Joshua Adams, author of Past Lives (Jackleg Press), recently sat down with d.S. randoL, a poetry reader for Variant Lit, to discuss his debut collection. As a past contributor to Variant Lit—with his poem “Views” included in Past Lives—Adams explores the philosophical depth, experimental forms, and the tension between logic and emotion that shape the book. In this conversation, Adams provides insights into his creative process and his thoughts on the evolving role of poetry today.
This interview was conducted over Google Meet in August 2024 with d.S. randoL and V.J. Adams. It has been edited and arranged for clarity.
—
d.S. randoL: I wanted to note the epigraphs in the book that you attributed to Frank O’Hara and Wittgenstein. These two quotations deal with this sense of logic that persists within the narrators’ minds throughout the entire book. It’s kind of a ‘distant’ book, if you will — it’s not very heavy on emotion, which a lot of poetry tends to be. An interesting diversion, I’d say. In particular, the quote from Frank O’Hara that you selected reads:
Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. —Frank O’Hara
I’m curious how this theme of logic equating to pain inspired you and informed the more calculated themes and logical sense of style within the book.
V. Joshua Adams: I’m happy you noticed the epigraphs. I chose them deliberately, but after the manuscript was already finished, so it wasn’t as if they were there the whole time.
dSr: Ah, so it wasn’t really a guiding principle then, more of a realization of the work’s focus at the end?
VJA: The significance of the epigraphs for me, is that they’re basically contradictory in terms their estimation of how important logic is and the consequences of thinking logically. And so there is a contradiction that runs through the whole book — that may be a bit subterranean — in which the various speakers or people in the poems are simultaneously committed to a project of rational understanding of the world and life, and also simultaneously being undone by emotion.
dSr: I see, and I think it’s cool that you mention that. I found the speakers to be very deeply interested, if not a little obsessed, about this notion of being able to rationally understand the world. Within the first part of the book, (“First Life”), it seems to be a consistent thing where the narrators deeply desire to understand things, but are notably quite frustrated by their inability to do so. These narrators and voices you use in this first set of poems, they navigate the situations that they’re in and they try very hard to maintain this professional and scholarly standing within themselves. I wonder what that was like to get in the headspace of that, and how you were when crafting these modes and mentalities, where you’re not quite able to grasp the world that we live in which, you know, I think we all struggle with at times — we’re all trying to understand. I would love to hear more about that!
VJA: I think, in part, the book is biographical — because I’m a professional intellectual, I trained as an academic, and I teach at a university. My professional life would be impossible to understand outside of some affirmative account of our capacity to learn and know and increase the project of knowledge production. At the same time I feel, both intellectually and artistically, that the project of knowledge production deserves a critique. It’s one of the roles of poetry — as I see it in the present moment, particularly since it occupies now a substantial space within the university — to generate that critique or reflection on the limits of the project of the production of knowledge.
dSr: Would you say that poetry isn’t really doing that at this time?
VJA: Well, you know, it might be! There are plenty of vanguardist writers who would describe themselves as engaging in something like that kind of effort… So perhaps I’m just traveling that path with them. However, at the same time, some of that vanguardist work is so oppositional to the tradition of poetry as an oral and aural artform, that sometimes it’s possible that the critique becomes more legible than the art.
dSr: I see, so would you say that the oppositional stance turns more toward a rejection of a “perfection of the craft” and what that’s meant in the 20th century and prior?
VJA: Maybe, maybe. I think even broader, as an overall rejection of what art is. So that’s not necessarily something you’d see in my work. What I’m trying to do is to appeal to a concept of the traditional work of art that also does some of the critical work we associate with more experimental and radical work.
dSr: And with that, I’d like to touch on the type of work that you’re producing in this book, and the form and craft that you’re working with. One could say that, in really any artform, you could point to a more established technique and rules, and then you have the vanguardists that say, “Well, screw that! I’m gonna do whatever I wanna do!”, and I find that one thing that is very fun and refreshing about your book is the almost endless work you’re doing in different forms and stanzas within it! There are multiple single-stanza one-shots, some exclusively in couplets, some prosaic blocks, and even more unique formattings with rules specific to a single poem — I think of “Twenty Sixteen” where every second line hangs on its own and every other line is left-aligned. I would love to hear more what drew you to these different forms!
