A Conversation with Jaswinder Bolina
BY DAVID RODERICK
Jaswinder Bolina’s fourth poetry collection, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2023. He is the author of three previous books of poetry, The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His poems and essays have appeared at venues including Poetry, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and others. His debut collection of essays Of Color (2020) is available from McSweeney’s.
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David Roderick: Jaswinder, can we try a radically different interview launch topic? Can we talk about adjectives?
Jaswinder Bolina: I’m resisting the urge to answer with a bevy of adjectives. Let’s do it before I lose all restraint!
DR: When poets of our generation were developing our craft, we were often told by our mentors to trim modifiers like adjectives and adverbs from our poems. From our prose too. But I find in your work strong and frequent use of modifying words, which establish tone. Or they code-switch for or wink at the reader. Here’s the first sentence of the title poem of your new collection, “English as a Second Language”:
We came upon a line of English
eating dog, we thought, on plump bread
steamed and slathered with a drab yellow
chutney from a cart in the Kew Gardens.
In this passage my attention lands on “plump,” “steamed,” “slathered,” “drab yellow.” Can you talk a bit about what these words do for a poem like this?
JB: I haven’t really thought about this in this way before, but rereading those lines, it occurs to me that the word choice is driven as much by my ear as by my desire to be descriptive. Sure, I wanted to include some tactile detail, but I included those words because the line just needed something there, some susurration of s’s, some little drumbeat of p’s and d’s and b’s. I don’t write metrically, but there’s still a rhythm to the line, and my internal metronome wants an extra beat here or there. The thing about adjectives is that they do embed those winks and codes you’re talking about, but they also elongate and syncopate the language in ways that just sound right to me. It’s a compulsive thing I do, and it might be a failing by another poet’s measure, but every poet’s job is to rejigger the thing until it fits our obsessions, not somebody else’s. Then, you just hope others hear it, feel it, see it in roughly the same way you do, and you hope they like it and get some fresh perspective from it.
DR: I like knowing that you’re guided more than anything by your ear.
This poem compresses and dramatizes a prominent theme in the book—the story of the restless immigrant attempting to forge a new life somewhere in the Western world. In this poem, we see the speaker and his mates eating at a food cart in London; many more of the poems take place in the American Midwest. I really love how the end of this poem scopes out from the action of eating hotdogs on the street, the “conspiracy” of the men’s shared (and maybe exotic) experience, to this wonderful and surprising conclusion:
When you sack the villain’s estate,
you have to raid the villain’s kitchen.
You dress in his topcoat and drink his gin.
You set his horses free and drive them
home in the rain. You see? We weren’t
afraid. We didn’t come here to become
like them. We came here to eat.
Most of the modifiers have fallen away here at the end, as if the speaker is now getting down to business and making a bold claim. When you wrote these lines, do you remember how you felt? To me this feels like a significant moment, tonally and thematically.
JB: So, this poem is based on the true story of the first time my father ever ate a hot dog. He’d emigrated from Punjab to London at 18—with only £2 in his pocket, he will gladly tell you—and at some point during his first year there, he and his great friend Gian, who I grew up calling “uncle,” were knocking around the city on a rare off-day from work.
DR: Great! I wondered if this was a family story.
JB: It is! I’ve changed a few minor details, but the narrative in the poem is mostly true. They really did come across a hot dog cart in the Kew Gardens and really did think—because they could read the language even if they couldn’t really speak it—that the English were eating dog meat. My dad always tells this story with a huge grin on his face. He loves telling it. They really were repulsed by the whole thing, but whenever anyone asks him why they ate it if they were so disgusted, he always says something like, “Well, we were hungry, and we figured if these people could do it, so could we!”
DR: I like how the poem guides us through their pragmatic thinking in the moment.
JB: Thank you. I hope I captured the maybe surprising complexity of that thinking. I realized at some point that, to me, the story is about how potent a force assimilation is, how this thing that Whiteness and the West asks of us as a matter of course is powerful enough to make us defy our most fundamental natures and senses of decency. I mean, sure, it wasn’t actually dog meat, but it wasn’t much better.
