Read the poems here.
Camille Bliss
I recently dated a man who referred to his body parts by their anatomical names. If he hurt his knee, for example, he’d say “Ah, my patella!” I had difficulty taking him seriously because these terms feel so detached from my body. You use words like “vena cava,” “aortic,” “nerve ending,” and “neural pathway” in your poems. Was your intention to separate the reader from their occupancy of the body? To see it as another thing, much as we see flowers as things?
Jacob Schepers
Yeah, I do like the distance created between reader and body when using these more anatomical or medically precise words. My writing has generally leaned toward the more scientific because I like introducing these somewhat exotic-sounding words into poetry’s lexicon. There’s a lilt to jargon that I find really appealing from a sonic sense, and the fact that it refers to our body in a different way is a perk of the process.
My two favorite poetic techniques are probably bathos (shifting from the grand to the trivial or vice versa) and defamiliarization (making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar).These kinds of words and the treatment of our most fundamental relation, our own bodies, scratch that itch for me.
Camille
It’s autumn, and on a stroll through the neighborhood I’m struck by a front yard teeming with sneezeweed and marigolds. I feel compelled to pick and press them into a book—the same compulsion you point out in your poem, “To Pick a Wildflower.” How did the idea for this poem generate? Do you actively tell yourself “No, don’t touch,” or is this an awareness you’ve always had? Where do you believe the caveman-like urge to possess beautiful things stems from?
Jacob
This poem arose from a physical place: the northern Michigan backwoods of my in-laws’ property that has been in the family for a century or so. Christened “the rainbow woods” by my four-year-old due to the leaves’ vibrancy in autumn, these woods are mostly untouched and abound with trillium, those delicate white flowers, in the spring. I may not tell myself “No, don’t touch,” as much as I like that impulse in so many areas of life, but I do reflect on the laws and general guidance not to pick wildflowers on public land and why such laws need to be in place from the jump.
There’s something so primally human, so “caveman-like,” as you say, about wanting to possess beautiful things, and my unscientific hunch is that it stems from two impulses. On one basic level, humans have an eye for beauty and rarity and seek out such experiences. On another level, some cultures have tended to consider nature as distinct from the human and thus want to “possess” natural beauty or “capture” it in some way. It’s the same impulse, I think, that elevated artistic imitation, mimesis of the natural world, in aesthetics. I’m interested in this poem and, more broadly, in what happens when we shift thinking of the human/nature divide and imagine the human as part of nature that doesn’t need to “capture” or “possess” anything because we already contain and are contained within it.
Camille
With your poem, “The Wake-up Robot Problem,” I picture peaceful, mechanical beings overcome with appreciation for beauty when you write, “the problem is what to do when the robots unionize to have a chance to appreciate flowers.” AI was created by humans who have placed the health of our planet on the back burner. Do you think newfound consciousness would also include gratitude and appreciation for nature? Or, because it’s consciousness created in our likeness, do you think robots would be capable of the same appreciation?
Jacob
This is so astute and apt. Funnily enough, the earliest version of this poem is close to ten years old and thus pre-dates the current state of AI and its human and environmental damages. So much of AI’s training has centered around capitalist ideology and is built on theft. Growth is supposed to trend upward at all times and with profits always filling the coffers. The AI bubble will inevitably burst, though, and there will be plenty of fallout and handwringing about it.
A rosy scenario that I like to imagine, far-fetched as it may seem, is that a more world-conscious and anti-capitalist version of AI might emerge. Really, though, I feel as if I’m describing a “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” This version could be one that prioritizes interconnectedness and the fragility of ecosystems broadly considered. It’s a hell of a job to undertake and “de-program” the current operations, but a more humanistic and environmentally conscious guidance could, I hope, do plenty to offer an alternative to the language of domination that has pervaded AI models thus far. In short, humanity creates AI and robots in our likeness, but we are no monolith. I would want to see a different vision of humanity take seriously what it is to create AI responsibly and without a preoccupation for the bottom line. I’m aware, though, that this vision may be far too optimistic, which makes me lament all the more what might have been.
