Jordan Stempleman is the author of nine collections of poetry including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, the co-editor of The Continental Review, editor for Windfall Room, faculty advisor for the literary arts magazine Sprung Formal, and curator of A Common Sense Reading Series. In 2013, The Huffington Post listed Stempleman as one of “The Top 200 Advocates of American Poetry.” The following interview is occasioned by the release of his ninth collection, Cover Songs (The Blue Turn, 2022):

Cameron Morse: I remember you talking about how the poems in your 2012 collection No, Not Today are organized by day of the week. That certain days began to have a certain feel, and it was the feel, as opposed to the day on which you were writing, that determined which week day the poem would fall under.

A middle section in your latest collection, Cover Songs (The Blue Turn, 2022) seems to deploy the numbers that organize it (“Song 9,” for example, being the first, followed by “Song 2047”) in a similar fashion. Did you rely on intuition in the selection of these numbers? Was there an aleatory procedure in place? Would you care to kick off our discussion with a description of the role intuition, or randomness, plays in Cover Songs?

Jordan Stempleman: I definitely relied on intuition and sometimes a private/sudden coding of the numerical sequence found in titles. But more often than not, my intent was to reveal a finite yet massive logbook that was released of any sequential bind. I felt like this was a much better approach to how memory moves, what it latches onto and where it clusters, especially when trying to reflect on some life event that’s particularly chaotic or resistant to easy summation. And since many of the poems I’m this collection are about a long relationship that eventually lead to a long separation that lead to a long divorce, I needed the numbers as a way to remind myself that I was at the very early stages of making sense of something that felt way beyond my capacity for understanding at that time.

CM: Robert Creeley once called the poem “that place we are finally safe in” where “understanding is not a requirement” (introduction to Best American Poetry 2002). I’ve thought of that more than once reading especially those parts of Cover Songs that challenge or defy understanding. From “Song 192”:

I write notes about ambush and extinction
and leave them in other people’s
dryers so when they fold their laundry
they face these short, handwritten
play cries, like bird melt
or ex-boyfriend gum wad.

Whether we’re meant to understand “bird melt” as the contents of the note, the “play cry,” or not, the idea of planting notes in dryers, implying access to “other people’s” laundry machines (I’m wondering about a laundromat, maybe?), is a delightfully absurd narrative element and “bird melt” is a crazy image. I love the strange specificity of: “A label peeled from a salsa jar twice bitten by the red wet mouth / of a sock puppet” in “Song 242424”!
In light of these strands of delight and absurdity that run throughout both the narrative elements and the images in Cover Songs, I wonder how much of the book is aimed at the intellectual activity of understanding? More broadly, what do you feel is poetry’s relation to understanding? Is understanding the delight of poetry or its more serious side?

JS: I love that Creeley quote since what drew me to poetry in the first place was it felt like the most exciting expression of knowing and not knowing. So I agree that understanding isn't a requirement for the poem to produce pleasure for both reader and writer. Although, I might not call the poem space a safe space. Safe, perhaps, in that the unknown activates inquiry and humility, as opposed to ridicule and insecurity.
The poems I love to read and write are those that seem attracted to deeper forms of attention and sudden states of understanding. These poems also include some exciting expressions of uncertainty as well. I am always looking for a fusion of encounters: pleasure, attention, mood, sound, sense (sense of humor), understanding, absurdity, epiphany, and those steady and reliable unknowns.
My reminder to myself when writing, and something I always try to reinforce with my students, is let the poem move a few paces ahead of you. By this I mean allow for the poem to collect its own sense data independent of your command. Once you do this, you can always come back in and be a total control freak if you want to in your final edit, not that I'd recommend that. But you get what I'm saying. The poet has much more to learn from being in/occupying the state of the poem and listening to language behave differently than it does in our dominant modes of communication: efficiency and transaction.
I write poems because they humble me. They vacillate between the seemingly endless reach of language and the undeniable limits of language. And to be in a state like this, where language is both incredibly reliable and unreliable, can only then be both incredibly serious and wildly absurd. This is the instructive tension that the poem provides, I think. Be deadly serious and seriously playful.

