A Conversation with A. Van Jordan

Lauren Myers-Hinkle, A. Van Jordan | April 2024

A. Van Jordan

To immerse oneself in an A. Van Jordan poetry collection is to enter the heart and mind of an unfettered dreamer, inventor, and machinist: this is a poet who breaks apart art forms and theoretical concepts, studies them down to their foundations, then reassembles them and makes them roar to life. His work is ambitious and bold, far-flung and far-reaching: it not only reinvents traditional poetic forms like the corona and sestina, but it also draws upon a variety of artistic media such as music, photography, theater, and film, and fields of inquiry such as mathematics, physics, and history, interweaving and intercutting them in fresh and dynamic ways. Yet Jordan’s poetry never feels cold or remote, like an experiment in a vacuum. Rather, his lyricism and strong narrative drive pull us deeply into the stories and emotional arcs of disparate people, such as African American spelling bee champion MacNolia Cox, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and African American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. In the process, his poetry transforms history and the present into an evocative, pulsing tapestry. Jordan opens new ways of perceiving and experiencing the world around us and raises important questions about what art, firing on all kinds of cylinders at once, is able to do. 

A. Van Jordan is the author of five poetry collections: Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was listed as one of the best books of 2005 by the Times (London); Quantum Lyrics (W. W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W. W. Norton, 2013). His latest poetry collection, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, was published by W. W. Norton in June 2023. He is also the author of a chapbook, I Want to See My Skirt (Unicorn Press, 2021), based on his collaboration with filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Jordan’s work has received numerous honors, including a Whiting Writers’ Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. He has taught at various institutions, most recently the University of Michigan, where he served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and director of the Helen Zell Writers’ MFA Program. He currently holds the humanities and sciences chair in English at Stanford University, where he teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting.

This interview revisits and goes deeper into a major focal point in Jordan’s work, the juncture of poetry and film. It also delves into the arc and evolution of Jordan’s work, questions of craft and process, balancing teaching and writing, and challenges of the writing life. We also discuss When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, which engages with Shakespeare and the Black experience. 

Lauren Myers-Hinkle: In your 2007 essay “The Synchronicity of Scenes,” you argue that poetry and film run parallel in terms of their formal maneuvers and techniques. You also state,

I look to film, now, as a way to solve some of the artistic problems I encounter in poetry. The joy of working through these artistic problems in poetry is that I can be my own director, editor, costume designer, prop master, and cinematographer: all the craft of these artists comes together in a line or a stanza under my pen.

Do you still look to film in this problem-solving way and, if so, how?

A. Van Jordan: Yeah, I think largely because you can’t help but think visually when you’re thinking cinematically. What’s often a speed bump with poets or even prose writers, when they’re thinking about scene, is visualizing both the spatial context and the situational context. And when you’re thinking about a scene, you’re often thinking about what’s at stake, and what precipitated this moment in the scene—what do the figures in the scene want, what do they regret, what are they hiding? So in thinking about those elements, a writer often has to look at whether that scene is visually serving its subject matter: the power dynamics between the figures in the scene, the placements of elements in the scene. If we start thinking about tone, we start thinking about colors, the lighting—there are things that are automatic when we start thinking cinematically that don’t necessarily kick in immediately when we’re on the page. 

Myers-Hinkle: Has your MFA in filmmaking shifted the way you think and approach the page? 

Jordan: A big part of thinking cinematically is thinking logically. Often, when we start something as simple as, for example, keeping the pronouns straight inside of a poem, and you have two figures who are both pronoun he/him, you’re trying to think about how the reader is going to understand which one of them we’re talking about. Sometimes it’s just [managing] the context of who’s being spoken to, or who’s being referred to, based on certain actions in that scene. You have to think that way when you’re filming something. You have to think, “Oh, well we’ve shot these two folks in a two shot, and we’ve done that so that they [the audience] can see where they are, and then we cut to the other person, and we know where they’re looking, and we know where this person is looking, and we can’t have them looking the other way, because that would confuse people.” That kind of logical thinking goes into looking through a camera, but it doesn’t always translate once folks are thinking about looking through the camera of their pens. Are you asking about a current-day example?

