Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of two poetry collections, Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017) as well as a chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). A recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship, he lives now in San Francisco.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Rather than begin at the beginning, I’d like to begin at the end here, with the final poem in your collection. In “Love in a Time of PreP,” a speaker sees the brocken spectre of his own shadow while hiking a Hawaiian volcano with his husband. In the present of the poem, the two marvel at the light and the water molecules, their being there together where “the ocean’s panorama/[is] endless & shimmering.” Yet the AIDS epidemic has happened and is happening, the glory of light is both halo and haunt, the path “already deteriorated” even as they walk it. The end of the poem pivots to two young lovers who are “alone are discovering / something new. As if none of this / ever happened.”

But it did happen, and the paranormal visitors and queer saints will continue to walk alongside; even “violets bursting forth / [a]re reminders that the world // will go on generously without us.” The speaker is acutely aware of time throughout this collection, and so I wonder how you think about it in poems, and remain present while attending to the past? Can you discover something new that has already happened? What complications does this create in the lyric moment of a single poem?

JJR: A north star for me in writing this book was Sarah Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. In it, she writes: “There are two distinctly different kinds of AIDS that are not over: 1. There is the AIDS of the past 2. There is ongoing AIDS.” Brocken Spectre in part speaks to that first point, the ways in which “the AIDS of the past” still clouds and looms and informs our present.

To have such a devastating catastrophe happen in such recent, living history—with no reparations, and so few oral historians left who survived it—that was then so quickly buried and rebranded through the whitewashed efforts of the gay marriage campaign—left a fissure. It’s too simple to say that there’s a line in the sand between before and after. These poems were an effort to look back, look at, that fissure that has shaped and continues to shape everything that’s happened since. It becomes new, at least I hope, in examining it through a contemporary vantage point. I wanted to firmly ground this book in the 21st century as a way of re-seeing what this pandemic has meant to those who lived at its edges.

Beyond the poems that address the wide-reaching impact of the AIDS epidemic on our current moment, I’m more broadly interested in the ways in which the past always continues to live on actively through us in the present, through the legacy and mythology of catastrophe. Toni Morrison, in her commencement address at Wellesley College in 2004, said that “contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself.”

One of my goals in writing these poems was to give this sense of past and present occurring simultaneously both in the content of the poems but also in their structures and their grammars. The poems slip between time periods, and I wanted the forms—the tablatures, the caesuras, the lack of punctuation—to visually and syntactically encapsulate this slippage. I kept thinking of past and present as tectonic plates rubbing against each other, creating friction in this work. I hoped that these juxtapositions would, as Morrison says, “yield new information about itself.”

CL: I definitely want to hear you speak more about the lack of punctuation and how you see its absence functioning. In “The Loons Prove That Even Before There Was a Word for Grief It Existed as Song” the piece ends describing the lake’s surface:

…fissures
which might look to the fish to be tunnels

to heaven if only fish were not
so dumb if only captivity were not the opposite
of heaven if only time were malleable if only

we could hold our breath for as long
as those loons that slip under our boat
in summer & resurface a mile away

into a place they did not choose

Run-on phrasing forges new connections that surprise in the reading, even as the breathless cadence enacts that tight-chest feeling of loss that is so predictable we feel it to be true. Here sound and sentiment yoke perfectly to carry the poem. Does one ever get out ahead of the other? What do you do to make them work in tandem (especially) without the toolbox of punctuation? Or when what drives the poem is less aural and more visual, like “my cousin storing honey / on the sill of his bay windows / igniting the room into gold”?

JJR: For some of the punctuation-less poems in Brocken Spectre, or that use punctuation unconventionally, I had it in mind to do so right from the jump, leveraging that tension to generate the poem. For others, the omission came much later in the revision process as I tried to tease out other double-meanings from the sliding syntax. “The Loons Prove…” is an example of the latter, and my reason for playing with punctuation after nearly finishing the “content” of the poem was in the hopes of achieving in its final third, as you mention, a heightened crescendo. I leaned on one line from this poem as instruction for how to ultimately make sense of its sonic landscape, wherein the cousin’s life is described as “not lateral.” I wanted the poem to work not necessarily linearly (from Point A to Point B), but to give the reader the sense of acceleration as its narrative logic unraveled.

