As many of the best poems are, Jacob Boyd’s poems are little worlds. They beautifully balance image, music, argument, the line, the sentence, without one dominating or overtaking the others. Instead, the poetic elements interact symbiotically to create little ecosystems. I’m also reminded of William Carlos Williams’s well-known claim that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” and Valery’s version, that “a poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.” The latter is most useful here, I think, because when I read these poems by Boyd, I’m aware not only of my own experience as a reader discovering the poem, but also of the poet’s process of discovery in writing–its own pleasure.

Read on for my conversation with Boyd, in which we discuss the connection between the ecological “trophic cascade” and his invented form of the “strophic cascade,” poems as parks, ecopoetics, Roethke, Bishop, time and music. He has generously allowed us to share an additional two strophic cascades to complement the ones printed in issue No. 43, and it sounds, from his telling, that there will likely be more of these to come as this invented form finds its full expression.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Jacob Boyd teaches for the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He is from Lansing, Michigan. Cornerstone Press will publish his manuscript, No Lost Feast, in 2025. His latest collection, My National Parks, won the Midwest Writing Center’s chapbook award. Other work of his can be found in Blackbird, Cutleaf, On the Seawall, Poetry Daily, and more.

Poems:

“Strophic Cascade [The woods you know. The woods are owned.]” (from 32 Poems #43)
“Strophic Cascade [Between the storm inside and the storm window,]” (from 32 Poems #43)
“Strophic Cascade [She ran the goddam gamut]” (featured here)
“Strophic Cascade [What was country music? Country was what]” (featured here)

Interview:

SRN: Jacob, can you talk about the origins of this Strophic Cascade series of poems, two of which appear in the most recent issue (No. 43), and two more of which we’ve included here? The title is clever, of course, combining the poetic term “strophe” with the phenomenon of “trophic cascade,” where a chain of indirect effects on an ecosystem is caused by the suppression of one “trophic level,” or level in the food chain. What does the phrase “Strophic Cascade” mean to you, and how does it link these poems?

JB: Thank you, Sarah Rose, for succinctly describing trophic cascades. There’s a study of the wolves and moose in Isle Royale National Park that has been important, I think, to people studying predator-prey relationships and ecosystem dynamics, because the park is an island. When the wolves almost died out, the moose nearly stripped the island of vegetation. That of course would have consequences for anything that needed the vegetation for shelter or food. I had just finished writing a chapbook (called My National Parks, Midwest Writing Center printed it this summer) in which each poem represented a different park. I had been thinking of the poems themselves as parks—places that could be visited, were mostly driven through, had some secretive residents, some famous features, a lot of history. They were my parks because each one was representative of my mind at the time of writing. It was a borderline confessional book, personal, written during the pandemic, written from home, projecting private desires and fears on the world outside. It was also, structurally, a book of sentences—prose poems that only occasionally threw a line break in to shake things up.

When those were done, I wanted something different, but I guess I wasn’t done with the idea of poems as little ecosystems. Other poets have approached eco-poetics with more seriousness and thoroughness. I just wanted some triggering ideas and a few rules to play with. So I made these up. In a strophic cascade, each strophe must begin with a line that contains a repeating word; that word cannot appear again in the poem until the final strophe, where it must appear. I don’t typically use the word strophe but, hey, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, it “implies movement;” it’s not as regular (metrically or rhyme-wise) as a stanza. Christina Pugh, my teacher in Chicago, would appreciate the distinction.

A strophic cascade is flexible. Do the strophes in a given poem have to be of equal numbers of lines? So far, yes. Should it have end-rhyme? Sometimes. I don’t like sestinas and I’ve never been able to write a decent villanelle, but I found this challenge manageable and fun. As for the, like, big idea of it—the restriction of not being able to use the repeated words again in the poem until the end—whether that would have noticeable indirect effects—the verdict is still out on that. One problem is that most of the words I’ve chosen as repeaters don’t seem to be keystone species; that is, their absence doesn’t cause much of a stir.

SRN: I want to push a little further into the connection between form and eco-poetics here in the “strophic cascade.” Your comment about the repeating (and then withheld) word not being a “keystone species” makes me think of Kristi Maxwell’s recent book, Goners, in which she uses the lipogram form (where certain letters are omitted from the poem) to write with the phenomenon of extinction. Each poem’s title is the name of an endangered species, the poem cannot contain any of the letters of the name of that species. For example, the poem “Cheetah” has no c, h, e, t, or a, leading, as you can imagine, to a very compressed vocabulary. I’m wondering if you’ve attempted any strophic cascades where the word you choose would intentionally be more of a “keystone,” where you would really feel its loss, as a writer, during the course of the poem and then feel a coming back into balance with its return in the final strophe? Now that I think of it, I did experience some sense of loss in the poem that begins “The woods you know. The woods are owned” because the poem’s shift to the city called up the erasure and de-wilding of forests, whereas the word “goddam” is more expendable.

JB: That conceit in Goners is clever. The poems I’ve seen from that book–to my mind–face a similar dilemma as the strophic cascade: in not mentioning the extinct species, certain letters, or the keystone word–rather than evoking what’s gone–they end up turning attention elsewhere. I’ll have to read more of Goners to really get a handle on it–I’m basing this on the few I’ve found online. Those few were very playful in an associative way, non-linear, non-narrative, and I wondered while reading them if there was a missed opportunity there. Just as, if I fail to write a strophic cascade where the missing word shouts out its (temporary) absence, I will miss a formal opportunity. What I’m after here is the importance of plot in these poems. How attention to cause-and-effect relationships, analogous to connections in a food web, is almost necessary to make these forms click. I don’t think I’ve written the strophic cascade poem that fully realizes that yet.