Camille
The imperfection in the way plants grow is beautiful, yet much of our food is now monocropped and bioengineered for optimal production. In “A Sense of Design,” you reflect on the unlikely existence of ginger root and vanilla. How has our relationship to food shifted over the decades? Is it something we still honor to put in our bodies? How can we feel more connected to and grateful for the food we eat?
Jacob
I too love the irregularities in natural produce and vegetation. Nature’s quirks in appearance were, of course, a large part of what I was working to note in “A Sense of Design.” With factory farming and the customer’s expectation of regularity and supersizing, our food and its varieties have largely flattened, which I consider to be a shame. Give me a small Michigan strawberry over an out-of-season Franken-berry any day! I think local farmers markets and independent farms have it right: Being inextricably bound up in place, the history of that place, and the threats facing that place can all make the produce more “honored,” I guess, because of the deep care and concern that goes into it. I’m aware of some farms that almost make a ritual of a harvest or even a slaughter by attending closely to the vegetation or animal in a way that factory farming makes simply transactional, if not downright exploitative. That, to me, feels like a way of honoring the food chain—and, if a customer’s mindset were to honor the process by which we nourish our own bodies.
Camille
In “Entry Point” you write, “If I ever find a method for injecting flowers / into my bloodstream / my poetry is over.” Do you view writing poetry as our own way of adding beauty to the world? How can art, and its creation, impact us in the same way nature does?
Jacob
I tend, actually, to think less of poetry as adding beauty to the world and more about how writing poetry lets the world into us, with its beauties, its horrors, and everything in between. Almost like I’m a tuning fork struck against some object that resounds back and makes me reverberate so that I and, when fortunate, others can hear the humming we otherwise don’t notice. From that vantage point, art’s creation and its reception both impact us as nature can. We keep our ear to the ground for what the world around us is crying out to say, which we too often ignore in our busyness.
Camille
Your writing is uniquely contemplative, both in the beauty you see in nature and in death. In Tarot, the death card often represents a necessary end, but it can also be interpreted as rebirth, and awakening. How does the beauty of nature and death go hand in hand? How can death be reimagined as something beautiful, rather than dark? And if it can be beautiful, how can we embrace it?
Jacob
Thanks for such a kind reading of my work, first of all! This question actually reminds me of a bumper sticker I just saw on a car when I was at a reading recently in Spokane, Washington, that said, “There’s only one kind of people in this world: people who die.” (A quick Google search let me know that this line might have originated with dark-folk singer Amigo the Devil, for what it’s worth.) I bring this up because as much as death sucks and human tragedy is heartbreaking, there’s a wider view of death—particularly in the natural sense—that already is a kind of beautiful embrace. It’s a homecoming, a reclamation. We see nature dying around us all of the time and we tend to accept that; when people close to us die, it expectedly hurts. When we remember though that death is the most natural and universal experience and we join a long history of the dead march, there’s a kind of embrace in that. I think so.
Camille
Your poems use little to no punctuation, relying on line breaks for natural pauses. How has your approach to punctuation shifted since you first started writing? How can a poem land more effectively without punctuation, and when do you believe it’s necessary? What are the benefits of relying heavily on punctuation versus relying solely on line structure?
Jacob
I’m glad that you noticed the little punctuation use; that’s actually something that depends upon the work that I’m writing. The poems here and within the larger collection they come from do make sparse use of punctuation because the collection seemed to call for it. These are among the most unabashedly “lyrical” poems I’ve written, and so the absence of traditional punctuation and the line breaks may indicate something like the more “closely held” nature of these poems. They’re concerned less with traditional punctuation rules and emanate from more fundamental starts and stops like the heartbeat, the breath, and other embodied registers.
The benefits of relying heavily on punctuation depend upon the project—I find myself sticking to more standard usage when writing prose poems, as in my first book, A Bundle of Careful Compromises, or when I’m writing deliberately long, syntactically twisted lines, as in my second book, Ugly Ground Swell Moss. The more convoluted the sentence, the more “necessary” or at least the more “helpful” traditional punctuation can be. That said, I’m often not all that interested in being overly helpful and do quite regularly think that there’s a strong case to be made for so-called difficult poems that make the reader work alongside the language of the poem.
