Author Interview with Jay Deshpande – The Umbrian Sonnets

By Damien Roos

[PANK] Team Member Damien Roos spoke with Jay Deshpande about his newly released little book, The Umbrian Sonnets.

Jay Deshpande’s body of work includes the poetry collection Love the Stranger (YesYes Books), the chapbook The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books), as well as publications in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is an instructor for Brooklyn Poets and has taught creative writing at Columbia, Stanford, Rutgers and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His new chapbook The Umbrian Sonnets, recently released by PANK Books,examines the tension between beauty and suffering, begging the question as to whether the beautifying impulse of the poet can be ethically useful, or whether it comes at the cost of effacing unbeautiful things.

Damien Roos: The series of sonnets was inspired by your 2018 Summer Fellowship in Umbria, a region in central Italy. Did you know going in that you would be writing sonnets specifically? What drew you to this form?

Jay Deshpande: No, I really didn’t know I would be working on this when I was there. I think the incredible privilege and good fortune of getting this fellowship meant that I would have the opportunity to consider different possibilities, different projects I might work on. I was wrestling with my second full-length manuscript, trying to understand the trajectory of where I was in my writing. I found myself very inspired and thinking about writing a lot of different things, and then also feeling the frustration that comes from an embarrassment of riches.

There was so much I wanted to work on it was difficult to choose. I felt the challenge of: what is the necessary work right now? That persisted for a couple of weeks while I was settling into how I would work there. But then there were a couple of influences. One was learning more about what was happening at the US-Mexico border in terms of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, and registering the sheer extravagance of that brutality; I wanted to be able to speak to this. Additionally, I was engaging with work by poets who have tried to speak in witness, or in conversation with the “poetry of witness” before, like Carolyn Forché and Solmaz Sharif.

I’ve always been attracted to the sonnet, especially to what an American sonnet can be and how one can manipulate the conventions of the form. I came up reading Denis Johnson’s sonnets in The Incognito Lounge in particular, which are very formal in their way, but also do not announce themselves as sonnets in the way that some poems might. Maybe not even as much as my own do.

DR: There is a strict adherence to guidelines when you are writing a sonnet. Do you find that useful or challenging?

JD: I find that the sonnet provides just enough constraint—at least in the way that I think about the form, which is mostly the compulsions of 14 lines. The use of blank verse or, like, a 10-syllable structure with 5 beats, is an underlying rhythm I can play with, manipulate, toss out when I need to, but have as a kind of heartbeat. These are the formal constraints that I adhere to. I also think that the rhetoric of the sonnet is really important. I have written a lot of sonnets that are introspective poems, or love poems, or erotic poems. I am interested in how the form automatically, historically goes to those modes; but it also is an argumentative form. The structure of the sonnet signals this: you move from point A to point Z in 14 lines, and the turn happens at the volta, even if you adjust where the volta occurs. It demands a kind of rhetorical development. One of the things that really excited me with this project was exploring what would happen if I tried to build an argument across not just one sonnet, but across the sequence.

DR: Yes. I particularly enjoyed the turn in Sonnet 6, in which you followed your description of an olive grove with the statement, “I think of olive trees as sacred beings”. As far as your writing process is concerned, what was it like during this fellowship, and how did that differ from how you would write at home?

JD: It was very different. At home, I usually have the mixed blessing of distraction. But during the Civitella Ranieri fellowship I was very immersed in my process, so that any time I hit a wall in the writing, I just spent those hours hating myself until I could find my way back in. But at the same time, writing this sequence gave me a certain technical satisfaction that I hadn’t known before in composing. I think it was because I was trying to manipulate argument and blank verse both at once. It made the poems feel more like puzzles to play with—how to figure out ordering, how to place the right images at the right times, and then how to just fit them into sentences. It all let me use the more analytical part of my brain. I get to use that part of my brain when I teach. I do not go there as often when I write.

DR: Many of the poems reference the sun, such as Sonnet 2, in which you write, “The daylight here has history inside it. / It dilates. It looks in cracked embrasures, / evaluating dust. It’s old enough / to wonder why I pause from writing poems / to watch sun slowly fill the garden.” Still, other poems reference the sun metaphorically such as Sonnet 8 in which you describe a patch of sunflowers as a, “hillside of small dawns”. Could you talk about the significance of sunshine? What does it mean to the work?

