John A. Nieves
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: North American Review, Crazyhorse, Southern Review, Harvard Review and Massachusetts Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
Interview by Haley Winans.
You are constantly incorporating new subject matter and informational tidbits into your work. What outlets/websites/ways of thinking would you recommend for writers that want to expand their pool of inspiration or feel that they’re repeating the same material?
Becoming good at writing about something that isn’t just you takes the realization that eventually, you’re going to get bored of just you, and probably other people will too if they read enough of you. But there is a part of you that no one will ever get bored with, and that’s the part of you that sees the world because no one can see it like you do, literally no one at all. So the trick is just to look at different things. Not to exclude yourself completely, but to get yourself in situations you’re not used to.
Bring what you do know to what you don’t know. I think “write what you know” is one of the worst pieces of advice you can get. Let’s say you get a yen for nouveau New England architecture, but you’re also obsessed with fish. Then if you marry those two things, you have something no one’s ever seen before. That is a chance for greatness. Whereas individually, both of those things aren’t.
There are websites that give me inspiration, but I don’t use them exclusively. Reading the news is important, knowing what’s happening in the world. Atlas Obscura is great. Archaeology.org’s news site is amazing. New scientist is really good. Public Domain Review is amazing. Even looking at the NOAA weather page can give you something you didn’t expect. You never know what rabbit hole you’re gonna go down. You have to be the one who discovers, you can’t let someone else’s discovery map yours.
For new poets/writers, what couple seeds of wisdom do you think are most significant for internalizing how to start out in creative writing?
Don’t be afraid to revise. Don’t be afraid to have lots of versions of the same thing and then pick your favorite. It may take a while, but eventually you’ll have a favorite. It’s like someone lays five curries in front of you, you just keep tasting until you figure out which one’s the best.
You have to be open to constructive criticism, and you have to be open to what feels awkward for you. New writers don’t think they have any expertise and they’re wrong there. What happens is they read a line and they know it isn’t the best, it bothers them. But then they’ll try to ignore it because they’re done with the assignment. Don’t ignore it, you’re right. Trust your instincts, don’t think everyone will catch everything, you’re going to catch more than you think you do.
Anybody who tells you you have to wait your turn is not your friend. It’s an ageist myth. I run counter to that, the punk rock kid in me hates that. I wanna see young people blowing the world up because we don’t have literature if they’re not writing. If they don’t write, there’s nothing. To pretend they’re not important or their voices don’t matter is- I don’t mean to sound unkosher- but fucking stupid.
I love online journals, I run one, but send to print journals too just so if somebody digs up a dusty book, they have a chance of finding you. We don’t know how long the online world will last. It’s important to have somebody who can help you understand when a piece is ready to go out for publication, but that’s about the piece. Once you’re ready, you should be sending.
Is your writing environment a huge impactor on your work? (music, workspace, art, food)
I prefer to write in places where there’s some sort of noise. Music is best because I can steal shreds of rhythm or phrasing or a word. I love diners back when they were a thing people could do because you have no idea what someone is gonna say and is gonna catch your ear and it’s always the weirdest shit. Sometimes just the rhythm of the plates hitting the dishwasher rack, or the sizzle of the oven will change the way I’m thinking of a line.
I love to eat and write, especially if it’s something that’ll tickle me, not something I eat a lot of times. Getting surprised by a flavor will definitely spur something. Paying attention to my senses is important to me, more than anything else. If I’m in a totally quiet place while writing, I find that I’ll do anything to get texture. I’ll rub my jeans or wiggle my toes or try to create a hot spot on the back of my hand just so I have something different to think about. You have to let what comes out of you surprise you. If you don’t, you’re gonna be bored with your own stuff before you start revising it. Where I am is not terribly important as long as there’s something happening.
Has covid morphed your writing in any way?
It made me have to write at home more, which made me realize changing body position is really important to me when I’m stuck in the same place. Like writing on my side for one, lying down for another, sitting up, standing up, kneeling, next to an ottoman just to feel like I’m in different places. Just because there really is a kind of crazy that sets in being in the same place for a long time and I’m finding ways to fight that.
Covid has changed my tenor of writing. The realities of the world we’re in…I can’t pretend they’re not there. Little elegies for things I never thought I’d elegize creep in. I realized when I was writing a poem a couple months ago that such normal things would be anathema now. Like if a kid’s ball rolled off their lawn into the street and I reflexively went to pick it up and throw it, I might be a terrorist. That used to be the good Samaritan and now it’s deep evil. I need to acknowledge that in my work. These things that we counted on as touchstones of how we understood our moral fabric of a society are rent, ripped, gone, and we don’t have enough contact right now to realize what that means.
Slowly as we come out of this, we are going to see something that looks a lot like a new, less idealistic version of the 60s where people are just going to be touching and fucking and gathering and drinking constantly because they can. They’re going to be carpe diem-headed. They’re gonna think like the end of the Mark Mckee poem “Electric Company.” The next thing’s gonna come and we’re gonna be separated again, we gotta get this while we can, and I’m kinda looking forward to that. I think people are gonna come back weird and there’s gonna be a lot of allowings for that. Because it’s just gonna be everyone.
People are gonna be weirder which is gonna be good for us because we’re getting homogenous. Autotune is not just what happened to really bad music, but also what happened to society. We need a lil punk rock kick or a hippie shake.
We have relearned the value of simple kindness, and that doesn’t go away easily. Whole generations hold onto that. That gives me hope. I don’t think we can hide these things. This isn’t 9/11, this isn’t Challenger, this isn’t the wall falling. We have to wait a little while to write about it to digest it. Those are events. This isn’t an event; this is a reality. If we don’t write about it, we will not understand it and no one else will either. Because it changes every day. I’m not saying you have to write about it, but you can’t hide from it.
