What’s most exciting about this book to you?
The most exciting thing for me about A World in Which is that it exists as a book: a material object that can be shared with others. Before its publication date, I dreamed (literally! at night!) of holding the texture and weight of these years of poetry in my hands, in book form.
I’ve always loved the idea of poems as objects to hold onto. In a letter to Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan wrote, “I am sending you something here that will help against the little doubts that sometimes come to one; it is a piece of sycamore bark. [...] But—I can’t keep it from you—poems, and yours especially, are even better pieces of sycamore bark.” On some level, it’s remarkable to me that language materializes, takes physical shape, and becomes something that enlivens itself in the handover between writer and reader. I remain deeply grateful for the time and attention that others might give to my words, and I hope that my poems, likewise, might offer them something in return.
Do you see this book as a continuation of earlier work/themes, a departure for you, or some combination?
A World in Which represents both a continuation of earlier themes, as well as a divergence from them. It’s more wide-ranging in its approach than a work like my chapbook Recovery, which is a sequence of poems offering a meditation on grief “from the borderless territory in which the membrane between memory, dream, and ordinary time is porous,” as Dale M. Kushner observes in her review of Recovery. Although A World in Which exists on a different timescale than Recovery, it follows memory’s plumbline in taking up loss and chronic pain, while weaving in more hopeful moments.
The title for A World in Which comes from my engagement with Judith Butler’s work, particularly Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. In it, she considers “a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.” She writes that dislocation from First World privilege through traumatic events “offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community” (emphasis mine). “Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all,” she says. A World in Which grapples with shared forms of anxiety and loss, while beginning to imagine otherwise and to articulate those possibilities.
At this point in your career, do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
Hilde Froese Tiessen, in her talk at the 2006 Mennonite/s Writing conference at Bluffton University, relayed how, in Canada, the word “Mennonite” designates both a cultural/ethnic identity and a religious affiliation. Thus, she said, “I am—in the language of the diversity of Canada's heritage groups—Mennonite Mennonite,” which is not a way of doubling down on the essential Mennonite-ness (whatever that is!) of one’s self but instead pointing toward its dual function, which I read as the opportunity to be culturally Mennonite while religiously or spiritually other-than (or vice versa). Thus, you could say my work is Mennonite insofar as I, as a person, have been steeped in forms of this culture over the years, from the community in which I grew up (a town of 2,000 with four (!) Mennonite churches and names like Yoder and Kauffman and Landis sprinkled through the phone book) to later communities of choice in cities: first in Boston, and now in Madison, WI.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what it means to inhabit an identity that is in many ways privileged but is also linked with historical persecution. The underlying principles of peace, simplicity, social justice, and mutual aid that solidified during times of hardship are still there if one pauses to listen. A truth is: when it came down to fight or flight, Mennonites chose flight in order to live.
Another is this: in my past live ancestors who fled, who set up homes together in community. And still, a third: fear and flight are threaded irrevocably into my physical body. These themes emerge in my poems, where, as poet Carolyn Hembree notes,
the quotidian—open houses, carpool lines, married life, pet care, and election days—barely conceals the dystopian—scarab infestations, environmental illness, mass surveillance, biblical floods, and meteor showers. Granted communion with their beloved dead, the living persevere despite the ‘approaching hoofbeats’ of the Apocalypse.
When I read this response to a friend, saying, “I didn’t know my poems had to do with capital-A apocalypse,” she laughed. “I did,” she replied. It’s true that in many of my poems, there’s often something that is about to happen, or has already happened, or is happening at a distance. These threats make themself felt to a reader even when they are not named.
My grandmother was born in the Texas panhandle after her family decamped there to protect her father’s health (he was diagnosed with tuberculosis but then ended up living until he was nearly 100). They made a home in the Snyder Community, a Mennonite settlement where she lived until she was 11.
When the farming failed in the early 1920s, her family returned to Ohio. She lived there without seeing the ocean until she was in her early 90s, raising four children and tending a garden, milking the dairy herd with my father, still a child, when her husband was laid up with an injury during a particularly difficult winter. These were family members who stayed put, who said to each other “bloom where you’re planted” when few other options presented themselves.