VJA: I think I liked the idea of a book that was doing different things. These different sections, different lives that compose the book, are in different voices and maybe versions of a voice. I didn’t really have a programmatic stance about that, except insofar as I wanted the book to be a little bit restless. With respect to the shape of poems, I wanted the book to reflect the diversity of ways of organizing ideas and sounds in the poems. So, the book is lyric poetry, but lyric poetry is not one thing. If there is a sort of agenda that the book is promoting [laughs] beyond the artistic content, it would just be an affirmation of the variety of ways lyric poems have been able to be manifested over the ages.
dSr: I hear you! I like the word, ‘restless’. I think that is a great summation of how the narrators feel throughout the book, I feel that. Do you find that when you were writing the pieces, did you plan different poems to their forms as you came to them, or did they happen and you just held the reins and rolled with them?
VJA: I typically don’t have a totally formal picture of a poem until I’m pretty deep into one. Occasionally, as with prose, I can kind of tell just based off the sentence structure, and how the thoughts are coming to the paper. But I quite frequently write the same poem in five or six different formal arrangements — sort of testing them each out. I’ll do that and see which one is achieving the objective. There’s a lot of testing of different shapes, line lengths, metrical moments, things like that — I’m searching for where the mineable ore of it really is.
dSr: [laughs] That’s so cool! So when you were writing these poems, and you had all these forms and shapes — how did you know which one was the most successful, your favorite, the version that was going to end up in the book?
VJA: I think each situation went differently in different cases. I think that some poems, when they were laid out in multiple versions, demonstrated that cutting and splicing and moving things around was necessary. Others, like “Twenty Sixteen” for example, seemed to move linearly toward the form that it was without much need for rearranging or collage. However, there is a fair amount of collage aesthetic in the book, in terms of stanza-to-stanza, or poem-to-poem transitions.
dSr: Yes, and I noticed in particular, in “First Life” and “Third Life,” the poems tend to have more varying structure. All the poems in Past Lives are lyric, but in First and Third there tend to be semblances of narrative or strings of actions to be followed. However, in the second part, “Second Life”, the poems are all quite abstract, all quite subconscious pieces by comparison. They seem quite visually comfortable as a batch! Did the poems in this section come one after another as you were writing them, or did they come through more sporadically across the greater process of the book?
VJA: The stylistic combination of Second Life’s poems being more sonically palpable and conceptually abstract is kind of what united them. In terms of composition however, this book has poems that are almost 20 years old.
dSr: Whoa!
VJA: Yes! The oldest poem in the book is “Bohemia Bagel,” which has its origins with me being in Prague in the summer of 2003 at a place called Bohemia Bagel, reading John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror — 21 years ago. Anyway, I would see the more sonically dense poems come from a period where I was really interested in that kind of work, and I would come back to that style from time to time. I studied briefly with a poet a long time ago, Karen Volkman, who helped me understand what that kind of sound can do. As a whole, the current form of the book took its shape about 6 years ago, and I’ve been shopping it around since about then.
dSr: Well, congratulations again for getting it published! I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’m glad that people can get to enjoy it now. One thing I particularly like about the poems here, are the openings — I find them particularly strong. You have a lot of snappy, witty poems that get a lot of that steam from those initial bursts, placing us within the scene and tone of each piece. I’d love to hear how that process starts for you — do you usually start with that initial strong first line and run with that?