JD: I think the sun represented certain things to me subconsciously in this context. But I also think this is one of the challenges I face when I draw on conventional poetic diction: sun, trees, bodies of water, etc. At a certain point, some tropes become overly familiar; then it’s a matter of how you imbue the objects with fresh meaning so that we see them vividly again. What is it in the mentality of the voice that needs to seek out a tree, or the ocean, at certain moments in the poem? I have noticed it definitely happens with “sun” a lot in these poems. It also happens with the word “air.” In revising the sequence I had to stop and consider, what am I using air for here? When is it specifically about the texture or feeling of what I am inhaling, and when is it gesturing towards something capacious and vague? And what can I do instead of that?

I think the sun probably has such a role in these poems because it was omnipresent in the experience of being at Civitella. There was so much sunlight in July in Umbria. Every morning I would wake up and go running in the hills. I would sweat, and the heat was oppressive, and then I would go back into this dark castle that had been protecting people from the sun for hundreds of years. So I think that this sort of interplay between light and dark, on a very elemental level, was a big part of my sensory experience. But there is also something important about the sun and scrutiny, about what we can and cannot look at, about what is enlightened. I think that that was unconsciously at play throughout the work, too.

DR: It becomes clear early on that the poet is suffering a sort of push-pull internally. He is simultaneously experiencing a beautiful land while also beset by the world’s cruelties, in this case Trump’s mandate to separate illegal immigrant children from their families at the US-Mexico border. I would like to hear more about the genesis of this theme. For example, was there a specific moment you recall when the beauty around you really contrasted starkly with the human cruelty of the broader world?

JD:  I wish I could say there was. I don’t think there was a specific moment like that. I think that for me it was more like a crystallization of a problem I have had for a while. I am very drawn towards the beautiful and, I mean, we all desire beauty. We like to look at a work of art that is beautiful or a landscape that’s beautiful.

I find that often in encountering great beauty I end up being turned back on myself and my own desire to stay in it. In a kind of venal way, like, I just want more of it. I’ll think to myself, “This is great. But what would I have to do to be forever in the presence of this, the sunlight on a field of sunflowers or this joyful moment with my friends?”And it is that selfishness in the encounter with beauty that was turning me more and more towards the dark underside of a fetishizing impulse.

So, while reading the New York Times every day while sitting in a castle in Umbria, I felt even farther than my many interacting privileges already distance me from the brutalities of American foreign and domestic policy, the ways that our society is built on racism and oppression.I wasn’t consciously thinking about how this could enter these poems. But I was thinking about the responsibility of the poet. Not on the page but in terms of paying attention, of looking and seeing. Reading the news, which feels so quotidian sometimes, is something I have often had the privilege not to do every day. I could avoid it, I could just stay in my little writing world. But I found myself asking what the news actually was, what the actual facts were. In all of that, I felt like there was a duty to do a kind of research. Reading the news is the poet’s research, investigating things, looking for more information.

DR: The order of these sonnets is not chronological. This makes for a kind of dreamlike, pleasantly disorienting experience when reading the collection in full, with the reader sometimes unsure at what point in the fellowship the poet is writing from. How did you decide to order these?

JD: I think “pleasantly disorienting” is a wonderful way to put it. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out the order because it was a sort of puzzle. Not having generally written in extended sequences before, I have not had to do that same kind of work with manuscripts. So I found I had certain ideas. In my initial push I wrote, I think, something like 10 or 12 sonnets, just back to back in one day, initial drafts motivated by frustrations, by a search for inspiration, by the images around me, etcetera. Basically, nothing from that work remains in this collection. It was quickly thrown out. But it gave me some sort of spine to work with, and then I could remove vertebrae and insert new vertebrae as needed. I wanted to articulate some values and priorities early on. I wanted to keep making recourse to the same images, to echo the way an obsession can persist. When something is obsessing us, the idea feels continual in the mind, but what makes it feel continual is that you leave it for a little while and then you come back, and that demon is still there.

