Green Linden Press

 Interview with Jordan Zandi on Solarium — December 21, 2023

Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium (Sarabande Books, 2016), selected by Henri Cole for the Kathryn A. Morton prize and named by the New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the best poetry books of the year. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Chicago. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is the product lead for a data analytics platform.

Simeon Berry: I love superhero comics, so I have a special affinity for the origin story. What was the seed of Solarium? Were you struck by a radioactive turnip? Did you spend years in a bunker perfecting a wearable ion engine?  

Jordan Zandi: A little of both actually, though the seed was pure radioactive turnip to the head—a real Chicken Little moment. Solarium the book began with “Solarium” the poem, and “Solarium” the poem began with its first image, the one of the sun (all this sounds almost methodically logical). I remember I was reading a book in bed or on the nearby couch. I’d been writing rather poorly for a long time, but then this ecstatic tone lit my head on fire, and as I sat up, I saw the sun in my mind also sitting up—to the horizon, an image repeated elsewhere in the book. Pretty much the whole first section of the poem “Solarium” came then, though it had to be edited. Writing the rest took about a year and a half.

Berry: I was listening to the ID10T (formerly Nerdist) podcast the other day, and Chris Hardwick was taking great pains to point out how many things stand in the way of a good movie being made. I feel like a poem is beset by a number of similar (but far less expensive) improbabilities. Anything that may have stood in the way of you becoming a poet? 

Zandi: Well, for starters, we weren’t exposed to much of any kind of art where I grew up in rural Indiana. I don’t remember reading any literature in school, so the concept of the thinking life didn’t exist for me. I did read a lot as a kid, but just stuff I thought was interesting. No poetry, really. I think the only poems I read were a few by Poe, a few by Dickinson, maybe one or two by Whitman. But I was pretty well-steeped in the Bible from the King James Version on. There’s still a lot of vitality to be absorbed from some of its translations. And for better or worse, in church we sang a lot of hymns.

I do remember the first time I made a distinction between literature and other writing. I was in an English 101 type class and we had this wonderfully energetic professor named Bishop Hunt. I remember he drew our attention to a paragraph of Joyce’s “Araby” at the beginning of the semester—I still see that paragraph’s location at the top of the left page in the anthology (which I’ve kept all these years). 

He pointed out how Joyce had invested the paragraph with religious words (they’re still underlined—“litanies,” ”chanting,” “come-all-you,” “chalice,” “prayers,” “praises”). It’s just basic diction, but it blew my mind, the fact that there was some sort of design on that level.

Reading that passage now, I can’t believe how appropriate it is for a poet. Uncanny. I changed my major from Biology to English. That was sophomore year. So if I’d had some kind of tyrant for that class, then I might not have become a poet.

There was also a kid on my dorm floor who was reading and writing poems. His name was Brian Looper. He introduced me to modern and contemporary poetry—in other words, an idiom, a series of gestures that I could more naturally understand. Until that point, I was interested in non-fiction, a genre that to this day I haven’t returned to.

Berry: When I was reading the book, I was struck by how there seems to be a faint pattern of imprints and traceries throughout, like the book was an empty invitation envelope. Is absence an important principle for you?

Zandi: I love white space—absence—and the way it animates the substance around the text. Look at the opening poem: “Bowl of the lake. Bowl of the sky. / Bowl of the lake with the sky in it. // You looked at you in the water. // The blizzard is cold. / And the boy in the blizzard is blue.”

Put those last two lines at the start of a poem, and it sounds like the clunky beginning of some children’s tale. Put them at the end of a very end-stopped poem and triggering a jump forward in time—they gain tonal complexity. Not because of their meaning but because of their position, because of their separation.

Berry: For a long time in my writing, I was allergic to wisdom in poetry. What is this book allergic to? What are you allergic to?

Zandi: I’m allergic to will. There’s really nothing that I despise more in a poem than an obvious engine, which, at least to me, feels dishonest. I like for there to be some sort of psychic undertow, a covering up of volition, some letting go of the reins.

I suspect that at least some of this reaction stems from my own religious background. As I was growing up, my family attended several Christian churches, each different in spirit. For the most part, they combined a dose of old-school Protestant puritanism with the emotional looseness of evangelicalism. I think both are unhealthy in that they present an unhealthy approach to managing the self and desire: put it in a pen and electrify the bars, or stick it on an emotional rocketship aimed heavenward, toward what is immaterial.

The evangelical Christians, at least in my experience, tended to emphasize emotion as the primary way of locating the self in relation to reality, and this seemed to fit best with my temperament. For me, this spectrum had a real polarizing effect: I overdeveloped my trust in the unconscious, in spontaneity, and I came to associate will with a lack of emotional authenticity. You do that, and you’re going to have some problems functioning in reality. The tension between the two is one of the engines of Solarium.

