Justin Jamail is the author of the new poetry collection Exchangeable Bonds. He is the deputy general counsel of the Metropolitan Opera, and worked as a mergers and acquisitions attorney based in Tokyo. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Q: Over how long a period did
you write the poems in your collection?
A: Most were written in the
last five years or so, but many are considerably older.
Q: How did you decide on the
order in which the poems appear?
A: I asked a friend for
advice. It is a funny task because I at least (but I think most people?) don’t
read books of poetry in order, or even start at the beginning. It’s one of the
minor pleasures of poetry, and a reliably harmless one. Possibly the
expectation that I won’t enjoy a book of poems leads me to pick about in it
until it seems SAFE to read more fully…
Anyway, except for the first
six poems or so (some of which are new) and the last six poems or so (some of
which are old), I believe the poems in this book are in roughly chronological
order. One result of this is that the poems written during the years that I
lived with my family in Tokyo are more or less together in the second half of
the book…
Q: How was the collection's
title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I came across exchangeable
bonds in the course of my work as a business lawyer, was struck by the
potential to happily misapply the concept, and found that it even more happily
fit the “suggestive plural noun” structure for poetry collection titles…
Q: Which poets have
especially influenced you?
A: I took up writing poetry
in college in the first place out of a desire to out-do my classmate Carson
Cistulli, who was already aggressively writing “poems” when we met at Columbia
in the late ‘90s. Is that an influence? I hope not.
Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi
were both very important mentors to me, and I am continually inspired by their
writing. Charles North and Tony Towle, as well. I think I learned from them my
interest in writing variously, what to take seriously about poetry - and what
not to take seriously.
I suppose that if there is
anything to the notion of a “New York School,” a shared sensibility with
respect to “seriousness” and “importance” might be central. Or, anyway, there
are probably worse things to point to. I could go on…
I tend to recoil at
quasi-spiritual or “transcendental” attitudes toward art - and generally that
is what I like least in many Romantics and Modernists. These are negative
influences.
Recently, I have read a great
deal of later Auden - particularly The Age of Anxiety - and, to my surprise,
Swinburne.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I am pulling together a
second collection of poems and three long poems, provisionally titled “A Taste
for Ossian,” “Drinking with Men,” and “No Skating.”
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: My last name is Lebanese
and rhymes with “snail,” “fail,” and “jail.”
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment