Perry Janes is the author of the poetry collection Find Me When You’re Ready from Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Electric Literature, Poem-a-Day, Zyzzyva, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He holds a BA from the University of Michigan, where he was a five-time recipient of The Hopwood Award, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He currently splits time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where he works as a screenwriter.
Leigh Lucas is a writer in San Francisco. Her chapbook Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. She has been awarded residencies at Tin House, Community of Writers, and Kenyon, and has been recognized with AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, as well as with a Best New Poet nomination, Best of Net nomination, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Leigh’s poems can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Alta Journal, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson.
On the chilly evening we first met near the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Perry was a first semester MFA student; I was on my way out. Then, a couple of years ago, I welcomed Perry as a new Bay Area neighbor when he and his wife relocated some thirty miles south of me and my family. This past year, we navigated the exciting and nerve-wracking experience of publishing our first poetry books only months apart. It’s my hope that our stories continue to braid and his thoughtful insights on art, poetry, and personhood will be a constant in my life. Over the course of a week this September, we set out to write one another each day, to compare notes on our debut publishing experience and to discuss craft, process, and the intersection of life and art.
-Leigh Lucas
Leigh Lucas: I am so excited by your use of form in this debut. The sheer range in your poems and variance from poem to poem is kind of incredible—couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoums, prose poems, back to back to back. Did this happen naturally as you found the best-suited container for the contents of each piece, or was it your artistic desire to create a collection that was expansive and diverse enough to capture the variety of your life to date?
Perry Janes: This is such a generous question. The short answers are “yes” and “yes,” in that both things are true. But! Your last point really resonates. As a coming-of-age story, the speaker in this book arcs across time and space. By definition, that story covers a lot of ground. Now, a poetry collection doesn’t exactly have the same narrative capacity as, say, The Great American Novel. But poetry has different capacities—particularly the use of form to contrast divergent, sometimes clashing thoughts, feelings, and memories. Toggling forms became a way of turning the story this way and that, the speaker this way and that, to honor those contradictions.
To expand a little: I’ve come to think of myself as an undercover formalist. I’m powerfully interested in strategies that invite readers (and not just your typical poetry readers) into the poem. That might mean employing a conversational tone that reads as informal, creating levity, or thinking about “genre” in the poem by using tropes (monsters or meet-cutes) that riff off a set of expectations. These strategies are aimed at capturing the reader’s attention and engagement. From there, all bets are off. Having walked the reader into the poem, I look to disarm them, surprise them, confound those expectations. Form does this. Whether it’s tension between the line and the sentence that seems to argue against itself, the tidy containers of fixed stanzas that promise (and fail) to impose order on disorder, or the ways in which language recurs in received forms to change meaning, form offers tools to torque the poem in new directions.
There’s a quote by the poet Alan Shapiro from an interview with 32 Poems that goes like this: “If you believe with Coleridge that the job of the artist is to bring the whole soul into activity; and if you believe that every genre, every form, like every style or mode of writing, is like a lens that brings some aspects of life and language into focus while excluding others, then it follows that you’d want to work in as many forms as possible to capture the greatest amount of life.” I feel that way when it comes to poetic form. I’ll probably never be the poet that settles into a stylistic signature, but I hope, with a rigorous attention to poetic voice, my sensibilities will bind the work together.
I’m glad we started here, with form, because it gives me the opportunity to ask about Landsickness, which feels reminiscent of an essay or diary with its long lines and declarative sentences. Unlike my restless approach to form, there’s a pervading feeling of calm—the phrase I find myself reaching for is “dialed in”—about the shape of these poems. I’m curious what led you to this form? If it’s unique to this chapbook or indicative of Leigh poems to come?