Myers-Hinkle: Yes, as I know you work so beautifully between film forms and poetic forms, doing this almost mathematical thinking through of how they relate to each other. 

Jordan: I’ve been working with something that takes its cue from music. I’m calling it chords, and it’s basically thinking about the third, fifth, and seventh line of a twelve-line poem and thinking of how that operates as a tercet for an envoy at the end of the poem. That’s what I’ve been playing with in the latest collection. I went back to using some definition poems, thinking about the way language works in that way. Thinking about form in general also relates to thinking about film, though people don’t talk about it in the same way; but you’re constantly thinking about form when you’re thinking about the construction of film.

Myers-Hinkle: Absolutely, and that leads to another question: You’ve spoken so eloquently and beautifully about montage in various ways. How do you approach the long take on the page? 

Jordan: A big part of it is thinking about how I represent something that’s “happening in real time,” and how that might be reenacted or sort of rendered on the page. And sometimes the discomfort of two people locking eyes, sometimes that could be for a moment, but if it’s past that, it could either be discomfort, or it could be passion, or it could be whatever. And then they could be thinking about doing a task, so they’re doing something in the poem, and how many steps are there? So now I’m thinking about sequential time, what happens in this moment, what happens in that moment, what happens in the next moment, and how? What is the order of operations for that? And then it [sequential time] kind of becomes a bit of scaffolding for thinking about the shape of the poem.

Myers-Hinkle: I get the feeling sometimes that you see a higher order, an overarching and unifying symmetry, at work across various planes of artistic production and thought as well as across disciplines and central human experiences. I’m thinking here about how you discuss physics and love in Quantum Lyrics and then of your more recent discussion of music, film, and physics at the Hurston/Wright Foundation. How do you see these patterns and resonances and translate them from one to the other? I don’t think many people could do that.

Jordan: I actually think most people do think this way. I just don’t think they embrace it. I know so many people who have such varied interests and things that they’re into, but I don’t think they always believe that they have the permission to bring them into the poem. And for me, I think of the other writing arts, and it seems that this thing poetry is so wide open. I’d [also] say playwriting and plays: they’re challenging [and] they’re getting up there as imaginative, and nimble, around how they present story, even lyrical movement. Not too many other art forms right now have that level of freedom. I just don’t see a reason to put the brakes on. I see the reason to have brakes everywhere else in my life [laughs], but not there. So I try to embrace that kind of boyish curiosity in me when I get to the page.

Myers-Hinkle: Yes, but I also think you’re able to see true symmetries between things. I’m not sure everyone can actually see, like X-ray vision, into how certain things relate. I’m thinking of your discussion at the Hurston/Wright Foundation, your way of translating between physics, math, and poetry. And then I’m also thinking of your movement between the fermata, that musical concept, and poetry and physics. I mean, what you’re doing with this concept is profound.

Jordan: Thank you, thank you. I’ll take it. 

Myers-Hinkle: [laughs] So your process of looking into these sorts of patterns made me wonder: Is the intellectual a way of getting to the personal and emotional for you?

Jordan: I think the intellectual can be a way of making sense of the emotional, sure. We usually need some intellectual strategy to render emotion. 

Myers-Hinkle: And how do you blend your academic interests with your writing in a way that the reader, who may not grasp all of the intellectual work that you’re doing behind the scenes, can still feel hooked? Also, how do you keep yourself working between a more emotional, dreaming, and intuitive stance and one that is more idea oriented? And how do you let messiness into your often quite mathematical and precise process? That was a lot of questions at once. [laughs]

Jordan: I don’t really know how to “keep a reader hooked”; I only know how to keep myself hooked. I follow that path, hoping others will relate to my experience with the subject and with the way I tried to render it.

