily rich poetic lineage.