Several years ago, I reached out to Jane to offer my admiration for a poem she had written. Though we didn’t know each other, she sent a warm response. Now with the publication of her first collection, I marvel, as does poet Catherine Pierce, “…at the generosity, grace, and selfawareness of these poems, and at the gorgeous play of their language.” In the conversation that follows, Zwart reflects not only on the “strange and sudden and bounded clarity” that poetry can bring to our unknowingness, but also on the ways she, and contemporary poets she admires, write toward, or against, God.
W.J. Herbert: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me and congratulations on the collection, Jane! Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is a work of dazzling complexity, inviting the reader, with compassion and generosity, to join the speaker in her meditations. “I am letting what my son knows of time / climb and turn a laddered wheel in my mind. / I am letting the river run the mill that changes / one kind of unknowing into another.” How difficult was it to integrate this unknowingness into poems, most of which ultimately embrace the speaker’s sense of wonder? Did you sometimes find yourself veering too far in one direction or the other?
Jane Zwart: Thank you so much for your time; you’ve been so generous to me and to my poems, and to talk with you is sure to be all joy—beginning with this question about unknowing. And I’ll start by saying that I hope you’re right that most of the poems in Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best are long on wonder because wonder seems to me the most fitting response to so many things: to herons and bananas and fireworks and jump shots, let alone to people--and, of people, maybe kids most of all. At the very least, it’s true that my own kids, as the lines you quoted hint, move me from wonder to unknowing with special efficiency. I’m thinking, for instance, about when my son was a kindergartener and somehow under the impression that there were two earths, the one we live on (the patchwork of playgrounds and grocery stores and front porches he knew) and the one that’s a whole planet. The front edge to a revelation like that, to entertaining a notion like that--even secondhand--is wonder. But the unknowing follows pretty quickly. After all, if there are two earths in my son’s cosmology, what else is in there? Well, the truth is I don’t know the half of what hypotheses and geographies and worries are bumping around inside him. But it’s not just my son, not just kids. A kid, sure, is uniquely willing to hazard the wild, gorgeous guess. Even so, we’re all moving through the world the same way kids are, at least to some extent. We’re all full of misperceptions, some of which are funny and some of which are tragic, any number of which are beautiful. We’re all full of imagination, of bonus worlds. Which is exactly the kind of unknowingness I could lose my way in. So, yes, keeping your bearings when you’re writing from--and to--wonder is tricky. Because it’s easy to find the poem that’s only ooh-ing and ah-ing, that has no shape or rigor and angle, and that’s rarely enough for a poem to do. Then again, I could lose my way by imposing too much on what I don’t know, by taking the exit from unknowing to cleverness for its own sake, which is, I think, a betrayal of mystery. Rather than what strikes me as the right, the one back into an unpossessive wonder.
WJH: The collection’s opening “Poem with a Hole in It” sets a tone of humility, suggesting comprehension of the speaker’s intents and ideas will be communicated to the reader, as if via a child’s game. “But I am threading two tin cans’ / punctured ends that you might know me yet.” Yet the poem is deceptively complex, its second line referring to the entire enterprise of poetry as one rife with holes. Subsequent couplets suggest that the collection’s poems will not only hone our vision, as in “the circle / cut in a kaleidoscope so we can see colors petaling,” but will also point to the mysteries between us, as in “We are on different sides / of this eyelet.” How did these complexities affect the organization of the collection?
JZ: Well, you already know, because you’ve helped me think about sequencing poems, that I find organizing a manuscript difficult. Not un-fun, but difficult. Because as with the songs on a mixtape--or, for readers who aren’t old, songs on a playlist--you want the poems in a collection to sketch a trajectory. You want their order to imply a plot or follow some logic. At the same time, you don’t want to just bunch like with like. You want variety, a few subplots. The first part of Oddest & Oldest is, more or less, plotted autobiographically, which is what made “Poem with a Hole in It” seem right as an opening, given that there’s a child in it, with her tin-can phone and kaleidoscope, and an adult in it, with her wayward typewriter. Then, too, it felt right to lead into the first part of the book with the wish in the last line: “that you might know me yet.” Of course, there are holes in that knowing, some gaps in the autobiography that the first part of the book unfolds. That is, whatever there is of self-disclosure in the book, it’s partial, as the limits of our vision (of ourselves, or each other) are always partial. On the other hand, as you say, there are holes that hone our vision if we put our eyes up to their apertures, and I think the second part of the book is organized around that phenomenon of strange and sudden and bounded clarity, the kind that comes to us in art, in the framed moment singled out despite the rush of time. Finally, the third section begins by, as “Poem with a Hole in It” would have it, “your pupil guzzling / data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light.” It lets in more of the world before turning to reckon with heartbreak, maybe with the question of how to accommodate, all at once, both the world’s heartbreak and one’s own.