By way of “messiness,” I think I just want my writing—poetry or prose—to sound like a person talking or, at the very least, like a person thinking. There’s less math involved than feeling applied. As a way of checking my work, so to speak, to keep the math analogy going, 

I read my work aloud when I’m going over drafts of it. I never want it to sound overwritten; it needs to feel good in my mouth for me to commit it to the page.

In terms of the emotion, life dictates that strategy. How emotional situations work in life is how they need to play out on the page; that’s my ambition, at least. I will often ask if this is what this speaker would feel in this moment. What would be this speaker’s fear, their disgrace, their regret? I want to know what motivates the action, and that resides in the interior.

Myers-Hinkle: That makes sense. So how does teaching affect or shape your intellectual work?

Jordan: It’s a bit of a lab. I can discuss things that I’m working through. I can work through those with the students. Yet I find so often that students think that their first way of learning is to critique. Instead of getting to the point where they’re able to absorb this thing and just kind of marvel at it, even a little bit, they initially start trying to dissect it. And I think it’s a missed opportunity. 

 I remember my first day, my first class, in a classroom at the University of Texas Austin. That previous spring, I had been at an AWP bookfair. On the last day of the bookfair, they were giving away Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard. I read it on the plane back home and I thought, “My God, this is a perfect, perfect collection of poems. It’s so beautiful.” I was so excited. I wanted to impress the students, so I was going to start off with this book—

Myers-Hinkle: [laughs]

Jordan: I went to Warren Wilson for my MFA, and they have this thing called bookshop, where you take a couple of days and you really dig into a text. I’ve been doing that at wherever I’ve been teaching full-time. And these students, they just started in, were like, “I thought this is really overdone.” It was a three-hour class. I felt like I was being interrogated, like I was at a confirmation hearing. The next semester that collection won the Pulitzer Prize, and the students that I had the semester before sent me emails saying, “Oh, that was a great book.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? You hated that book!”

Myers-Hinkle: [laughs]

Jordan: Sometimes I just feel, if I like it too much, if it’s too personal for me, I don’t want to go through that again. If I feel that invested in it, I sometimes don’t bring it in.

Myers-Hinkle: I get that. To turn toward a more positive form of questioning: In your discussion with Lauren K. Alleyne in The Fight & The Fiddle a couple of years back, you said something very interesting about the centrality of the question to poetry. You remarked, “I think the poem is a space in which we can celebrate the question just as much as the answer.” How do you go about turning a poem more toward that kind of celebration of questioning in your writing process or in revision? And how has your questioning process shifted over time? Or has it? 

Jordan: My response to that came out of a bit of a maturation process in myself. It’s not just that I feel more comfortable on the page—it’s that I feel more comfortable in myself. So I’m much more comfortable with having questions, with being in a space of not knowing, just kind of discovering and experiencing. I think one of the things that stops us in our tracks while we’re trying to write is that many of us, we grew up with this impression of writers of books as being experts on subjects. Sometimes they are just people who are curious about subjects.

When I look at people like Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, I feel like they’re all people who put their curiosity in the foreground and share it with others. So when I approach a subject, I’ll often say, “I don’t know much about this, but I’m curious about it, and I want to spend some time with it and learn more about it.” This is how I got to VCFA [the Vermont College of Fine Arts for my MFA in film] in the first place. I was working on The Cineaste when I went there. And then I got the bug, and one thing I do is finish a book and then say I’m going to go out on the road both to do readings and to do more research on the subject. I have to know more because people are going to start asking questions. And I felt like I wanted to know more about film, and that’s how I wound up going to VCFA.

As far as the first part of your question on questions, I just mean that often the missing element in our world is a lack of questioning, and sometimes just asking a question exposes something that’s untoward or something that’s sublime. We don’t always need an answer for that; sometimes we just need to know what someone is turning over in their mind. 

