Interviewed by Shawn Norton
Jeffrey McDaniel is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been included in Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry 1994, and The New Young American Poets, as well as on the National Endowment for the Arts website. McDaniel did poetry slams in the early 90s, and Katostrophenkunde, a compilation of his selected poems, was translated into German in 2006. He currently teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. The Endarkenment is his fourth book of poetry.
Q: Is there a difference for you in writing poems for performance versus writing poems for publication? What I mean by this is do you find yourself paying more attention to certain things while writing in either situation?
A: I’m not sure what you mean by performance. I do readings of my poems at colleges and what-not, but I don’t do performances per se, and haven’t done anything like that in over a decade. I write poems that I hope will work on the page. After a poem is written, I will often read it out loud to myself, to feel the syllables in my throat, to see if I can hear where it creaks or lags. This feeling of the poem in the larynx is a crucial part of my revision process.
Q: Most of your poems seem to be in some way related to actual events in your life, or at least emotional responses to them, but not all. Which is more challenging to you, poems that are based on personal experience or those that are more abstract? Why?
A: I think every poem is challenging, regardless of where its roots are. Your question makes me wonder what percentage of my poems seem to arise out of personal experience and which have no direct correlation to my life. I’m looking now at The Endarkenment’s table of contents. It seems that of the five sections, sections 1 and section 5 contain poems (not exclusively) that have a correlation to my personal life. The middle three sections have very few poems that are directly linked; in fact, there are a number of persona poems: “Ethel Rosenberg,” “Trent Lott,” “Dick Cheyney,” “Picasso, a quasi-preacher.” I see the first-person “I” as rather flexible, as liberal. Sometimes the “I” feels like me, or some version of me, and sometimes the “I” is an alter ego, or an unspecified persona. Many times the lines between aren’t so clean. My goal isn’t to represent or reflect some experience but rather to create a new experience out of language. The poem must have a life of its own if it is to survive. It can’t keep calling me in the middle of the night to pick it up. If it’s going to make it in the world, it will need to toughen up.
Q: The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence … name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A: I wouldn’t use the word jealous. It’s always easier to admire work outside your own era—such as W.S. Merwin’s poems in the 1960s. I think Terrance Hayes, Paisley Rekdal, and Alicia Stallings are all doing interesting work.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: A very curious one.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: It’s changed over the years. When I was first submitting poems, during grad school in the early 90s, each response from a magazine felt like a big deal, but now I have more perspective and see rejection as a necessary part of the publishing process.
Q: What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A: I only have 4 books so it seems pretentious for me to answer this. Maybe when I’m 80…
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: I don’t write much during the school year, so it’s hard to remember (sadly).
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: I can’t tell the difference between my writerly habits and my non-writerly habits so it’s hard to tell.
Q: Lastly (one random fact to top it off) ... what did you have for lunch today?
A: Ham and egg sandwich from Homespun Foods in Beacon, NY, and some of my wife’s homemade chicken noodle soup.
