Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of 2019. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Guernica, and Missouri Review. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: First, I have to note what a spectacular treat it was to spend time with your latest collection Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going. Take me! Because this book goes intrepidly into love—a territory where the self melds into something much richer, to someone with much more to lose. I’d like to begin though with the collection’s classification: a memoir in poems. While often thinly veiled, most poets avoid identifying the speaker as themselves out-right; so I’m curious about your decision. Why was it important to position them this way?

Jessica Jacobs: Thanks, Cate! As a big admirer of your writing, this means the world to me.

Though I hope these poems stand on their own, I arranged the collection as a work meant to be read from start to finish, the way someone would read a prose memoir, with a narrative arc that builds on itself as it goes. I find when reading memoir (as opposed to, say, fiction), I tend to trust that the narrator is speaking from a place of genuine emotion and experience, which means that though I might quibble with an author’s craft choices, I believe in the truth of their experience. Written during the first three years of my marriage, these poems are hard-won records of my struggle to understand what it means to make such a commitment, of the wonder of truly loving someone, as well as the accompanying terror of that love’s potential loss.

CL: I think you’ve hit on something; the way I read definitely changes when I know something is a “true” story, versus fictionalized. Often, I think I’m more permissive of what seems unbelievable—your love and you—you there with another person—walk into a bar and end up together? You fall in (lasting) love at a writing conference? Elope to marry in California between teaching classes? In general, love poems (you are a love poem virtuoso!) can leave readers, if moved, skeptical. One might approach poems like “Thanks, stupid heart,” a sonnet that ends “she was your only // aim, and faithful dumb muscle you are, stupid / beautiful heart, you beat only for her” or the end of “Out of the Windfields” this way:

…And my mouth to you was every water
I’d ever tasted: clean shock

of snowmelt in an alpine pond; …—but most of all,
chlorine’s high bite in the throatback

of every Florida pool in summer, the water
so bath-warm, so body-kindred, that entering

was like sliding into another skin—skin
that entered you back.

And yet I am not doubtful; never once do they come across as maudlin. And so I think it’s more than hard-wonness at work here—I actually do think it’s craft! I’m curious as to what considerations you make when writing explicitly about love that sidestep excessive sentimentality and let such a complex emotion surface? Is sentimentality better held in a single poem, or across a collection, as you mentioned above?

JJ: Writing a collection of love poems was definitely a daunting task, one plagued by fear of not just implausibility (for what love story doesn’t sound absurd when boiled down to what in retrospect is an unbelievable amount of coincidence?) but of cliché. Though I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—change the way things happened, I could decide how I approached those events in my writing.

If I were to let grand abstractions like love and longing stand on their own, it would be like writing billboards instead of poems: big words with nothing much behind them, forgotten as soon as they’ve flashed past. Instead, I believe the best writing is done through the body. So, I worked to ground those feelings in the senses by binding them to either an actual experience (like those lines you quote above in “Out of the Windfields,” where the immersive, self-dissolving delight of intimacy with the one you love is tethered to the sense-memories of the many different waters in which I’ve lost myself) or to a metaphor where the object of comparison, the vehicle, is rich in concrete details. In doing this, I hope to avoid tipping from sentiment into sentimentality and to write in such a way that I’m not just boring the reader with an anecdote but creating a space in which she can revel in her own memories or imaginings called out by the poem.

As for your second question, I think poetry excels at focusing in on and exploring a specific moment or emotion. So, though I think a single poem can capture one or even a few facets of a given topic, a book-length narrative, with each poem revealing a new perspective, ultimately offers a more three-dimensional rendering of the subject explored.

CL: And we see this reveling in the barrage of sensory details; a rich passage in “Curly, My Tangler” says the beloved’s hair “…is the shade of farm-fresh yolks, the color of things rich // on the tongue. Whose hair sings the plaintive song / of bed springs. Whose hair is the drifting / smoke from a village of chimneys, corkscrews/enough for a thousand bottles of wine. A ski slope / of s-curves, a grove of twirling maple keys, every playground slide / worth sliding.” No one figure gets it right; we need multiple to approach adoration, enrapture, wonder.

And yet I’m most interested, I think, at the moment the sensory transforms into revelation, either self-revelation for the speaker, or for us, as readers. “In the First Fall of our Marriage,” for example, the speaker asks, “How many times can you cry on my chest before something good grows there?” The speaker imagines transforming into a redwood, ultimately making a Giving Tree type entreaty to be of use even when fallen. The poem concludes with a cross-section of her trunk on a phonograph, as “a record of what has passed, playing the music of what / is to come. A song for each year / I’ll learn to love you better.”

