“Matriarchy,” “The Missing,” “The Vanities,” and “Sub Rosa” by Jane Zwart appeared in Issue 37 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set.
Looking back at this quartet of poems, I notice that two of them—“Sub Rosa” and “The Vanities”—owe everything to my childhood, to its partial and vivid memories, and two—“Matriarchy” and “The Missing”—hail from the internet. You can easily guess (far too easily) at the origins of “The Missing.” But “Matriarchy” is a weirder inventory of women’s textile arts, and all of the examples in it I stumbled across online.
What was the most difficult part of writing these poems?
Writing poems, I’m always trying to figure out what I can get away with and what I would be better off giving away—because, while I want part of the poem’s reward to be play, I want part of its reward to be understanding, too. It’s true that there are surreal poems I love and music-forward poems I love. And it’s true that I would be hard pressed to say what some of them are about, apart from their own dreaming or singing. For the most part, though, I don’t want to write poems that only play. I want to write poems that also ask the reader to work and then reward them with meaning, poems that readers can “get.” I found that difficult with these pieces. But I always find it difficult. It’s hard to balance the urge to let language play, exulting in its own elasticity, with the need to state some things plainly.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
It hurts to choose just one, but I’ll say Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris. So many of the poems in that book I found (and find) excruciatingly beautiful and true.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
At Calvin University’s 2018 Festival of Faith & Writing, I was lucky enough to share a meal with Amit Majmudar, and, though we’ve met only once, I consider him my closest poetry sibling. So I’ll choose drinking a ginger beer with Amit.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am working on more poems. Most weeks, I write one or two. Some lucky weeks, more. Some weeks, of course, all I write is emails. And some months, I write book reviews. In fact, I’ve go an amazing new gig co-editing book reviews for Plume, alongside Timothy Liu. I’ll be honest, though: after a few near-misses, what I’m hoping comes next is a book contract.
Our thanks to Jane for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Matriarchy,” “The Missing,” “The Vanities,” and “Sub Rosa” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/new-poetry-by-jane-zwart.
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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.