By Jael Montellano
I think of JSA Lowe’s poems the way I think of American trompe l’oeil, the oils so decadently layered and glossy-rich they teem with the pulp of life. Like William Harnett’s still lifes of game or Julie Heffernan’s rococo portraits of self, if you bit into the canvas, surely your teeth would stain red. Similarly, the lines of Lowe’s poems both feed and curdle the stomach, exposing the intricate veining of your own skin, your own guts, the way your lipids congeal.
It was with wild, girlish delight that I gorged on her poetry collection Internet Girls (from Finishing Line Press) and pleaded her for an interview. Below is our conversation.
Internet Girls spans the gamut of relationships, romantic, platonic, sapphic (“too nervous to hold hands, a man asked ‘do you have / a boyfriend.’ She looked at him dumb…”), the joys of existence and the violence of heartbreak. There’s a watchful, wry, savage, rebellious interiority. Was there a guiding post as you wrote? What were you writing towards with this collection?
It wasn’t really a collection until the long poem “Internet Girls” happened, and then that became something of an anchor, the center around which everything else moves. I love long poems and this one is short for me but helped me understand that this particular collection is about what my groupchat friends call “sad sapphic yearning,” to be colloquial about it. Jeanette Winterson wrote, “Why is the measure of love loss?” and this selection of poems has things to say back to that. Does it have to be loss? Can there be plain joy in the having, before the losing?
In his essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” Gregory Orr talks about poets being form-givers, and that different poets are born with different temperaments and these “determin[e] essential qualities” about the poems they compose. What temperament[s] do you feel you have? What do you find are the essential qualities that drive your form-giving and how did you approach Internet Girls with those in mind?
Well, Orr is smarter than I am, for one thing. But I do think of Richard Hugo writing that there are public poets, like Auden, and private ones, like Hopkins. And ultimately I guess I decided to be a private one—or poetry decided for me. Jack Gilbert speaks to this, as well, in his Paris Review interview, describing how hard public poets work—they teach, they give readings, they run presses, they put themselves out there tirelessly. And, he goes on to say, good for them! I know these poets and love them; they serve the community as poets laureate and poets in the schools. But my background and upbringing and disability mean that I will always work best at a slight remove, somewhat concealed, hidden away like a mollusc behind its operculum.
In terms of poetry, Alberto Ríos (a very fine public poet) told me once that the poem must do 51% of the work, and then the reader will willingly kick in her 49%. I think for private poets, the proportions are a little different. The reader has to contribute more work up front, and many readers are not able or willing, and that is fine. In this case language unspools on the page in whatever form it wishes, and I try to tend it like a gardener does overgrown trumpet vines: in mortal peril, most of the time. In shape-making, which is how I think of form, I’m moving around syntactical units to try to approximate music, most of all. I’m less interested in meaning and more interested in making sounds that chime and ring like bells, but inside someone’s eyes.
I seldom read contemporary poetry, but am always listening to music and reading prose. Norman Dubie is the one who discovered I was a prose writer at heart; he always was willing to let me make so many mistakes. I grew up singing and playing in church, and with my dad who was a country and gospel guitarist and musician; and in college I wanted to be a folksinger, played piano and guitar, was briefly in a jazz band, this kind of thing. So I do feel that music is a taproot sunk deeply into me, onto which poetry is grafted. Ultimately I was unsuited to a life of touring and hustling, which is how one became a working musician before the era of Soundcloud, so I retreated into poetry and sort of closed the door behind me, where it was quiet and I could think.
You have previously published chapbooks such as DOE and Cherry-emily, but Internet Girls is your first full book collection. How long did it take to write? What challenges did you come across? What did you learn about yourself through the process of this collection?
I first put together a book collection in 1995, so it’s funny to me that this is like my sixth or seventh or tenth book—I’ve honestly lost count. But rarely do poets now publish their first collection first. It takes a while. With every iteration, though, I think I get better at developing a through-line: the story of a book of poems. Perfumiers talk about the story of a fragrance, how it unfolds through time and heat and movement, and poems are maybe a little bit like perfume. The challenges are always the same: what would I, as a reader, want to encounter when I open this book. I want to be able to move from poem to poem, but I always want the small grace of being startled. Unfortunately I don’t think I learned very much about myself, only what I have known for a long time: that I am a relatively self-serving person, as many poets are, and always, always, an unreliable narrator. None of the internet girls should have ever befriended me.
Recently, I had a thought that poetry is a medium of the body more than any of the other linguistic arts. You identify as LGBTQ+ and disabled. What does poetry offer you as a disabled LGBTQ+ artist that perhaps other practices, even other mediums, do not? What does it mean for you through a theory of the body, and by extension, desire, to be a poet?
I often joke about wanting to be a brain in a jar already, kind of like we were promised flying cars by now? It’s difficult for me to theorize the body, this body, as a conduit for poetry, when I feel that my own writing is often so cerebral and distanced—even divorced, or cut-off from, bodily resonance, despite my previously saying that I feel all the same it’s rooted in music. Admittedly I do count syllables on my fingertips, and stressed syllables by touching my lips, and only really use slant rhymes, because true rhyme can be so annoying in English (we have too few rhyming words, unlike Romance languages; so English runs the risk of sounding perky or like doggerel if we use exact rhymes). While I’m hardly a spoken-word poet, the mouth gets involved inevitably, as I sit here and whisper my poem aloud. And I love to give readings; I love to inflict the poems’ sharper and angrier sonic properties on unsuspecting innocent listeners.
