In In Their Words, writers published in The Feedsack answer questions about their work and sometimes read it aloud. This time it’s Jane Vogel, whose four poems ran here on October 23.
Where do you write these days?
We travel between Minnesota and Arizona for family and I have a small office in each of those condos, but a lot of my writing happens over voice memos on the phone, sitting on a porch or on some trip where I have to sit for long periods.
Who were the first poets you read?
A High School English teacher loaned me A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, later, some work by Nikki Giovanni. Poetry became something beyond daily assignments at that point and has been ever since.
Which poets or writers do you count as major influences in your work?
I read a lot of poets that expand my ideas about what can be done in poetry, but I hesitate to say that I could write like them. For example, I read Stephen Kuusisto and Arthur Sze for the “ride” with the amazing associations they can make. However, I just read Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, which was very much about her place and time even though it was a take on the Iliad’s Helen. That was an entirely different and enjoyable type of poetry.
Do you write every day or when the moment strikes?
For the past several years I have written almost every day.
In “Union Depot in St. Paul,” you wanted “to know everything about her plan,” but the poem ends on what she wanted from you: “our regular commute, / waiting and meeting at each end, / that she kept asking about.” Did you know it would turn that way when you started?
No. I was focused on what happened that evening. It was a rare occasion when the poem fell out of my pen.
“Urban Haboob” corrects itself in the middle: “I am the last one to leave the street / and shelter in my apartment. I am not the last one / in the street.” How did that correction come into the poem?
That was an unexpected turn for me. I was thinking about the changes outside, like the palm trees, with the dust building so quickly in the air. I realized that the people left behind were part of that “outside” and they belonged in the story.
“Spidershadow” is the only prose poem of the four, and it runs on phone calls: the waitress “wouldn’t answer the phone,” later “answers all her calls” at a drive-thru, and the Parker boy “waits for clients to call.” What made this one a prose poem instead of lines?
I actually composed it with lines. However, I thought of it more as someone in that town telling the story of the Parker boy. My father’s home town in North Carolina is a frequent setting for my poems and I was thinking of the cadence of the speech from there.
“A Volunteer Writes Letters to Asylum Seekers in Detention” greets each woman in turn, some with “Estimada” and some with “Dear,” and ends on “being heard / is a luxury, belonging only to people / who own the bed where they dream.” Did the poem come out of letters you’ve written yourself?
Yes. Before the U.S. closed the border I wrote letters to asylum seekers in detention for about three years. Some were in Spanish and some were in English.
What’s your favorite of these four poems and why?
I am someone whose favorite poem can shift daily but, in “A Volunteer Writes Letters to Asylum Seekers in Detention,” I felt some success in expressing the awful isolation trying to communicate with real people that you would never see and, also, never know what happened when they were no longer in detention and the letters came back.
Your bio says you write about shelter, home and community, and all four poems turn on who has shelter and who doesn’t. Are these part of a larger collection, or what are you working on now?
All of these poems, except “Spidershadow,” are part of a collection that I have just finished and am preparing to start submitting.
Read Four Poems by Jane Vogel.
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