A CONVERSATION WITH JIM WHITESIDE
By IRENE HAN
Jim Whiteside is the author of Another Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026), winner of the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, and a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019). The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, his poems appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Brooklyn.
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Irene Han: I deeply admire the time you took to write this book. There are poems I recognize from recent publications, as well as pieces I read when I was your student in 2021. From what it means to become a man, to lose a father, and to love a man … there is an emotional breadth and arc to the book that feel almost bildungsroman-like. The speaker comes to life, to death, and to love. What was your process of collecting and organizing your poems from across the years?
Jim Whiteside: Another Man does indeed have poems from across my entire adult life as a poet. Some come from as far back as 2014, right as I was finishing my MFA thesis. The book comes from two book projects—one that centered on queer longing and loss, and another that stemmed from the grief surrounding my father’s chronic illness and death in 2016. I loved both projects individually, but I took a step back and saw how much the poems in both manuscripts were preoccupied with mourning. The poems mourned the loss of a father, the loss of early love, the loss of innocence and security that comes with those other losses. I combined them into a book in three sections: one that establishes a bit of a queer origin story rooted in the American South focused on my childhood in Tennessee, a second section that addresses my father’s illness and death, and a third section where we see the speaker as an adult in the context of what came before. To call it a bildungsroman would not be inaccurate!
IH: How do you approach writing about childhood? You have such precise details in these poems. I’m thinking in particular of “Neighbors.” How do you draw from experiences that are so far back in memory?
JW: In thinking about my father’s illness and death, I wanted to reach back into deeper memories. It was important for me to write about my father as I saw him when I was a child, to retell some family stories. I was also interested in this larger conversation that’s taking place among queer writers from the American South, one where we’re giving some much-needed airtime to the stories of queer folks outside of large urban centers. The poem you point to, “Neighbors,” was one where a lot of the themes of queer origins, childhood, and Southern-ness started to coalesce. We see the child speaker and a friend experiencing and exploring gender, and then we see the speaker observing a gay couple who lives next door. I wrote the poem because I was thinking about queer role models and how we first witness queerness, and I realized that the first gay couple I knew were our next-door neighbors when I was in elementary school. I was thinking about how they weren’t in the closet, exactly, but there was a bit of a “hush hush” way in which they lived in our small town, like they were hiding in plain sight. As for details, I wrote what I could remember and filled in the gaps of what I couldn’t. I’m reminded of my undergrad teacher Mark Jarman’s poem “Ground Swell,” which ponders “Is that all I have to write about? / You write about the life that’s vividest. / And if that is your own, that is your subject.” and concludes with, “I must start / Where things began to happen and I knew it.”
IH: Can you talk about your teachers and their influence? I’m curious if your transitions in form—from lyric fragments to lengthy, unbroken lines—have to do with them.
JW: I’ve always benefited from great teachers. My attention to form and the formal aspects of a poem started early. As an undergrad at Vanderbilt, I was lucky to be taken under Mark Jarman’s wing. Mark was one of the key figures of the New Formalists, and he always encouraged a marriage of form and function. I also took a workshop in formal poetry with Beth Bachman, who, though not a strict formalist in her own poems, knows more about compression and tension in the line than just about anyone working today. My MFA advisor, David Roderick, taught a similar class on poetic form, which reinforced these lessons. David’s one-on-one meetings felt so formally expansive to me. I would leave our meeting with several directions in which I might take one poem. This was so revelatory—a poem could be revised in more than one way? David encouraged me to see the formal possibilities in my poems, to experiment with line breaks and line lengths in new ways. All of this came together when I received the gift of a Stegner Fellowship, where I worked with Eavan Boland and Louise Glück. There, I really began to learn what the poem’s relationship with itself must be. The poem’s content and its form must work together to create a structural enactment of our lived experiences.
IH: You see your father as a teacher, too, it seems. Poems like “Eighth Grade” and “Final Lesson on Love…” reveal the lessons he imparted. Do you think he’s shaped your aesthetic sensibilities?
