Jason Tandon’s first full-length collection of poems, Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, won the 2006 St. Lawrence Book award and was published earlier this year by Black Lawrence Press. It is a collection of poems at turns funny, idiosyncratic, and deeply moving. Elsewhere on this site I said of the book, “What begins as a collection of Americana quirk slowly bleeds into a collection of failed lives, both documented with equal reverence and skepticism.” Raised in Southern New England, educated at Middlebury College and the University of New Hampshire, he currently teaches in the writing program at Boston University and is at work on a third collection, presently titled Quality of Life. Jason was kind enough to find time, amidst the flu (on my end) and a teetering stack of midterms (on his), to talk with me over email.

—Dan Manchester

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“Sometimes an image will trigger this inexplicable, but very real,
feeling of guilt or shame to be alive…”

 

SUSS: The clear arc of the poems in this new book struck me, especially given that they don’t have that sort of cohesive, concept album-like project they’re being written into. What begins very funny leaves us pained on the way out—and does so very gradually, almost effortlessly. Having put together a chapbook before this full-length collection, what was the process like in constructing the running-order of Give Over the Heckler…?

JT: Well, in terms of your first comment, if I could write a book of poems as good as Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I'd be a very happy man!

Heckler, just like my follow-up, Wee Hour Martyrdom [sunnyoutside, 2008], came together quickly. I had the title early and a handful of poems; I had an overall idea of how I was hoping the whole book would turn out, and it came out that way. Lucky, I guess. I only cut a handful of poems from the final manuscript. Everything else seemed to fit. Most of the poems are inspired by cross-country travels, and the rest from living in New Hampshire and outside Boston. Wee Hour happened the same way. The title poem came quickly, and the over-arching theme followed. I'm currently working on a new manuscript that's working out similarly. I guess I just think in books. I haven't struggled yet with putting together my collections. It's a lot of fun spreading the poems out all over the apartment. I go through a couple of versions, show them to my wife and she gives me her two cents. I like to have links between poems, echoes from Part III back to Part I. A narrative of sorts. There was a time when I wanted to be a fiction writer.

SUSS: Place is so clearly a facet of your writing—in the new book, the poems’ speakers show up in various corners of the country, in many cases in such a way that the places themselves become characters. Your earlier chapbook was place-specific as well. How do you think about space in relation to your poems? Or, how does space inform your writing process?

JT: I think my view as a writer is primarily external. I do a lot of looking, observing, listing, describing to get started, rather than rolling an idea around in my head. The biggest criticism I got in workshops was that everyone wanted to know more about my speakers. I didn't think they were all that important. That's how I came to write "I Don't Speak Donkey," a response of sorts to those comments. I just seem to be more interested in the people I've encountered and places where I've lived (or imagined).  I guess places and people are what most attract my eye. And I want to represent them and render them so that anyone from anywhere can briefly imagine or commune with other lives and spaces.

SUSS: Those other lives and spaces seem to favor the misfits or marginal. Yet you use them not merely as comedic foil but delve into them lovingly or sympathetically, even when what they’re doing is ridiculous, even though these are not necessarily characters usually celebrated. Do you see anything political in what your poems do? Is this celebration of class and class identity attached to any sort of conscious politics for you?

JT: Again I think it comes back to what catches my eye, where my sensitivities lie. Certain places and people just seem to break my heart or weave themselves into my emotional fabric. Sometimes an image will trigger this inexplicable, but very real, feeling of guilt or shame to be alive, guilt over my good fortunes in the midst of all kinds of suffering both local and global. "Joint Operation," "Last Leaves," "Lambs Grove, Iowa," and "Ars Poetica" are examples of this.

When writing I don't set out do anything overtly political, but the English teacher/poem explicator/New critical-close reader side of me certainly realizes how my poems could be interpreted or what certain words will suggest. There are poems that overtly deal with race, for example. Not in any solution-based way, more intimations of anger and irony. My father's side of the family is Indian and I got my fair share of teasing and name-calling as I grew up. So I have always been conscious of race despite having attended and existed in very homogeneous communities as both teacher and student.

I wouldn't say I have any conscious politics behind my poems. I'm a registered independent, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I'm full of contradictions and I'm sure that plays out in my work.