While sonics are important to me, I don’t tend to lead with sound in my drafts. I’m often first driven to the page by narrative juxtapositions. Typically, only after I can get the poem’s various turns and braids down right do I let my ear take over the process and guide me through a poem’s final revisions. To shed that narrative scaffold in this poem was liberating! It made sense to me that this poem, which describes grief, could try to embody that anti-logical, anti-linear saturation that grief leaves us with.

CL: I love that description—sliding syntax. I’ve been reading about California geology lately, which, to my limited exposure, in a large part entails trying to sleuth shifting proximities and frictions. The juxtaposition and timing, obviously, create colossally different terrains. That line that you mention though—“his life not lateral but horizontal” gave me pause—not lateral but parallel to the horizon, which can be sideways or not, depending on orientation, or on where one stands. So many of these poems do seem to trouble orientation, not sexual, or geographic, necessarily, but more metaphysical—how we locate ourselves alongside the ghosts who populate our spaces, who have shaped them even though we can only imagine those forces. I think of “The Wake,” for example, a right-justified poem that operates in fragments, ending:

the year AZT was released      when I checked.
the records I was relieved.
that no one shared exactly my name.
that migration might mean the birds won’t.
come back      that six hundred thirty six.
thousand of us died & I did not.
know a single one.

Here the punctuation fragments one generation from the next and, while the speaker seems relieved, the form of the poem betrays its pain, as well. In geology, form evidences a certain type of relationship, so I wonder what complexities of proximity your forms reveal? In process, how do these come to be?

JJR: I love that you brought erosion up. It—as a concept, a metaphor, an image, a reference—weighed heavily on my mind while making many of these poems. In fact, if one of my favorite books wasn’t already titled Erosion, it could have been a title for this book. (And many of these poems do owe their visual forms to Jorie Graham, to whose great “The Age of Reason” I give a nod in my poem “The Fall”—but I digress). I came to California in my mid-twenties and was struck by how much geologically newer this landscape was (at least in comparison to the Appalachian mountain ranges where I grew up) and, as a result, more dramatic in their shapes and formations. The seismic shifting, the washing out, the eating through by rain, the burning out by forest fires—all of this spoke to me as a way of understanding inherited memory. What we carry from one generation to the next is incomplete, a corroded vision, a breakdown of structures that creates new structures, new landscape features. In the last poem of the book, I write: “Time moves like bluffs / like erosion. It flattens / to rift & split. It carves down / the precipice like the runoff // we clambered up to find / the path already deteriorated.” In another poem, “Prelude to the Narrows,” I use form to visually recreate an eroded fissure in order to replicate the image of a canyon. There’s a breakdown of terrain that mirrors, as you suggest, a metaphysical breakdown, a gap between generations—especially a gap speared through by the HIV/AIDS crisis—which creates a chasm where there ought to be a connection.

My earliest drafts of “The Wake” were not written in fragments. My challenge with this poem centered around the fact that my speaker was trying to communicate two competing ideas at once. These notions of regret and relief—as you point out—are in direct contradiction with one another, and as soon as I realized that the speaker’s own ambivalence is the tension that was needed to drive this poem, I came to its fragmentary form, which was partly inspired by some of the poems in Tessa Rumsey’s The Return Message. The inclination to use misplaced periods and gaping cesuras came from trying to push more ambivalence, more contrast, out of the closing statement. But by working through these interrupting periods and spaces, I had a window to better see how to re-envision the rest of the poem and how its structure could create more erosions of time and memory.