Does the world reveal your heart, or does your heart find its approximation in the world, or the world of language? Why is (or do you think) the natural world so often the vehicle for these revelations?

JJ: In his gorgeous book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes that we make “contact with things and others only by actively participating in them, lending one’s sensory imagination to things in order to discover how they alter and transform that imagination, how they reflect us back changed… perception is always participatory.” I’m enchanted by this idea and find its truth every time I run through the woods: just as what I see and hear and smell settles into my body and changes me, my steps leave traces on the trail and my passage is marked by squirrels scuffling off into the leaves, by birds calling warnings overhead. Just as I am perceiving the world, the world is perceiving me back.

Dwarfed by an online existence where many of our interactions occur in the ether, our actual worlds can get so small. With this contraction comes a poverty of embodied experience, which in turn creates a poverty of language. But if I move through the natural world taking Abram’s philosophy as my own, I enter into relationship with not just the people I pass on the trail, but with the rhododendron trees shading the path and the animals in the underbrush, with the stream I rock-hop over and even the sky that greets me at the top of the mountain. Nature expands my vocabulary and gives me new ways of seeing and being. This enters my poems by binding my heart, as you say, to particular places, and as metaphors that house my moments of revelation, fleeting as they are, in tangible images and actions.

CL: Ah, yes. In an age of the remote and the digital, I fear we’ve moved away from participating in life to observing (or mimicking) it. In many of your poems though, not only does the speaker relate and interact with the natural world, she often becomes it. One of my favorite images comes in “When You Ask About My Tramp Years” when the speaker says of past lovers “But so what / if their tics accreted / like barnacles; so what if I’m coral—a small-beings collective / masquerading as indivisible whole?” I love that moment so much because I picture a vibrant columning bed of coral; now, in light of warming waters, a column also dependent, and fragile. This sort of figuring happens often: the land that, after so much drought; can only repel rain, the uterus “an unblossomed pink / peony, crawling with fibroids invasive / but benign as a swarm of white ants.” I hope this isn’t redundant, but what does stepping outside the human self allow in your poems? Why or is this important in love poems in particular?

JJ: When my wife and I travel, I have a habit that drives her a bit crazy: There we are, in some gorgeous place new to us both, and some quirk of weather, some curve of the road, will move me to say, “This reminds me of…” and suddenly I’m no longer entirely present; I’m layering onto this landscape another place and time. Yet while this associative tendency can be frustrating to others—and even to me—in my writing life, it’s immensely helpful.

Often metaphors are so obvious as to feel like clichés, comparisons where the two elements feel pre-packaged: “love is a rose,” “anger is fire,” etc. The fun for a writer comes when she senses connections between two things that exist below the level of cultural consciousness, connections that make a strange sense only once the metaphor has been wrangled onto the page. And as Richard Powers, one of my most beloved novelists, said on Between the Covers, my favorite literary podcast, “You can’t understand the human without the more than human; they’re inextricably linked.”

Surprising metaphors are especially important when writing about a topic as timeworn as love. For me, for each of us, though intellectually we might acknowledge that our love is one experience in a long line of others’ past and future loves, in the moment it feels new and incomparable. So I guess each time I bind a very human emotion or experience to something outside the human, I’m trying to capture that sense love gives us: that just as no other two people have been bound as we are, in this shared love, so too have these two elements never before appeared together, dancing this particular shared dance.

CL: Or we’ve been dancing, but fail to realize how linked we are. I think of a poem toward the end of the collection where you and your wife dance in moonlight which ends:

we could easily change places, and have,
and will. She steps (sides-lit),
I step (backlit), to match

our shaded places. And only once we’re
fit like this, dark to dark, are we once more bound
                       by the light we each carry.

As I read these poems, more and more they seem a chronicle of self-awareness and acceptance—paradoxically even as the self dissolves. In the beginning of the book I see the speaker through her desire, and at the end through relation to the beloved. Both seem to hinge on a sort of deflected nakedness, and so I’m wondering how transparency plays into the crafting of your poems? How does this come to influence the forms these lyrics take?