Myers-Hinkle: I want to go back to The Cineaste for a moment. In the first and third sections of that collection, you use various poetic techniques to blur the line between the world of film and the world we live in, and between the speaker and the film. And then in the middle section you bring together the sonnet form and crosscutting to weave together these two historical moments: Mary Phagan’s murder / the subsequent Leo Frank trial with the rise of Oscar Micheaux and his own movement through film and history. Together, all of this creates this possibility that film and life are inextricably intertwined and that poetry plus film might become history in the making. And I just wondered, were you thinking about that kind of idea? Has it come into your work in a certain way, or is that just something I’m reading into it? 

Jordan: Can you say a bit more about history in the making? 

Myers-Hinkle: Well, it’s almost like you’re tracing and bringing out through the very process of the way you write—the way you structure the book, the slippage you create between worlds and your use of formal techniques to weave things together—a sense that you can’t separate the unfolding of the filmic from lived life in some way. It’s an intriguing, somewhat surreal idea, I suppose. 

Jordan: I like the idea. I don’t know if I was consciously thinking about it in that way. I was thinking a lot about the life of Micheaux himself and a lot about the birth of a new art form, what it’s like to be living at a time when you’re experiencing this new art form and start embracing that and thinking, “This thing is calling to me.” It’s hard to wrap my mind around that in today’s context. I think probably the closest thing that we’ve had to that is maybe the internet itself. So while the country is being taken by film, in a critical time, this African American out in Gregory, South Dakota in the nineteen-teens decides that he’s going to learn this art form. He’s an acolyte of Booker T. Washington, and so he decides that he’s going to pick up where Washington left off and do it in this art form. He’s kind of a failed farmer, been a Pullman porter, done all of these kinds of jobs. And when you look at his life, it’s not that he seems hapless, but he seems like someone who’s still trying to find himself in the world. And he finds film, and it’s the perfect fit. So I was just thinking about that, what it feels like, and I know what poetry has been for me. It was the first thing that I put my all into, and every time I approached it, it felt like the first time. So it was kind of addictive and seductive in that way. And I’ve never gotten bored with it because it never gets easy to me. When I look at Micheaux’s array [of works] and the arc of his work, clearly it wasn’t getting any easier for him either. He was still learning, and he had some bad films, and some brilliant moments even in some bad films—and some wonderful films as well that he doesn’t always get enough credit for. 

Myers-Hinkle: Yes, agree.

Jordan: So it’s just been interesting to think about that and also the way in which resources can change the way in which art is done. What resources do you have available? What services do you not have available to you? What restrictions are put upon you in the work? I was just sort of putting myself in that space, thinking about it in that way.

Myers-Hinkle: I guess part of what I was pointing to is how the first and third sections take this working through of what happened with Micheaux into the actual experience of watching a film. It’s a moment of translation to me, the way you bring the arc of Micheaux’s life, particularly the way it became enmeshed with film and history, into those other poems.  

Jordan: Yeah, thanks.

Myers-Hinkle: Okay, let me ask you this question, and then we’ll jump to talking a bit about When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, your latest collection. I’m going to read a quote from page 76 of Quantum Lyrics, from “Albert Einstein Thought Experiment #2, Toward a Unified Theory”:

Take all the phenomena—the skin, the sun, time,

the space of your bed of infidelity—

and although you come to realize

that thinking in public comes at great risk,

infinitely trying to unify all the loose strings,

you always believe it’s the quest to understand the world—

even a piece of it, even after you fail—

that calls you to experiment with life,

but you pull yourself up suddenly, in the center

of the vortex, again, against judgment and advice,

all the unfathomable odds, realizing it’s the struggle

to make the world understand you

that comes down to an equation that has no answer. 

Myers-Hinkle: I love these lines because they feel very Einstein to me and also very you.

Jordan: Thank you.

Myers-Hinkle: I wonder if you could speak to this quote. And what is the vortex for you right now, however you wish to address that question?

Jordan: It’s so interesting to hear those lines in this kind of a fresh way. I think part of the vortex is just the restriction of life itself; time and stuff that I’m dealing with right now with my family; loss, the ways in which we experience loss and deal with that; and just the way in which time evaporates. It’s kind of cliché, but it just goes so quickly, and so you’re constantly trying to find time to do the things that you are called to do, but you’re also trying to be a human being. You’re trying to manage all of that while you’re also trying to do this singular purpose. And it’s unimaginable in light of life.

