“I’ll Ring You,” “Frayed Sonnet to a Descendant,” and “Stolen Beam” by Jed Myers appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here
We’d love to hear more about this set.
I’ve always been entranced by sonnets. There’s something intrinsically right about the form, at least in English, that can make it work as a sharable holder of felt meaning. So from time to time I come back to sonnets from all my other shapes and sizes of poems. And sometimes I want to test or stretch the form, as, say, I’ve done somewhat in “Frayed Sonnet to a Descendant.” It’s a pulled-apart sonnet with respect to how the lines are placed, but otherwise true to the form. At other times I might stretch the rhymes till they’re very off, less-than-half-rhymes, so to speak. Here, these three sonnets all make use of pretty full rhymes.
Like many of us, I feel an initial exhilaration upon having just drafted a poem. Then, the thrill settles down over time and I can better see what isn’t yet right about the piece. I’ll often keep returning to a poem and revising it for months or years, no matter that I’ve sent it out, or even had it published. I want the poem to become the possibly lasting thing it “wants” to be—what I can’t quite see till I maybe can!
All three of these poems reach beyond the assumed limits of space and time. They occupy subjective space, where we can touch, see, or hear one another across the apparent rifts and barriers of distance or duration. I actually think the path of poetry can open these crossings for us, in real ways that the mentality of ordinary language cannot allow.
What was the most difficult aspect in writing this set?
What’s of course quite challenging about writing formal verse is, how can such poetry possibly sound and feel natural? How can it be an honest personal voice? Or, posed another way, how will the formal structure enhance rather than compromise the flow of feeling expression and its reception? If the formal elements of song—the recursions in sound and cadence—work well, the reader/listener’s experience may be enriched, but the risk is always of a stiffening, a sense of artifice prevailing over the potential for natural heart-to-heart resonance.
Recommend a book published in the last decade.
Books of poetry are like friends or mentors you spend time with. You make visits and return to thoughts or experiences you’ve had with these friends over the months and years, and you grow by these returnings. It’s too difficult to speak only of one such friend, as I’ve been comforted, challenged, and guided by quite a few in recent times. I must mention Linda Pastan’s Insomnia, sam sax’s madness, Andrea Cohen’s Furs Not Mine, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, and Tony Hoagland’s Application for Release from the Dream, but I will “officially” answer with Robert Wrigley’s Box, given that book’s overall synthesis of poetic capacities, its simultaneous ease and depth, its non-reliance on excessive wit or device, and its utter timelessness. Wrigley writes beautiful personal-and-universal poems. He makes keen and humble observations of outer and inner reality. I have no question much of his work will last, and his books will make friends with many in eras to come.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’d love to have a drink with Louise Glück, who is an all-time favorite poet, and whose recent Nobel Lecture is a beautiful call to all of us who write poems to risk being vulnerably relational, mutual, and intimate in our poems—to invite the reader into our private space. I attended a reading of hers once a few years ago, and since then, I’m more able to feel the exquisite exposure she risks without ever being the least bit seductive or exhibitionistic. I’d hope that somewhere into our second martini, she’d convey to me something elusive and pivotal that has allowed her this magic.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
These days, I continue to evolve and refine two full-length manuscripts and two chapbook manuscripts. As they’ve developed, I’ve sent them all off to various contests, and gotten a fair share of finalist designations, but no wins just yet. So I keep them in development! Perhaps when one of these works gets taken, I’ll start composing a new manuscript. The main thing remains the writing of poems, by which I seem able to make better sense of experience. I feel that poems get me to write them! In this sense they’re no more voluntary than dreams.
Our thanks to Jed for taking the time to answer a few questions and share his work. Read Jed’s poems “I’ll Ring You,” “Frayed Sonnet to a Descendant,” and “Stolen Beam” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/four-poems-by-jed-myers.
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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner, Grayson Books Chapbook Contest). Recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Millay Prize. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and is Poetry Editor for Bracken.