WJH: Do you think the arc of the collection attempts to transform the speaker’s fears for herself, for others, and for our planet into a view of the world both she and her readers can accept, albeit reluctantly? I’m thinking of an early poem “My childhood was not an agony,” in which the speaker contemplates her parents’ possible car crash, in contrast to a later poem “Harvest in the Dark,” in which after agonizing over famine, bees dying, and our own mortality, the speaker tells us:
“…between what is diametrical there is a field
of rhubarb growing so fervently that it creaks,
and to preserve its sweetness, farmers harvest it
in nothing harsher than moon- or candlelight.”
JZ: I love that you paired those poems, which I hadn’t thought of as close kin, though of course they are; they’re both vigils, which maybe a lot of my poems are. I also love the idea that a poem might transform a fear into reluctant acceptance. For me, poems have done that, both poems I’ve read and some I’ve written. Though I’ll admit that I find “acceptance” a difficult word. Because it’s not that I’m saying “okay” to the substance of my fears, just as I don’t think that, when it comes to grief, we’re saying “okay” to what we’ve lost. In fact, whenever I hear someone talk about acceptance as a stage of grief, I think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Dirge Without Music,” which opens with “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.” I’m with her. I’m not resigned to the loss of my brother, almost 40 years later. And I’m not resigned to what I fear: bees dying, car accidents, school shootings, wars and cancers and tyrannies. My acceptance isn’t resignation to those things, which are an affront to the way that things should be. But I am willing to say “okay” to staying here, to going on with this life where fearful, heartbreaking things happen right alongside the growing of rhubarb and a thousand other sweet things none of us could ever conjure up or deserve.
WJH: Many poems in your collection are infused with compassion and love. I’m particularly fond of the girl at the YMCA who, while everyone else is working up a sweat, “plugs her headphones / into the TV and leans / on the machine, ass against / guardrail, eating Cheetos, / never even shuffling her feet--” The speaker’s beneficence is also evident in the “Used Benison,” in which she borrows the helpless joy of others, concluding “I too have been loved more than makes sense.” Did this attitude take root in you as a child, or did it emerge in adulthood? Do you find yourself still needing to resist the urge toward insularity and self-interest that most of us battle?
JZ: Oh, I’m pretty sure all of us battle self-interest. But maybe I should stick to what I know for sure: I do, and sometimes I lose the battle. From the beginning, though, I’ve been in the company of people intent on resisting self-centeredness. Real people, the people I love most: my parents, my siblings, dear friends, the man I married, the family I married into. And, from the beginning, I’ve been surrounded by books. I’m not saying that reading is a failsafe route to compassion, of course, but it’s terrific practice. In story, after all, we see more deeply into strangers’ reasons--their pasts, their thoughts, their hearts--than we get to see of strangers’ reasons in ordinary life. If nothing else, then, to read narrative can remind us that everyone has reasons, which is not to say that all reasons are good; it reminds us that no one is simple, that everyone has to contend with a whole swarm of wants and needs and fears and delights. As for poems, they keep me tender. Because it makes me less lonely, across all the particulars of love as it manifests in the world and in words, poetry makes me trust my heart enough to open it. There’s also this: the story that means the most to me is about the love of God. In short, I believe that all of us “have been loved more than makes sense,” and that we are and that we will be loved, and in the light of that, the only conclusion I can come to is that none of what really matters is pie—none of it’s a zero-sum game, which makes it logical to be prodigal with love. To put it otherwise: if there’s an inexhaustible love at work in the universe, what could it possibly profit for me to be stingy with mine?
WJH: Speaking of God, many poems here attempt to reconcile a desire for personal agency with a resilient belief in God. I’m thinking of the swimmer in “Aphelion” whom the speaker hopes will realize he needs to turn in time to avoid catastrophe. By contrast, the mother in “Washing the Corpses” bows to her limited agency, praying “God, spare these corpses of an hour. / I have washed them just back into mortality.” How close are these poems to your own sense of moving through the world?