Anyway, even with all of that in mind, I realized the poem couldn’t be some sad sack immigrant story. These guys knew what they were doing. They weren’t making some ghastly mistake because they were simpleminded or ignorant. They were defiant. ‘Defy’ here works both ways: as a violation of the self and also as an act of courage, by which I mean, you don’t defy your own nature and sense of decency lightly. You do it because you’re brazen enough to survive. And truly, they did it with a sense of adventure and glee.
This is the thing: the villain always forces you to become something you’re not, to do things you don’t really want to do. But the hero responds by becoming more adept than the villain even as he risks becoming complicit, becoming one of the villains himself. He tries to resist that latter outcome, but I think the crux of it is that, either way, nobody comes out completely clean.
That ending felt powerful and true when I finally figured it out—it took weeks and weeks of trying—but in the end, it’s still mostly a poem about eating a hot dog.
DR: It’s easy to imagine getting down the fantastic anecdote, one that, for you and your family, has so much importance–but then getting stuck without any idea where it should go. Is that a frequent occurrence for you, writing fluidly in a mode or conceit for a while, and then hitting a snag? Do any of the poems come out right (or close to right) on the first try?
JB: That isn’t just a frequent occurrence, it’s pretty much the only occurrence! I seem to be unable to write anything if I know where it’s going at the outset. I really prefer to have just a line or an image and then chase it until it gets me wherever it wants to go. I’ve almost never had a poem, as you said, come out right on the first go. In fact, I find that if I have even a title in mind, I can’t write the poem. The title over-determines things at the outset, and I get blocked. The poem has to be a chase. I tell my students all the time that if you don’t learn something in the writing of a poem, your reader won’t either. Naturally, that premise comes from my own writing practice. There are plenty of other ways to do it, I bet, but the chase is the one that works best for me.
DR: You’re probably aware of this quality, but many poems, especially later in the book, open with very long sentences that have a lot of propulsive energy—stretching out for 20-25 lines before completing a thought. On at least a couple of occasions, (in “A Little Slice of Heaven” and “The Old Country”) a long poem is composed in one long, sinuous, run-on sentence. Can you talk about how these run-ons relate to your process? Are they a product of your first drafts? Do you revise toward them?
JB: I think it goes back to that writing by ear thing I said earlier. Sometimes my ear wants a plain statement, a concise image, something quick and punchy. But a lot of other times, my ear just wants the language to tumble and swerve. I love the readings and misreadings that long, run-on sentences generate with respect to subject, but I especially love the music they make in taking their oddball turns. I think those long sentences are mostly a product of first drafts. I default to the long sentence—at least in recent years I do—and then decide later to drop in commas, periods, Em dashes, or whatever else to add syncopation or staccato or some manner of interruption.
DR: There are a lot of elegies in this book—for the past, for your youth, for a dog—even for public figures you’ve deemed worthy of ridicule, like Billy Graham and Rush Limbaugh. One of the poems near the end of the book is titled “Actual Elegy,” as if to mock the elegies that appear earlier in the book. What led you to this poetic mode? I don’t recall seeing many elegies in your previous books. And how did you come to use that mode for satire, as you appear to do in “Terrible Elegy,” dedicated to Limbaugh?
JB: I’m pretty sure the very first poem I wrote for this book was the Billy Graham elegy. That one is based on another true story of being in the Sistine Chapel with my wife early in pregnancy. She needed to sit down, and I’d never noticed the pews along the walls other times I’d been in that space. Once we’d been sitting there for a while, she said something like, “Nobody ever talks about the floor of the Sistine Chapel…” I told her I was stealing that line, and (poof!) a poem was born. I’m happy to report that about seven months later, our kid was also born.
Anyway, Billy Graham had died and there’d been a memorial service back home in the U.S. while we were out of the country. I had that line and I had the Vatican and I had images of a giant tent in D.C. where all these politicos and celebrities were gathering in remembrance of a guy I didn’t respect or admire at all. And so, the poem became an elegy for him, but something of a sober, unsentimental elegy, satiric at turns but otherwise just trying to be observational.