CL: Or a chasm between what we think we (ought to) know and what we do. Graham is so invested in knowledge and its limits, and I can see her influence in some of your linear progressions and the thought processes their forms convey. Many of your pieces also come back to knowledge of the character of God, or to an understanding or mercy or grace that might give way to faith. In “Wild Though the Sea” you write, for example:

…standing in the presence
          of a Greater

          we walked the beach
                    the sand’s grit refracted

                              the expanse of what
                    I didn’t know endlessly

swallowing the floes
          the ocean has always been

                    immutable & dumb
          has always carried on

past my limitations
          though they were many

                    though I knew God
          the way I knew you

by being swallowed
          by giving my body over

                    to the dead I am
          a creature after all…

It seems I’m always after “what I don’t know endlessly,” and gravitate to poems for their ability to say what can’t be said, to breathe what’s beyond our embodying. Many of your pieces negotiate the territory between bodies and spirits explicitly, and rest in various states of belief. And so I wonder if you could speak some about the way doubt (faith?) shapes your poems?

JJR: I’m interested in the idea of splitting time, imaging alternative realities where certain things do or do not play out (and I suppose this is where the idea of God fits in). I grew up in the Catholic church to a very devout family: we rolled up the carpet each night to pray all the decades of the rosary on the hardwood floor in order to better connect with the pain of Jesus; we confessed our sins every week; we fasted our Fridays; we attended daily mass. Before coming out, I was preparing to enter the priesthood. With that upbringing, the question of God, time, faith, and doubt, may always be what my poems chase after.

Through my writing, I have the opportunity to live out different lives, to see time not as a linear line but as a kaleidoscope of a variety of possibilities, of different lives. Often, my poems are spurred by “What If” questions: What if I never left my rural Maine town? What if I had joined the seminary? What if I had been born twenty years earlier and lived through worst years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic? What if there never had been a pandemic? What if I had lost my beloved? Who would I be? Where would we all be now?

The poems in this book orbit around the proximities of faith: in one poem, the speaker reminisces that he used to talk out loud to God in the forest at night; in another, God watches over us as passively and distantly as the eye of Jupiter. In one poem, the soon-to-be priests at a seminary skinny-dip in the ocean, hiding their erections in the waves, and in another, faith allows the pilgrims the ability to walk again for only a short while. I suppose another way to put it: the poems in this book hang onto hope that there is a divine plan shaping this narrative of devastation, giving purpose to suffering and rewarding those who’ve endured it, as much as they give into the creeping nihilism singeing the borders that none of this has meaning, that all tragedy is senseless.

CL: Those ‘what-ifs’ plague us all, I think, and we answer or dismiss both those questions in a whole variety of ways. One wonderful thing about literature is that it allows us to indulge, but perhaps not get subsumed by, those other lives and possibilities populating our imaginations. Like you mentioned, your poems have a variety of speakers and speaker-experiences, from a shepherdess in a Portuguese field, to a teen kissing the throat of an older man. Often people conflate the speaker with the poet, which seems to limit poems’ speculative leaps; at the same time, most writers do develop, or hope to develop a voice all their own. In what ways do you think about voice in your poems? Can a singular voice remain despite shifting content, context, preoccupation?

JJR: As a younger poet, I had a lot of anxiety about finding my own voice, vis à vis Harold Bloom, as so many of my early poems were close imitations of what I was reading. My creative process back then would be to take a poet I admired and try to write a poem the way they might (e.g., How would Brigit Pegeen Kelly write about coming out?). I imagine this is true for most poets. The hope is that eventually we stop merely imitating others and start writing from our own distinct voice, although I think we always carry those other voices in our DNA, so that “our voice” becomes more of a blended chorus of all the poets we loved.

I think about some of the bodies of work from the poets who I admire the most and how/when they came into their own voice. A poet like Larry Levis, as an example, stepped more confidently into his own with each new book, so that his earlier poems now in hindsight offer a preludial shimmer of what would come. Other poets, like Louise Glück and Carl Phillips, seemingly had a clear sense of their own voice right from the first published poems, even if it still evolved over time in terms of breadth and formal restrictions. And others, such as C.D. Wright, offered us such intentionally different visions with each new book.

That said, I also like to think of voice the way an actor or a vocalist might: as an instrument to be trained and wielded in order to meet the needs of a role. Poems like “Golgotha” or “June 12th, 2016” asked for a shift from how I might approach a more lyric narrative poem like “Freshwater Eel” or “Monster Cock.” And all the poems in Brocken Spectre asked for more sprawl and space than did the poems in my first book, Novena. I have to trust that when writing in different modes and styles, those variations will still come through my own voice. Even if I’m elevating the diction or pitching it down to sound more how I might talk conversationally, just by virtue of having been filtered through my own brain and my own preference for syntactic syncopation, I have to trust that it will all come together in a singular way, though at times it may seem more like individual tiles in a mosaic than a continuum.