Do you write sporadically or every day?
Every single day, I’m writing by collecting. I’m thinking, I’m learning, I’m putting everything in notebooks. I’m a notebookaholic. I put the shreds in, and I don’t go back to them right away. I wait ‘til I have an idea and then I go back to my shreds and see if any of them are relevant. I try to finish a poem a month, they take me a long time. I’m a long process drafter. I’m not happy with version one ever.
I read every day because I think if you’re not reading, your writing isn’t evolving. You have to read new stuff and I think you have to react to it; you don’t have to like it. You have to know what people are doing. The market is a living art space, it is a place where people are putting things together. You have to know the organism and know what part of it you want to travel to. If you want to be outside of it, you have to know where the closest ball you can kick at is. But you also have to know what the mainstream of it is and know how to get the fuck away from that.
The reaction people usually have is to turn to social media and then they get things that make them write less things that censor them before they think it because the thought police are loud and they’re on the left and the right, and they’re both pretty much fascists, telling you what you can think, telling you what you can say. They’re burning books like Fahrenheit 451. Keep doing your thing, because other people aren’t, so it’ll stay relevant. If you try to follow the trends, you’ll become irrelevant with them.
Do you read anyone’s work to get into a lil groove of writing?
Lots of people. Reading my students’ work gets me fired up. I’ll always go to Simko, Yusef Komunyaka, Jake Adam York, Alexandra Teague. Kimberly Gray is really fun for my brain because she does really weird shit. Elizabeth Bishop, David Hernandez. I’ll get these people in my head and I’ll want to read them, they’ll get me going.
But I’d say the most times I get excited about writing comes from reading poems from student and alumni. Because I’ve known how they’ve grown and it’s always mystical to me. I didn’t ever guess this was the next thing that was coming. That tells me that art is alive and that makes me energized.
What do you pinch? (what do you hold onto for subject matter/inspiration/form?)
I’m a music store guy. I managed music stores for 12 years. That was my first career, my first life. I played in lots of bands. Music is the thing I will always go back to. It’s rhythm, it’s phrasing, it’s sometimes shreds of lyrics, it’s the way one song turns into another song accidentally on random shuffle will change the way I’m thinking about something.
Music is everywhere. Time signatures. Switching time signatures is interesting because it makes me think about different movements in a poem. It helps me decide where a volta will fall sometimes. If I can’t go back to music, that’d be very hard for me to figure out what’s next. So that’s my big pinch. Music. I pinch it every day. I take the Weaker Than’s album “Left and Leaving” and just listen to the whole thing over and over again. It will teach you what it means to understand nuanced emotion and not try to reduce anything.
Also, art wants to say things that we don’t have words for, so I think any time something happens to me or I feel something that I know for sure there isn’t a word for, I hold tight to that because I’m going to write that. I don’t have any other way to express that.
What have you been working on recently? Have you been taking on any new forms?
I’ve been writing a series called “Balladeer” so it’s balladeer couplets, tercets, quatrains, cinquains. Each one is pulling in a different artist. I also just wrote pamphleteer couplets because I was afraid people would stop knowing what a pamphlet is pretty soon. That used to be the way that you got information or found out things were going on. That is a non-entity now that the internet is everywhere.
I have these ten iterations I just finished. They’re all about seeing the gaps in things in different ways. So that we see those little spaces that exist in our lives that are actually empty that we never really think of because we just bump over them in the day. I also created a scavenger series so it was cats, raccoons, possums, and coyotes.
You generate beautiful intimacy with your diction without using melodrama or gushy symbols (doves, chocolate, hearts, etc) Do you use a loose formula in doing so? I feel like the empty-feeling spaces are so intimate because of the loss, distance, end, etc. What kills is what fills.
The way to avoid melodrama is to tell the truth. Because melodrama is always a reduction. When people are like, “I’m so heartbroken, I just lost this relationship.” That’s bullshit. When someone breaks up with you, you feel a zillion things: joy, fear, remorse, anger, sadness. The second they’re happening to you; they’re manifesting physically in the world. If you crumple your blanket and drop your taco, that’s the true story of the breakup, not all those abstract things. So give me the blanket and the taco and tell the rest of it to fuck off and I will feel what you felt. We think in general, but we live in particular. And if we remember we live in particular, we’ll find ways to be intimate because our lives are intimate.
In your poems like “Rates” and “Rummage,” you create such vivid, potent scenes. What is your process in reviving an observation/experience?
The real trick in writing scene in poem is don’t be true to the scene. When you remember a place, part of it is really the place and part of it is what your memory did to it. Don’t be afraid if you’ve been to another place that reminds you of that place to start incorporating things from that too. In the lyric poem, there’s no such thing as fiction or non-fiction, it’s an event. Let yourself do what you need to do to let the scene come to life. If you get anal and try to make sure that you’re doing it exactly, you’re going to kill it for everyone because it will feel like you’re making a blueprint instead of a poem.
If the kitchen of your Thai restaurant has a smell that goes really well with a garden when you were a kid, fucking put it there. That scene will become so much more alive for the reader because you weren’t afraid to make it what it should’ve been instead of what it was. Life is a series of joy and disappointments. In writing, we have the cool ass ability to take those disappointments and fix them. We have this superpower where we can be like “That was a disappointing funeral, how can I fix it?”
Bodies in Exile, Bodies at Rest
My hands are older than your eyes.
Yellow light plays tag with ice cubes.
You shake, sniff, but do not sip.
Old lovers under your fingernails
keep your grip weak.
He has neon in his hair.
It slides across curls like a flag on a coffin.
“Bodies in Exile, Bodies at Rest” was originally published in Superstition Review.