It’s funny that what gets called cynical or satiric in my work often feels, to me, like plain old observation. I’m not trying to describe things with tongue in cheek. I’m just describing things the way I see them. I get why, to a reader, the mode can be described as satiric, but I’m not channeling Jon Stewart or anything when I write.
The one for Limbaugh was also just an observation, as in, “Hey, you can celebrate the death of a bad person without actually being a bad person.” That’s okay. We all do it all the time, even if we disagree on who the bad people are. There is so much reverence in our culture for things that aren’t worthy of reverence and so much disregard for things that deserve our most serious and somber attention. I’m just trying to clarify which is which for me.
DR: Say more about “Actual Elegy.” That one clearly comes from a different place or circumstance.
JB: “Actual Elegy” was something else. That was also a poem of observation, but I was observing my feelings over the death of the poet, musician, and artist David Berman, who I hugely admire. I never met David, though we corresponded over a period of about ten years. I saw Silver Jews in concert in Columbus, Ohio, once and was standing at the foot of the stage for the whole show, but we never actually had a chance to talk. Still, his death hit me hard for reasons I can’t fully explain but that also feel self-evident. I still feel it thinking about it now. We’d written each other a week or so prior. He’d just put out his Purple Mountains record, and I’d just had a book—The 44th of July—published, and he’d asked me to send him a copy. I was so looking forward to hearing back and to maybe catching up with him somewhere on tour. Then I didn’t, and I never would. And that was the poem that came out.
DR: This poem emerges from a palpable feeling of loss and sadness. Other poems in this book feel sparked by joy, fear, anxiety, or wonder. When you begin drafting a poem, are those feelings present at the outset? Revealed through the act of writing that first draft? Or maybe discovered later, when you’re revising?
JB: There you’ve landed on something that’s at the heart of a slow change in my work. I think I used to be motivated almost entirely by a desire to hit upon some discovery through language, some new way of describing something and, therefore, apprehending it. Like, in one of the poems—“Hidden Valley Ranch”—I broke the word “nightmare” up into its constituent parts “night” and “mare” and then pretty much wrote a poem about a horse, I mean a horse doing nightmarish things, but the discovery was in the wordplay. This was true in a lot of my earlier work, but as I worked through this book, I became increasingly cognizant of that emotional impulse. Like, in the past, I always figured out the emotional core through writing and revision.
Lately, though—and in the poems I wrote later in the book—I find myself thinking about the kind of feeling I’m feeling at the outset, and then the language sort of takes up orbit around that mood. There’s a poem towards the end—or towards the beginning depending on which direction you’re reading—called “At War with the Cynics.” I wanted to write a poem in a good mood, one that pushed back against all the mopey, critical, cynical ones in the book, but I didn’t know what to write about. I only knew the mood I wanted. The language and imagery just sort of bubbled up out of the landscape of South Florida where I live. I was happy, so there were bawdy ditties, gumbo limbo trees, baby blankies, and dopey parrots all popping into the poem, all these happy sounding words and sounds trying to capture my mood. I sorted out the narrative logic and subject of the poem later.
DR: We’ve already talked a bit about how some of your new poems are grounded in suburban America, a lifestyle often interrogated or examined through the lens of the immigrant experience. Early poems in the book point to the stresses of alienation and assimilation as your family adjusted to life in a new place. I’m thinking about poems like “House Hunters” and “Ancestral Poem,” which seem to be family portraits. Or the details of a poem like “Americanistan”—those suburban garages “stuffed / with croquet mallets, red metal gas canisters, / hyperrealistic Christmas statuary—a pint of Cutty Sark / embedded deep undercover in the box of lawn darts / beside the magi.” Can you talk about the mix of tenderness and nostalgia in these poems, as well as the sense of absurdity that also emerges at times, such as in this passage?