After the farm sold, the house where she lived for decades was placed on a truck and moved downwind to new surroundings, the barn door on which my grandfather had recorded mottoes and moments preserved along with it, holding such reminders as “Bitterness feeds on bitterness” and “Prepare for the worst” and “Tough times don’t last but tough people do.” On the door, he had written the date of the sale, its “chattels and land,” as well as the “1st day of no horses.” He died six months later, severed from the earth that had preserved his being with its swales and low-flowing creek, its sugar maple grove and pasture where my cousins and I foraged each Easter, deeply dyed eggs tucked among cow patties where they warmed in the sun. The summer after his death, my grandmother rented a tour bus and took the family, whomever was available at the time, to the place of her birth.
Photo - newspaper article about the move of the house
Photo - "Farm sold, no horses"
Although I grew up laying claim to family and its traditions, this identity did not present itself as overtly Mennonite. Instead, it was a well-worn coat in the hallway closet: something present but unaccounted for, unacknowledged, yet overlying my own forays into the world. When I met my future spouse one January weekend in Chicago, we discovered a trapping of our common culture: the home-canned applesauce served at nearly every meal. There’s familiarity in the habits and practices of family, and only in taking a broader perspective does what’s invisible when close at hand become apparent.
What’s true for me? I’m still figuring that out. Someone reading my poems with knowledge of this subculture will glimpse my inheritance (it’s there for the looking) but also take in the broader story of migration from an identity rooted in the “rural ethnicity of language, food, dress, family, customs, and land” to a “new Mennonite ethnicity, if one exists, [that is] portable, largely symbolic and ideological” (source, emphasis mine).
What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
The poems in A World in Which exist in varied chronological and spatial relationships with each other. Because the poems in the collection emerged from a span of years—the oldest poems are from the early aughts—readers can recognize the contours of a relationship, including marriage and the arrival of two children on the scene. In this way the collection differs from a thematically grouped chapbook such as Not If But When or the response-based (and time-limited) Recovery. A World in Which is a compendium, a companion volume, the telling of a life.
Within this work, each poem operates according to its own logic, which extends to its themes as well as the way lines are employed throughout. A World in Which contains prose poems along with poems that use line and stanza breaks. The prose poems titled “Miracle Town” explore worlds that resemble our own but have different rules of the natural order. Other poems in the book play with where to break the line, either by having each line exist as its own distinct utterance, or by enjambing the line in a place that might feel unexpected to others but right to my ear and breath.
Further, each poem is rooted in a personal geography. In a somatic sense, I feel my way into a place, and then my poems emerge from this ground. For instance, I’ve ended up spending much, though not all, of my life in the Midwest, and so it feels essential to me to represent this interior space of the continent. (A confession: I may have written an entire “Miracle Town” poem in order to use the word “casseroles” and to capture the air of a potluck, with its “platters of steaming meat,” along with, improbably, a time machine and a desire to remake reality. The “tables set for a crowd” in “[this side of storm]” suggest another communal meal. Does this represent a coming together after a shared disaster, or a celebration? I find literary grounding in indistinction: a collapse of the wall between the “I” and “other” that opens up new ways of knowing and reshapes one’s understanding of the world and its potentialities.)
What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
I nearly always write by hand, in a blank notebook. Sometimes there are line breaks at this stage—but usually not. I mine these raw materials of language for the phrases that eventually coalesce into a poem. Once it’s on the page, typed into a document, I keep working with the content, often through several rounds of revision. Over time, this has been my main approach to writing.
Some of the poems in this book, however, were written by dictation, using the voice memos app on my phone while driving (I do not recommend writing by hand while driving!). These poems arrived close to fully intact: a new experience for me. I would press the record button, say a line or two, then hit pause until the next words showed up. Certain poems are transcribed directly from these recordings.
