Jane Zwart teaches English at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, Rattle, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.
Jane’s poem "Here's to the vivid images that did not change my life" appears in the Summer 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
So many of the images that structure your poem seem too strange to be fiction. Is there one in particular that was inspired by a conversation you had with a living person, or by something that happened to you?
An excellent call on your part. I invented the nun. Otherwise, all the images in this poem are imports from the non-fictional world.
As for one real image that’s stuck with me, unsurprisingly, it’s the man walking away from the farmers’ market holding a pretty good-sized spruce upside-down. It’s he who has, in some minor way, changed my life.
Partly, I guess, this guy carrying the Christmas tree one-handed continues to flicker into my mind every so often because, in the moment, it felt like he stepped right out of a surreal allegory. As my husband and I were drinking coffee with our friend Chris on his porch, this man simply happened by, walking a little off-balance, making very slow progress down the block. It felt exactly like something out of a dream.
But I also continue to be struck by the difference between how our friend Chris and I read this fellow. Chris saw in him an unlikely victor, whereas I could read the same man only as someone for whom even optimism had turned burdensome.
I suppose, then, the image of this figure with his upended tree sticks with me because, whatever he really was feeling, I recognized (or maybe mis-recognized) him as kin. He sticks with me because I know the odd and uneven weight of having to work at happiness, how it pulls you off-kilter.
The images which open the poem are so vivid, and often unsettling. But they don't change the speaker's life. Is vividness not enough?
I guess it depends: enough for what? I do think the vividness of the world, whether by way of beauty or by way of something more unsettling, is a great gift. And never wasted. At the very least, what stands out starkly—the disturbing metaphor that couples sundried tomatoes and scabs, the selective fastidiousness that sets out doilies but not cockroach hotels, the way bits of the city are secretly studded with gems or coated in precious metals—is of course enough in that it startles us back to a state of wonder.
I think of that famous line from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Vividness is enough in that it gives us a non-fatal dose of that “keen vision.”
Of necessity, though, we can’t take to heart every demi-miracle; the vividness of the world is prodigal, and we’d be too transfixed by awe to function if we gave every wonder its due. So there has to be something more than vividness that takes hold when an image changes our life: a match between the image that stands out starkly and some form of need in the one who sees.
How do you feel about Christmas decorations?
I am smitten with this question.
I don’t have much patience for the ceramic snow-covered village, but I do love a little gaudy excess at Christmas. When I was a kid, I longed for a kitschy tree-topper—a tinsel star with lights of different colors at its points. We have one now, a knock-off retro fire-hazard which my husband tolerates for my sake. I love it. And I love the houses strung in so many Christmas lights that you wonder whether they’re crucial to the structural integrity of the place. I love the liquor stores so haphazardly but thoroughly festooned that you wonder, in the words of an Uber driver I lucked into riding with, whether the owners over-indulged in their own stock while decorating.
Art often fails to measure up to the problems we face as a society and as individuals, and yet it remains necessary for many of us. A fence cannot stop a hurricane, but it can protect us from the debris. Is that why we surround ourselves with poetry?
Big claims about art make me skittish. After all, there are so many varieties of poem, and there are so many varieties of ourselves. And even so much variousness within our selves—because none of us are simple unities of consciousness or instinct or hope.
That said, I know I do seek refuge—sometimes protection, sometimes escape—from poems. I know I also need the poems that dismantle the shelters I set up for myself. I need poems that chasten me, poems that change my mind, poems that hurt to read or to write. And of course you’re right to say that art often fails us.
Coming back, though, to the analogy you suggest—of poetry as a hurricane fence—if that’s what poetry is, I suppose it’s important to spend time on both sides of that structure. Put otherwise, I would be foolish to reject the refuge, however partial, that poetry can offer. But how can I not also walk around the other side of a poem’s art, to see what tatters and wonders have caught in its mesh, even if I suspect that some of those vivid scraps, torn from their places, will scathe me?