JB: That stuff is all stuff I remember or noticed, whether in my own life or in various depictions of life in American TV shows, movies, car commercials, ads for home security systems, books I love. My family isn’t Christian; they’re sort of loosely practicing Sikhs—I don’t practice anything myself—so there were never any magi in our garage, though I do find it funny how much the turbaned magi resemble Sikh men in the cartoonish depictions I grew up seeing. Anyway, I’m pretty sure there was a handle of Cutty Sark hidden in a box beneath my dad’s workbench. Lawn darts were only legal in the 80s and not after, but I remember an older cousin having them when I was growing up, so those got tossed into the poem.
The thing is, we can be super cynical about all our commercialism, consumerism, and capitalism—I mean, I was a philosophy major in college and read my Marcuse too—but this is the stuff of our lives: the imagery, the language, the commercial jingles, etc. It’s a thing that writers like Don Delillo and Mary Ruefle, Evie Shockley and David Berman all understand. Kurt Vonnegut, Zadie Smith, all these writers I adore. Ditto so many comedians and screenwriters, hip hop artists and songwriters. The tenderness and nostalgia are there because our lives take place in the middle of all that white noise, and the alienation is there because the noise is so very White in America. The trouble is that our culture mistakes that Whiteness for normalcy, and the idea of normalcy is the most dangerous thing there is. It can literally be lethal. So, I try to revel in our American noise because this life I get to live, this life that I love living, takes place here. But I also try to derange whatever we think of as “normal” as best I can to underscore how fucked up this place is too.
DR: I get a strong feeling from this book and your last one, The 44th of July, that you’ve grown more comfortable with allowing your poems to venture into social criticism. Do you think that’s accurate? The title “Americanistan” itself carries a whiff of humorous critique. And that description of the garages point towards American religiosity, abject consumerism, excess, etc. Of course, you’re always implicating yourself in these dramatic circumstances as well.
JB: Totally! I am implicated. I think we can critique the muck we’re in without pretending we’re somehow above it. Immigrants, minorities, and oppressed peoples in this country live with this kind of double-vision everyday of their lives, the idea they’re part of something but completely apart from it. It allows my immigrant family members to love the U.S. and feel dispossessed of Americana at the same time.
This is more in my essays, but I grew up talking about “the Americans”—I absolutely love that book of yours by the way—meaning someone other than me, even though I was also born in the U.S. and am, by most accounts, an American. I could do that because America tells so many of us, “you’re not really one of us because of how you look, because of your name or the food you eat and the languages you speak.”
But I am one of us, so the poems need to be honest about that, about not only the critique, but also about my embeddedness in the place and times and wrongs I’m critiquing. They’re my fault too. I benefit from American hegemony as much as anyone, but that doesn’t mean I have to approve of it. It’s the exceptionalism I have beef with, that this is the greatest place on earth, and I benefit from it, so I should shut up. I won’t shut up, but I won’t preen myself on my critique either.
DR: A whole new component emerges in this book when a child (your first child) arrives on the scene. I presume your son was born somewhere in the middle of writing this book. Did you know you’d write about him right away? Does fatherhood change the way you approach writing poems?
JB: I probably guessed I’d write about him, but I was too damn tired to think about writing at all during that first year. So, of course, I wrote about that, and it all turns up in “Probable Poem for the Furious Infant.” But, yes, parenthood does, as everyone says it will, change everything. There’s an entirely new set of emotions and anxieties and perspectives that were all imaginable in the before times, but post-baby, the whole thing becomes—again, as everyone tells you it will—very very real. You get estranged from your own life, from yourself, from your self-centeredness in ways that are easy to anticipate intellectually beforehand but that become something else entirely when you experience them for yourself. I don’t think I’m saying anything any other parent hasn’t already said. Parenting absolutely changes your approach, not just to writing, but to everything else too, and if it doesn’t, you might need to speak to someone better licensed than me.
DR: You seem to make good use of that estrangement. After the arrival of that first child, it seems like your own life slides to the periphery, where you can see things anew. In that state your mind wanders toward amusement (“The Apartment (or The Jesus Elegy),” “Lines Composed Upon Changing a Diaper,”) or parental anxiety (“The Bad News: A Film Noir,” “The Plague on TV”). Do you think those poems are animated in a different or new way for you?
