Photo courtesy Forrest Gander
Editor-in-chief Su Ertekin-Taner sat down with poet, editor, and educator Jesse Nathan. Jesse Nathan’s debut collection of poetry, Eggtooth, won the 2024 New Writers Award and the 2024 Housatonic Book Prize in Poetry. His work appears in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, the Yale Review, and the Best American Poetry. His prose has been published in the New York Times and the Threepenny Review. Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, and he teaches literature in the English Department at UC Berkeley.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
1. In Between So Many States
Su Ertekin-Taner: Can you tell me about the many buckets in your life? All the different kinds of work you do, and how they fit together? I’m thinking of your writing, but also your work as an editor and a professor at UC Berkeley.
Jesse Nathan: That’s a question that has been on my mind I think most of my life, in a way. Poetry, writing poetry, reading poetry, making poems, is the bedrock. That’s what gets me up in the morning. Reading and making poems is the work my life feels centered around. And if I’m pulled away from that for too long, my outlook, my mental health – begins to suffer. The best version of it is when all of the buckets, as you put it, are feeding that central source, and are being fed by it. For instance, I teach poetry at UC Berkeley. These days I’m tending to teach single author classes. This semester we’re reading all the way through Gwendolyn Brooks. Or we’ll read through all of W.B. Yeats or Langston Hughes or whoever. All of that conversation feeds my own writing, too.
And then I’m an editor and writer at McSweeney’s. I remember when I was one of the younger people there, and now I’m – what’s a friendly word – an elder there. I don’t have an MFA. I always meant to get around to applying for one, and thought it would be fun to do, and I didn’t end up getting to it. Haven’t yet, anyway. But at Mcsweeney’s I’ve been for awhile doing a series of interviews with contemporary poets, one question interviews, and it’s been a kind of MFA for me. We’ve done over one hundred of them. I read everything I can get my hands on by the poet, and then I talk with them off the record, usually on the phone. And I’ve learned so much in the process. To get to sit at the feet – to have a kind of master class from Yusuf Komunyakaa or Linda Gregerson or any of these writers – it’s been a great gift.
Those are just a few of the buckets. The professional buckets, anyway.
SET: I want to talk a little bit about Eggtooth, your first and only poetry book. Before reading the book, I was unfamiliar with “eggtooth,” this mechanism birds use to crack open their eggshell. I’m wondering what membranes you’re broaching, cracking, cutting away at, or moving through in Eggtooth.
JN: That’s a great question. Well, I’ll say first that I was surprised at the title, too. It came toward the end of the process, and it actually came by way of Fady Joudah, who was an early reader of this book. There is a poem in my book called “Eggtooth,” and after he read the collection he said this, this is the title. And I resisted that idea for a while, but it continued to haunt me. And eventually felt inevitable. As you say, Eggtooth suggests a forceful or violent breaking-through, breaking a barrier, which is what the baby bird does with the eggtooth. That little bit of cartilage forms on the beak, while the creature is in the egg, and the eggtooth disappears once the bird is in the world.
It feels to me like there are so many membranes I’m breaking through, in these poems. And the poems are my eggteeth to do it. The voice in this book is between so many states, but is also breaking from one state to another, and I suppose at some unconscious level maybe that’s why I settled on that metaphor. For instance, there’s the breaking of one’s silence. A first book is the great breaking of your life’s silence, as a poet. And then there’s the way the book is my coming out. As queer. And so there’s the breaking of the membrane of – to mix the metaphor – the closet. Writing Eggtooth, to my bewilderment, pulled me right out of my own benightedness. I had been hiding from myself in plain sight all my life. Hiding what would’ve been obvious if I’d stopped to look at what I was. Writing can be a way of self-knowing. A poem like “Scouts” was searing to write, but it told me who I was.
I would hesitate to say that the poems are about a breaking free of Kansas just because the voice in the poems moves from Kansas to California. So I think that would be an oversimplification. That movement, in my life and in the book, still feels much more like a back and forth. So there is some breaking out in the book, and there is still some feeling of suspension – some feeling that the voice in this collection is between states.
SET: I also felt this kind of oscillating nature between places–from Kansas outward and back to Kansas. I’m interested in a similar anthropological facet of the eggtooth, which is that it’s temporary. Birds break through the shell with the eggtooth, and then it dissolves. Is retreat something that you find applies to your text? In what ways are you talking about something that’s temporary, or changes that have receded afterwards?