Camille
In “A Diary | A Botany,” you use rich metaphors, like “I track my days in chrysanthemums,” and “I scour hydrangeas for signs of another birthday.” Even the title emphasises this. Without metaphor, our world could seem bleak and impoverished. How can metaphor help us make sense of things we don’t understand outright? Are there overused metaphors you find annoying? How can a poet use metaphor to resonate most deeply with their reader, and when do you think metaphor shouldn’t be used?
Jacob
I think about metaphor quite a bit and liken it to the experience of coming into understanding by not understanding. The nature of an analogy is to make sense of something unknown via some known thing even while we know that at some point the comparison falls apart. Recognizing that, I see metaphor as a crucial way we roam about in our finite understanding in the world, with the world, and with each other. Overused metaphors become annoying when they become commonplace, meaning that language has a tendency to calcify or become inert. The fresh comparison becomes stale and cliché. One of the driving forces of this collection, in fact, was to try to rehabilitate “flowery language”—which I typically find a little annoying, or at least a little cloying—and turn it into something that felt necessary for these poems I was writing. And so I think that a metaphor, in short, should be something that enhances experience and doesn’t get in the way of connecting to something on the other end of the line.
Camille
I find the poem “Eros Is Eros Is Eros” erotic, describing a sensation without saying it outright. One of my favorite poems, “Strawberries,” by Edwin Morgan, struck a similar chord for me. Writing openly about sex can be tricky. How do you free yourself to write without bounds? An old instructor of mine writes, “This will be bad, and that’s okay,” at the top of his page before a freewrite. Do you have similar methods? What do your free writes look like? Are they spur of the moment, or do you set aside time in the morning or at night? Do you notice a shift in your writing depending on the time of day?
Jacob
I love the sentiment of “This will be bad, and that’s okay.” There’s a freedom in leaning into the terribleness of art, its pomposity, its sophomoric musings. I’m drawn to investigations of “lyric shame” in which poets are embarrassed about being poets, about having to write poetry, yet choosing to do so regardless. To call oneself a poet is to welcome that bombastic label, reveling in the eyerolls and the ridicule, and the outright derision that might result. That’s doubly the case for poets who profess to write about love, or sex, or beauty, or even nature for that matter.
I would actually say that my freewrites are very spur-of-the-moment—I’ve never been a writer who thrives in structured writing time because there seems to be such pressure in that situation that I can’t shake. As a result, my freewriting and many of my poems emerge out of excess, an excess of feeling, thinking, living. For me, a poem is a gasp that escapes my breath and heralds that one day those breaths will come to a complete stop. That’s super emo, but thinking of a poem as a sign of one’s mortality, of one’s having-to-die, that just feels kind of right to me.
Camille
In the movie Atonement, nylon stockings were placed over camera lenses to create a surreal, dreamlike effect. I notice my mind applying this same effect when I read your poems, like in the lines “flaxen to pearl,” “A patch of trillium snaked around my ankles,” and “In the circles I run in I carve out a field / with my heavy footfalls.” How do certain images evoke specific emotions in a reader? Was there a particular emotion you wanted to highlight in your collection? How do you believe emotions become tied to images?
Jacob
Poetry has a special obligation to layer the nylon stockings over the camera lens and, at times, to remove the nylons we may not have realized were there in the first place. A poem is not real life, but rather an engagement with language considered in full. That’s a phrase I repeat often when I’m teaching, because it allows the writer and reader alike to recognize all of the ways we interact with language: how it looks on the page, how it activates our imagination, how it sounds to our ears, how it feels in our mouths, how words carry a history, and on and on.
Images and emotions are intimate parts of this dynamic, yet they’re also individual to each encounter. The field I describe and envision might look very different from the one you imagine. The density of the trillium around ankles will vary across each of us. What’s more, the emotions and associations I have with an image may conjure up for you something entirely unprecedented when I was writing the poem. That’s the kind of magic words that poetry can play with, because an image will take on a life of its own at the sheer mention of a poem saying, “Look at this!” or, “See here?” All of that to say, the poems in this series try at least to capture a sense of wonder or mystery. I wish we could walk around gobsmacked as a matter of course in our day-to-day experiences.
Read the poems here.
