Interview with Jared Harél on Let Our Bodies Change the Subject — October 9, 2023
Jared Harél is the author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, selected by Kwame Dawes as the Winner of the 2022 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Go Because I Love You (Diode Editions, 2018.) He’s been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, as well as the William Matthews Poetry Prize from Asheville Poetry Review. Harél’s poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review and The Sun. He teaches writing, plays drums, and lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and two kids. For more information, visit: jaredharel.com.
Catherine Fletcher: Congratulations on Let Our Bodies Change the Subject and on the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize, Jared. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me about this new collection.
Let’s dive right in. Your title poem explores an intimate but grim conversation about the process of dying between your wife and you, even as the news of a shooting streams from a nearby TV and fills the space between you. In other poems, the reader is drawn into joy—of your adventurous togetherness in “Too Soon in San Antonio,” the moment before realizing you’re pregnant, or of your young daughter’s exuberant crush on the whole world in “Spring Crush.” You mix vignettes of delight and wry humor with the casual threat of death and a dose of morbid curiosity. Tell us about how these different threads shaped the collection.
Jared Harél: First off, thanks so much for spending time with my book! As you alluded to, one of the main threads in my collection are these twin impulses to both look closely and look away. To pay attention even when—maybe especially when—we’d prefer to “change the subject.” These poems navigate issues of luck and loss, privilege and responsibility, of feeling fortunate, but also like it’s all going to hell, you know? And how to raise children in a world like that? A number of poems in this book find the speaker wanting desperately to bury himself in the intimate and personal—family, nature, sex, television—but returning time and again to listen and bear witness.
Fletcher: I loved the multi-generational family elements in the book, but I was especially struck by your exploration of the blind spots family members have about one another. Your mother knows little about you, though loves “both the me I was and wasn’t.” Your daughter’s offbeat insights often astonish you; she, in turn, is bemused by this astonishment. The encounters with your baffling father, especially your surprise at finding him praying in “Tefillin,” I found really compelling. They reminded me of Rilke’s observation: “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” What distances enabled you to better see family members and portray your relationships with them?
Harél: Raising children has given me a new way of seeing my childhood and my own parents. This may have happened anyways as a result of aging, but having kids hurried things along. Suddenly, it was easier to view my parents as individuals who loved us, but were also young and winging it and doing their best.
With regard to blind spots, I like poems that gravitate toward the unknowable, or unsayable, or those moments that remain unresolved. This notion of “writing toward discovery” is something I try to enact in my work. I come from a tight-knit and loving family, but even so, there are things that are easier to say in a poem than at the dinner table. Elizabeth Bishop once wrote in a letter to Robert Lowell that “it’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry.” Perhaps the distances that poetry and poetic craft provide enable us to speak and see more clearly.
Fletcher: Yes! For me, poetry or even the note-making process forces me to confront what degree of truthfulness exists in what I see myself having written, whether it’s an attempt to express a deep feeling or offer a precise description. And I become more aware of when I’m exaggerating—or lying, really, for artistic effect. There are a couple of pieces in which you mention the lies your parent-self tells your children. How does that jive with the truth your poet-self is writing toward?
Harél: Yeah, it’s a tough one. Part of being a parent means keeping your kids safe, and another part is trying to make them feel safe even when you, in fact, are terrified. Covid was a big example of this for my wife and me. Also sending our kids to school in a country that endures hundreds of mass shootings every year. I could go on, but the point is that poems force me to confront these stories or half-truths or outright lies I sometimes tell in order to help us live saner, happier lives.
Fletcher: Many of your poems are tightly woven: single stanza pieces with mostly enjambed lines, or in couplets which are not only enjambed within the pair, but also within the whole poem. Could you describe the role the line plays in your work?
Harél: Generally speaking, I find the single-stanza poem to be my go-to mode. It represents a cohesive thought for me, or a grouping of interconnected, colliding thoughts. I usually write first drafts as a single stanza, then break form if or when the rhythm, pace, or content calls for it. I utilize couplets when I’m looking to slow the poem down or create poetic “silence” between the lines. Every so often, opening lines occur to me as a couplet, as they did in my poem “Our Wedding” which begins, “It wasn’t what we wanted, / but we wanted each other.” Those lines arriving as a couplet—as point and counterpoint—set the tone for the rest of the poem.
Fletcher: Two poems I’m curious about are “Self-Portrait as Nature Preserve” and “Primal.” Their short, fractured phrases and heavy use of white space are atypical for you. How is your use of space and lineation in these poems different?
Harél: I often enjoy it when poetry collections break their established patterns and try something different. Both “Self-Portrait as Nature Preserve” and “Primal” began as single-stanza blocks, but I soon realized that something wasn’t working; content and form weren’t in sync. So I went about experimenting, reading the poem out loud over and over again, paying attention to the rhythms, beats and pauses in the language.