LL: A fellow Alan Shapiro fan! And I love your aspiration to never settle into one form. I’m pretty interested in voice as well. I like your words here about Landsickness—calm, precision, and dialed in—they remind me of a line from our friend and poet Megan Pinto, “I am calm. Like a serial killer.” I think I wanted the spareness and illusion of calm to create some tension for the dark humor sprinkled in. I wanted this book to be as honest as I could make it, as far as communicating how grief felt for me. I also wanted to be honest about some of the very real but less flattering elements of the grieving process and this form felt like the most raw route I could take—I certainly couldn’t hide behind too many clever little poetic moves. The short declarative sentences often came to me already complete and I built the poems around them, lines like “he sank like a man of stone,” “they tuck their hair behind their little ears,” and “the world will be unsettled. I will unsettle them.” And you know what? While this form felt right for this project, and for some projects I’ve worked on since, I also aspire to continue to experiment; I hope my writing takes many shapes in the future.
There are so many gorgeous lines in your book, but one that I couldn’t stop returning to was in “Love Poem as Trojan Horse”: “Sometimes hope is a question of redirecting the camera.” I love the word “question” in this line, as opposed to a word like “act” or “decision” or “result.” This question of hope is asked again and again in this book. What is your relationship to hope? What does hope mean to these poems?
PJ: I’m so glad you asked about that poem, because it’s a favorite of mine, and one of two ars poeticas in the collection. But before I tackle hope—let me take a detour. Having begun with form, I should loop back to content.
Find Me When You’re Ready is a poetry collection, but it’s also a narrative told across five acts. The book traces a single speaker as he goes from boyhood to manhood, chases his dreams, finds love (all those good genre tropes) and processes a salient childhood trauma of sexual abuse—what we might call “peer abuse,” where the abuser isn’t an adult or authority figure but an older child. That’s a too-quick recap, but it’s helpful to situate how this question of hope figures in. Because you’re so right. That word, question, is intentional. So much of this book is about questioning. Over the speaker’s journey, he questions many things: desire, ambition, money, complicity—but most of all, who he is in the world.
When I began writing the earliest poems for this book, they were full of rhetorical authority. They confidently declared this happened! Then this! Then this! There was power in that, and no small amount of security. (Poems like that can feel a bit like armor, can’t they?) But they foreclosed any way of seeing the story from a different perspective. Of asking: Is it really so simple? Asking questions feels, to me, like widening the camera angle. One is forced to be curious, to look around and take in new vantage points.
So: hope! In a real sense, I think the impulse to ask questions is a hopeful one. When one “redirects the camera” from hardship or pain—what are you going to put your focus on? Why? Redirecting the camera doesn’t have to mean turning away from sorrow, anger, or damage. It might mean seeing in a different light—or just seeing more, and not allowing one instance of harm to fill the viewfinder.
Speaking of striking lines, and lines that say something about personal poetics, I’m a little obsessed with this couplet of yours: “Art requires careful theatrics. // Yes, be more cold.” Landsickness courses with powerful emotional riptides—but the tonal register is often dry, even cool in its composure. That tonal choice, in my experience, acts like a suppressant for those heightened emotions, allowing them to sneak up on me with even more force. It also feels like a natural extension of these poems’ sense of humor, because they’re often funny! It reminded me of Sarah Manguso or Amy Hempel (if Amy Hempel wrote poems). What about “the cold” called to you when writing this chapbook?
LL: Ah, coldness! This was a major preoccupation of mine throughout the writing of this, and I’m so glad it comes through for you. Heraclitus wrote: “Dry, the soul/grows wise/and good.” He also wrote: “From the strain/of binding opposites/comes harmony.” He has a lot of good advice for poets. That specific couplet that you refer to is inspired by Heraclitus but also by a Chekov quote that I love, “When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. . . . The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.”
I read a lot of elegiac works in the process of writing Landsickness and I found that many of the ones I liked best handled their subject matter with reserve and detachment (my favorite being Nox by Anne Carson). Their authors seem to have taken Chekov’s advice to heart—their deliveries were more deadpan than melodramatic and their tones were cool and dry. This great contrast of a careful and dispassionate delivery with a highly personal and tragic subject matter created a stronger effect than a hotly emotional handling of the material could have done.
