Revising the Stories We Tell Ourselves: NUP Poets in Conversation

Curbstone Books, an NUP imprint, is known for innovative books focused on promoting equity, justice, and intercultural understanding. This month, we have two phenomenal debut poetry collections publishing under the Curbstone imprint. Find Me When You’re Ready by Perry Janes, a lyric coming-of-age collection interrogating the myths we carry, and Nicholas Molbert’s Altars of Spine and Fraction, a look into Louisiana and the generational trauma and climate crises abiding there.  

The two debut authors sat down with one another to talk about a plethora of topics surrounding their forthcoming collections: what it’s like to live in LA when growing up elsewhere, the challenging of what it means to be masculine within their work, their craft processes, and more. Both collections are available for pre-order on our website.  

Nicholas Molbert: Talk a little bit about the meta level of poems—poems about poems—the revision or further explanations that takes place on those poems. What does it do for you as a poet, and how does it show up in the book?  

Perry Janes: While the book is about many things, it is interested in how poems work almost as much as the more surface-level subjects. One of the reasons I come to poetry is its ability to enact thought and emotion in ways other forms can’t. The opportunity to lineate thought creates possibilities for contradiction and introduces doubt into the narrative. So much of what this book is about are the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, where we come from, where we’re going and the need to inject those stories with some uncertainty as a way to free ourselves from them, to give ourselves permission to revise and create new ones for ourselves. A huge project of the book was scattering this meta level engagement with the artifice of the poem to highlight the artifice in those personal narratives.  

In the same vein of meta-narratives, your companion poems “Louisiana Birth” and “Comment on ‘Louisiana Birth’” betray the speaker’s similar impulse to interrogate or revise their own story. What led you to write that second poem?  

NM: At first the book was just childhood and family poems, but over years it started to incorporate poems about the significant other who delivers babies for a living. I needed something to bridge the poems about the masculinity of childhood and family to a totally different place, both geographically and psychologically. The “conversation” didn’t happen verbatim, as we do use hyperbole for the sake of the work to make it move along. It wasn’t premeditated. It just happened.  

From your collection’s title to the content of poems and structure, a large project of the book is correcting the record at the nuts-and-bolts level of the poet.  The book reclaims and revises and exclaims that there must be change from an organizational perspective. When did these ideas of change and revision clarify for you? 

PJ: I was writing toward this book for quite a long time, and early on I had the sense of the work as having a contiguous speaker throughout all of the poems. Whether that speaker was a version of myself or a construction, it was the same voice coming back again and again, so that meant there was a sort of arc baked into the poems as a whole. The early sequencing for this collection was wildly elliptical and non-narrative. But it wasn’t working, and it took showing to a friend to see the very linear narrative. The poems are lyrical, so even within a narrative structure they maintain elasticity. There is an understanding that we are moving forward in time, but the character was constantly dealing with the reverberations and echoes of the journey and time before.  

One of the things that we share in common  is this movement from one place to another. For me, it’s from the post-industrial Midwest to Los Angeles. For you, it was Louisiana to Los Angeles. Your book feels deeply engaged with the South in a way that is both lived-in and quasi-mythic. Besides being a setting for the narrative, what are some ways that Louisiana influenced your writing? What do you hope the reader takes away from your work about your hometown?  

NM: Louisiana is so weird, a good place for a poet to come from. There’s something about the combination of natural disaster and religion. Catholicism in the deep south has a unique mystical caveat. There’s an acknowledgement that the weather is a powerful force that can really mess you up. There are rituals for it. The correcting the record comes from highlighting the community and the joy in these people’s lives. There are people who have been out there on the Gulf Coast who fish and shrimp and crab for a living who have never known anything else. They don’t have the means to move if they wanted. It’s easy to look at that part of the country and see them as victims. I want to present the wholeness and the joy.  

I didn’t really start writing Louisiana poems until I moved to the Midwest for graduate school. What is your experience? Did you have to leave Detroit to write about it?  

PJ: I have a tendency to get obsessed with writing about a place while I am in it, which has the effect of pickling my brain in a place while constantly trying to achieve an impossible level of distance. So much of my work is about the Detroit metro area. Especially in the late 90s and early aughts, Detroit was synonymous with ruin and the end of the industrial dream, then it became synonymous with industrial rebirth. It has perpectually been spoken about in these symbolic terms that erase the human story. There is some truth to them, but they are reductive. I found myself writing about the place while I was there and then continued to write about it even at a distance. I think being away did give me different perspective, and it all filters into the poems.  