Disability for me is about having a mind that is very often in opposition to me; bluntly put, my brain generally wants me dead and it’s been the work of a lifetime to stay in this bone-cage. Poetry then becomes a place to stow things for a while. My late godmother, a pianist, used to talk about the shrines for people on a pilgrimage, with shelves where you could put your belongings for a while as you rested. Art is that place where I can rest my arms for just a moment from holding heavy things—but also a place where other tired people (underprivileged, struggling, exhausted by the sheer effort of continuing) can place their things for a while, and rest. I hope.
Also lately a lot of poems, maybe too many, feature my service dog. But he’s never more than a few feet away from me, so I guess that’s just how that is. Being queer is the same thing; it’s right there, so it winds up in the lines.
I find constructing poems quite different from fiction or any long piece of work. Poems are structured and layered in sometimes puzzling, unclear ways, and yet they arrive, somehow, at true north. I’m particularly fascinated by the way you layer memory and collapse time (and your syntax! with all that French musicality). What is your revision process like? What comes first to you, between story, image, syntax, and structure, and what do you consciously revise for later?
The late John Trudell used to say that in his darkest hour of need, lines came to him, were given to him, lines that he could hang onto. I feel that in my bones. The fey will bring you such lines, if you write them down; if you stop writing them down, they’ll take them to other people who want them more. I’m not sure how else to say it. So lines come first to me entirely, and the rest of the poem gets hammered in around them, like a setting for a gem at first.
Then, it’s a matter of connective tissue and rearranging. I’m sworn to uphold Anne Carson’s introduction to “The Life of Towns,” when she writes, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.” At this late stage in the game my revision process is deeply intuitive. I’m seeking compression and I’m seeking to upset the reader, trouble the reading. I’m always trying to balance Pound’s phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia (sound, image, story, if you will). It’s a maypole dance where everything becomes one: music, pulse, the blurred faces of the dancers.
Internet Girls opens with two quotes, one by the writer Denis Johnson, notorious for writing drifters in the margins, something which seems thematic across the verses of many of these poems, and the other by Whit Merule, who I have a sneaking suspicion is a fanfiction writer, but I have to say–one I am not familiar with. Who is Whit Merule and who is the “little nightjar”? What do both of these writers mean to you?
That Denis Johnson quotation is distorted a bit by me, but when I first read it, in a cabin in Southern California during a writer’s retreat, it made me throw the book across the room. Then I had to pick the book up and apologize. Johnson doesn’t always write in prose and Angels is no exception. It might as well be by Milton, in the way it delves all the way down into human fallibility and depravity and then resuscitates the human creature, elevates it into the divine.
Whit Merule is a wonderful writer of many things, and a nightjar is a funny little evil-looking crepuscular bird, like a skinny owl. Joseph Brodsky used to say when a bird appears in a poem, it’s always the bard. So taken together, both of these epigraphs are there to say: I’m really sorry, everybody, but I have to do this. I have to pursue her, and I have to tell you about it.
You teach American literature, but you are also a researcher in media and fandom studies, in particular queer media. How does your research inform your poetic practice and vice-versa, how does poetry affect your research? What unexpected surprises have you encountered in your studies?
Admittedly I teach American lit starting with Columbus’s letter to Spain and Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación, and I tell students up front: you see all these problems that we have today? All the things all around you that are so frightening and bad? Everything has a root, a source—let’s go back together to find it, because I can show you how it started. After teaching those texts the first time, I wrote a twelve-page poem about Cabeza de Vaca’s 1527 shipwreck, which might have happened on the same beach where I walk the dog every night. What I mean to say is, if you keep your face open you are always researching. Fan studies don’t affect my poetry but I can’t help but be a poet when I write up research, which is probably why Reviewer 3 hated my most recent 10,000-word essay on danmei, and why I’m not sure how to revise it to fit anywhere.
Tell us what poets (and/or other writers and works) we should be reading.
There’s a poet named Katie Schmid and her debut book, Nowhere, unseated me handily. I always come back to Ariana Reines and Thalia Field, in confusion and in curiosity, circling, circling. You can buy two books by Tim Ramick online, from Last Press: Meld, and Wilderment, and I hope we see more of his dense layered work in print soon; it out-Faulkners Faulkner. (Poets need Faulkner just like we need the films of Stan Brakhage and David Lynch, and the paintings of Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin.) I happily teach my friend Jill McDonough, and another friend, Jon Davis. The late Norman Dubie will be anthologized for decades and I hope centuries to come. American poetry is also poorer without Lucie Brock-Broido and CD Wright; Jorie Graham’s next book, To 2040, may be her last and it’s already casting a long frightening shadow. When I’m lonely, there’s Dickinson and Tsevtaeva and Stevie Smith. When I’m manic and need loud desperate music, there’s Whitman. For prose I go to Lydia Davis and David Markson, David Foster Wallace and Karl Ove Knausgård. This is a mess, an untidy hodge-podge; but so is writing, the curse the witch whispers over our cradles.
JSA Lowe’s first book of poetry, Internet Girls, will be published in June 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Biscuit Hill, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review’s Mixtape, Missouri Review, Rupture, Screen Door Review, Sinister Wisdom, Southeast Review, and Superstition Review, as well as previously in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and Versal. Previously, her chapbook Cherry-emily was printed by Dancing Girl Press (2015), and her chapbook DOE by Particle Series Books (2012). She is a lecturer in English at the University of Houston–Clear Lake; she lives on Galveston Island.
Jael Montellano (she/they) is a Mexican-born writer, poet, and editor. Her work explores the psyche and queer life and features in Tint Journal, Beyond Queer Words, Fauxmoir, The Selkie, Hypertext Magazine, among others. She dabbles in photography, travel, and is currently learning Mandarin.