JZ: On the one hand, my belief in God makes a better case for my finiteness than anything else could. On the other, even if I didn’t believe in God, I would have a lot of evidence for the limits of my agency, all the way from the beauties I can’t wrestle into poetry to the smallness of any part I’ll ever play in parrying climate change or resisting an authoritarian government. Limited agency is built into the way all of us move through the world. But saying that also presupposes--rightly--that agency is built into the way all of us move through the world. I would never say, of course, that we all have the same amount of agency, and I would never say that there’s no conflict in what occurs when people exercise their agency (or, for that matter, act on their love). In the world we move through, inequality is baked in, so competition is inevitable. But for me, the problem isn’t a belief system where God’s power and knowing, like God’s love, are infinite and mine aren’t. God isn’t the one driving down supply, meting out less agency than we need. The problem is the scarcity we impose on ourselves and each other. That said, I’ll confess that when it comes to mortality, for example, which is the anxiety at the heart of “Washing the Corpses,” I wish for more agency than God has given me. For a lot of us who believe, maybe that’s true: that death is the thing we find hardest not to hold against God.
WJH: Yet in “All My Life I Was a Bride Married to Amazement,” the speaker accepts the inevitability of death, imagining a magical quality to her own last moments:
“I want to see the caterpillar, his whole body
a fat neck, rolling hills and horripilation.
I want to remember how, every time
he dropped from some leaf to my arm,
we appalled each other. I want to remember
how, every time, astonishment
made us the same.”
Can you speak to the way the amazements and mysteries in your poetry become, for you, a demonstration of faith?
JZ: I do think that wonder and mystery are both correlates of a belief in the divine, whether the believer is a poet or not. In any theistic faith, not-knowing is part of the equation, because a human mind is finite and God is omniscient. But faith, by definition, needs some definition. For people of faith only to gesture vaguely in the direction of truth, merely to posit that truths exist—it’s not enough. Whether the words are borrowed or invented for the occasion, it matters for people of faith to confess their faith. Of course, poetry is not the only place that poets who believe can confess their faith. Sometimes a poet’s faith bends their words all but invisibly.
But for some writers who matter immensely to me, it has proven possible—and perhaps indispensable—to write toward God. Or to write against God. To write, anyway, from a keen consciousness of God. I’m thinking here of Amit Majmudar’s “Answers from the Whirlwind,” which takes God to task for human suffering. And I’m thinking of Christian Wiman’s poetry, which so often names God even as it recognizes the impossibility of fitting the divine into the sound and syntax. In the poem, “Every Riven Thing,” for instance, Wiman repeats the nine words “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” in each stanza. But he punctuates them differently; in one iteration, God is an attentive creator; in another, “God goes.” The poem, then, feels like a feat of vorticism, where belief and not-knowing keep swapping places.
There’s also the technique of resorting to metaphor or simile as a means of reconciling certainty and mystery. One of my favorite examples comes from Jane Kenyon, who, along with her cats, gives chase to a bat that “evade[s them] / like the identity of the third person / in the Trinity: the one / who spoke through the prophets, / the one who astounded Mary / by suddenly coming near.” The poem knows it can neither capture nor ignore the Holy Spirit. Which is why—to stay in the orbit of the God she can’t pin down—Kenyon resorts to metaphor.
Maybe that’s what Majmudar and Wiman and Kenyon have in common: writing from a consciousness of God, they’ve somehow managed to yoke daring and humility.
WJH: And speaking of daring and humility, sending out new manuscript can seem like its own exercise in juggling dualities. Can we hope to read another of your wonderful manuscripts soon?
JZ: You’re so kind. I do have another manuscript that I’ve been sending out, and it’s been a finalist in a couple of contests, which feels like an encouragement to stay stubborn. I’m also just starting to send out a “project book”--well, a project chapbook--with a unifying concept. Mostly, though, I just keep courting the poems. Some of them I know almost as soon as I write them are weirdos--poems that, however much I like them, are unlikely to fit in any future collection. The majority, though, feel like they’re from the same extended family, enough to give me hope that I’ll be able to fit them into an album together later. We’ll see. For the moment, it’s hard enough to believe that Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best came to fruition and to figure out what to do all with this gratitude. Including to you: thank you so much for these amazing questions.