Berry: Solarium has lots of formal diversity: tercets, quatrains, prose blocks, varying line lengths and indentation... Do you have a theory of the line, or a structural effect that you hope to create (or avoid)?

Zandi: Not one that I can articulate. But even when I look back to some of the early poems I wrote, I would have lineated them the same way now. I have a real bent toward naturalness; I hate posing, even for pictures. I think of Moore: “The hero, the student, / the steeple-jack, each in his way, / is at home.” I never have a form in mind—my breaks and spaces are based on delay, and the delay corresponds to a shift from one psychological state to another (which is evident in the tone). But it’s not just about communicating that to the reader. For me this is part of the exploration, the discovery. I throw the poems from form to form, trying to “get it right,” and eventually they find themselves: hero, student, steeple-jack. The form tends to solidify when the poem’s found a groove that will take it home.

Berry: One of my parlor games is to collect exotic words, so I was very happy to come across your use of “flitch.” This made me wonder if you have a stable of words that you’ve had to hunt to near-extinction because of your affinity for them.

Zandi: Ah. “Flitch.” You know, I can remember exactly where I first saw that word. Zukofsky has a poem in which he refers to the “red varnish” of the fretboard wood on a stringed instrument as “warm flitch.” It stuck with me; it has that Germanic sound that I love, very visceral. I also liked those two divergent yet overlapping meanings of timber and meat.

So clearly—yes, I have a list of words. A few that have been sticking with me lately are “pleiotropy” and “quagga.”

I want to say, though, that I didn’t become a poet because I love words or language. They feel more like the enemy. I love abstraction, abstract shapes. Probably why I feel so at home with mathematicians.

Berry: When I was taking a workshop with David Wojahn, one of his exercises was to ask us to write a poem to our poetic nemesis. Do you have any enemies, abstract or otherwise?

Zandi: I have a friend who does cartoons—you know, ones like the New Yorker publishes with an evocative sketch and a line that completes the emotional matrix. She’s got this one that she dedicated to me. There’s a guy who looks quite wracked with pathos—his eyebrows knit circumflexes, that sort of thing—as he warily eyes the mirror in front of him. And the caption reads: Please leave me alone.

Berry: You address yourself directly by name in “Solarium,” which seems rare in poetry. I’ve noticed how often jarring it is in close relationships to be called by your full first name, how it’s often a sign of tension. How do you feel about modes of address in poetry? Is there a particular strategy (i.e., first person, second person, etc.) that you feel especially drawn to in your work or others?

Zandi: It is rare. I addressed myself—or tried to—more than once while writing this book, but only the one instance made it in. That’s all I could get away with! I think I was able to do it there because I’d really gotten myself into a Castaway moment. I mean I was essentially my own Wilson volleyball at that point.

Dan Chiasson’s exceptionally good at this move, but he’s got this real balancing act between being preternaturally affable and making light of the artifice of the speaker’s reality. It’s very different than my own use of it, because the self in my poems really does buy into that hallucinatory reality. But maybe what we have in common is we acknowledge that, in order to address yourself, your self has also to be playing the reader. I think of his poem “To Dan Chiasson Concerning Fortune.”

But as for preference of address—all of them? I do like “I,” both in my work and others. I’ve been reading some “I”’s with many layers lately. I loved the Knausgaard books, which pulled me right in. And I keep going back to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine. I love how when I’m reading it, it’s like she’s already way ahead of me, talking from somewhere near the middle, maybe even the end. Seeming so calm and assured, these “I”’s are very different than my speaker’s. I must be looking for something different.

Berry: Have you ever had one of those (to steal from that Don Roos movie, The Opposite of Sex) “My life was never the same after that summer” moments?

Zandi: I’ve never seen this movie, but I think I understand the question. Sometimes I still can’t believe I did this, but I dropped out of law school to become a poet-bartender. I don’t regret it, though, of course, in order to take that leap I needed to have more than an average amount of naïveté for a twenty-something.

I think I realized that I’d gone to law school for a number of bad reasons: because I wasn’t yet sure enough of myself to choose writing; because I’d wanted to please my parents; because I’d wanted the prestige of a profession. The school had a deal where if you dropped out by a certain date you got your money back. I was enrolled there a total of two weeks.  

I remember sitting in the quad between classes and watching one of the other students stop suddenly and bend over to fix a crinkle in their sock, and I wrote that image down. That moment feels to me now more like the decision, even though that’s not when I actually decided.

Berry: In “At the Sign of the Skull,” you have the following exchange (which I was tempted to take for an ars poetica): “‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ / I said. You said, / ‘Start asking for signs / and you’ll take anything.’” Does this critique of causality have a larger significance in the book or your life?

