"Counterbalance to the Pivoting": An Interview with Charles Jensen

Charles Jensen is the author of The First Risk (Lethe Press 2009), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and the forthcoming chapbook The Nanopedia Quick Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture (MiPO Chapbook Series, 2012).  His poems have appeared in Court Green, Field, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Willow Springs.  He currently teaches at community colleges and in the master's writing program at University of Denver and serves as an arts nonprofit consultant.  He is active in the national arts community by serving on the Emerging Leaders Council of Americans for the Arts and locally by rebooting the Tucson Emerging Arts & Culture Leaders group.

His three poems "Letters to the Editor," "Prospero's Confession," and "Poem Beginning with a Line Falsely Attributed to Voltaire" appear in Issue Thirty of The Collagist.

Here, Jensen speaks with interviewer Amber Cook about sonic guidance, line tension, and surprise juxtaposition.  Enjoy!

1. Your three poems, “Letters to the Editor,” “Prospero’s Confession,” and “Poem Beginning with a Line Falsely Attributed to Voltaire,” overlap with various similarities and differences. Where was the birth place for each of these poems?

All three poems were written within a few weeks of each other in the winter of 2010-2011 when I was living in Silver Spring, Maryland.  You can definitely see the presence of winter in “Letters to the Editor,” I think, as the time of year is part of the speaker’s malaise.  I loate winter, snow, cold weather—all of it.  All of the poems come out of my experience quitting a job during the recession, having to find a new way to live, and reflecting back on what I’d experienced in that position.

2. You have a knack for playing with sound, whether it is with assonance or with something like near-rhyme. A line that stands out to me comes from “Letters to the Editor” when you write, “ you observed my innocence/objectively, wrote your observation down…” I mostly enjoy how tricky it is for the tongue to navigate over lines such as these. How does your playfulness with sound contend with the pacing of your poems?

I love sound play in poems, but usually only on an internal or irregular basis.  I think a lot of my poems actually seem to end, when read aloud, with rhyming couplets, although they don’t appear this way on the page.  “Prospero’s Confession” does this with the “skin/wind” rhyme.  When I’m writing poems, the sound of the words is often a stronger guide for me than the meaning of the sentence.  This can get tricky in revision because I’ll feel like a poem sounds right but I can tell I’ve chosen the wrong word on the level of meaning, so then I have to puzzle out a way to compromise.  In my head, the sounds of a poem work best when they twist and turn on various axes, like a Rubik’s Cube—you can spin on one sound over and over, or you can pivot on the axis of a word into another echo.

3. “Prospero’s Confession” has a lot of repeated words or phrases. Is repetition a tactic that you often return to? How does repetition function for you?

Yes, and, in fact, I’m starting to get busted on it more and more.  Anaphora for me is the counterbalance to the pivoting sounds in the poem.  It’s almost like the poem has two hands—one hand is doing the twisty-turny sound thing, while the other hand is the stable, rhythmic refrain.  I find refrains like this “reboot” the sound of the poem, the way you use the smell of coffee beans to “clear” the scent of cologne from your nose when trying to figure out which one to buy.

4. You are able to string together pop culture and humor and criticism so beautifully. How do these entities converse with each other among your text?

Thank you!  I love applying pressure to the disconnect between perceptions of high and low culture.  In “Poem Beginning with a Line Falsely Attributed to Voltaire,” I like the tension of classical French writing immediately crashing into the plot of Lost, or “Prospero’s Confession” having a place in a manuscript that features an America’s Next Top Model pantoum and a sonnet sequence in the voices of the Project Runway judges. These collisions also make me giggle—you know, in an intellectual way.  I love surprising my reader with these juxtapositions and, hopefully, encouraging them to reconsider the way they view both what we exalt as “classic” and what we denigrate as “trash.”

5. Both stepped (tercet) lines and couplets are used in the poems presented in Issue Thirty. Do you view these couplets/tercets as units working together, or do you view each line as a stand-alone unit?

Both, I think.  Another important layer of the poem for me is its visual appearance on the page.  “Letters to the Editor” appropriates the indented format of the letter, but then keeps pushing the reader further right with each line, or pulls the reader backward in some cases.  That push-and-pull relates to what is happening with the sentiment there.  The other two poems feel more straightforward to me, but I do look at the stanzas as units of of the poem and the lines as the units of the stanza.  I don’t write many poems in single stanzas.  I like the breaks in between stanzas as much as I like the breaks in lines.  I want these places to have tension.

6. Do all three of these poems belong to one project, or are they from multiple projects?

These poems are all from a larger manuscript called Career Suicide.  The book as a whole—the humor, especially—was a departure from The First Risk and even the poem previously published in The Collagist, some of which appeared in The Nanopedia Quick-Refereence Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture.  Career Suicide is a bit tongue in cheek from start to finish, but I think it strives to touch on how our occupations shape our identities, both the way we see ourselves and the way we allow ourselves to be seen by others.