W.J. Herbert: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me and congratulations on the collection, Jane! Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best is a work of dazzling complexity, inviting the reader, with compassion and generosity, to join the speaker in her meditations. “I am letting what my son knows of time / climb and turn a laddered wheel in my mind. / I am letting the river run the mill that changes / one kind of unknowing into another.” How difficult was it to integrate this unknowingness into poems, most of which ultimately embrace the speaker’s sense of wonder? Did you sometimes find yourself veering too far in one direction or the other?
Jane Zwart: Thank you so much for your time; you’ve been so generous to me and to my poems, and to talk with you is sure to be all joy—beginning with this question about unknowing. And I’ll start by saying that I hope you’re right that most of the poems in Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best are long on wonder because wonder seems to me the most fitting response to so many things: to herons and bananas and fireworks and jump shots, let alone to people--and, of people, maybe kids most of all. At the very least, it’s true that my own kids, as the lines you quoted hint, move me from wonder to unknowing with special efficiency. I’m thinking, for instance, about when my son was a kindergartener and somehow under the impression that there were two earths, the one we live on (the patchwork of playgrounds and grocery stores and front porches he knew) and the one that’s a whole planet. The front edge to a revelation like that, to entertaining a notion like that--even secondhand--is wonder. But the unknowing follows pretty quickly. After all, if there are two earths in my son’s cosmology, what else is in there? Well, the truth is I don’t know the half of what hypotheses and geographies and worries are bumping around inside him. But it’s not just my son, not just kids. A kid, sure, is uniquely willing to hazard the wild, gorgeous guess. Even so, we’re all moving through the world the same way kids are, at least to some extent. We’re all full of misperceptions, some of which are funny and some of which are tragic, any number of which are beautiful. We’re all full of imagination, of bonus worlds. Which is exactly the kind of unknowingness I could lose my way in. So, yes, keeping your bearings when you’re writing from--and to--wonder is tricky. Because it’s easy to find the poem that’s only ooh-ing and ah-ing, that has no shape or rigor and angle, and that’s rarely enough for a poem to do. Then again, I could lose my way by imposing too much on what I don’t know, by taking the exit from unknowing to cleverness for its own sake, which is, I think, a betrayal of mystery. Rather than what strikes me as the right, the one back into an unpossessive wonder.
WJH: The collection’s opening “Poem with a Hole in It” sets a tone of humility, suggesting comprehension of the speaker’s intents and ideas will be communicated to the reader, as if via a child’s game. “But I am threading two tin cans’ / punctured ends that you might know me yet.” Yet the poem is deceptively complex, its second line referring to the entire enterprise of poetry as one rife with holes. Subsequent couplets suggest that the collection’s poems will not only hone our vision, as in “the circle / cut in a kaleidoscope so we can see colors petaling,” but will also point to the mysteries between us, as in “We are on different sides / of this eyelet.” How did these complexities affect the organization of the collection?
JZ: Well, you already know, because you’ve helped me think about sequencing poems, that I find organizing a manuscript difficult. Not un-fun, but difficult. Because as with the songs on a mixtape--or, for readers who aren’t old, songs on a playlist--you want the poems in a collection to sketch a trajectory. You want their order to imply a plot or follow some logic. At the same time, you don’t want to just bunch like with like. You want variety, a few subplots. The first part of Oddest & Oldest is, more or less, plotted autobiographically, which is what made “Poem with a Hole in It” seem right as an opening, given that there’s a child in it, with her tin-can phone and kaleidoscope, and an adult in it, with her wayward typewriter. Then, too, it felt right to lead into the first part of the book with the wish in the last line: “that you might know me yet.” Of course, there are holes in that knowing, some gaps in the autobiography that the first part of the book unfolds. That is, whatever there is of self-disclosure in the book, it’s partial, as the limits of our vision (of ourselves, or each other) are always partial. On the other hand, as you say, there are holes that hone our vision if we put our eyes up to their apertures, and I think the second part of the book is organized around that phenomenon of strange and sudden and bounded clarity, the kind that comes to us in art, in the framed moment singled out despite the rush of time. Finally, the third section begins by, as “Poem with a Hole in It” would have it, “your pupil guzzling / data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light.” It lets in more of the world before turning to reckon with heartbreak, maybe with the question of how to accommodate, all at once, both the world’s heartbreak and one’s own.