VJA: Sometimes they come right away. But I think a common phenomenon, particularly with younger poets, is that the first line of a poem can really be found hiding in the sixth or seventh line — and what precedes is more of a warm-up. And sometimes that happens to me too! That said, it’s important to me that the poems are engrossing, and that they give pleasure. I see them as rhetorical, and the important thing to captivate an audience is get them interested right from the start. At one point years ago I thought I was going to be a journalist, and the most important part of the article is the lede, you know? Though, memorable lines can exist anywhere.
dSr: Speaking of great lines that can be found anywhere, I would love to just mention a couple of them, and I thought it’d be fun to see. I’ll just spit a couple out, and I would love to hear just your thoughts on each one. And if you know which poem they’re from, it was off the top of your head. I thought that might be a little fun thing to do. One of the first lines that I thought was very cool, and I was thinking it and repeating it to myself in my head, was, “Now you are sweating a bit in the heat in the sense, and also chilled with death thoughts.” I love the poem this comes from. This is probably one of my favorite poems in the book.
VJA: You mean “Come What May”?
dSr: Yeah. I love that poem. It was really good.
VJA: What do you like about that poem?
dSr: My own interpretation of it was I really enjoy just the nature of the angel of death’s appearance, this almost gentle presence of death. I really enjoyed the way that, in my mind, the angel of death touches you on the shoulder, and the narrator knows instantly the angel of death. And the way the poem, on a very surface level, one could read it as, the narrator is just showing death around. But in my mind, it’s pretty clear that the narrator of this particular poem dies when he’s touched on the shoulder. And I think the result is quite serene. It shows throughout the whole book, the narrators are dealing with struggling to accept the reality in which that they are in, and here is a departure from that. This is a very serene and peaceful poem, and the narrator is dealing directly with death and its consequences. It’s kind. I like it.
VJA: I’m glad.
dSr: I thought I would mention that. Maybe any other thoughts you have about that particular poem?
VJA: That one came to me all at once, actually. It was one of the atypical poems in the manuscript. I think I had gone back to Neruda for a little while, and I was reading some of his odes. That poem was written during the pandemic, too. So it was a combination of this quite direct, almost easy approach to the poem, and also an interest in the concrete that comes out of those odes of Neruda’s, with generally menacing sense of anxiety and dread. And so those two things came together, and home as a result.
dSr: Thank you for that insight. I also enjoyed the lines, in an earlier section of the book, “But your father, in his pastel trunks, insists the Lithuanian nobles / were the last to give up their paganism. / ‘You know what this means,’ he says, I do not, but nod.” I enjoyed those lines. I enjoyed the tone that they have. I feel like it sums up a lot of that earlier section of the book where the narrators, very often, they act like they have it all together, but there is some disconnect. I would love to hear a little bit of what you think about that.
VJA: That poem, “Views,” appeared in Variant Lit! Yeah, you know, I’m just looking at the poem now to refresh my memory, and the idea that what we see is simultaneously apparent and also laden with contradiction, it runs through the whole poem.
dSr: Right.
VJA: And that epistemic fact, I guess if you wanted to call it that, has consequences for interpersonal relationships. There’s a constant encroachment in the book of the life of the mind with practical life. The poems take that collision. That bit about the Lithuanian nobles, I am reasonably sure is true. I don’t know if I went back and checked it, but it was something I had learned a long time ago in terms of the history Christianity in Europe. But I guess I don’t know the significance of it. [Laughs]
dSr: Another thing I found interesting, speaking of religion and of Christianity, is that there are these little references that are sprinkled in all over the place. The Lithuanians, the Southern cross, all these little small things sprinkled in. I wonder how these religious relics pop up in the poems and how your experience with that may have motivated or inspired the book in any way.
VJA: I studied it for a long time seriously as an academic, and it was my first area of concentration, religion. I thought at one point I was going to be a professor of religious studies and study the history of religions. For many people in that field, their entry was often through literature. In the case of one of my old teachers, as for me, it was reading The Waste Land [by T.S. Eliot] and being totally fascinated by all these Eastern texts that I didn’t know anything about. In some cases, not just text, but actual pieces of language, of Sanskrit and allusions to the Buddha. So yeah, it’s part of my intellectual biography that I studied it. It’s also part of my personal biography that I was raised in a Catholic household. And so I guess I have an appreciation for relics, power of relics, and for fetishes. But I come from a background that’s quite mixed in terms of its religious faiths. I’ve got Jewish grandmothers, I’ve got a Muslim brothers-in-law and nephews—
dSr: So, it’s been quite a melting pot.
