Jesse Nathan is a lecturer in the English Department at UC Berkeley. His poems appear in Paris Review, Yale Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. He grew up in rural Kansas and lives now in San Francisco. His poem “If You Draw Rightly on a Wound, It Might Righten” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the May/June 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “If You Draw Rightly on a Wound, It Might Righten”?
I don’t know that there was one impetus. I guess writing a poem by way of question-and-answer—interview, call and response, a catechetical structure—had been in my mind for a while. It seems like a powerful way to split open that troublesome lyric “I.” But those were just abstract ideas rattling around somewhere in my mind. Poems usually begin for me under the pressure of a word or a phrase or an image that I can’t shake, or some combination of these. Occasionally a workshop-style prompt, or an “idea” for a poem, results in something worthwhile, but most of the time those efforts fall flat for me, maybe because they’re manifestations of the will more than the spirit. Products of diligence and resolve, rather than need and nerve. The will is diligent, the spirit fickle. But the spirit, what I’m calling the spirit, for me is what sustains feeling. Willpower gets me to the desk sometimes, but feeling is what tends to get me past the inertia of the blank page. What happens most often is that some bit of language or image gets stuck in my craw, so to speak, and the poem is a record of my trying to reckon with it. I don’t remember how this one came to me. I had found myself writing many poems in this particular stanza, and one led to the next. Partly that was because I was following a larger story, in these poems, with these poems. At some point I began imagining two people who are leaving the world they know, for various painful and inspired reasons, stopping on the way out of state to “mark themselves for themselves,” as I think I say in the poem. To claim and maybe even reset their accounts of who they are. And I began hearing the two voices, one knowing and one childlike, telling the story by question and answer. Two voices watching two people from afar, like gods. The title draws on an ancient idea: Prehistoric people believed that what we call tattoos could heal a wound or ward off further damage.
The speaker does not tell this story from an “I” or “we” perspective, but rather a “they.” What does this distance between “I” and “they” suggest? Is that space necessary in order for the speaker to communicate this experience to the person who is asking?
So interesting. I don’t know. You might be in a better position to say. I think the lines just came to me at this distance, or came to me representing it. I might’ve experimented with other perspectives, I can’t remember. Sometimes I lose track of myself in the process, and later can’t really recall what order things emerged in, or how the poem came to be what it is. The decisions are many and rapid and instinctual, a flow over hours or weeks or much longer. An ice cube riding its melting. Going on nerve, as O’Hara said. And then of course there’s the revision process, which I love, and which is certainly much more involved with the conscious self. All of which is to say, it’s a little bit mysterious to me but, yes, I do think the poem had to be just this way to say what it had to say.
There’s a certain ebb and flow to the poem’s form: the holding and then, with the indents, the releasing. What inspired your formal choices and line breaks?
Where these lines break is in many ways a matter of rhyme. Or in my case, bad rhyme. I’m fond of off-rhymes, odd rhymes, nearly-not rhymes. Emily Dickinson rhymes. In that way my handling of John Donne’s stanza here is not very like the Renaissance. Renaissance poets very rarely used anything but what people sometimes call “true” rhyme. Donne used a version of the stanza in “The Good Morrow” and also a handful of other poems, like “Confined Love.” In the edition I had, a tattered little paperback, the lines indent in that alternating way you’re talking about. They dance the poem down the page. I’m still trying to understand how I found my way to Donne’s stanza. Why this shape, or my version of this shape, felt so freeing and right and necessary. Why at this time in history. And why for the particular subjects I was about. Something to do with the relationship between imposed form and deep resistance to that form. A representation of felt alienation.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I hope it’s gotten better.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I think Kerouac said, “Imagine it again.” So, call it to mind, and see if you can see more of it—it being whatever you’re trying to get at in writing. Not as easy as it sounds but, I’ve found, very powerful. Though maybe it’s a version of what’s really both the best and the worst piece of writing advice I’ve received or given: “Keep going.”