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Callaloo 27.4 (2004) 908-919



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"The Poem is Smarter Than The Poet"

An Interview with A. Van Jordan


A. Van Jordan. Photo by Carla Fielder.

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This interview was conducted on June 8, 2004, by telephone between College Station, Texas, and Greensboro, North Carolina, where A. Van Jordan, an Ohio native, lives.

ROWELL: When I pick up Rise, your first book of poems, I am first struck by your love of music. Music has apparently had a major impact on the formation of your aesthetic sensibility. As I read your poems, I am almost inclined to say, here is a man who lives in music.

JORDAN: First of all, thanks for framing it that way. Certainly part of the iconography of my life has been centered on music at times and then at other times there's simply been evidence of how I'll hear things, just the beauty of a sentence. So when I was growing up, not being a very literary child—I wasn't the kind of kid you would see with a book in his face all the time, aside from a magazine or comic books—I didn't really read much, and I only read two novels before I went to college: Great Expectations and Animal Farm. But even at a young age I was sort of in love with sentences. And the thing that would catch me was not necessarily the rules of grammar but how the sentences sounded. I would get sort of hypnotized by the sound first and then get into the meaning of the sentence and try to unravel that. So I think Rise is sort of an amalgamation of those two experiences. First, growing up listening to music and loving jazz and funk and Motown, which was the music that I had in my house growing up. I used to play trombone, and that was my first introduction to understanding music. Second, just my listening to sentences and loving the way sentences sound informs, of course, how sentences come out of me.

ROWELL: I am proud to say that we published the title poem in Rise in Callaloo. "Rise" might be the best poem in the volume, but as I read that poem now I always ask for more from it. What do you think of it? Is it possible that it is the beginning germ, so to speak, for a book-length poem? I'm not really saying that the poem is unfinished; I am, however, talking about the possibilities of the poem as a long coherent text standing alone.

JORDAN: I think what's happening in the poem "Rise" is a struggle to condense an experience into a poem, an experience that ostensibly could be an epic experience of the African-American presence on this soil, charting it through music much in the way [End Page 909] historians chart American history through the presidents or the wars. I'm looking at the history of African-Americans on this soil through music. And for me, I felt that possibly the sonnet crown might be able to contain some of that. But I think your instincts are correct in noticing that this certainly could be expanded to a much larger project. And in many ways, I think it might be—it's probably something I'll have to think about for some time—fair to say that's the poem I continue to write over and over again. I felt that some of that was coming up even in M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, the struggle to try to capture an epic story within a poem and trying to find the right structure that would contain it.

ROWELL: Will you talk further about writing that one poem over and over? What does that process mean to you? How then is "Rise" related to the other poems in the volume? And why did you place it as the final poem of the collection?

JORDAN: I think the first poem...

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