VJA: Yeah, sure. I mean, many faiths are represented in my extended family. My wife is a congregationalist from New Hampshire! Anyway, I think the idea of secular life being a norm was just not something that ever really occurred to me until I was much older. And even now, I look askance at the idea that there is such a thing as a truly secular life. That is to say, I tend to see secularism as another sort of faith. And maybe that’s an intervention that the poems are doing that, quite honestly, I wasn’t really fully aware of until I just spoke about it.
dSr: Well, thank you for sharing that. I agree. I feel like it definitely can be hard to live a truly non-secular life just with how present it all is. You spoke about how when you’re reading T.S. Eliot, those Eastern texts and these things that you didn’t recognize and these talks of locations that you didn’t recognize. I wanted to touch on — there are quite a lot of locations featured within the book. You talk about Italy, you talk about Paris, you talk about Gstaad, and I wonder how your travels have inflicted — not inflicted — have affected your work.
VJA: They may have inflicted it! That is to say, surely there’s something pretentious about it. But I guess I’m just somebody for whom traveling and being in a different cultural situation just seems to generate work. For me, it’s just a source of inspiration, that friction and fascination with things that are different. Some people will go to a cabin in the woods and sit down in silence or amidst beautiful natural surroundings, and they’ll be filled with inspiration. That’s not me. I need movement.
dSr: You need culture.
VJA: I need movement and people to get things going. So I think in part, that’s why there’s these locations. On the other hand, too, it’s a book that’s written at a contemporary moment in which these places are not as far as they once were, at least for those of us who are in a certain social class. And also what happens in those places is newly or maybe increasingly relevant, that is to say, we have in our late-capitalist moment made the world one marketplace, and that has an effect of collapsing distances. So maybe that’s me, the book is registering that.
dSr: Cool. Another consistent theme that I noticed is fashion and clothing within the book. Quite often, you write to detail about what these characters are wearing and how they’re wearing it. We have mentions of Oxfords, we have mentions of a fur-lined, green suede bomber jacket, messenger bags. There’s a pale blue fleece robe that you take off, “and blue went everywhere” that I really enjoyed. I would love to know how clothing and the expression of how you present yourself and how you dress yourself, how that influenced the work as well.
VJA: I don’t think I’ve consciously thought about the role of clothing in the book, but I guess what I would say is that I take it seriously. I take fashion seriously as a social indicator or a way in which we talk to each other without talking and locate ourselves in the social. And I also just love clothes. I think it’s an example of something concrete that has a lot of symbolic significance, but that is simultaneously part of everyday life. I guess I would say that that conjunction of things would account for my interest in it.
dSr: I wonder, on top of the clothing, a lot of the external characters in the book, outside of the narrator, a lot of people are described quite objectively and on the surface, so to speak. A lot of times, simple actions are described, like horses sleeping in luxury cars or people sitting and drinking frappé and beers, which I also enjoyed as a line. And I’m curious about the narrator’s perspectives on these individual people, or not individual people, but rather these groups, these masses of people, the people that you see on the sidewalk walking around every day, and what the book and what your intention was behind painting these pictures of people — it’s not an in-depth look, but a lot of the time they are almost set pieces, almost.
VJA: Yeah, I think on the one hand, that is a tendency that one might criticize about this book or about a book like it, which is that the interiority it’s interested in is frequently not an interiority of other people.
dSr: That makes sense.
