A Few Words a Day: An Interview With Lisa Jarnot
Lisa Jarnot is interviewed at rob mclennan's Touch the Donkey journal supplement, where she responds to questions surrounding her poem, “Part Five: The Sublime Porte,” which appears in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey (and previously in Prelude #1), among other things. An excerpt from their conversation:
Q: Tell me about the poem “Part Five: The Sublime Porte.”
A: “Part 5: The Sublime Porte” is part of a long work in progress, a growing book-length poem. I began it in 2009 after my daughter was born. Pressed for time, I decided to write three words a day. At the end of every year of word-gathering, I cobble the phrases together. The book is evolving to be a record of the quotidian—family life, social and political incursions into the everyday domestic scene, and also child development.
Q: With one section a year, that could potentially become a rather lengthy compositional process. How many sections/years do you think the finished manuscript will have? It also makes me curious about how you feel the shift in approach is changing your writing; how do you feel this project is different from your previous book-length work, or even the way you see your individual poems?
A: I’ve never written a book-length poem before, and have always wanted to, so the opportunity arose through the circumstances of slowing down to be a parent. I expect the book will sprawl on until it comes to some organic finishing point. I’ve joked that it will be 18 years/18 sections, but I really don’t know how it will play out. My work has always been based on sprints of lyric/musical energy, so this is in fact very different that my other works. I think it’s important to include motherhood, domesticity, the household in poetry—the labor-value of these things is always underestimated. And the clarity of children’s insights are overlooked because they are smaller and lesser than us. I am very keen on the idea of democratizing the relationships between children and adults. This is one of my reasons for not sending my daughter to school—I don’t want her to be talked down to and "taught"—I want her to grow autonomously. All of that gets filtered into the poem.
Q: You’ve already published a small handful of poetry collections—Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001/Salt Publishing, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008), and Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (City Lights, 2013)—so I’m curious at the deliberate movement to change the ways in which you compose new work. Prior to this, did you focus on the individual poem or the book-length collection as your unit of composition?
A: My work has been various. Some Other Kind of Mission was composed as a book of visual collages interspersed with prose poems. Ring of Fire and Black Dog Songs were mostly individual poems. I’m not sure there’s a determined thought behind any of it—it’s just what works in the moment. At this moment I can make time to jot down a few words a day and once a year I can sort them into a composition 6-8 pages long. So, that’s the form.
Read the full interview at Touch the Donkey.