JW: In many ways, my father shaped my sensibilities by teaching me connoisseurship. From a young age I learned this—if you love a band, know them intimately; if you love a painting, learn how a painting is made, learn about the artist. He was an automotive engineer, but he also managed a touring rock band in the 60s. He told me that when he was in high school he’d wanted to be a painter. My parents loved taking me to museums, and I remember watching my father study landscapes, how he leaned in to see how each brushstroke was designed to be part of the great compilation of brushstrokes that made the painting. Late in life, he tried his hand at sculpture, and later still when I went to graduate school he wrote a few poems and quietly sent them to me. The best way, I think, for him to understand what I was doing in school was to try it for himself. As an engineer, he specialized in process improvement, in understanding a series of tasks, talking to the people who perform those tasks to understand their work, and how to design a workplace that helps those tasks happen. Maybe there’s something I gained there, if my poems are said to be formally conscious or having a kind of mechanics to them, from his attention to process and making.
IH: I didn’t know your father managed a rock band! Song lyrics feature throughout your book. How do they find their way into your poems? Do you listen to music as you write?
JW: Music made its way into the poems pretty organically. I was interested in writing about my youth, and music was a huge part of that. I’ve loved punk, metal, and hardcore music since I was in high school––they formed for me early examples of what art was, how moving it could be for a group of people, how community can form around art and artmaking. The mosh pit is a space we’d think of as hyper-masculine, but I also find it a pretty queer community space, one that is both equalizing and uplifting. It was also one of the first places where I allowed myself to be close to other men’s bodies. Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men)” is referenced in the book. Poems like “Mosh Pit Ode” and “Rock Fest” address this directly, but the selected lyrics from some of my favorite bands do this more subtly. Some of the poems in the book take their titles from songs by metal bands. It’s a secondary theme in the book, music as artmaking and music as community building.
I do listen to music while I write! Usually something with no lyrics or indistinguishable lyrics (Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós), or something really heavy or fast that can form a kind of background static (Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean, a current favorite, The Body, Killswitch Engage).
IH: I’ve heard it said that poetry takes us to the edge of ourselves. Are there poems in this book that have brought you somewhere unexpected?
JW: Once I allowed my poems to be more expansive, at least in my conception of what I could write about in a poem, I was occasionally surprised by what came from that. I realized I could convey and retell family stories in poems like “Aunt Crane Works for the Hot-Air Balloon Company Near Tucson, Arizona,” which I think helps the reader see the speaker’s fuller world, a deeper context. Some poems feel like needed asides in the book, which helps release some of the pressure that might’ve built up in some of the book’s more intense lyric moments.
IH: What was it about family stories that felt outside of what you could write about?
JW: I think I was just obsessed with the idea of the intense lyric, the big feelings that came from my own experiences. The book without these aside moments felt suffocating. The reader needed room to breathe. I also had some conflict about writing about experiences that weren’t my own. Could I do justice to my aunt’s experiences working for a hot-air balloon company or the US Postal Service? Are those my stories to tell if they’ve just been told to me? They weren’t being written down otherwise, so I gave them some space in the book. But also, the hot-air balloon poem became a poem not about loneliness but about being happy with one’s solitude—a lesson and distinction I’ve learned in part from my aunt Margaret. They tie back to the larger themes in the book, just in new modes and tones.
IH: On modes and tones, elegy is the predominant form of the second section of the book. How do you see the elegiac mode?
JW: The elegy is one of our best methods for processing grief and memorializing our loved ones. My thoughts on the elegy were shaped, in part, by something Eavan Boland said in workshop. Someone (maybe me, I can’t remember) submitted an elegy to the workshop, and Eavan asked the group what we thought of the elegy as a mode. None of our answers satisfied her. She turned to us and said, “The elegy is a hard form to get right. It cannot be a poem about the speaker’s own grief. It must be a true memorial; once the poem centers on the speaker’s grief, the elegy fails.” I sat with this for a while. But it makes sense! The elegy is a poem that grieves, but it isn’t a poem about grief. The elegy remembers, preserves, crystalizes, honors, but the moment it becomes about the poet’s grief itself, the poem loses its center and falls apart. In the poems about my dad, I tried to keep this in mind. Those poems aren’t about how sad I am that he’s dead, but about how he lived and how he influenced me during his life.
