“The Greeter at the Bureau of Betrayal Always Gives the Same Speech” and “The Basement of the Bureau of the God We Trust “by Lucas Jorgensen appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We would love to hear more about this pair of poems.
These two poems are a part of a larger project called The Bureau of Yes, where each prose poem deals with a bureau, real or imagined. Part of the idea of this project, one I hope is evident even in the two poems here, is to do as many different things as possible within the prose poem. One of the things I particularly enjoy about “The Basement…” involves the process; I brought this poem into a revision workshop during my MFA and Catherine Barnett had us do an exercise where we were required to steal words from an old cleaning product manual and revise the poem to incorporate those new elements. I think this idea of creative contamination radically changed the poem, especially as the language of cleaning and labor—“the invisible domestic helper,” for example—added another texture to the poem. This helped open my mind up to new revision processes and taking an even more extreme approach, not just in the initial drafting, but in revision as well. “The Greeter…,” on the other hand, has a personal significance. I’m very interested in Judas Iscariot as a figure, the conflict between his status as the ultimate betrayer and his critical role in the divine plan. It’s one of two Judas poems in the manuscript, and I felt like this, the first, was an important stepping stone in my development as a poet. For a time there were poems that I had the ambition to write, knew that I needed to speak on in some way, but when I sat down to write them, I felt my poetic ability was not yet there to handle these topics that felt so big. The Judas poems were one such topic, and I feel in this poem I finally saw a maturity in my work where my control of the writing allowed me to handle these more ambitious subjects.
What was the most difficult part of this particular piece?
Both of these pieces were written very early into the project (I wrote 104 poems and narrowed it down to fifty for the manuscript; these were both among the first ten drafts), and so I think one of the challenges was in still defining what a ‘bureau’ poem even was. “The Basement…” in particular changed dramatically once the later poems came; almost two years into the project, I went back to it and realized that it was a poem that should feature the manuscript’s recurring character The President. So for me, one of the big challenges was working on a piece for so long, returning to something that had been written in the early stages of the project and then seeing how the individual poem needed to change in order to better serve that project. For “The Greeter…,” it was really a challenge of getting the ellipses right rhythmically; that’s something that I’ve tinkered with time and time again, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the version that eventually shows up in a book varies slightly from the version published in Sequestrum.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I think I’ve answered a question like this before with this pick, but not with the opportunity to talk about why I love it: Chessy Normile’s Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party. What I really appreciate in this collection is Normile’s ability to contain so many disparate elements in her poems and weave them together. When I see a discursive poet at work, very commonly it seems that they’re discursive in a specific slant, with a clear focus. Even if they make two or three big jumps, the thought is there. There’s a clear triangulation. Normile manages to make many massive jumps—in her longer poems especially, we’re treated to a maximalist’s mind at work on the page. She’s not triangulating, she’s making poetic octagons. I think it’s a really special collection, and one I love returning to. It also has a quality I often strive for, employing humor even when dealing with serious, heavy subjects.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’ve been lucky enough that some of the first names that come to mind are writers I already have had the chance to sit down and talk with (though only sometimes over a drink). One of the writers that I haven’t gotten to meet personally and chat with is Rae Armantrout. Armantrout’s use of language is itself incredibly interesting, but I also find the subjects of her poems and the insight she gives to be truly singular. In addition to being incredibly informative to my own interest in playing with language in poems, a conversation with Armantrout would be, I imagine, extremely interesting on the whole.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Currently, I’m wrapping up The Bureau of Yes and sending it out to contests. It feels like 98% done. Every once in a while I open it and read through and find lines to change or elements that need to be worked over, but the book has a set order, all the components, and I’m mostly doing polishing now. I’ve also begun work on a next project. I really like working in series, giving myself a mode to return to but also to vary within. I’m writing a series of what I call “Misprisions.” The idea is taken from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence where he defines misprision as the way poets create new work by misreading their predecessors. I’ve applied the idea more expansively (and probably directly) than Bloom intended and am doing these misreadings of classical literature while also exploring misreadings in other senses: times I’ve misunderstood myself, times where communication and mutual understanding have been impossible, times where I couldn’t read the subtext of a situation. I’m also trying to figure out how on earth to write in lines again after doing so much prose poetry, so these are inconsistently metrical and and rhymed as well (something I also hope speaks to the idea of ‘misreading’–the rhyme and meter don’t always line up). These have been dominantly, though not uniformly, Odyssey themed so far, but I want to expand my scope in terms of the literature I’m responding to and past the “Misprision” mode alone.
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Lucas Jorgensen is a poet and educator originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He was a winner of the 2023 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and holds an MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas where he teaches and studies poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, LitHub, Southeast Review, Copper Nickel,and others.