JN: Well, I want to go back to what you said about oscillation. There’s some way in which the poems–the book as a whole–refuses to choose. I like to quote my dad, who always says, I come down firmly on both sides of the issue. I relate deeply to that feeling of ambiguity, ambivalence about finally choosing–choosing anything. Kansas or California, Jewish or Mennonite, urban or rural … it stretches the metaphor, because the bird of course doesn’t experience a choice. It must break free of the egg to survive.
But to take something as your eggtooth is a different use of that idea. And now that this book exists, I’m not sure I can write in that stanza form anymore. Which is to say, I think it does disappear. I’ve tried to write in that seven-line shape, the stanza that’s the engine of this book – I’ve tried to come back and write in that form again once or twice since the book was finished. And it went nowhere.
So I think the eggtooth, for me as for the baby bird, is a strange and provisional tool. A makeshift solution. My relationship to the idea of form in general is like that. I mean that I find myself having to invent forms or reinvent them – out of some urgency, some necessity to deal with whatever a moment or a period of time or a psychological state requires. In the case of Eggtooth, it was this modified John Donne stanza that somehow came to feel necessary over a period of years. It came to feel like a tool by which I could access the experience of life, of childhood, in rural Kansas, and the experience of moving out of that place, moving into a kind of post-childhood, early adulthood in northern California, while remaining intimately connected–traveling back and forth–to the farm and rural America. And it’s a little bit of a mystery to me why a seven-line stanza, ending in a triplet rhyme, invented by a poet in a totally different time and place – 17th century England – could tell me something about my twentieth-century life, or about the American prairie or west coast.
But these days, I need new forms. For me what a poem is about–its subject, for lack of a better word–is a form. The aboutness and the shape are the same thing, merely different facets of the same phenomenon, different faces of the same urgency. It’s not that they determine one another, or that they call out to one another–it’s that they are one another.
2. There’s Almost Always A Little Bit of Static
SET: I want to talk about your translation work. I listened to your Poetry Foundation podcast in which you talk about your experience of translating the Popul Vuh, a history of the K’iche people in Guatemala. What did you learn in that process? What did you reaffirm about the work of translating in relation to the membrane?
JN: I translate with my sister, my nephew, and my brother-in-law. Mostly texts from Latin America and Spain. I’m not sure what this work has to do with membranes. It’s certainly the crossing from one language to another, which is always a fraught border. I think poetry is, in many ways, untranslatable. I often think a better word is version. That we make versions, not translations.
Poetry is like humor, it’s so entwined with the nuances of a given language that it just doesn’t ever fully translate. The best we can do is try to make a decent and worthwhile approximation. Like tuning a radio dial. On AM radio anyway there’s almost always a little bit of static. You’re getting a signal late on a clear cold winter night from three states away, and you have to fiddle with that dial until you get it as close as you can. But there’s still static. So I start from that view, that translation is impossible and always a failure. And then you do what you can. Translation is another kind of education, a thrilling and wonderfully subsuming way to learn the art.
SET: I like the way that you understand translation as a “version,” an iteration. In that same podcast, you talk about the work of translation as not only the work of creating a version, but as adding a new frame. I’m wondering if you could map this concept of “adding a new frame” onto writing Eggtooth? How are you adding a new lens to a lot of very pertinent canonical threads like that of the Midwestern story, coming out, growing up?
JN: Each of those things has a deep tradition, in terms of representation in literature and art. To write about growing up, coming out – there are long lineages there. And so my adding my own new little frame to the conversation is mostly a side effect of the process of discovering who and what I am as a writer. And it’s mostly an instinctive process. Which is to say, I think we just carry our frames around, and they become a part of the work we do. Inescapably. I didn’t think much about leaving my mark on the traditions. I just figured that would take care of itself if I took care of the process of making the poems.
The myth of the Midwest as flyover country gets re-read by the frame of my experience, for example. And my experience includes a love for both the coastal cities and the vast interiors. A love for both landscapes. And a sense that it’s absurd to describe the Midwest as empty. It’s teeming with life, if you stop and look. And I love things about both cultures and, you know, there are things I have trouble with about both cultures. And that closeness and sharedness, that refusal to finally or definitively choose between them – that’s part of the frame that I think the book insists on, especially at a time when the media treats those two worlds like two planets at war with one another. My life seems to insist–and you don’t have much choice over these things, you get born into the life you get born into, and your choice is often limited to choosing to lean in or look away–but my life seems to insist on not choosing. On saying: all of it, yes, this life includes all of it, woven together whether I like it or not.