JJ: My first book, Pelvis with Distance, written before I was with my wife, is a collection of ekphrastic epistolary persona poems written primarily in the voice of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Though I couldn’t have said it at the time, this collection was driven by my feelings of solitude and longing—the longing both for an ideal partner and to discover what it meant to live as an artist. Yet even writing that one-sentence description of the book, it’s clear how many screens and protective filters I needed to even come close to those emotions on the page. The novelist Kenneth Millar, who cloaked himself in the pseudonym Ross MacDonald, said that writing in a persona is not just writing with a mask but with a “welder’s mask,” which allows you to handle subjects otherwise too searing to touch. Writing my concerns in O’Keeffe’s voice allowed me a safe distance.

But one of the things I’ve discovered about sharing my life with another person, especially in a relationship we’ve vowed to define by not just honesty but forthrightness, is that it’s nearly impossible to hide. Though often frightening, particularly in those moments I’m made to confront truths about who and how I truly am versus how I’d like to be, I think it leads to the paradox and transparency you mention: though I’m less independent than I used to be, mirrored by and enmeshed with my wife I can see myself far more clearly. I try to capture this in the poems, figuring that if these newfound truths—difficult and painful as they may sometimes be—are useful for me, they might be useful to a reader, as well.

CL: The poem that comes to mind immediately has a speaker bicycling past a turtle in the road, vowing to move it to the shoulder on her way back only to later find “the top of its shell / torn away. The dead turtle, / a raw red bowl, its blood slashing the twinned yellow lines / into an unequal sign, / as in a ≠ b, as in thinking about doing the right thing / is not the same as doing it.” The disconnect between who we are and who we want (or claim) to be is painful, but I also feel possibility in the gap—for growth, for mystery.

I’ve noticed many of your pieces end in revelation: “Because whether a story is happy // or not depends on when you end it;” “I couldn’t see a single thing I wanted / more than this;” “Here, the mystery /is dead, long live the mystery;” “Yes, gravity is inevitable / as death. But why let that desecrate / even a moment of this flight?”

While growth occurs across the collection in the narrative arc like you mentioned, many of the poems do end with that quantum leap of heart. How do you write toward revelation? Are there any writing practices, forms, or strategies for discovering what you mean rather than saying what you mean?

JJ: Quantum leap of heart—I love that, and now have a new goal when I sit down to write.

My practice is to try and always come to the page with a question—an image I’m attempting to coax into words, an experience or idea I’m muddling through and more fully engage. So when I first begin drafting, I do my best to set judgement aside and give myself permission to write expansively: if the draft is sloppy or clichéd, so be it—clichés are often a subconscious shorthand, a place-holder for what you’re trying to say, and perhaps not quite ready to.

Later, with my revision hat on with its little veil of judgement firmly affixed to its brim, I then return to all that raw material, looking for opportunities to push the language toward more precise meaning and increased musicality. And beyond those higher-level concerns, I search for where my poem has lingered stubbornly on the surface, where there’s a deeper truth I wasn’t yet ready or able to fathom. Often, this is an area that feels too easy or too pretty to be true, because what’s described is far messier and more complicated. Then, uncomfortable or painful as it usually is, I write into those places, spelunking again and again until I find the underground chamber I could sense beneath the words, carrying up to the light what I find there.

CL: I love hearing about people’s processes especially when they differ so much from mine! Spelunking seems about right, too, in terms of things surfacing, and also landscapes that continually reveal. Take Me with You begins in “falsely innocuous” Florida, with its “taffied summer dusk” and “heat amniotic.” It’s a humid section—full of heat and water of all kinds—the taste of desire is “mineral and lake muck, seaweed, and algal blooms,” the speaker has her nose to “the gym class dampness” between another girl’s shoulder blades, describing where grass is “whispering up its pesticides” and she was “once a bucket—an occasional, embarrassing slosh over the top if jostled—now a sieve, desire leaking from every pore.” In that section especially, I’m amazed by the way you write sexuality—and also the discovery of it—so intertwined with place. It is as though each piece becomes both ode and elegy, and so I wonder how you see the tension between these operating?

JJ: Growing up in Florida was, for me, a childhood of canoeing shallow rivers while gators sunned on the banks, of lake-muck between the toes while clams and mussels razored up through the silt, and, zipping along behind a ski boat, that head-rush combination of walking on water and flight that is wakeboarding. It was truly an amphibious existence, one overgrown and strange, all worthy of odes reaching for both celebration and understanding of this place not inherently friendly to human habitation.