IH: I see that in your elegies. Beyond mourning, the speaker is searching for how to carry his father forward within himself. He puts on his father’s “old flannels…they smell like him.” He is looking to resist death’s erasure: the father’s clothes “forgetting his form.” And finally, in “Last Poem with My Father in It,” we learn to see the father’s presence through his living son. “I wear his sweater and watch the news.”
There’s something in clothing, which remembers the body. And the spirit of the father, which remains vital in the speaker’s body. Do you see the body as a kind of memorial?
JW: I think there was so much clothing, so much ephemera, because we’re confronted with that in loss. The grieving process is so often tied up with sorting through a loved one’s belongings. Clothes felt connected to my dad because they touched him, and I could feel closer to him by wearing one of his shirts. Those objects can carry so much weight in our lives and in our poems, so I filled my poems with them. They’re the elegy’s ultimate objective correlative. I do think that, on some level, I see my continued life as a kind of memorial. I have the same name as my father, which I feel heightens that responsibility. Keep living.
IH: The last section of the book takes on that mantra: keep living. These are poems that are searching, with their theories and questions on love. One poem declares: “I want to find the place / where we sing the imperfect.”
We’ve talked about writing out of the vividest parts of childhood, and in memory of those we love. Can you talk about your poetry’s relationship to the unknown, especially in this third section which sings and dreams into futurity?
JW: Poetry is obsessed with the unknown. Two more lessons I’m always thinking about from my teachers: poetry is a form rooted in our experiences which helps us complete our incomplete experiences (Eavan Boland), and we write books of poems because we have questions that need answering (Paisley Rekdal). The unknown, the questions, the incomplete. Poetry is the balm. But it’s also a way of imagining the possible. What can my life look like? What’s next? The poem can help us picture what’s next, but also help us sit with life’s inherent ambiguities. It finds comfort in discomfort, and, if done right, helps the reader sit more easily with their own questions.
IH: On that, I’d love to talk about “Argelès-sur-Mer,” the ending poem. The question: “Love, will we always be childless?” And the answer: “A boy packs a bucket full of sand, turns it over to make a house.” Is this a turn toward hope?
JW: It’s a funny thing, figuring out how to end a book of poems. It’s a pretty mournful book, particularly in the second section, but I wanted the last section to take a brighter turn. In that last section, the speaker makes a new life for himself––a life informed by grief, but a life with a kind of hope, in new places. I wrote those poems as I was moving to drastically different places that shaped the poems. I moved to California for the Stegner Fellowship, and I began to travel more extensively. The speaker is in coastal southern France, so far from his childhood home, but finds the occasion to question what his own future might look like, whether he might have a future as a father. “Argelès-sur-Mer” ends with an image of a boy making a sandcastle, a home destined to wash away. It resonates with the speaker’s own childhood. So that’s the note we (nearly) end on. There’s also an outro poem, “Before the Elegies,” that serves as the final note for the book. We move in those two poems from a beach on the Mediterranean to the shores of a river, back in a memory from childhood. The penultimate poem sparks the memory in the last poem, one where the speaker and his father are back together, alive and vital.
IH: I’m so moved by that sandcastle. The transformation of sand to house reads as an act of the will: a wish willed into reality. At the same time, its loss is already foreshadowed, as you said. The outro poem, too, has that quality. The speaker recalls a living father.
It’s such an extraordinary place for a book weighted by loss to end on. I’m excited for readers to arrive here at the end of your collection.
JW: It felt like the perfect place for the book to end. When I was reordering the book for the last time, it finally landed there. End in memory, preserve the lost life in a singular, crystalline moment.
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Irene Han is a writer from the Bay Area. She is currently a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in Orion and The Cortland Review.
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