CM: Can you give an example of a poem from Cover Songs that ran a few paces ahead of you?
JS: Oh, so many, especially in the section of cover songs that you’re referring to and the specific poem that you mentioned (“Song 242424”). The poem brought in the sock puppet, the torn bicep, the difference between intimacy and radical intimacy. All of it. Now the poem also mentioned and sensed other images, feelings, and aphoristic statements that I witnessed and passed on.
So much of what I love about the writing process is the witnessing and the discovery that feels outside of me, but that conversely feels like it’s driven from so deep within. This is probably what prayer feels like to so many. I’ve tried prayer and I’ve tried poems and I keep coming back to the poems.

CM: I love the idea of bearing witness to language. The decision to include language that is coming in from outside the poem. The inclusivity of that.
If Cover Songs itself is a kind of witness borne to a relationship at its end, I think I can almost hear echoes of the witnessed, or lived, language of that relationship even in the long, allegorical, mythopoetic poem, “Cover Songs for Edgar Rice Burroughs,” where the mythic heroine Thuvia of such basic elements as wood and bone encounters Utan, a sort of primordial, apelike being, and the two match.
Even in that distant context, the contemporary idiom the poet’s witnessed language shines through with such snatches as “loveless marriage” and “lower intelligence.” Hybrid, mytho-contemporary images like, “the time of the flashlight” and the basketball court that “bursts into fire” in the final section add to this sense of lived language experience.

JS: That's a thrilling read of that section, Cam. Thank you. The "lived language experience" is such a wild state to consider. I almost see it as this tripartite encounter, like the lived in language state is one of three experiences we have with language or one of the three forms that language takes.
First, there is the imagined or lived-in event. This is where language is so fluid. We don’t really recognize it. It labels and conveys. It is this quiet soundtrack of sorts. Then there is the transfer of this into new forms of language that go deeper, where language becomes more elastic, more expansive, creative, bent, etc. And then there is a final state, where language can’t say anything more, or where we are no longer there to use it, where silence comes back into the fold, and where language is asked to wait, patiently, before it can recombine at some point to be and say something else. That's what that final sequence in "Cover Songs for Edgar Rice Burroughs" speaks to: "They are guests of words now. / They are the unlit guests of words, / thresholds before the why not or what for."
Their world was falling apart, which is to say their language was failing. My world at that time was too. And yet even though this world we encountered briefly (intentionally so) was gone, experienced as a reading/a telling after the fact, it’s the language that remained. And, of course, one day this language will just go back to words in isolation and to sound. A long wait before meaning returns again.

CM: Readers will notice the back cover seems to offer the alternative title Off Days in the same font and size of font as the front cover’s Cover Songs, as if suggesting: Read me backwards and I’m Off Days; Read me forwards and I’m Cover Songs. The book, however, ends with a poem called, “Off Days,” that is formally distinct from the rest of the book: It’s stichic. Each line its own stanza, its own paragraph. The poem begins: “How today it seems the only way, to write // I moved into a new place.” Obviously a statement that could be applied to the book, too, and its movement. Would you like to end with a word about this?

JM: That poem is a poem of total uplift and renewal, not that I see something like uplift and renewal as sanitized and utopic experiences, so there's definitely some looking backwards in there too. The book could be read into its origins for sure. By this I mean going from the final long sequence "Off Days" and ending up at "Cover Songs for Joyce Mansour." This would be a reading of a hardcore looking backward, seeing what it took to arrive in a place of security, newness, love, comfort, and even strangeness.
So, when I first wrote that opening sequence of poems, there of course was no dedication to V, my wife, since she didn't exist in my world as of yet. The poem sequence was one of total longing—longing for the erotic, for connection, for that magical state of aloneness that accompanies the right company. Writing through someone like Mansour allowed me to be both in a state of longing and absence and in an imagined yet optimistic state of some new reality. It was only after I had finished the final poem "Off Days" I could then go backwards and dedicate this initial sequence to V. The actual abundance replacing the actual lack and imagined abundance.
The other thing I should say about "Off Days" is that it's very much a cover song of James Schuyler's "The Morning of the Poem." I didn't know this at the time that I wrote it, but I can see this now. The poem was about replicating a state of awareness that seemed to flow and last a few hours, the poetic flow captured for a few hours, before the poet found themselves released from the poem and returned to their world.

August, 2022