By Seth Piccolo and Kristina Pepelko
Jason Braun is a busy man. He teaches English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is the Associate Editor of Sou’wester there. He’s written a comic book with graphic novelist Matt Kindt from DC Comics, hosts a weekly radio show called “Literature for the Halibut”, and has released two apps: Homophone checker, for completing deeper proofreading than ordinary word processors can handle, and Paradise Lost office which, according to its description, “contextualizes John Milton’s epic poem for the cubicle crowd.” Jason also writes and performs some amazing Hip Hop with a long list of musicians as Jason and the BEAST, where he boasts, "...not a single stolen sample used."
He’s a prolific and well-published poet and writer whose observations about whatever culture surrounds him at any given moment are focused and wry. Jason has been very open about struggling with language early in his life. As a dyslexic, reading came later than most to him. Now, the only thing that seems obvious is his absolute love for written and spoken words.
Seth: Thanks for taking some time for us, Jason. So, you are quite the Renaissance man. You're teaching, developing apps, recording some fantastic Hip Hop and writing and publishing fiction and poetry. Since what we're talking about here is the poetry, how does it fit in with all that you’re doing?
Thanks! “Renaissance man” sounds a hell of a lot better than “dude with attention deficit disorder.” I’ll take it. For me it begins and ends with poetry. Poet in Greek means maker. It doesn’t mean guy who wears a lot of black clothes, drinks too much, and looks out windows all day. Though I have been guilty of that before.
When I get an idea, sometimes its form or shape comes to me as a poem, essay, app, song, or lesson plan. Other times I might take an idea and try it out in these different places. The duality of escape and homecoming, for instance, is in almost every story or poem I’ve written. I have my students write about what happens when they go home over Thanksgiving break. What has changed there? What has changed about themselves? How do their parents and friends treat them after being away at college? Did they find themselves in Chicago and strangely missing the college town of Macomb, IL? Do they have a room of their own? I’ve got notes on an app that deals with some of this as well.
The great thing about making music and apps is that it allows for collaboration. When you write, you are alone. But that’s the great thing too. If I want to make a poem, all I need is pen and paper. And writing a poem is also the kind of thing you can do in one sitting. You can sit down and end up with a decent draft within an hour. Apps and songs take longer.
Kristina: Taking a cue from Seth’s question: do you find that your other work and projects have impacted your poetry or you as a poet overall? Or, to think of it another way: has your other work enriched your poetic life at all, or do you find it is completely separate from everything else?
It is really the same impulse. The question is what shape, what container, what frame an idea should strive to fit. So, yeah, it comes back to the poems. Each poem is a self-contained system. Each poem is designed. I try to create a small world that works according to its own rules when I make a poem, a song, or an app.
Seth: One of the big things that drew us to your work is the snapshot quality of your imagery. "Immersion", for example, is full of little details of images bumping one to another. It's very rich writing. I'm wondering if this is something you've spent time cultivating, or is this innate?
I have been a big fan of James Wright and all of that Deep Image School. Yusef Komunyakka is another of my favorites who might have pointed me towards searching for images.
Seth: A writer friend once told me poetry is less about writing and more about seeing. Of course, good writing chops are important, but I think his point was all the good writing in the world will not save a poem that may tell me a great deal but shows me nothing. Your stuff has this pragmatism about it that says, "See that? That's how it is." It forces me to enter the world you're showing me and choose whether to be a part of it or not. I'm curious if you think my writer friend was right about this?
I had a professor at community college who ingrained this into my mind--Wane Lanter, who was an Iowa Workshop Graduate. He told us that just as the photographer works to train one’s eye, so does the writer. He also talked about training one’s ear to hear stories.
I write a poem every day so I’m always looking for things that could be poems.
There’s also something else that I think you’re getting at here. Poets are open-minded and as of recent many poems are loaded with qualifiers. They are afraid of being wrong. But if you say, “your hair could have been a bird that night,” is that as good as something like, “your hair curled into seven broke beak doves forever”? Which is truer? Which is an image? Which storyteller has the confidence to run the voodoo down? This is something I’ve learned by reading the late Jack Gilbert.
Kristina: I’m always very interested in how writers get “into” their work—they’re subjects, imagery, revision, etc. Could you share with us a bit about your process as a writer? How do you go about crafting your poems and where do your ideas for them typically arise? How then do you tackle the process of revision, if at all?
As of the middle of January 2014, I’ll have been writing at least one poem a day for two years. At this point I’ve attempted to write nearly every way I ever heard about. When I started this, I used The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach. But by the time I finished the book, I was off on my own with no problem.
