Kercheval: I think I’m very funny in real life. If someone criticizes my writing, they sometimes say, “I don’t see that humor is appropriate in this situation.” I think “Well, sorry.” To me, tragedy and comedy go together, or at least ironic humor or observation. I think that’s pretty consistent through all of my writing. Kercheval: I use humor as a way of tolerating the world, of cutting the sorrow. Do you use humor to make difficult topics more bearable? Rumpus: In this book, that voice is often funny. It’s sort of that voice where you’re saying in your head what you’re not saying out loud. Kercheval: I think it’s some distilled version of me talking, probably a less polite version. I think that’s true of my writing, in general, but this book in particular. I hear the voice and I just let the voice speak in these poems. This is not a COVID-19 collection by any means, but I was putting it together during the height of COVID-19, when it felt like it wasn’t a time to whisper: it was a time to speak directly. Poetry was a place where you could do things you don’t exactly do in prose. The Rumpus: “I Want to Tell You,” the titular poem, starts us off with a voice that’s quite direct and a no-nonsense attitude: “I am talking about poetry / I am talking about breaking out of the neat little box of humorous lines / rising to a zing of cosmic meaning at the end.” Is poetry that for you? Breaking out of a neat little box It was my great pleasure to speak with Jesse Lee Kercheval on Zoom about her humor, her “voicey-voice,” the urgency and arcs in her work, and having the courage to step into places that scare her. Her essays and illustrated essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, the Sewanee Review, New Letters, the New Ohio Review, On the Sea Wall, Blackbird, and the Los Angeles Review. She is the author of three prize-winning collections of short fiction, several translations (she specializes in Uruguayan poetry), and the Alex Award–winning memoir Space: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Kercheval has also authored several chapbooks, including Film History as Train Wreck, winner of the 2006 Poetry Chapbook Competition (designed, printed and bound by Barbara Henry). Among the others are America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Press, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize the Spanish language collection Extranjera/Stranger (Editorial Yaugarú, 2015) Cinema Muto (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Award Dog Angel (Pitt Poetry Series, 2004) and World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 1999). My first exposure to her poetry is this, her sixth collection. She knows we must, and will, learn the hard way, even as she wishes it could be otherwise.Ī long-time fan of Kercheval’s essays, fiction, and, most recently, her visual art, I loved I Want to Tell You. “I know / I know / what I am asking is impossible,” she writes. As Kercheval gains greater understanding through the poem’s explorations, her voice softens. The reader is then eased into an engaging, moving, and often humorous, emotional arc. The collection begins with an urgent tone, as Kercheval’s poems ask critical, high-stakes questions. Kercheval’s “voicey voice” (her words) presses us to learn from her mistakes so we can be spared from repeating them in our own lives.
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