I’m grateful for your generous reading of “The woods you know.” Maybe the referential nature of that as an opening line (think Frost’s “Whose woods these are I think I know”) helps it along a little, since there is immediately a missing referent, a ghost poem. Now, as for “goddam” being expendable, them’s fightin’ words…

SRN: Haha, I take it back! But you’re right that the Frost reference you mention does give that poem extra weight–the weight of absence of that forest of collective poetic memory, as well as of forests in general. Important to note, perhaps, that even the more idyllic forest in Frost’s poem was acknowledged to “belong” to someone–it was already long-claimed by the colonial project and on its way toward destruction.

Speaking of poetic forebears, who are your most present influences, and how do you feel them showing up in this series or in your work in general?

JB: The only book of poems on my father’s bookshelf in my house when I was little was a hardcover of Frost’s collected poems. Because it was so unlike all the other books (I remember “In Cold Blood,” Michener, a Lincoln biography), I attributed special power to it. After all, you could open it to almost any page and find a complete piece of literature that didn’t seem aimed totally at adults or at children. In that sense, it was closer to the Bible. I was intrigued and–I don’t know how it happened–I asked for more and, in eighth or ninth grade, received an anthology of Romantic Poetry.

Looking at these strophic cascade poems, I hear Theodore Roethke’s “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow” in “The fly wakes slowly–if waking’s what this is.” There’s that somewhat singsong music of his lines–the repetition within a line throughout his “I Knew a Woman”: “Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay”; “she played it quick, she played it light and loose”; and so on. His Saginaw is about seventy five miles north of my Lansing, but he was one of the (in my mind) old-timey poets writing in form who I could actually stomach. When I got to college, the poet Nancy Eimers had us read the anthology called The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. It had Roethke (who I had read in high school) and it started, I think, with Lowell and Bishop. I was in awe of the cadences and the meting out of sound in “Skunk Hour” and “One Art.”

When I was writing these poems, though, I was reading Laura Kasischke’s Where Now, Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk, and Daisy Fried’s Baudelaire poems. Put those three (four, if you count Charles) poets together, something decent is bound to happen.

SRN: This answer brought me so much pleasure, because I too fell in love with Roethke in high school. Someone gave me a Vintage anthology called Eight American Poets, and it was where I first discovered Bishop, Merrill, Plath, Ginsberg, Roethke, Berryman, Sexton, and Lowell. What an education in just one paperback! I particularly fell in love with Roethke for a time, so I bought his Collected and memorized “I Knew a Woman,” “Epidermal Macabre,” “My Papa’s Waltz,” and others. There was something magic, as you point out, in the music of his lines. The beauty is so fleshed–there’s a childlike quality, but it can also be like overripe fruit, almost souring on the branch. I remember being amazed, too, by recordings of his readings—the almost painful slowness with which he reads “I wake to sleep, but take my waking slow”—almost like Yeats’s incantatory reading style.

While your poems don’t necessarily have that incantatory sense, there is a clearly intentional slowing in your poem that begins “Between the storm inside and the storm window,” this sense of settling down deeply into a single moment with no concern for what lies beyond it. Could you elaborate a little on how you think about music and time in your poems? Given the frame of the trophic cascade for these poems (something that happens over time, a web of consequence), is time something that you especially consider in this series?

JB: I wish I could say there was an “intentional slowing” as I sat down to write those lines. As you say, the spider and fly poem moves slower, with a narrower focus than much of my other work. That poem performs the kind of attention I’d like to have more of. Something gets crystallized there, and thankfully my normally chatty self recedes a bit to the background. Even that poem has distractible moments: the memory of a dream rises to the surface at a few points. Without that element of the dream of the dead father, it wouldn’t be much of a poem.

I don’t really know how to talk about what you’ve asked—there are so many combinations of music and moment. In poems like the strophic cascades [What was country music? Country was what] or [The woods you know. The woods are owned.], I’m working more stanzaically, with roughly similar groups of lines. In those poems, I can play out the stanzas like verses of a song. Part of the pleasure of writing like that comes with creating then breaking a pattern, as happens towards the end of both of those poems, where the sentences spill over the stanza breaks. In the other two strophic cascades here, the music is less segmented from the get-go. There’s heavier enjambment throughout, and part of the structural pleasure of writing like that comes from the liquidity, maintaining a kind of pattern-less flow. In my head, it’s something like the structural difference between a country song by Billy Joe Shaver and a free form prelude by Debussy. I like to try both. It gets problematic when I start combining them.

That’s a straightforward assessment of lineation and the grouping of lines, but I think you have in mind something more closely related to content. Thinking through that anthology of yours, I admire Bishop’s handling of time—her portrayal (or enactment) of how it dilates on us in significant moments. In her poem titled “Poem,” the speaker, describing a small painting, says, “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! / It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name. / His barn backed on that meadow. There it is, / titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple, / filaments of brush-hairs, barely there, / must be the Presbyterian church. / Would that be Miss Gillespie’s house? / Those particular geese and cows/are naturally before my time.” I love the sweep of that—the heightened pitch that gives it immediacy amidst a lifetime of memory, the way it’s right there and just out of reach, the detail and texture of the painting paired with the slightly dismissive “naturally before my time.” Later in the poem, she writes “Life and the memory of it cramped,/dim, on a piece of Bristol board,/dim, but how live, how touching in detail/–the little that we get for free,/the little of our earthly trust.” With the title “poem,” it’s as much ars poetica as anything. Contrast that with the abundance, excess, and quickness of Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” or “Howl,” or the dreamlike, terrifying dirge of Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” Honestly, I want it all. I want to put these various musics in motion in my own writing, and I tire fairly quickly of books that stick for long in one musical register. Regardless, I like for a recognizable sense of time to be present in a poem, though I’m not sure it’s as important as a believable voice.