 

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“Until I find someone else who knocks my socks off
as much as he does, I'll stick with him…”

 

SUSS: You’ve said elsewhere that you took a break in your twenties from writing after college, only returning later around the time you went to New Hampshire for graduate school. What pulled you back?

JT: It was the January 2003 issue of Poets and Writers that triggered everything, the one with Kevin Young on the cover. His book Jelly Roll had just been published and he was interviewed by Colson Whitehead—I can remember all these details, but not the actual content! I do remember that his responses and views of writing poems were refreshing and fun—they energized me. It was the first time I'd read an ultra-contemporary poet discussing his or her work. In college the poets I read were primarily Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, English romantics, Frost, Whitman, Dickinson—Robert Lowell was as contemporary as I had gotten.  After college, and while getting my MA in English, I began teaching English in private schools and the poets I taught and read were many of the same. I went out and bought Jelly Roll and loved it. This led me back to Hughes, Brooks, Berryman, and ultimately back to Charles Simic (who I discovered on my own just after college). A few pages after Young's interview was an advertisement for the Indiana Writer's Conference, where I spent nine days in the summer of 2003. That fall, I applied to UNH.

SUSS: What draws you in as a reader? What are the hallmarks of a good reading experience for you?

JT: What I perceive as sincerity, honesty, humor—great images. Tight lines. The hallmark of a good poetry reading experience for me is one that sends me off into my own world of thought or imagination, or makes me immediately want to write something, to contribute to the ongoing conversation.

SUSS: You write narratives and lyrics and elegies, yet they’re neither quiet nor staid. And you write funny, absurd poems that are not frivolous or merely adventuresome for the sake of the joke. There are formal structures (sonnets, especially) among your poems, but you use them both sincerely and mockingly, with the inherited reverence and with a more postmodern irony. All of this makes you a very hard poet to characterize or classify among the purported divisions and schools of contemporary poetry. (And all the better for it, I think.) Where do you see yourself working in relation to whatever personal canon you might define? Rather, what’s the lineage of your poetry as you see it? Who are you in conversation with in your writing?

JT: Simic is my biggest influence, no doubt. I've been thinking lately that I need to move on—but every time I want to pull a book off the shelf, I'll reach for him. I absolutely love his poetry. It's so unlike any other American poetry, and until I find someone else who knocks my socks off as much as he does, I'll stick with him. I guess if you take the riddling economy of Dickinson with a little W.C. Williams vernacular and add the irreverence of a Rimbaud or Benjamin Péret and the a dash of the eeriness of Poe or Vasko Popa—his poems, like few others I've read, have that re-readable quality. His poems are alive in the sense that they can create the same chill, the same wonder of amazement.  I tend not to like very ‘prosey’ poems, poems that emote too much, that don't allow me a way in—I like poems that I can slip inside of and stay forever if I like. There aren't many poets that I read consistently or buy everything they've written. I'm more a fan of individual poems that I continue to return to or aspire to. I wish I had written Plath's "Blackberrying," Keats's "To Autumn," a handful of "Dream Songs," and so on.

I have struggled a bit with the fit: I'm a first generation American with an Indian father and German mother. I've got a lot of rich traditions that I grew up with culturally and continue to celebrate. But I don't consider myself an Asian-American poet, for example. If I submitted poems to such a journal I don't think I'd have much chance. This is also what attracts me to Simic's work—not just his poetry but all of his essays and autobiography that detail his immigrant experiences.

I like what I like: I wonder how everyone would get along if I invited Yeats, Brooks, and Neruda to the same dinner table?

 

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“I want them to feel that there is something just beyond…”

 

SUSS: One of the most striking aspects of your work for me is the wonderful sounds you find in odd pairings and grouping of words: “bucket themselves,” “streetlit sagebrush,” “rain-steady trickle,” “Kwik-Stop. Exit Tub.” Musicality is obviously important to any poet, but I’m wondering if you find these sounds only in revision or if they’re more often a starting point? Where or when does the sound of your poems come in to the writing process?