WJH: Do you think the arc of the collection attempts to transform the speaker’s fears for herself, for others, and for our planet into a view of the world both she and her readers can accept, albeit reluctantly? I’m thinking of an early poem “My childhood was not an agony,” in which the speaker contemplates her parents’ possible car crash, in contrast to a later poem “Harvest in the Dark,” in which after agonizing over famine, bees dying, and our own mortality, the speaker tells us:
“…between what is diametrical there is a field
of rhubarb growing so fervently that it creaks,
and to preserve its sweetness, farmers harvest it
in nothing harsher than moon- or candlelight.”
JZ: I love that you paired those poems, which I hadn’t thought of as close kin, though of course they are; they’re both vigils, which maybe a lot of my poems are. I also love the idea that a poem might transform a fear into reluctant acceptance. For me, poems have done that, both poems I’ve read and some I’ve written. Though I’ll admit that I find “acceptance” a difficult word. Because it’s not that I’m saying “okay” to the substance of my fears, just as I don’t think that, when it comes to grief, we’re saying “okay” to what we’ve lost. In fact, whenever I hear someone talk about acceptance as a stage of grief, I think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Dirge Without Music,” which opens with “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.” I’m with her. I’m not resigned to the loss of my brother, almost 40 years later. And I’m not resigned to what I fear: bees dying, car accidents, school shootings, wars and cancers and tyrannies. My acceptance isn’t resignation to those things, which are an affront to the way that things should be. But I am willing to say “okay” to staying here, to going on with this life where fearful, heartbreaking things happen right alongside the growing of rhubarb and a thousand other sweet things none of us could ever conjure up or deserve.
WJH: Many poems in your collection are infused with compassion and love. I’m particularly fond of the girl at the YMCA who, while everyone else is working up a sweat, “plugs her headphones / into the TV and leans / on the machine, ass against / guardrail, eating Cheetos, / never even shuffling her feet--” The speaker’s beneficence is also evident in the “Used Benison,” in which she borrows the helpless joy of others, concluding “I too have been loved more than makes sense.” Did this attitude take root in you as a child, or did it emerge in adulthood? Do you find yourself still needing to resist the urge toward insularity and self-interest that most of us battle?
JZ: Oh, I’m pretty sure all of us battle self-interest. But maybe I should stick to what I know for sure: I do, and sometimes I lose the battle. From the beginning, though, I’ve been in the company of people intent on resisting self-centeredness. Real people, the people I love most: my parents, my siblings, dear friends, the man I married, the family I married into. And, from the beginning, I’ve been surrounded by books. I’m not saying that reading is a failsafe route to compassion, of course, but it’s terrific practice. In story, after all, we see more deeply into strangers’ reasons--their pasts, their thoughts, their hearts--than we get to see of strangers’ reasons in ordinary life. If nothing else, then, to read narrative can remind us that everyone has reasons, which is not to say that all reasons are good; it reminds us that no one is simple, that everyone has to contend with a whole swarm of wants and needs and fears and delights. As for poems, they keep me tender. Because it makes me less lonely, across all the particulars of love as it manifests in the world and in words, poetry makes me trust my heart enough to open it. There’s also this: the story that means the most to me is about the love of God. In short, I believe that all of us “have been loved more than makes sense,” and that we are and that we will be loved, and in the light of that, the only conclusion I can come to is that none of what really matters is pie—none of it’s a zero-sum game, which makes it logical to be prodigal with love. To put it otherwise: if there’s an inexhaustible love at work in the universe, what could it possibly profit for me to be stingy with mine?
WJH: Speaking of God, many poems here attempt to reconcile a desire for personal agency with a resilient belief in God. I’m thinking of the swimmer in “Aphelion” whom the speaker hopes will realize he needs to turn in time to avoid catastrophe. By contrast, the mother in “Washing the Corpses” bows to her limited agency, praying “God, spare these corpses of an hour. / I have washed them just back into mortality.” How close are these poems to your own sense of moving through the world?