VJA: I guess my defense of that criticism or justification of the practice is that, number one, I think on a basic level that what philosophers call the problem of other minds is a real thing. That is to say, I think there’s all kinds of ways in which we can learn about each other, but there seem to be no ways in which I can occupy your point of view and you can occupy mine. I mean, I guess we have one way, which is to fictionalize it, but of course then it’s not true. So the novelists can transcend this problem, but only in fiction. Number two, the philosophical problem of other minds has a close relationship with lyric poetry. This is something that I didn’t come up with myself, but that I gleaned from Allen Grossman, a poet and critic I spent a little time with back in the day, and someone whose work is really profound. At the beginning of his book, Summa Lyrica, Grossman talks about how lyric is the genre of the problem of other minds. That is to say, insofar as lyric is a first-person genre, it is inevitably going to run up against this problem, the limitations of the first person. And so that would be my sophisticated justification for what someone might find to be an opacity with respect to others in the book.
dSr: Thank you for clarifying that. That was very palpable. I know we’re about coming up on the hour, and I wanted to maybe open the floor up a little bit. Maybe give you an opportunity to talk about poems that — I don’t know how often you’ve necessarily talked about the book or other interviews or people just in general — poems you’re really passionate about, you really care about, that you haven’t really gotten an opportunity to speak on yet, or anything that you want to talk about the book?
VJA: I don’t have any particular poems that I feel like need special advocacy. I guess for me, what I would say in terms of a general summation is that the most important thing is that the book gives pleasure. If it does that, I feel like it is a success. To a certain degree, maybe that’s an anti-intellectual way of thinking about it, but there’s lots of different kinds of pleasure. I want people to find intellectual pleasure in the book, too. But I think I joked about this when I tweeted out the news of the book’s publication, when I said that “you should buy it for someone who thinks that they don’t like poetry.” I didn’t really have a reader necessarily in mind when I wrote the book. But as I brought it together and as I’ve thought about it, I think I tried to write a book that could be appreciated by someone who had no special knowledge or interest in poetry, but that could simultaneously also be appreciated, and maybe should be appreciated by somebody who did have special interest in knowledge and poetry. Maybe every poet does that. Maybe I’m just reinventing the wheel. I guess I’ll leave it to the readers and listeners to decide.
dSr: I think that makes a lot of sense. I feel like as poets, a lot of the time we recognize that the art form isn’t in a place that it has been in the past, as it’s been occupied in the past. So a lot of the time there is that notion of who are we writing for? What are we doing it for? I think trying to achieve that accessibility is very noble, and it’s sometimes all we can do. I think that’s totally fine. Have you had any particular feedback or words about the book that really resonated with you, that you really appreciated, and that made the effort feel worth it?
VJA: I’ve had a number of friends — poetry friends, poets — who’ve expressed how much they’ve enjoyed the book, and that’s great. I have a writing group here in Louisville and many of these poems were seen by them and met with a certain amount of enthusiasm and acclaim in that process. I mentioned them in the acknowledgments. But I think there’s two pieces of news about the book, or rather, two reactions to the book that have moved me.
dSr: Oh?
VJA: One was last week, I went to my local poker game here in my neighborhood in Old Louisville. We’re all sitting around the table and we’ve got our chips, and our bourbon, and beer, and we’re about to play. Then the host, my friend, pulls out the book and proceeds to the poem, “Imagined Community,” and reads some of his favorite parts of the poem. And that really was great because that’s a context in which I wasn’t expecting to receive that response. My local poker game is not a bunch of professors, it’s just a bunch of dudes. Then apparently, another neighborhood friend purchased the book, and her five-year-old daughter, probably attracted by the cover, by Andreas Töpher, by the way, an incredible designer based in Berlin. Anyway, my friend’s daughter, who’s five, asked for the book to be read to her at bedtime, and she has continued to ask for it [laughs]. I don’t exactly know how it’s being handled. I guess I’m going to hear about it pretty soon.
dSr: For real? That is so cool.
VJA: But in the realm of possible responses to the book, that was not one I ever would have considered happening. So that was really great.
dSr: That’s amazing. Oh, my gosh. It’s going to be something she probably remembers for her whole life.
VJA: Who knows? Who knows?
dSr: I love that.
dSr: And speaking on going forward, I know that you are going to publish another book — congratulations times two — called Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems. I would love to maybe hear a little snippet about what’s to come with that and the progress of that. That must be very exciting equally as well.
