KJ: Once I found it, I carried Sharon Olds’ “The Father” in my bag for years.
TJ: Which contemporary poets do you envy? Exactly what do you envy? The Camille Claudel poems were particularly helped along by Andrew Hudgins’ After the Lost War and Margaret Gibson’s Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti. Van Jordan’s MACNOLIA, and Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife. Sure those books rotate, but I often find myself returning to the same favorites: Edward Hirsch’s Special Orders, Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, A. I keep a stack of books near me that I spend time with before I even begin to write. TJ: Which writers are your touchstones when you find yourself in a rut? I began writing these poems about three years after that semester, so the research was, in many ways, a psychological vacation. I was a French major in college and my interest in Camille Claudel came out of my time studying abroad in Paris. For me, though, that vacation comes out of the research more than the form itself. TJ: How often do you look outside English language poetic forms? Do you feel it to be a sort of vacation when you visit them, either when writing them or just reading them? Form allows me to play with the narrative. I need that sense of structure to subvert my tendency to explicate too much. And I certainly play with the flexibility of those rules, but I want them there to begin. With boundaries and rules, I have more freedom to explore other avenues and opportunities the poem might give me. On the second day, they used the entire enclosed space for their play.
On the first day–without the fence–it was observed that the children barely explored the area. On another day, the class then had recess on a playground in which a boundary was defined by a fence. During recess, the children were to play as usual. Teachers took their preschool students to a playground on a field that had no fence. KJ: So liberating! A while ago, I read about this child development study (and I will now butcher the science by paraphrasing it). TJ: Do you find the structures of form liberating or constricting when you employ it for a poem? If by history you mean the poets who precede me, then yes, I’m aware of where these poems fall in with those I’m writing after. I tend to read before I even begin to write, so I hope that the poems take after those poets I’ve learned from. KJ: I don’t think about the origins of the form too often, though my Turco is rarely beyond arm’s reach if I need it. TJ: Is there ever a thought, even a fleeting one, about where a poem you write ‘fits’ within the history of the forms you choose? Given the nature of the villanelle, given that the poet must return to those refrain lines, it seemed the perfect form to imagine Camille in her final year.
Her brother had her committed-against doctors’ recommendations-to a mental asylum where she lived for the last thirty years of her life. I’d been working on these Camille Claudel poems set at the turn of the century and it felt dishonest to not see her very difficult demise, not to see where she wound up. Before I sat down to work on what would become “Montdevergues, 1943,” I did know, because of the content, that it had to be a villanelle. I try to be aware of any and all opportunities for form and I’m often looking to see if there are any words or phrases that might bear repeating. TJ: Do you actually sit down to write a sonnet, ghazal, or villanelle? Or is it a more organic process related to the content? Jin Editor's Feature / Poetry tagged Katharine Johnsen / TJ Jarrett by Ryan Gunn
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