JB: I think they were partly animated by exhaustion. I mean, the kid just did not sleep that first year, and by the time he started sleeping and we had him in daycare and were kinda sorta getting our lives back to some semblance of a routine that resembled life before the kid, the pandemic hit. Then, there was this additional layer of cataclysmic, global, existential anxiety to go along with the usual parenting worries.
That was a wildly bizarre time for so many reasons. The “lockdown” didn’t really feel like a lockdown to us because we’d already been locked down by an infant, but then, all the hopes and plans we’d had to have family visiting on the regular, to take him to visit them, all vanished for an entire year and a half until not just we but he could finally get vaccinated. I remember being on FaceTime with my in-laws once, and my wife said something like, “I don’t want to seem like I’m overreacting…” and I blurted out, “There is no overreacting! Short of a comet hitting the planet or aliens arriving, this thing is the biggest thing that could possibly happen! It isn’t possible to overreact!!” I mean, billions of people were stuck at home. The streets of every major city were empty. You could barely breathe without thinking of death, and we had this adorable little kid rolling around our apartment disrupting everything we’d ever known on top of all that.
So, yeah, my life, at least as I’d known it, very much slid to the periphery. I don’t think any of us are even remotely over it by the way. I think there’s a lot of weirdness out there, a sense of estrangement far and wide, that can still be traced back to that moment of cataclysmic, existential, global trauma.
DR: There definitely isn’t a narrative arc to English as a Second Language, but the book’s final poem, “The Usual Entertainment,” is a kind of self-portrait featuring you eating hotdogs, among other delights, at a Cubs (or is it a White Sox?) game. You’re with your friends Jorge and Mike, among your fellow citizen-fans, taking in the spectacle, and enjoying your food and drink. There’s some mirroring or echoing element in tandem with the opening poem, “English as a Second Language,” right? That’s how I read it, anyway, as a delightful symmetry.
JB: Yes! That was a happy accident. Hot dogs take a prominent place in the book for reasons I can’t fully explain. I mostly try to avoid eating them anymore, but I definitely grew up with them as a staple of my diet. How can a Chicagoan not? And for the record, it’s definitely the Cubs. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of that other team you mentioned…
Anyway, the mirroring is absolutely there with the other title poem that starts the book, and there’s another poem somewhere in the middle called “The Living Daylights (or A Passage to Indiana)” in which Chicago’s very own Superdawg™ serves as setting. I definitely have a Pop Art/O’Hara/Ashbery streak in me, that thing I said earlier about Vonnegut and Zadie Smith, et. al. I like using the language of my life in my poems alongside all the fancy pants philosophical, political, lyrical stuff. So, naturally, hot dogs land right in there with all the existential musing and meditations on assimilation and alienation.
I also loved thinking of my dad with his friends in London in 1967 and me with mine at Wrigley in the late 90s. The one event doesn’t happen without the other, and the point of all that struggle is the joy in life, the thrilling little adventures and indulgences between all the wins and losses, the joy of eating a hot dog in the sun.
There’s also the whiff of the philosophical in a hot dog. I mean, is it a sandwich? Is it a taco? What’s in a hot dog anyway? And beyond that, there’s a deeply political conflict. My friends all give me shit for slathering my hot dogs with ketchup. That’s not something you do in Chicago. Even President Obama is on record telling Anthony Bourdain that ketchup is never okay. I say, Come at me, Barack! And, of course, there’s Chicago-style versus New York versus whatever the hell Skyline Chili and all those foodie food trucks all across the country think they’re doing.
So, maybe I love the hot dog, too, as a site of identity, conflict, and defiance—like my immigrant dad and his friends in that first poem. Or maybe it’s just a fucking hot dog, but how can you write about life in these United States without mentioning one of our most quintessential culinary artifacts? I’m not sure how to avoid it, but wherever you land on any of this, the single most essential point remains: Go, Cubs, go!