I read some poems everyday and usually make some kind of notes for lines or notes about some factual thing that I find compelling to later turn into the first draft of a poem. But even if there are no notes, I sit down and write a poem. Good. Bad. Who cares? I showed up. I’m not waiting for inspiration. I’m not afraid to fail. I know I’ll fail. It’s cool.
You wait for the muse when he or she is in the bathroom after you’ve paid the tab and are heading home with her/him (or both).
If I’m stuck and having a tough go of it, I’ll open up an Art history text and write ekphrasis (a response to art) or I’ll find a poem I like and try to write a poem that is like it in form, in rhetorical purpose, or in tone.
At this point I’ve got about seven hundred poems besides the ones in my manuscript “Songs to Sing in a Getaway Car”. Since I’ve just sent that off to publishers and contests, I’ve got time so I’m sifting through these now and looking for ones to revise and shape into a book.
The poem a day thing started as a bet. We have a Facebook group email between five to seven writers. Showing up is the idea. But if someone says “Yeah, I like this one,” then I look at it again and print it off to revise. You could call this beta testing or crowdsourcing. Other times, I just know that I’ll come back to a particular poem later. I love revision. I realize it’s not about me. Publishers and editors seem to love poems broken into stanzas. I usually write short poems that are all one stanza. But that’s not my beef. If they like poems in multiple stanzas, I’m okay with it. It’s just not usually the first thing I think about. I sometimes revise poems to fit as a group to have a sort of consistent voice when I send them out.
Seth: There seems to be a rich variety of experience in your poetry. I'm thinking especially of the South American poems, two of which we published in our Autumn 2013 issue. How much of this is autobiographical? And, how important is real, tangible experience important when writing poetry?
Only the names and places have been changed to protect the innocent. I joke. All the stories are true. The persona isn’t always synonymous with Jason Braun, but if it’s not something I’ve felt directly, it’s something I’ve observed first hand. As for Central America, I have traveled in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Some poems I’ve said Honduras or Panama, not because I want to gloss over the finer points of these varied and complicated cultures, but because I like the sound of that particular word in that line. And the finer points of the culture mentioned in the particular poem remained true.
Seth: I want to ask specifically about your time in South or Central America (not sure where). I'm digging that those poems came out of the experience you had there with a sort of culture shock and, maybe, having nothing to do with poetry. I really like the idea that, as poets, we don't always have to sit in the back of the hippest coffeehouse in town, downing caffeine while digging into our cruel past.
I was actually planning to go to Key West when I ended up in Guatemala. Well, I was off for winter break and planning to go to the Hemingway Museum and do some fishing. A friend of mine took time off from work. Then we realized that we’d go broke real quick in Key West. On a whim, we decided on Guatemala. I always wanted to climb those temples at Tikal. The best route is to fly into Belize City and take the bus down from there.
My graduate thesis adviser, Adrian Matejka, told me to write five narrative poems on my trip. I ended up with about twenty and they’re still coming.
I have purged most of the myths about the writer’s lifestyle that the Beats popularized. But there is something to travel. It got me thinking about race and identity in a much more complicated way than I would have come to in St. Louis.
Seth: To follow that up, are you a reactionary writer? By that I mean, do you write quick responses when a situation strikes you, when the images are still fresh and powerful? Or, do you need awhile for things to steep?
I always have a notebook handy. If I’m away from it, I’ll put into notes on my iPhone.
This is one thing that drives me insane about students. To sit there with a notebook closed. It’s not even that I’ve got so much brilliant shit to say. But they might have an idea, a brilliant idea, and lose it forever. I write everything down. I have probably four hundred notebooks in my house.
Most of the time I’ll read some poems and make a few notes or sort of pre-draft in the morning, get away from it for a while, and then write a proper first draft at night.
Kristina: And before we leave you, could you share with us some of the recent poets, collections, poems, or other writing on your current (or upcoming) personal reading list? Anything that has been particularly influential or intriguing to you that you’d recommend others check out?
This guy Perry Janes is publishing all of these amazing poems about Nikola Tesla.
I’m almost finished with the Best American Poetry 2013. I’ve earmarked a number of the poems to follow up and buy some more books.
As for what else I’m reading right now it’s a mix of how to and theory stuff.
Theory of fun for game design by Raph Koster.
Disability, representation and the body in Irish writing, 1800-1922 by Mark Mossman.
Programming Arduino : getting started with sketches by Simon Monk
For more Jason, check out his blog and the short film, posted below, by Zia Nizami to see what Jason and the BEAST does with a beat plus some William Blake, Samuel Johnson and Shakespeare, among other things.