Making art from the raw emotional space of grief requires these “careful theatrics” I refer to in that couplet because it requires a performance of detachment. Detachment in the case of elegy is not only an aesthetic posturing, but also, I think, a coping mechanism for thinking about the unthinkable. Sentimentality, on the other hand, communicates an illusion of control but it ignores all complications and contradictions and turns something real into an abstraction.
“You Keep Asking the Question. We Keep Answering.” is such a masterful poem. I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading it. This poem, as well as a number of your poems where you use what I have come to think of as a very signature Perry Janes titling convention—two perhaps alternate titles joined by a semi-colon and the word “or”—develop a theme of perspective and the effect of context on a narrative, and of alternate truths, of unreliability of memory or narrator, or even a splitting of consciousness or disassociation that is, of course, common in circumstances of trauma.
PJ: That poem is the most personal piece in the book. Aside from being the longest poem, and the most overt in its look at sexual trauma, it fills a pivotal role as the stand-alone act three “climax.” It’s also a poem that takes my formal interests to extremes. Each time the speaker begins to narrate, the em-dash interrupts to revise the story, changing the details. Here’s a quick example.
I went to see Aladdin On Ice! with his parents—
My parents took us to the movies—
They chaperoned us in—
They dropped us at the curb—
We walked the same path to school
each morning. Those back alleys, again.
We learned about saturation in science class.
How, eventually, a rag dipped in water
just won’t hold any more.
Is this too plain—
Am I saying it clearly—
What’s too much, too many—
I’m afraid of the saturation point, my story
like a rag you can’t use to clean any damn thing.
Initially, I thought of this as a way to embody uncertainty, to enact it on the page and force the reader to participate in that struggle. But as I wrote, I then began to think of it as a polyvocal poem.
“Peer abuse” remains mostly invisible. While writing, I went looking for statistics, and while looking for statistics, I found very, very little. What I did find was a 2018 study from UK charity the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They estimated—I’m going to quote them—“anywhere from one-fifth to two-thirds of sexual abuse is committed by other children and young people.” Not only does the numerical range here indicate how little we know; that upper bound is breathtaking. This helped me think about the poem differently. I started to see it as the Chorus in a play. Through the speaker’s interruptions and revisions, you can almost hear other voices speaking through him. The way I think about it now, the speaker is struggling to hold onto an irreconcilable multiplicity of experience—the multiplicity of his own story, fractured between childhood memory and adult hindsight (What happens when memory shifts as we pin it down? How culpable can another child be?) but also the multiplicity of other stories like his own (What do those look like? How many are there?).
As you can probably tell, one project of this collection was—how did you put it? Alternate truths? Split consciousness? That. Exactly that.
But you asked about titles! I’m very fond of titles. They do a lot to manage a reader’s expectations. A title that hints at not one but two (maybe even dissimilar) poems ahead is another way of embracing multiplicity, of knocking the reader off-balance before we’ve even begun. That’s true in this poem, but it’s especially true in the book’s many odes, like “Ode to Griffith Park; or, Every Tourist Attraction Gives Me Another Reason for Mistrust.” That’s a poem about love and togetherness. It’s also a poem about the ways memory and trauma can echo back in a crowd.
And this brings me back to hope. On the one hand, this collection refuses to let trauma become the full picture, because it isn’t the full picture. I was deeply uninterested in writing a book fixated on pain. On the other hand, writing a straight-ahead ode felt disingenuous. I’m still working this out, but maybe, I’m most in touch with gratitude and love when holding those emotions against their contrast? And maybe the ability to hold those contrasting emotions without giving them undue power is its own form of love? Its own reason for gratitude?
That feels like a good pivot—because one thing we’ve discussed in the past is a shared, well, love for the love poem! In one sense, Landsickness is one long love poem translated through grief. On the other hand (here I go, widening the lens) I know you’ve got new love poems in progress. And in the world! Your poem “Department of Quiet Phenomena” printed in Alta is a favorite of mine. Can you tell me a little about how love figures into your work? If there are strategies you adopt to manage sentimentality? If that’s changed over time?
LL: I do love a good love poem.