When I wrote Quantum Lyrics, my father was dying, and he died before I finished the book. The writing was kind of therapeutic because it was this time to deal with certain kinds of grieving and conflicts of emotion inside me in a way that I wouldn’t have felt the permission to explore in any other kind of space. So it’s like the page became a space in which to be honest with myself and to work through some things. And I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone but myself in the process of doing that. In that way, it was very cathartic. But, back to the quote from the poem, I think life is about staying within a continuous struggle. You’re either Jacob wrestling with his angel, or you’re not alive. We can’t decide to create art when the world stops putting pressure on you; that time will never come.

Myers-Hinkle: Yes, you’re so right. Let me now turn to When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, which came out from W.W. Norton last June. Could you speak to the structure of the new book? Does it draw on Shakespeare for the structure—you draw on Shakespeare in the title and the writing—and is montage still at play in the structuring, as it has been in the past? Also, what do you feel is the grounding or centering element of the book?

Jordan: I think the structure itself is primarily just what I had to get out. In each section, I wanted to come back around to the celebration of Black youth and both the vitality and the preciousness of being young and what that means in the world. That’s a kind of a through line in the book. The structure for me in this book is more about each section being an individual experience. So I’m not thinking so much about how we go from this sequence to this sequence to this sequence, in that fashion. I’m thinking about an emotional arc. We start in kind of a frenzy, and we move to a sense of peace by the end. 

That’s the arc of the book, but each section is kind of an individual experience unto itself. There’s this one section that’s from the chapbook [I Want to See My Skirt, a collaboration with filmmaker Cauleen Smith]. There’s a section before that that’s primarily talking about Tamir Rice and working with that and characters from The Tempest. There’s a section that’s a short story, which is the title of the book. And then there’s a section that’s dealing with the image of Blackness and just the ways in which Black Shakespearean actors, such as Ira Aldridge, would be perceived. I’m also looking at the ways various characters—like Othello, Aaron the Moor—were perceived and kind of wrestling with that, with the presuppositions that come with just their face. Often, we hear about a person before we meet them, and so we have these kinds of judgments that come prior to even experiencing any sense of their spirit. 

I heard David Mamet talk about this at one point, about the way you can create character. You can say this person’s a millionaire and, basically, you just have a bunch of characters talk about that character before they even appear. And so, no matter what they do, oh that guy, that’s what he looks like. He looks like a millionaire, you know? And it’s kind of like that with Othello and with Aaron the Moor, and with Caliban. Aaron in Titus Andronicus comes onstage and is almost completely silent, and he’s just seen as this slave and kind of a prop, a part of the Queen of the Goths’s retinue, someone who’s expected to be seen and not heard, and so when he starts weaving—and he’s as manipulative as Iago—you don’t see it coming because he’s someone who is supposed to be invisible. When he speaks it’s almost like Ariel in The Tempest, it’s like this wind, “Is there a spirit in here?” It’s like this thing that’s almost subliminal. I have to believe based on what was happening at the time in England, that Shakespeare was hip to this, that he knew this is the psychology of the way in which we, the way society, perceives the Black body.

Myers-Hinkle: I think the leap you’re making is brilliant too, to put this in the framework of the way Black youth are racially profiled and framed. 

Before we wrap up: Could you speak to why, in certain circumstances, you’ve moved away from the complete sentence and coherent syntax, which you’ve discussed as important to your work? I noticed when I was listening to you read some of the poems from the new collection at Café Muse, poems like “Fragments of Tamir’s Body,” that you’re playing with fragmented language and form, and it feels like it’s for a very specific purpose. Why, at least in certain instances in the new collection, have you moved toward expressing childhood trauma and tragedy in this more elliptical, fragmented form? 