I find that my work emerges most readily when I’m in conversation with what others have written. As a way to make sense of my embodied experience, I’ve spent a lot of time considering Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain. In it, she makes the point that pain forces one into one’s body: in moments of extremity, there is no separation between inside and outside, mind and body. Everything collapses.
I think of this collapse, too, with language: the way the distance between word and thing, signifier and signified, folds in on itself—a tendency that Robert Hass describes in his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Similarly, in Anne Carson’s “the word that stops itself,” I hear, in this elucidation of the translatable, echoes of Celan’s sycamore bark: language that evades our attempts to carry it over and remains utterly itself. (And, speaking of translation, if you ever want to absorb someone else’s syntax, I highly recommend working to bring poems over into your native tongue, even if you don’t know the language of origin. This offers a way of inhabiting another’s voice.)
Is there a question we haven’t asked that you’d like to pose and answer to lead us to some things you’d like to say about the book?
I am drawn to the collective “we” when I encounter it in poetry and in prose. This may be a vestige of my upbringing, in which voices blended together in four-part harmony each Sunday, but I tend to find hope (as well as despair) in the communal, the emergent: what we create together. One word for this is “entanglement.” Another is “kinship.” Still a third is “reciprocity.”
In her essay “Poetry as Prayer,” Hyejung Kook writes, “Poetry, like prayer, comes out of urgency and necessity and at times desperation. Both involve a calling out from the heart, addressed to an Other with the hope of being heard.” She wraps up by asking, “What have I heard from my innermost self?” and responds:
That surrendering the singular I is not annihilation but an opening up, necessary to becoming our most expansive selves. That I can attend, I can tend, I can be tender and receptive to the world that was and to the world that is. That I can also visualize and bring intention toward a new and better world through the power of language. Together, what future can we call into being through our poems, our prayers
In her work, Donna Haraway describes this surrender to the communal as “the flesh of mortal world-making entanglements,” while Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, writes:
We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.
As a form of close attention, poetry can bring us into interconnection with those (and that) residing outside of ourselves, whether human-made, natural, or divine. The other lays claim to us, and the awareness of life that emerges, as if humming with electricity, calls us toward the “we.”
A World in Which, too, reaches toward this awareness, this asking. “Brother André’s Heart, Montreal” lays out its obligations: "We know in our bones, / which is to say our deepest selves, the world / thrown open, the veil torn, seeded fields ungrown / at last. It falls to us to shovel dirt over the flames." We can’t undo what we’ve brought into being, and so our task is engagement, momentum, a turning toward or away from that which unsettles, which I view as one of the central tasks of poetry.
A poem from A World in Which
Heart Land
It is time for tea bags on the eyes.
A budding of anxiety, its roots and branches.
They never forewarn you about this shift.
I’m going to tell you how it works.
The last stand of trees along the horizon.
The parcel soon to be sold.
Snow eases its way through the fence.
Wind eats away at the ridgelines.
The car skids into the other car.
Two women climb out and face one another.
Count the ways the world should not exist.
We should give our possessions away.
Are you preppers? we are asked over and over.
People admire the rows of canned beans gleaming.
The moons of peaches glistening in the half light.
No, we say, these just keep showing up.
Let’s not forget how life moved inside the body.
The paper at the heart of the fortune-teller.
The god who sits with you in darkness.
The god who will not leave your side.
The yews at least five decades in the making.
Limbs grown to our second-story windows.
Birds eat their way through the storehouse.
We place peppermint along the back sill.
Clumped cedars keep the road swathed in ice.
Snow fastened to one side of the trunks.
Still, love keeps unfolding.
The soft arm of your flannel shirt.
from A World in Which (Terrapin Books, 2024)
Links:
- Dale M. Kushner’s review of Recovery in Wisconsin People & Ideas: https://www.wisconsinacademy.org/magazine/fall-2023/book-review/recovery-jl-conrad
- info about and images of the Snyder Community historical marker in Texas: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=91330
- an article in the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Ethnicity
Additional Links:
- my website: jlconrad.com
- Terrapin Books: https://www.terrapinbooks.com/store/p64/conrad.html
- Texas Review Press: https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680033403/recovery/