Alta asked me to write a little introduction to “Department of Quiet Phenomena” when they printed it, something I’d never had to do before, but the exercise was illuminating because it required me to really crystallize my thoughts about the work. I discovered that this is a poem I never could have written in an earlier stage of my life. It holds space for the brutal truth of life—that it is filled with enormous suffering—but importantly, it asks if despite that suffering, can art insist on the perseverance of hope? Poetry is, in some ways, a very modest art form. It has a modest readership and audience, it takes up just a few shelves in even some of the best bookstores. (Except not my neighborhood bookstore. My neighborhood bookstore gives poetry its own entire room! Shout out City Lights.) But in other ways, poetry is essential—so many cultures bring poems to their most important human experiences—births, love, marriages, deaths. Throughout history, poets have made great activists and organizers and have been brave in speaking truth to power. But the art form itself communicates quietly. Does it stand a chance against the roar of violence and brutality? This poem wants it to, and so do I.
Starting a family also changed something in me and something about my approach to art. Some days the most I can do is the modest work of feeding, speaking gently to, and loving my little family. It’s work that feels very much like writing a poem.
All of this reminds me of another part of “Love Poem as Trojan Horse”: “I used to prize clarity without compromise. I used to want suffering center-stage, well-lit in the lens. Now it’s changed.” I think we share a sensibility here. I’d be so curious to hear how your artistic goals have changed over time (if they have!). And what your hope is for your art when it reaches an audience.
PJ: My artistic goals transformed while writing this book. Many of the poems in this collection were not only emotionally demanding to write—they required absolute tonal precision. They were tightly coiled machines. But as I wrote my way through this book (and out of it) the poems became more conversational, truer to my natural way of speaking—and more interested in joy. I think about that Robert Frost quote we poets toss around: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” But you could easily replace that word “surprise” with another concept. My new mantra might be: “No joy for the writer, no joy for the reader.” How do I locate joy in the writing? How can I better connect this work, which I’ve dedicated my life to, to my reasons for living? For me—this is bringing us full circle to your first question—that looks like a growing interest in levity.
Creating levity on the page is one hell of a risk. If it feels performative or mannered, it destroys authenticity and (worse) becomes cringeworthy. I believe that levity done well requires vulnerability. It demands we set aside our inhibitions to risk appearing foolish or childlike or earnest. It functions like an invitation—Join me! It’s okay to smile in spite of it all!—an invitation the reader might reject. And that’s frightening. Rejection sucks. Disappointment sucks. Pain and injury, which are a natural risk of letting one’s guard down, are awful. But as I age, I find that focusing primarily on pain . . . that’s actually a way of protecting myself. Of closing myself off. I don’t want to do that in my work. I want my work to risk it all.
This doesn’t mean I’ve renounced any examination of suffering but I want to try to hold it all. That might mean messiness or failure along the way, but the tradeoff—freedom to be fully myself, to offer that self to others—is worth it. That’s what I hope for when my work reaches an audience, that they receive it like an invitation for us to each remove our armor and be vulnerable in all the ways that make us human.
You mentioned we may share a sensibility here. I think so too. Having said all that—what’s your reaction? I’m mindful that we’re both in the wake of our first publication, which is also a moment of reflection. How has putting Landsickness out in the world changed or reinforced your own goals?
LL: I love your words here—“an invitation for us to each remove our armor.” This is a noble goal for your work, and you should be proud because you truly achieve it with Find Me When You’re Ready. That’s all I could ever want too! I also wanted, with Landsickness, to make something the person who died would have been proud of me for. I know that sounds a bit silly. I wanted to honor his life and the massive loss felt by the vibrant community he built over the course of his short life. Some people have said to me after reading the book, this is how it felt for me too, whether it was a parent, a friend, or a partner they lost. And that really crystalized what my artistic aim had been—to portray the feeling of grief as honestly as I could.
Now I find myself re-examining my artistic ambitions. What do I want for the book I’m writing now? I have always liked to laugh and make people laugh. And point out the absurdity in life. And make room for a little joy and hope? I would be very happy if, one day, I could write a book like that.