JZ: On the one hand, my belief in God makes a better case for my finiteness than anything else could. On the other, even if I didn’t believe in God, I would have a lot of evidence for the limits of my agency, all the way from the beauties I can’t wrestle into poetry to the smallness of any part I’ll ever play in parrying climate change or resisting an authoritarian government. Limited agency is built into the way all of us move through the world. But saying that also presupposes--rightly--that agency is built into the way all of us move through the world. I would never say, of course, that we all have the same amount of agency, and I would never say that there’s no conflict in what occurs when people exercise their agency (or, for that matter, act on their love). In the world we move through, inequality is baked in, so competition is inevitable. But for me, the problem isn’t a belief system where God’s power and knowing, like God’s love, are infinite and mine aren’t. God isn’t the one driving down supply, meting out less agency than we need. The problem is the scarcity we impose on ourselves and each other. That said, I’ll confess that when it comes to mortality, for example, which is the anxiety at the heart of “Washing the Corpses,” I wish for more agency than God has given me. For a lot of us who believe, maybe that’s true: that death is the thing we find hardest not to hold against God.
WJH: Yet in “All My Life I Was a Bride Married to Amazement,” the speaker accepts the inevitability of death, imagining a magical quality to her own last moments:
“I want to see the caterpillar, his whole body
a fat neck, rolling hills and horripilation.
I want to remember how, every time
he dropped from some leaf to my arm,
we appalled each other. I want to remember
how, every time, astonishment
made us the same.”
Can you speak to the way the amazements and mysteries in your poetry become, for you, a demonstration of faith?
JZ: I do think that wonder and mystery are both correlates of a belief in the divine, whether the believer is a poet or not. In any theistic faith, not-knowing is part of the equation, because a human mind is finite and God is omniscient. But faith, by definition, needs some definition. For people of faith only to gesture vaguely in the direction of truth, merely to posit that truths exist—it’s not enough. Whether the words are borrowed or invented for the occasion, it matters for people of faith to confess their faith. Of course, poetry is not the only place that poets who believe can confess their faith. Sometimes a poet’s faith bends their words all but invisibly.
But for some writers who matter immensely to me, it has proven possible—and perhaps indispensable—to write toward God. Or to write against God. To write, anyway, from a keen consciousness of God. I’m thinking here of Amit Majmudar’s “Answers from the Whirlwind,” which takes God to task for human suffering. And I’m thinking of Christian Wiman’s poetry, which so often names God even as it recognizes the impossibility of fitting the divine into the sound and syntax. In the poem, “Every Riven Thing,” for instance, Wiman repeats the nine words “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” in each stanza. But he punctuates them differently; in one iteration, God is an attentive creator; in another, “God goes.” The poem, then, feels like a feat of vorticism, where belief and not-knowing keep swapping places.
There’s also the technique of resorting to metaphor or simile as a means of reconciling certainty and mystery. One of my favorite examples comes from Jane Kenyon, who, along with her cats, gives chase to a bat that “evade[s them] / like the identity of the third person / in the Trinity: the one / who spoke through the prophets, / the one who astounded Mary / by suddenly coming near.” The poem knows it can neither capture nor ignore the Holy Spirit. Which is why—to stay in the orbit of the God she can’t pin down—Kenyon resorts to metaphor.
Maybe that’s what Majmudar and Wiman and Kenyon have in common: writing from a consciousness of God, they’ve somehow managed to yoke daring and humility.
WJH: And speaking of daring and humility, sending out new manuscript can seem like its own exercise in juggling dualities. Can we hope to read another of your wonderful manuscripts soon?
JZ: You’re so kind. I do have another manuscript that I’ve been sending out, and it’s been a finalist in a couple of contests, which feels like an encouragement to stay stubborn. I’m also just starting to send out a “project book”--well, a project chapbook--with a unifying concept. Mostly, though, I just keep courting the poems. Some of them I know almost as soon as I write them are weirdos--poems that, however much I like them, are unlikely to fit in any future collection. The majority, though, feel like they’re from the same extended family, enough to give me hope that I’ll be able to fit them into an album together later. We’ll see. For the moment, it’s hard enough to believe that Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best came to fruition and to figure out what to do all with this gratitude. Including to you: thank you so much for these amazing questions.
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Jane Zwart’s debut poetry collection is Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best (Orison Books, 2026). She teaches literature and writing at Calvin University and serves as co-editor for book reviews at Plume. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review.
W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen, (Beacon Press, 2021) was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded a 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2022 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry, Herbert’s work also appears in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry 2017 & 2024, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Maine. |
Jane Zwart, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best (Orison Books, 2026)
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