DR: In Sonnet 5, you compare nature’s cruelties to the cruelty of the current administration, making the point that focus must be placed on the latter, presumably because it is more constructive. One choice that really stuck out to me was your characterization of America when you state, “Back home late empire dreams /  of walls, demeans women, holds black men down.” I wonder, do you harbor any optimism that this country can be salvaged or do you feel, as some experts have suggested, that we are simply another example of an empire in decline with little to be done about it?

JD: I do very much think that the American empire is in decline, as it should be. There are so many elements that have brought us here: a late-capitalist materialism, a misunderstanding of human rights, a misunderstanding of love and of self-love, of property and of protectionism. A lot of these impulses are moving in the right direction, which is the direction of their own annihilation.

But also, hearing you read back those lines makes me think about the differentiation the poem makes between the natural world and human-made empire. Which is useful in an argument, but it is also a false dichotomy. Often when we aestheticize something in the natural world, we create this incorrect distinction: that is perfect, and we are not. So if we recognize that we are part of the world, then we can see it is our own nature that we are grappling with in various ways.

DR: With that being said, what role do you think ethics should play in art?

JD: I frankly change my mind on this all the time. But I think it is less that ethics should or should not play a specific role in art, and more about the dialectic: what matters is grappling with the question of politics. I think there’s enormous value in the dialogue between ethics and art. Can art empower us, speak to the angels of our better nature, and move us in positive ways? Yes. Can it mobilize us toward specific political action? Generally, the answer seems to be no, but I think that it is much more complex than that, too. The real power of art is in its access to the radical imagination: how art can move us to see differently, to empathize differently. That is not ethical action in and of itself, but it is essential to our growth and development.

DR: In Sonnet 14, which is perhaps my favorite, you write, “If it happened, was beautiful, I want / to preserve it. The impetus is always / my fear of death. I make things to make things / stay.” As an American in a castle in Umbria, a palpably ancient setting, did the weight of mortality feel heavier to you?

JD: That’s an interesting question. I do not think I felt more conscious than usual of mortality. But I think I felt more conscious of time, and I can describe that on a couple of scales at once. I could feel the days passing and how I was using my daylight hours. I knew I was only going to be at the residency for five or six weeks. So, what was I making of that time?

Then, my larger sense of time was also affected by what was happening in my personal life. The day I left New York for Umbria was also the day that I proposed to my now wife. So another interesting side of my experience was about engagement. And what does it mean to be engaged? What does it mean to make this contract? And what does that mean for me in relation to our society across thousands of years?

And finally, I was thinking about political engagement and what that could mean. So overall, I found myself asking how these forms of engagement in a moment related to the passage of time and who I was becoming. I found that all these elements of my life in that period created a certain sense of time, even if I was not thinking about my own death. In a word, I was thinking about change.

DR: Congratulations on the engagement and the marriage. That is definitely an interesting side note. I feel like marriage did the same thing for me. It definitely changed my perspective of time and made me consider time and eternity a little bit differently.

JD: There are so few moments in modern adulthood that can do that, at least for men. I think there are very few markers within that vast expanse of one’s 20’s and 30’s.

DR: The final sonnet is unnumbered. I wonder if you could speak on the decision to leave it unnumbered.

JD: Yes. I like the idea of how that can work in a sonnet sequence. I was thinking particularly of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems. I always loved how there was one unnumbered poem in that sequence, and the notion that such a poem can disrupt the chronology and whatever ideas of development we have. Because poems are not meant to develop novelistically, where we have a beginning and we have an end and a linear progression between them. I like the idea that if there is an unnumbered hovering poem, it can sort of circulate through them all and can show another cast of mind that is happening at the same time as these.

DR: Perfect. What are you working on now?

JD: A few things. Right now, I am working a lot on translating Georges Henein, an Egyptian Surrealist poet who wrote in French. I’ve been tackling Henein’s poems for about a decade now. I am also working on my second full-length manuscript, which requires reconciling the many poems I’ve written since Love the Stranger was published in 2015. Additionally, I’ve been working on a few personal essays and craft lectures that I’m hoping to complete in the new year.