I have a friend who thinks this stance is just complete waffling on my part. That it’s no stance at all. To him it’s a failure to choose, and a sign that I’m not bearing down, having some discipline, doing the hard work of discernment. And we argue. I want to insist on not-choosing itself as a value sometimes. I want to rehabilitate the idea of equivocation. I notice the word “vocation” in there. My vocation is partly the work of representing this suspension, this in-betweenness, this perpetual unresolvedness, which I suspect is a facet of the human condition.
SET: When I first read Eggtooth I was really attracted to the sonic quality of it. I think “Straw Refrain” is the best example of this. The Midwest also strikes me as a geography where soundscape is very important. I’m wondering if there was a part of growing up where you were concerned with sonics in the same way that you are in your poetry.
JN: I suppose I’ve always been making music. I played piano from a young age, and also the clarinet, and I sang in various choirs, all the way through college. I’ve never been more than an amateur musician, but I come from a musical family. The nephew I mentioned before plays violin in a professional symphony. My mama plays cello. Those two, plus my aunt, who’s a sculptor and a violinist, often play in an informal trio –and sometimes sing–at family gatherings. All of this is to say, I grew up with music, and I think my musical education probably trained my ear. I don’t really know. But my father has a beautiful way with words, and my mother does too.
Often, my feeling is that poetry has more in common with music than prose. I think the sounds of words can bring you to a kind of threshold where you might hear certain things newly. The poems that I like to read are built out of sound patterning. I’m very interested in the textures of poems, and the music the words make–read aloud or in the mind–are a big part of that. When I read a poem I want contact with an almost tangible or palpable texturing of language. I want to feel the blade of it. Isn’t a tooth the very edge of texture, in a way?
In Eggtooth, I wonder if the texturing I was trying to create was partly – and the making of it was mostly instinctual – the texture of an inner world – all the flights of joy, agony, confusion, intensity of emotion – but also an outer one, a world of plains, prairie, farm life, barbed wire, calloused hands, wind-blown fields, the trunks of old trees. I’m interested in the textures of existence. How experience feels, in language.
3. Geology Bulletins and Field Guides
SET: Your poetry is very referential to some of my own favorite poets: Hart Crane, Hopkins, William Cullen Bryant, John Berryman. Who were you thinking about as an influence when you wrote this poetry book, if anyone at all?
JN: It’s hard for me to say. I’ll leave that to you. [Laughs.] The list is so long and strange, and I’m aware that influence is both conscious and unconscious. So I feel like you’ll have to tell me what the influences seem to be. You and other critics. In some sense I think everything I’d ever read influenced the book. And there was also a point in the process where all of that fell away. Became muted. In the most intense phases of the writing I wanted to listen deeply to the voices I was hearing, coming to me from wherever voices come from. And I knew, of course, that my own voices would inevitably, without my trying, be made of the voices and things that were most important to me–my influences. So I didn’t need to think much about that, it would take care of itself.
I was also reading a lot of non-poetry sources: geology bulletins, textbooks on lightning, fields guides, maps, atlases, police blotters, erotica. And I was walking a lot out by Ocean Beach in San Francisco. I lived in the Sunset District, which ends in the ocean. One of the great features of the city, I think, is that it ends in a long public beach. I would take long walks out there as I worked on the poems. Turning them over and over in my head as I went up and down the sand. Turning them over like a rock tumbler. And I feel like the waves along the Pacific must have influenced my poems. The shapes and rhythms of the waves. The sea air.
But – one book does come to mind: I was reading – and I’m sort of always reading – Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s a sequence of prose poems. It’s usually called a novella. Amazing writing. Vignettes that tell the story of a girl growing up in Chicago. A growing up story. Like Eggtooth.
SET: My last question: in the spirit of Eggtooth, what are you broaching next or what membranes are you crossing or what membranes are you staying suspended in? What’s next for you essentially?
JN: I want to know the answer to that too. It’s so foggy still. I dreamed last night that I was driving in fog across the Bay Bridge, and it feels like that is, in many ways, where I am artistically. It’s an exciting moment. A little bit scary. I’m finishing up a book, a long poem, that I actually wrote years ago, before Eggtooth. But as for the newest material, I can say that I seem to be very interested in the period of my childhood before we moved to Kansas, which is the urban part of my childhood.
I’m probably interested in that because I’m now raising my own children here in urban northern California. And that’s stirring up memories. And memory is for me often a way of thinking about my present, too. I’m finding it impossible not to write about the experience of being a parent. It seems to me that one of my great subjects or themes is the idea of family. How we inhabit families. How they inhabit us. What those relations look and feel like. What they mean. The violences and joys of these most intimate structures. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer to your good question. Ask me in five years about this time, and I’ll hope to have clarity then about what it is I’m doing now.
SET: You’re on the edge of it!