The Shaky Phase is fierce, it burns, burns, burns like a ring of fire and puts you against the ropes where you're vulnerable. And not said often enough, Jessie Janeshek's poems are really funny too. "I've fallen and I cannot renaissance" case in point. If you want poetry that puts you to sleep there's plenty of that out there, but if you want a book that keeps you up as if lightning somehow made its way under your skin, rattling around your insides like a train misfiring on a broken track in the dead of night, then this collection is for you. The lines in The Shaky Phase operate much like a boxer's upper cut, they are both devastating and disorienting. Setting piss on fire and biting off non-dominant hands, one imagines this poet saying "I don't fuck around, so don't test me," both on and off the page. These characters, whether composites of the author or not, rattle their cages, they treat iron bars like an inferior opponent and by the end of the book they've put their captors where they once stood. Equal parts political and comic, dangerous and fun, these poems will leave actual bruises on you; in other words, you are most definitely in the ring, and your opponent is yourself. AHC: The Shaky Phase, how did you come to that title and overall how would you describe this latest collection? Jessie: The title of the book is taken from one of the poems therein, “This Is the Shaky Phase.” I think of “the shaky phase” as that liminal space between singing and suicide, which is where I believe most of my poems’ speakers hover. It took me a while to come up with a title that I felt could be an umbrella over all the poems in the book. AHC: The cover art is amazing, did you have a hand in choosing it? Who is the artist? There's a Nina Hagen poster in the back ground, is she at all an inspiration of yours? Jessie: Thank you so much, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it. The cover is a still of actress Amy Davis from Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 film Mod Fuck Explosion. Using the still from the film was completely the idea of James Reich, the editor of Stalking Horse Press. James knows Jon and Amy, who are married, and they were kind enough to license it to us. James shared the image with me because he thought it was a good match with my work and also because he thought that Amy resembled me a bit on the cover and, as he put it, “it would be like having an actress playing you on the jacket.” I loved the photo, and I loved James’ thinking behind its use because acting and theatricality are key components in my work overall, and several poems in The Shaky Phase specifically use movies and television. I was also very drawn to the fact that London, the character played by Amy in the film, is in her bedroom. I feel like a lot of my work is sort of centered in the heads of speakers who are alone in their rooms; I grew up an only child and spent a lot of time in my bedroom, reading and writing but also trying on clothes and doing my hair and putting on blue eyeshadow for no one but myself, so this image of a girl in a spangled dress in her bedroom resonated. However, before I said yes, I read up on the film. My favorite description of it actually showed up on Wikipedia and ovguide.com: “Mod Fuck Explosion is a film by Jon Moritsugu about a young girl named London who is trying to find meaning in the world, or a leather jacket of her very own.” I started cracking up once I read that, because that’s more or less my life. As for Nina Hagen, I know who she is, but I don’t know much of her work yet. Honestly, I’m not that cool. Which brings us to the next question. AHC: Your work is described as punk, do you consider it punk poetry? Jessie: My initial response is “not at all” because I’m definitely not cool enough to write anything that could remotely be considered punk. But when I think of the various characteristics of punk—a DIY aesthetic, a dislike of rules and “the establishment,” a hard edge, general dissent—you could call it punk in those ways. (And by DIY I mean DIY in the sense that I think many poets on the fringes are DIY unless we’re the ones who are getting poems in the “big” journals and getting books with mainstream presses. Or maybe those poets feel just as DIY as I do…I don’t know, honestly.) I don’t think my work will ever be mainstream or even anything that appeals to a wide range of people. I’m okay with that now and maybe even proud of it. It took me a long time, about seven or eight years or so, to find an audience for what I do, but that didn’t really prompt me to make my writing any less weird. There’s definitely a freedom in poetry, I think, an art for art’s sake-ness. I always figured I wouldn’t be able to make a living off of it no matter what I did, so there was no use trying to please anyone or anything and I might as well just do what I wanted with my poems. So I have. It’s really the freest place in my life, the little worlds I create and control. AHC: A lot of references to pre-code Hollywood show up in your work, do you see a similarity in that flapper, pre-code era and the era of punk? In the sense of confident, rebellious women who smoked, drank, cursed, refused to marry, fought with men and sometimes even knocked them out with a punch to the face, aka Clara Bow? What is the draw to pre-code Hollywood for you? Jessie: I’d never really thought of a connection between flappers and punks, but now that you bring it up, I can see it. My interest in pre-code Hollywood started as kind of a hobby in while I was working on my Ph.D. Grad school was rough in some ways, and I had a lot of trouble sleeping, and for one reason or another I started watching Turner Classic Movies at night a lot, starting in 2007 or so. Three of the first films that stand out in my mind as really piquing my interest and informing my aesthetic are Baby Face and Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Rain with Joan Crawford. And then I started checking books out of the University of Tennessee Library, histories of the pre-code era and biographies of the stars, and reading them all and working what I was reading and seeing into my poems. So, what started out as a way to cope and escape and get my mind off my “real work” actually became the foundations of my first full-length book of poems, Invisible Mink. I’m cursed that way. I can’t keep a hobby. As for why I am