J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, and a dog. Debut poetry chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). Poems in The Denver Quarterly, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere.
His poems “Cult Classic,” “Going Out” and “Aesthetics 101” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Cult Classic,” “Going Out” and “Aesthetics 101.”
A: The first two poems go together. I have questions about the movies. Movies are very expensive to make — in terms of money but also numbers of people, hours of work, &c. Poetry is the opposite. It costs no money to write a poem. And yet you can still be killed for it — amazing! Movies are a communal experience — much more so than poetry. When you’re involved in making a movie, how do you fit your creative input with everybody else’s? When you’re in the audience, how do you manage the social aspect of your experience?
And then, of course, there’s the wordy-mechanical part of writing the poems. These two movie poems go together in this way too. I was very much thinking about sentence structure and Gertrude Stein. And I’m perennially thinking about how one sentence leads to another. How does one even stick to a subject? Where is the subject? How does a sentence change a previous sentence?
As for “Aesthetics 101,” I like to think this poem speaks for itself. Except for that part about the teeth. And maybe the Hydra. And the French words.
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: Lately I’ve been more interested in the Bible. There’s the truism about the King James leaving its footprints all over the English language. But what I’m interested in is how foreign a concept the religious life is. And I’m using the term religious on purpose. Faith is pretty slippery, it’s not accountable. You can have a statement of faith, a creed, but that’s getting back to religion. Religion is repetition, things written down, people gathering together, more repetition, enemies. And I’m religious. And it’s weird to me. Sometimes I’m bopping around my life of schedules and budgets and phone notifications and cars — and then I'll think of Moses walking up into the hills by himself to go talk to God. And I ask myself, “Am I connected to that? How am I connected to that? What are these words I’m reciting that are thousands of years old? Are words that durable? What about words is durable?”
Q: What brought you to attempt these explorations through the form of the lyric, as opposed to through some other manner? Have you any models for these kind of poems?
A: Mostly I write short pieces. I think my average poem length is under 20 lines. One very practical reason for that is that I have six kids. I don’t get much contiguous time for writing. Harder to sustain the things in longer pieces that need sustaining with such short writing times.
But maybe the weightier reason is that by temperament and by long habit I talk too much. And it doesn’t help me. So I’ve been learning to say less. And in writing I find I am drawn to writing that is direct and spare and that doesn’t try to lead the reader from one point to another. “You talk a lot / but you’re not saying anything. / When I have nothing to say / my lips are sealed. / Say it only once. / Why say it again?” Irony and all, that’s what draws me to the lyric.
I don’t have a direct model for these poems, but they do come out of reading. John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Tom Snarsky, Kyla Houbolt, Jordan Davis, Rae Armantrout. Those are probably the ones I would connect to these poems.
Q: With a published chapbook debut under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: My work has developed more difficulties, more questions. What kind of poems do I want to write, anyway? And why? God only knows. I am shopping around a full-length manuscript. And I’m glad I didn’t try that when I was young. The anxiety might’ve killed me. Now, and with everything else going on in my life, it really doesn’t have a chance to rise to the surface. Or not for long. I look at the stuff I write, and I wonder if any of the five things I think I do well would even show up on the board of Family Feud. And if all that sounds depressing, it’s really not. I am enjoying writing. I am enjoying working out just what it is that I like and don’t care for, what I would like to see more of in the world and what I needn’t bother with. And I do wonder what to do with this feeling I have that something is building up behind the dam and whether that feeling is connected to a slowly growing desire to write something longer.
Q: Given your chapbook debut wasn’t that far back, what was the process of putting that manuscript together? Has putting that out in the world prompted you to see your work any differently? What has been the response?
A: I was really lucky to work with a publisher who likes eclecticism. He looked at many more poems than could fit in a chapbook and he suggested a grouping. He was really looking for a collection of good poems, rather than a narrative or theme or an arc.
Here’s what the process taught me. A poem is like a syndrome, right? If you have 7 of these 12 things going on, then you’ve got the syndrome. If you only have 5 things, well then you’re pretty sick, but insurance won’t cover it. Ashbery reportedly would give each poem in consideration for a collection an A, B, or C. And you’d think he'd put all the As together and call it a book. But he thought you needed a certain percentage of Bs in there.
Reception has been pretty good for this chapbook. That is, I’ve tried to get it into the hands of people who are part of the conversations if like to be part of. And mostly, those people have been pretty happy to receive it and pretty happy to be in conversation with me. Has it sold well? I believe we have broken even, and I may even get a check in the new year, maybe enough to buy myself a chapbook. If it’s big enough, maybe I’ll get a year subscription to Hanging Loose!
Q: Has this process shifted the way you write, in any way?
A: I’m still writing the same way. That is, I keep one long Google doc open for six months at a time and every day I write in it. Sometimes I pull a poem out of it. At the end of six months I go back over it all and pull out lines I like. Then I start a new doc. Once a year I pull out all the poems and look at them and try to figure out what might hold together.
But when I look at an individual poem, I am asking:
Is this poem big enough? Is there enough of the world in it?Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
What's the vocabulary of this poem? Does it have all the words it needs?
Is it a serious thing?
Is it any fun?
Does it tell the reader what to do? (A yes would be bad.)
Did I write this poem already?
A: Kenneth Koch. The first poem of his I read is “One Train May Hide Another.” I’d never read anything like that before. I’ve read it aloud to many people. I asked around and got some ideas of where to start with Koch, and I’ve read a fair bit by now. Some favorites: “Some General Remarks,” “The Art of Poetry,” “The Boiling Water,” “The Brassiere Factory,” and my very favorite, “Passing Time in Skansen.” Koch’s poetry is like listening to your favorite teacher talk spontaneously and perhaps at length on a subject they love. I try to absorb from him love, energy, interest, fun, exuberance, daring, curiosity. If I ever think to myself, “Why poetry?” I can read some more Kenneth Koch and respond, “That’s why.”
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