Ask the Author: Jenna Le
Answered Questions (5)
Jenna Le
I began to develop a more loving and intimate relationship with pen and ink when I took up drawing as a serious hobby a few years ago. And I do occasionally enjoy writing first drafts of poems in my pretty pocket-sized sketchbooks. At the same time, though, there's no denying that word processors make it ridiculously easy to delete or edit a thought. Crossing out a handwritten stanza, crumpling up a notebook page, and starting from scratch can feel so much like a defeat that it can make me feel discouraged sometimes, but deleting a typed stanza leaves no traces, allowing me to continue to feel as clean and fresh and hopeful as when I began. And that psychological boost can mean the difference between a successfully completed poem and one that is abandoned unfinished. Moreover, the existence of cell phone keyboards allows stealth writing while riding the train, versifying in the dark while rocking a baby, etc. -- unparalleled convenience for someone with a busy life!
While I don't love listening to the stammering sound of my own voice, I do think audio is great. I think it's salutary to be reminded from time to time that, centuries ago, lyric poetry had its origins in oral performance: there's that age-old sisterhood between the word lyric and the word lyre, after all. Was it Ezra Pound who said, "Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music"? In any case, reading a poem aloud after it's been written could be argued to combine the best of all worlds: on the one hand, you get the slow, thoughtful, care-filled deliberateness that the physical labor of writing provides, and on the other hand, you get the viscerally hard-hitting immediacy of a sound that is heard.
While I don't love listening to the stammering sound of my own voice, I do think audio is great. I think it's salutary to be reminded from time to time that, centuries ago, lyric poetry had its origins in oral performance: there's that age-old sisterhood between the word lyric and the word lyre, after all. Was it Ezra Pound who said, "Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music"? In any case, reading a poem aloud after it's been written could be argued to combine the best of all worlds: on the one hand, you get the slow, thoughtful, care-filled deliberateness that the physical labor of writing provides, and on the other hand, you get the viscerally hard-hitting immediacy of a sound that is heard.
Jenna Le
Hi Doug! A couple years ago, I read a fascinating poetry collection centered around this topic: Christina Olson's The Last Mastodon. I've been captivated by so many books about the history of the planet, its radical transformations, ecological crises and mass extinctions. I'm currently reading Les Misérables, in which Victor Hugo opines, "Animals are nothing else than...the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect." While I don't quite believe all that, I do think the relatability of animals across time is a cosmic gift that provides us a way to be more fully part of the natural world, with respect to which we as human beings bear such great responsibility.
Jenna Le
Hi Annabella! I have huge appreciation for librarians! Some of my happiest memories from childhood are connected with libraries and librarians. For a while in middle school, I spent the first period of each school day volunteering as a sort of informal assistant to my school librarian, and the memory of that period is now like a muzzy, rosy dream. Hiding between the stacks to read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca one day, a biography of Emily Dickinson the next day, an issue of Time magazine covering the presidential impeachment proceedings in stark detail the next. Libraries are critical hubs of freedom, particularly to young people, who can use them to access all kinds of knowledge that might otherwise be closed off to them, and it is the brave, hardworking librarians of the world who make this possible. As readers, I hope the enthusiastic discussions we hold about the books that enthrall, enamor, and challenge us might persuade others to join us in reading them. As authors, by making every effort to put only our very best writing efforts into the world, we are privileged with an additional opportunity to make literature an appealing prospect to others.
Jenna Le
Hi Arthur, thanks for your question. I first read Auden as a rather young girl: in childhood, I owned one of those "Everyman Pocket Poets" editions of his work. I must confess that it took me many years to come around to appreciating Auden's civic preoccupations, the strong political undercurrents in his work: as a kid, I was most interested in simple romantic poems written from an "I" perspective, and Auden's frequent evocation of an unromantic, unindividuated "we" perspective left me cold at first. But I remember being immediately enraptured by the master's technical brilliance, particularly his facility with nonce forms and unconventional rhyme schemes. Take a poem like "Musee des Beaux Arts": many people don't realize that this poem, which masquerades as a simple free-verse poem, actually has an intricate interlacing rhyme scheme, wherein every end-word except one rhymes with exactly one other end-word (wrong/along, understood/wood, waiting/skating, be/tree, forgot/spot, course/horse, away/may, cry/sky, shone/on, green/seen). These subtle and intricate embroideries of sound excited me, making me realize that there's much more to poetic form than the flashy singsong stuff that many folks envision when they think of poetic form. It made me realize that there exist millions of shades of gray I had previously never known of. It was a revelation to me, like what the ancient Greeks must have felt when they discovered that there exist numbers outside of the rational numbers, all these infinitesimal distances on the number line that they never knew existed.
Jenna Le
Sagar, I apologize for not seeing this question earlier! I did not mean to ignore you. I share my writing for many reasons, one of which is that I (perhaps foolishly, naively, and self-importantly) believe there is something in my writing that others will find unsettling, entertaining, edifying, titillating, loneliness-reducing, or otherwise valuable. The authors I read and loved as a child -- prose writers like Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Henry David Thoreau, Bertrand Russell, Brenda Ueland, Janet Frame, Amy Tan, and Jamaica Kincaid and poets like Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, e.e. cummings, W.H. Auden, Guillaume Apollinaire, and countless others -- all touched my life ineffably, and I wouldn't put my writing out there if I didn't hope (perhaps foolishly, naively, and self-importantly) that it might touch others similarly.
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