VJA: Yes, it’s exciting. Like Past Lives, a labor of love, or maybe not love in that case, but a labor that has taken a long time to bring to fruition. The book is not obviously related to my poetry, but I think connections can be made, and particularly if you think about the epigraphs of this book and what I was talking about before about the problem of other minds. But it’s an academic book on modern poetry and philosophy. It will appear from Bloomsbury, who has a wonderful series, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry that’s a mix of literature literary critics and philosophers writing about the intersection of poetic texts and philosophical arguments. I was fortunate to be approached to be in that series. The book’s based on my dissertation, which I finished a decade ago. But then there’s a lot that’s been revised and also new material generated for the book, and pending my last permission request, it’ll be out sometime in spring or summer of next year.
dSr: Excellent. I’ll be looking forward to that, and I hope our readers will be, too. I wanted to maybe wrap up a little bit and just talk about anything else that you might have to add Is there anything else that you’re looking forward to in the future, maybe even beyond Skepticism and Impersonalitu? I know that’s sometimes an unfair thing to ask an artist or ask an author, what they’re working on right now, but do you have any continuing further goals that you’re trying to pursue and get out there? Any words that you’re trying to put out there in the future?
VJA: I have written new poems since Past Lives was accepted in 2022. I think that these new poems are part of a manuscript, and the working title of the manuscript is Central Time, and there’s going to be a couple of different sets of significance related to that phrase that are legible in the poems already that I’ve written, and some that I’ve sketched out. So who knows when that will fully take shape, but I’m working on that.
dSr: Excellent!
VJA: And then there’s another critical project on poetic vocation that is more of an idea than anything else at the moment.
dSr: Awesome. Well, it sounds like you got a lot on your plate and a lot you’re working on, so I think that’s really exciting. Do you have any advice for any other working poets or writers out there that has helped you a lot coming up?
VJA: Man, I don’t know. It’s always tough to generalize from one’s own experience. But that said, I would say that I think James Baldwin famously says something about this — about how talent is not enough, you really need endurance. Of course Baldwin, obviously, was a genius. Maybe it was easy for him to say that. But I think that in my experience, not letting rejection and not letting close calls with publication demoralize you is hugely important. It took me the better part of six years sending this manuscript out.
dSr: Staying steadfast through it all.
VJA: It wasn’t cheap. There’s an economic dimension to this, obviously, to sending it out to contests and to open reading periods. But as long as you believe that you’re producing work of value, you should be steadfast in trying to get other people to see it, if that’s what you want. Some people just write for themselves, and that’s who they are. But a lot of poets want to write for more than just themselves. And if you want that, then you got to be prepared for a very long road. And quite frankly, the publishing industrial-complex, both in its trade fiction manifestation, but also even with respect to poetry, there’s a prioritization of not just people who are young, but people whose careers take off very quickly. And for most of us, that’s not the case. So you just got to be prepared for that. And finding magazines like Variant Lit and other places that are publishing work that you admire and sending to them.
dSr: Know your audience a little bit.
VJA: Know your audience, curate your submissions based on your aesthetic sensibility, which is something that indicates that you’ve thought about that sensibility seriously. That’s a good strategy. I mean, I think it’s important for me that Past Lives eventually got taken not as part of a contest, but as part of an annual open reading period by a small press. And it was a small press whose books I had looked at, had read.
dSr: Okay. Well, listen, I want to extend a huge thank you to you for the opportunity to read the book, the opportunity to talk to you. I really enjoyed the conversation that we had. I want to say thank you to Variant Lit and Megan Nichols for helping organize this interview. And if there’s anything else that you’d like to add or anything at all.
VJA: I’m just grateful to you, Devin, and to Variant Lit, not only for publishing work of mine, but also being interested in letting me talk about it. Thanks again.
—
V. Joshua Adams is a poet, critic, translator, and scholar. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, where he was also a former editor of Chicago Review. Today, Adams teaches at the University of Louisville. Past Lives is his first full-length book of poems; a critical book, Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.