But those wonders were also bound up with the deep loneliness of a queer adolescence in a thoroughly conservative place and time, of waves of desire with no real outlet, so they simply doubled-back on themselves and amplified, leaving me treading water like crazy until I was able to escape to college. So, I was only able to appreciate much of that lush beauty in retrospect, as something already gone.

CL: I love that—waves doubling and amplifying—and I read this amplification even stronger come collection’s end, when the speaker clutches the present in fierce fist after fist. The penultimate piece “Because You Waited for Me to Fly Your First Kite” ends: “Let me be a kite that trusts itself / to the sky / Yes, gravity is inevitable / as death. But why let that desecrate / even a moment of this flight?”
And despite illness, despite self-doubt, so many of these poems fight to remain here. Which is interesting, because your lines do a lot of movement, often stretching long and staggering, not unlike waves coming, receding. Can you talk some about the shape of your poems? How do they shape or syncopate desire?

JJ: My wife and I often teach workshops together and one of the hard truths we’ve observed again and again is that people write how they are—which carries a significant corollary: To change your writing you must change your life.

Looking back at my first book, a collection shaped by uncertainty about both my writing and my life after graduate school, written during a period marked by real loneliness, as well as the effort to control my rising panic about “being a writer” in the larger world (whatever that meant), you can see how the work is shaped by those concerns. Most of the poems have relatively short lines split into uniform stanzas and hug the left margin like a kid clinging to the edge of the pool, terrified of being sucked into the deep end.

But falling in love—especially with a poet and person like Nickole—changed all that. During our first years together, I grew more confident as a writer and a teacher—and, if I’m honest, as a person, too, feeling more secure about the path we were forging together. And touring with Nickole, watching audiences respond to the expansive, powerful poems in her second book, Fanny Says, made me eager to allow more of my own life, strange and contradictory as it often was, into my writing.

So, I think the form of these poems reflects that—the lines longer to accommodate the many things I wanted to remember from that time, the stanzas more improvisational, unmoored from the left margin, free to range across the page and mimic the movement of the words that they carry. As someone who’s naturally active, movement is my way of being in and understanding the world, and I think these poems are a more authentic rendering of that truth.

CL: I often think about a project that would trace the career development of great poets—and by great I mean those who not only take the top of our heads off, but continue to grow, innovate, and change—throughout a writing life. It’s too early in your case, of course, but many of the writers who come to mind had growth spurts in their writing at critical life junctures. Which is all to say your longer, unmoored lines make sense and do lay bare a poet’s way of moving through the world.

Sometimes I take my way of navigating via poem for granted, and forget that many have had brief exposure to poems, or perhaps even negative associations with them. If you were to meet someone relatively unfamiliar with poetry, which one would you share with him or her?

JJ: For those who believe poetry’s too meek to allow in the true mess and wreck of the world, I’d share with them Nickole Brown’s poem “Fuck,’ which chronicles the many uses of her grandmother Fanny’s favorite four-letter word while reflecting on the fierceness of the woman who helped raise her—all with humor, lyricism, and surprising tenderness. (What a joy to have the good fortune to be married to one of my favorite poets.)

For someone so overwhelmed by the horrors we’re wreaking on the climate and each other they prefer to hide in the narcotizing ether of pop culture, I’d offer pretty much any poem by Matthew Olzmann, who can springboard from the perfect click-bait fact into a deeply funny, deeply thoughtful poem about anything from climate change to enduring love to gun violence to images of God. I especially love “The Millihelen” in Contradictions in the Design and “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz” up on poets.org. (Who knew Florida Man and Comic-Con would be ideal subject matter for poetry? Matthew Olzmann did.)

But, really, I come back to that associative tendency I mentioned earlier. I read a decent amount in many genres and tend to evangelize about books and poems that I love, so when it comes to people in need of poetry—and who isn’t, even if they don’t yet know it?—it manifests for me as a kind of literary algorithm, an if-you’re-into-x-you’ve-got-to-read-y, which I hope results in a suggestion that’s just what’s needed in that particular moment.

So, my best answer? Reader, if we run into each other, let’s sit and talk for a while. Chances are, you’ll leave with a recommendation or three and I’ll hope for the same—there’s so much wonder and wisdom we’ve yet to discover; we might as well help each other along the way.

CL: As you have me. Thank you, Jessica!