JT: Sound comes early and often. I tend not to begin with an idea or emotion, as I've said earlier. It begins with the words or the phrase: "A spawn of snow fleas in my mudroom" or "We're stranded at table sixteen" for example. Early in writing Heckler I was working with Richard Hugo's composition by sound ideas in The Triggering Town. Trying both planned and arbitrary patterns. "Men at the Lamprey" was composed this way. There was the actual Lamprey Tavern, but the men and the pinball machine became products of sound associations.

SUSS: Many poets have some pet point of craft—line as unit, meter, something that they focus on in composing and revising that maybe is taken for granted or largely unnoticed by a casual reader. Is there something that you find yourself focused on when you’re drafting poems that is only for you, or perhaps only for the closest of readers?

JT: I am conscious when writing of certain words carrying certain allusive weight. This comes from so many years in the classroom "analyzing poems." My ideal poem is one that can be apprehended literally by a reader and a reader can be entertained or find pleasure in just that, but I also want them to feel that there is something just beyond, either because of a certain word or grouping, or a juxtaposition. Nothing too crazy, of course--how much can a lyric poem honestly get away with?

SUSS: There’s a long history of humor in poetry—especially in the last century, from the surrealists through the various generations of the New York School to a lot of contemporary poetry—yet there’s still some divide among poetry readers that causes those of us who revere the comedic to find ourselves defending, say, Ron Padgett against claims of frivolity. As someone who writes poems that are actually funny, how do you negotiate this point of view?

JT: In his essay "Cut the Comedy," Charles Simic wrote, "The philosophy of laughter reminds us that we live in the midst of contradictions, pulled this way by the head, pulled that way by the heart, and still another way by our sex organs." I subscribe to this philosophy.

On a related note, James Tate in a Paris Review interview said, "I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best."

There is, of course, a tendency for poets to take themselves very, very seriously. I hope people read in my poems moments of celebration too: sex, friendship, a great cheeseburger, or a well-poured Guinness—the good things in life.

There are certainly times when I want to do the same as Tate; loss, sadness, pain, loneliness are all powerful emotions. I wish I laughed as much or more than I feel these other emotions. It's hard to write funny poems. Humor's a very subjective thing—nothing worse, too, that trying to be funny and failing. Most people give me a look when I tell them that Heckler was intended to be a comedy. I was reading a lot of Kenneth Koch and Richard Hugo at the time—I suppose that was my perfect blend of poem. I get tired of Koch—the zaniness—and sometimes you just want a human voice speaking to you about human concerns in sincere ways.

But I continue to read and love Edson, Péret, Huidobro, Rimbaud—I think Dickinson has a wonderful sense of humor. No need to defend anyone or anything in this business. Like O'Hara said, I'm not looking to force feed anyone too much cooked meat.

SUSS: Often your poems find their power in the juxtaposition of the profane or jarring against a calm backdrop. For instance, in other hands “Fire in the Great Hawk Colony” could have been a pastoral lyric of berry picking and the threat of smoke above the tree line, yet it becomes something else entirely when

You wanted to see a charred child’s body,
a parakeet’s burnt beak thrust through cage bars,
a doll’s head with looseygoosey eye.

This turn away from the expected emotional landscape happens again and again—often marking the funniest or most moving moments in the book. Does this ability to see the absurd and the unexpected in the face of the mundane come naturally to you or is it something you’ve adopted for your poetry? I suppose another way of asking this question would be, do you think this way of seeing the world predetermined you toward writing poetry?

JT: I've been asked in job interviews questions like what made you want to be a poet? or why did you start writing poetry? Strange questions. For starters, I really don't like the word poet. I never refer to myself as one. When people ask what I do, I teach. You realize pretty quickly post-MFA that no one (out here in the "real world") cares about poetry or has heard of a hundredth of the poets you could mention let alone a single journal where you've published.

But back to your question! I think my poems come very much from how I see or want to see the world. There's a lot of revisionist history.  It's a great opportunity to shape my past life. There are moments and images that just stick with me. I like to say that they bully their way onto the page.

My “turn away from the expected landscape” is also something I've thought about. It's a product of my upbringing, my parents, their cultures: emotions weren't generally something expressed. I'm still learning to hug.

 

 

 

 

 

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Dan Manchester is the editor of Suss: Another Literary Journal.