Fletcher:Actually, reading “Primal” aloud, it’s quite percussive, like a heartbeat.
Harél: Right. I realized that “Primal” needed more percussive intensity, like you said. The heavily enjambed lines and jagged, blank spaces in the published version are meant to enact a kind of pop-out surprise and echo our primal impulse of being scared of the dark.
Fletcher:How does your experience as a drummer affect your writing?
Harél: I guess being a drummer makes me hyper-focused on the musicality of a line. When I’m editing a poem or even sometimes at poetry readings I’ll catch myself tapping along. Mostly though, I’m drawn to the differences between writing and drumming. Writing poems is such solitary work, whereas drumming in a rock band is social and collaborative. I enjoy that creative balance in my life.
Fletcher: Going back to what you said earlier about your speaker sometimes wanting to bury himself in the intimate and personal, the world beyond tends to emerge from the book’s margins.The most prominent of your minor characters is death, but God is also significant. While you acknowledge the presence of the divine, your feelings vacillate between resentment and indifference. Your focus is to “try / against hope to be better than myself” and to “haul kids toward thoughtful—the kind / in humankind,” nurturing a Judaism-inflected compassion in a society that can be uncaring and violent. Could you tell us about this thread, including “If I Never Find God,” a poem in dialogue with poets Baruch and Yehoshua November, whose work dwells on Judaism more so than yours?
Harél: The poems in Let Our Bodies Change the Subject have conflicted and inconsistent feelings toward God, which I’d say is pretty consistent with my own feelings. Because books are printed and “finished” things, it can be easy to forget that poems are often snapshots of how one feels on a particular day, or even a particular moment. It need not be a definitive declaration on the subject. Some poems in my collection, like “As Plagues Go,” are pretty ticked off with God. Other poems are more reverential or uncertain.
When I wrote “If I Never Find God” I was reading Two Worlds Exist by Yehoshua November and Bar Mitzvah Dreams by Baruch November, both of which I highly recommend. In any case, I felt myself in dialogue with these works that depict, in my mind, more secure relationships with Judaism and faith. Perhaps my own wobbly faith is a personal failing or the result of being too lucky to “need” God in my life. In that moment, on the day I wrote that poem, I wondered if my agnosticism was a luxury and if God was something I might distractedly search for until the “other shoe drops.”
Fletcher: Yet there does seems to be a search for some kind of redemption, wanting “ruined things” to be redeemed.
Harél: Yes, I hope so. To make a poem, paint a landscape, sing a song, or put really anything creative into the world is an act of reckless optimism and redemption. It’s a gesture meant to communicate and connect. I doubt I’d have the impulse to write if everything felt utterly doomed. I’d like to think my poems reflect a mixture of ruin and redemption, that loss implies value.
Fletcher: Following on from that, “On Suffering” was written after Wisława Szymborska. This collection has an epigraph by Czesław Miłosz on the frontispiece. You and I have chatted about our deep admiration for Adam Zagajewski—the simple and moving urgency of “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” The frank tone, reverence for the quotidian, and the irony in a number of your poems, in my opinion, echoes Szymborska and Zagajewski. What draws you to 20th-century Polish poets and poetry? How have they influenced you?
Harél: I adore the poetry of Szymborska and Zagajewski, as well as Miłosz, though I came to each of these writers at different times in my life. For that reason, it’s hard to say whether I am drawn to 20th-century Polish poetry or if Poland happened to produce some poets that I—and so many others—admire.
On the other hand, both my maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors who grew up in 20th-century Poland. I was very close to them, and so there may be some inherent quality in Polish poetry that I find particularly moving and familiar. My own poem “On Suffering” was inspired by Szymborska’s “On Death, Without Exaggeration.” At first, my poem was longer, ironic, and utilized personification in the style of Szymborska. Then pretty far down the page I wrote “To be clear, I’m no expert.” Those words struck me as the first true statement I’d made in the poem. I eventually decided to cut everything that preceded it and start from there.
Fletcher: Finally, would you like to share a few lines from a poem in Let Our Bodies Change the Subject that you think act as a good window into your work or that address an element in the collection that I may have overlooked?
Harél: Sure thing. A poem from my collection that doesn’t directly explore themes of family and parenthood is “Elegy for Recycled Encyclopedias.” This poem speaks directly to the encyclopedias and concludes:
It’s a miracle that we are till the instant we aren’t. You knew that too— a knowledge as mythic and dispensable as fact.
My favorite moments as a writer are when I say something I didn’t know I knew, or in a way that startles me. One of the threads in this collection is not only paying attention to the world but what to do when we actually encounter something true. Do we listen and value it? Demonize it? Or worse yet, simply dismiss and dispose of it? In this elegy for encyclopedias, I didn’t realize what I was writing toward until I typed out those lines.