Zandi: Oh, gosh, I’d never thought of this one as an ars poetica, but maybe you’re right. There’s so much emphasis on meaning, on stasis, that we jump to when we talk about poetry, like poems are these escaped lunatics running amok and we’ve got to wrestle each one into a straightjacket—hurry, quick! Of course, in this poem the skull isn’t even there, but we supply it anyway. That’s how identities are built. We connect the dots, drawing the fabric of meaning from image to image. Whether you know what you’re saying in a poem or not, you can be quite sure that your reader is going to find something to say about it. I mean, let’s be honest, isn’t that just what I’m doing now? And I’m supposed to be the author! Causality!

This poem, though, obviously nods to Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.” And I think of her Aunt Consuelo, who didn’t exist, and the National Geographics, which didn’t exist, or at least not as she presented them. Still, the accuracy of these details seems not to matter. In fact, they are even more “there” now to a great many people than the real aunt, the real magazines. Well, there’s history, and there are we. Which goes along with the way the rest of this poem undermines reality. This is a poem that interrogates causality: “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?” 

“At the Sign of the Skull” is also loosely based on reality. My cousin found a skull at a reservoir. It was identified by the vet as a small canine skull, and there were indeed a bunch of heartworm-stuffed dog hearts on a shelf in his clinic. The last lines are made up, but most is true. Or is it? Actually, I’m not so sure, on second thought, whether it was my cousin or a friend...

This is disgusting, but I can’t help myself: the skull had a hole in the back where the spinal cord would have connected, and it stank. But I found it irresistible, and I kept looking into it.

Berry: There’s restraint in Solarium but the book doesn’t feel grudging or miserly with its content. It seems like the poetry world often likes to sort stuff along an axis (lyric vs. elliptical, political vs. personal, minimalist vs. maximalist), and I know that I have often given into these impulses myself. Have you struggled with similarly fixed ideas or cleavage points yourself?

Zandi: No. I don’t think about poems in market terms. I do hope that they’ll change, though. For the sake of what’s interesting, for curiosity’s sake. I wish this in the same way that I wish not to be the same person ten years from now.

Berry: Solarium seems closely engaged with nostalgia and the way it infiltrates our minds. There was such a sense of polite disquiet in the book that it almost felt like an apocalyptic pastoral. Are there landscapes you returned to in the writing of this book?

Zandi: I moved back to the Midwest from Boston, about two-thirds of the way through its composition. I’m always moving somewhere else and then being rubber-banded back to my origins. A real prodigal, I guess.

As for nostalgia, it gets such a bad rap, doesn’t it? There’s a thought experiment I do fairly regularly, in which I imagine the present as if it’s the past, as if I’m looking at a home video of my life: “Here’s the day where I sit in the bathtub with a book I won’t remember, staring at that painting of a canal I’m likely to throw out years ago.”

One of the problems with nostalgia is that it deadens the range of the senses and causes us to romanticize in general. It’s an enemy to self-awareness. I find that during these experiments, however, the opposite happens, and I become much more aware of the details of my life and how little they mean to me. But this awareness gives them back a sense of meaning. It’s like nostalgia in reverse.

Berry: It’s fairly common to be accused of having an agenda behind one’s work. Do you have an agenda you’d be happy to be accused of?

Zandi: Yes: not having one. I think the speaker in this book (and the way he processes the world) is much like Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s characters. He’s got this last line: “Where I have shoulder blades I don’t need reason.” God, I shouldn’t even admit this—all the world loves conscious intention—but when I was working best, these poems were hallucinatorily real, and I was blind to their meaning.

Berry: Does this book have any Dutch uncles, patron saints, or unindicted co-conspirators?

Zandi: Well, Louise Glück should be listed as something of a co-conspirator. She taught me the power of a veto, and she gave me willingness to use the razor’s edge, which I learned by example. 

I took two wonderful courses with Rosanna Warren, who taught me much of what I know about form. She introduced me to Hart Crane, Anne Carson, and Geoffrey Hill, the last of whom, believe it or not (because he’s so damn different in style), was essential, particularly The Triumph of Love.

I suppose the book also interacts a lot with Stevens. As usual, I didn’t realize it at the time, but poems like “On My Pool Life,” “Transparencies,” and “Inside” are critiques of Stevens. “Man doesn’t live by bread alone,” it goes; well, she or he sure as hell doesn’t live by poetry either.

As for saints? Sven Birkerts—Saint Sven, I should call him. He was kind enough to lend his ear from time to time to some kid who picked him up once from the airport to deliver him to a conference. He recommended to me quite a few books that helped me early on.

Berry: I noticed that despite the implicit radiance in Solarium, the book begins denotatively guttering out (“Ta Da. You go out”) and ends in unlit silence (“It’s quiet now / and dark as a wick”). Was this correspondence a significant one?

Zandi: I think the echo here is between waking and sleep, layers of consciousness. This also comes up imagistically in the beginning of the title poem. There’s a sense in which we extinguish day-to-day reality when we enter a book. But by the end of it, things have become so real that we’ve once again extinguished normative reality. The water was cold getting in, but now that we’ve gotten used to it, the air getting out is just as cold.