drawn to the era, there are superficial reasons—I love the lush star-making glamor of MGM contrasted with the urban grit of Warner Brothers—and also, more importantly, this was a rare time in popular culture when women’s stories consistently mattered and women were portrayed as able to use their “feminine wiles” to make it in a man’s world by using men’s own weaknesses against them. I realize of course that the pre-code era was far from ideal—this time period was terribly patriarchal and terribly whitewashed and a lot of the women who were ballsy on screen (like Clara Bow) were exploited off screen—but the aspects of the era that were exciting and progressive continue to intrigue me. AHC: Evocative southern imagery figures heavily as well in your poems, did you grow up in the south and how much does that environment work its way into your books? Jessie: Well, I grew up in Weirton, WV, which is a steel town just west of Pittsburgh, PA, so I really wouldn’t consider it the south. And now I live only about 18 miles south of where I grew up, in Bethany, WV. I did live for six years in Knoxville, Tennessee while earning my Ph.D. and then doing a post-doc year, so that was pretty southern. I don’t think it’s so much the south as just the woods….thick vegetation and a predilection for the damp, which, within my imagination, feels gothic. Where I live feels very cloudy and heavy and dark a lot of the time. AHC: Your poems are also poignantly political yet incredibly funny as well, there are moments where one is laughing while reading and then a punch comes, that aha moment, how do you balance all of those elements and decide which direction a poem is going to go in? Are there one's where you say "okay, no humor here" and others where you feel compelled to add a bit of biting, smart comedy? Thank you for saying that. I think my poems are kind of funny and I’m kind of funny, but I rarely get the sense many others do, at least not in my day-to-day life. I have a pretty dry, dark sense of humor, and most people think I’m being sarcastic when I’m not and vice versa. It can be frustrating. And a lot of times at readings I’ll read a line that I think is darkly or absurdly comic and everyone is like “….” Maybe they don’t know if they should laugh, but they probably just don’t think it’s funny. As for whether or not I strive to create an emotional balance in my work, I don’t. I read people really badly. I put people off a lot without even trying, so I think it would be a disaster to try to deliberately elicit a specific emotion from an invisible reader. I just try to make the poem “work” within its own world or sort of the web of poems it’s a part of, because I’m usually working on a network of several poems at one time. AHC: What books or poets were you reading as you wrote the poems that are now The Shaky Phase? Jessie: When I was writing the first section, I was reading Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff. When I was writing the second section, mostly in Paris, I was rereading Lolita and also reading Dark Places and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. When I was writing the middle section in New Mexico, I was reading YA books by Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak and Wintergirls, although I rarely read YA. While writing sections four and five, I was reading Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini and Mother Was a Tragic Girl, Marisa Crawford’s The Haunted House, and the wonderful Gurlesque anthology, edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg. I was also rereading Orange Crush by Simone Muench and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn throughout all of this (I love those books!). Dickinson, Sexton, and Plath are always there as well. It’s funny that I named a lot of fiction because, besides poetry, I read mostly history, biographies, and true crime. I’m always reading individual poems daily, online and in journals, and just picking up books around my house and reading poems here and there. AHC: If your poems were made into a movie, who would be the director? Jessie: I used to have people tell me my poems were Lynchian but I haven’t heard that in forever, so I won’t say David Lynch. I’d say a cross between Ernst Lubitsch and Stanley Kubrick. Blood and champagne. AHC: Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer to write in silence? Jessie: I used to always listen to music and now I never do. I don’t know why. AHC: Do you have any words of advice for poets out there struggling or doubting the work, the journey, the process? What are the kinds of things you tell yourself when you become blocked or have doubts about what you're creating? Jessie: I’m probably not the best person to ask this, because I am a really negative person with a lot of hang-ups about what I do. I’ve never been good at positive self-talk (see, there’s that negativity!) and pretty much always feel like I suck and that I’m never doing enough for my art. And when work and other things get in the way of having time to think and process and create, I get really cranky and miserable. I don’t usually get writer’s block…I can always figure out something to write, but sometimes while I’m writing I feel like what I’m writing sucks or that I’m not passionate about what I’m doing or that I’m just writing the same thing over and over. I think the wisest, most useful thing I say to myself is this: Don’t let your emotions about the writing cloud the work itself. Like sometimes I’ll read a draft I felt really happy writing a few days later and it’s not nearly as good as I thought. Other times I’ll read something that I felt absolutely miserable writing, and it’s quite good. Also, if the business side of it isn’t your forte, force yourself. Force yourself to submit; always have the same poems out at least two places; send them right back out when they get turned down; force yourself to read at open mics and take advantage of opportunities to get your work heard and read that might make you uncomfortable. No matter what, just keep getting your art out there. --------- *Pre-order Jessie's book from Stalking Horse Press here: stalkinghorsepress.com/product/the-shaky-phase-poems-by-jessie-janeshek/ Visit Jessie's website for poems, reviews, interviews and more info here: www.jessiejaneshek.net/
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