CL: To write as only you can, yes! It borders cliché at this point, but Tennyson is right—we are a part of all we have read (met). Not everything sticks, of course, but—with poets I love, it’s less that I want to write like them, but more I want to carry their words close. And hope to somehow talk back, or carry the poem-photon’s energy forward in a way that might alter but never diminish or destroy it. It’s wild though to think about how a writer like BPK might approach a specific topic; most often I chase how to recreate a particular sensation. Do you begin writing about a definite subject, or is that one of the ways your poems come? At what point had you grown comfortable enough with your own voice to know where Novena ended, and Brocken Spectre began? How did that distinction start to take shape? Did you realize at the time, or only now, in hindsight?

JJR: A few years ago, I would have answered your question by saying none of my poems came from ideas; that each poem began with a scrap of imagery, or a misread line, or a spoken phrase that caught my ear and that only through excavation of that image/phrasing did a poem’s meaning take shape. When I started to write the poems that make up Brocken Spectre and found myself exploring the weight of queer history, I knew I needed to approach my work process differently and conduct a substantial amount of research in order to do these poems justice. Sometimes new poems would spring out of what I was reading (a poem from my chapbook In the Time of PrEP called “Lot’s Wife,” for example, rises directly out of reading Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind). Sometimes these sprung out of conversations (both “In the Castro” and “Western Wall” came out of discussions with friends about queer spaces: whether or not they are still needed, and if they’re no longer needed, whether or not that’s a sign of progress). I swapped out my influences, as well, trading in my go-to books that I keep on my desk as talismans, to get to different sounds and rhythms.

By the fall of 2013, Novena more-or-less was in its final form but wouldn’t find its home for another three years. Up until that period, I was constantly swapping out newer poems and ditching older ones until the manuscript teetered on the edge of becoming a Frankenstein’s monster. While at Bread Loaf that summer, I was given excellent advice from Martha Rhodes. She told me that if I felt the book was done, then to stop tinkering with it and continue onto the next project, that publication shouldn’t be what dictates when a book was “done.” This may seem obvious, but in the haze of trying to get published and tying one’s self-worth to something as out of one’s control as publication, I couldn’t see through it clearly anymore. Her no-nonsense advice gave me clarity and helped me let Novena go.

Each year, when the submission season rolled around, I’d pull Novena out of its drawer and reread it with fresh eyes to see if there were any weak spots, any poems I felt no longer held up, if any of my new poems should be folded in. With the exception of a couple of substitutions, each year I came to the same conclusion: none of my new poems belonged in my old manuscript because I wasn’t making poems the same way anymore. Novena was a love letter to my 15 year-old, queerly repressed, deeply religious self who needed poems wrought from the center of that Venn diagram. The new work felt so far removed from that mode that I couldn’t imagine crossing back over.

CL: Are there talismans that have remained? What are some of your go to books? And I often ask this, but—if you met someone who had never really engaged with poetry before, or only in a cursory grade-school way, what poem would you share with them?

JJR: Lee Sharkey’s Calendars of Fire and Eavan Boland’s Outside History (both teachers of mine who passed away in 2020). Jorie Graham’s Erosion and Larry Levis’ The Widening Spell of the Leaves. Li-Young Lee’s The City In Which I Loved You. Ellen Bryant Voight’s Headwaters. Poets who wrote through and about the crisis years: Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, Tory Dent, Tim Dlugos, Doug Powell.

As someone who used to teach poetry to grade-school students, I hold some hope that students today are equipped with a deeper, richer relationship to poetry than I was in grade school. That said, the poem I often give to those who have no relationship to poetry yet is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” It is so left field of what folks’ preconceived notion of what a poem should sound like or should be. Its foreboding tone, the force of its imagination, its Biblical register, its mythic scope—it’s hard for anyone of any experience level to read that poem and not feel a little changed by it.