NM: Touching on our shared theme of masculinity, I found the poems in your book centered around tenderness to be the most moving. But as they so often do, these are poems that also have a hint of a certain kind of violence. What’s the relationship between violence and tenderness? 

PJ: The connection between tenderness and violence is a productive mystery for me.  It was of particular importance to show those two things can coexist on the same page in the same moment because violence is often positioned as destroying our capacity for tenderness. To not bring it in is to cede a victory to violence.  

In your work, I drew a line between musicality and masculinity. I keep returning to your poem “Box,” which I found to be one of the most sonically layered and lyrical poems in the collection. It’s also a poem very overtly about masculinity. This poem felt like a microcosm of the book as a whole, which conjures a word of “rigbound roughnecks” and men who get “cut good checks for factory work”, but years later come out with “crude slang and chronic illness.” Could you speak a little bit about the connection between music and masculinity in your book?  

NM: I think this goes back to my book as an introduction to Louisiana. Unlike the Midwest, where older gentlemen have that classic American radio voice, people where I’m from are Cajun. If you’ve ever heard somebody Cajun talk, it’s so musical. You might need translation because it’s so thick. I didn’t consciously realize this and decide to make a sonically dense book. I just grew up listening to the way that they spoke and the sayings they had, which were all ready-made for poetry. It was a way to push back against the stereotype of Ernest Hemingway masculine language, which isn’t musical, just the nuts and bolts of what happened.  

PJ: I have to ask you about those hurricane poems. I love a persona poem. The voice for your hurricanes is notably plural, so it resists the identity of any single storm. I thought of them like a Greek chorus in the book. I’m curious about what the hurricanes in this book represent to you and what led you to persona in the first place.  

NM: I wrote more hurricane poems than ended up in the book, and my instinct was to put them together in one big family. Hurricanes had this kind of mythic, looming presence in my childhood and life. There’s a joke that people from Louisiana don’t give directions—it’s not “turn left in a mile,” it’s “turn left at the McDonald’s.” It’s about landmarks. Our family history is told the same way, using hurricanes as temporal landmarks. 

How does your work as a screenwriter give you a leg up on somebody like me who might not think of transitions in the same way?  

PJ: The poet A. Van Jordan has a phenomenal essay all about the proverbial camera in the poem. Transistions make the “camera moves” more apparent, but I think about what’s filling the frame and how to feel what is just off screen. It’s how I think about subtext in the work and what’s happening with the gaze. To bring it back to the larger question of how screenwriting has influenced my work, one of the ways is the answer about sequencing I gave earlier. Another is genre and the way genre trades on expectations, how to manipulate tropes to satsify a reader while maneuvering their emotional experience.

NM: One move I noticed across multiple poems was the unfinished sentence. I think of that being a place where you might be empowering the reader to subvert the situation. You’re not finishing, even though we might be able to tell where it is going using the context, you’re inviting the reader to fill in the frame. It’s a masterful way to set up those expectations and subvert them.  

PJ: I’m curious in hearing a little bit about how your relationship, particularly with a non-poet in medicine, has influenced your work. Obviously, they show up in the poems as a figure, but I’m confident they are present in many ways I cannot see in the book.  

NM: If it wasn’t being published and I had to write more for this book, I think the poems would center around the difference in work: creative labor versus the back-breaking life of a surgeon. It was important for me to include her line of work in the book because as the book arcs toward happiness, the speaker carries all of the traditional mores into the relationship. It’s a way to subvert gender expectation, where the male speaker is not the breadwinner of the family. That men are providers was a massive emphasis when I was growing up. It was important to make fun of myself as a poet, like write one line per day or move a comma, playing up what is obviously more complicated than that.  

PJ: That’s so interesting. For me, my wife working in medicine doesn’t feel like it has a particular effect on the poem so much as she has a titanic influence on them. I’m constantly relearning how to write love poems. There are many ways in which her presence is felt in the book and in my life and process. But I enjoyed reading your poems because I did feel as though that professional contrast was so germane to your work. I love the idea of you performing surgery on the commas of your poems from the operating theater of your desk.