Jordan: Yeah, I think a large part of it is the ways in which we get snippets of information, the dependency theory, the way we’re dependent upon media, other people, whatever they tell us happened, the way we open up our phones and we get news that isn’t fully baked yet. We don’t even know everything that’s happened, but we have these little fragments. I was trying to render some of that experience, of what it’s like when you’re just getting bits of information that won’t be fully informed until we get that last bit of information. 

Myers-Hinkle: When you said that, I was starting to think about Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein and montage. And I was thinking when I was reading and rereading the poem that it feels like little montage segments—

Jordan: Hmm! 

Myers-Hinkle: But it’s not exactly an Eisenstein kind of movement in the sense of building toward an overarching idea at the end, something that gets everybody leaping out of their seats. It seems almost like it’s going in the opposite direction, sort of like what you’re talking about, connected to a more fragmented culture, but also maybe to the violence of what’s happening to the body and to the spirit. And so you have to break it apart another way?

Jordan: Yeah, yeah. So the thing that’s kind of amazing about that kind of fragmentation is that if the subject is adhered to, you can go almost anywhere within that subject, and it still develops. So it’s like Sappho’s fragments. We know they’re about love and so, even when we get these snippets, we fill in the blanks, and it feels like a complete story. We’ll see something as fragmented as a Maya Deren film or something, and you start realizing, “Oh, this isn’t going to operate in the sort of linear narrative way.” A lot of it is just the feeling of it. And so if I’m okay with allowing that to kind of wash over me, I can kind of experience that and it’s fine. Agha Shahid Ali talked about the way in which the ghazal works, and how that it’s the unity of disunity, and you feel that in the power of the ghazal as you move down the page. There’s this kind of fragmentation, but it still feels unified in some way. I think all of that is at play there. 

Myers-Hinkle: So I’ve been thinking a lot about the final lines to the poem “How to Celebrate a Revolution.” Do you mind if I read the end of the poem? And then I’ll ask you a question about that. 

Jordan: It would be wonderful. Thank you.

Myers-Hinkle:

Long after today, 

we will see a flicker in the mind,

a Polaroid of memory shaken into focus.

Imagine, before the show of your life fills

with static snow on screen, you look outside

and decide—not see but decide—there is snow

on the front lawn; you jump

on the white dance floor,

stomping with your boots until 

your neighbors come outside to see

just what the hell is going on. Well,

infected by your groove, they unplug, they

join in; we all do, and we continue long into the night,

into the coming day, a Soul Train of revolt

lining rural routes, and filling streets

in our cities with our dance. 

Jordan: Umm. You read that beautifully. Thank you.

Myers-Hinkle: I’d love to hear your thinking and feeling behind these lines. Every time I read them, I feel a lot of emotion, especially in this very dark historical moment. I feel an opening, a sense of the world as a blank page, a rewriting of the static and stasis-inducing screens in our lives, especially device screens that can be so draining. What were you thinking and what were you hoping for when you were writing this? 

Jordan: Thank you for seeing into it, for connecting with it in that way. The collection opens with this kind of an incantation called “Hex.” It’s saying, “Lift us out of this thing.” I wanted that poem [“How to Celebrate a Revolution”], which is the last poem of the book, actually, to be a bit of a blessing. Think of it as a different kind of incantation that leaves us with a little transcendence, a little hope.

Myers-Hinkle: Ah, interesting. Regarding “Hex”: I noticed you’re going back to the cinematic there, that there’s a feeling of the homing-in, tracking-in camera eye, and it’s moving from this large scale to a moment of individual tragedy and then moving out again. Did the highly cinematic poet Lynda Hull figure into this collection as more than just a dedication and inspiration for “Hex”?

Jordan: Yeah, she always does. I love her work. Lynda Hull, Robert Hayden, Merwin, Rilke. These are poets that I always return to over and over again.

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Lauren Myers-Hinkle is poetry coeditor of The Maine Review and recently received an MFA in writing (poetry and literary translation) from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She did graduate work in cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as RHINO and Carve Magazine.