CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Jeffrey Bean and Em Bober

May 2, 2023

Writer Em Bober talked with Jeffrey Bean about his new chapbook Ella’s Plan which was the winner of the 2022 Chapbook Contest, hosted by The Poets Corner and Maine Media, and selected by poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Jeffrey Bean:  

So fun to talk to you, and it's kind of a double whammy. I get to catch up with you and do the interview, so I'm glad that you thought of it like that.  

Em Bober:  

Yeah. And as soon as I saw you posting on Facebook about Ella’s Plan, I had to go pick it up. And I'm so glad I did, because that made me want to talk about this in the interview. Even more so. So to start, congrats on winning the Poet's Corner contest. And it was Naomi Shihab Nye, right? Who chose it?  

Bean:  

Yeah, that was that was the thing that was the most exciting part of it to me, because I have loved her work forever, like literally since I first started being interested in writing poetry and reading poetry. And my high school senior year in writing class was the first time I started reading contemporary poems, and hers was like one of the very first contemporary poems I enjoyed. And I  loved her stuff. It was her poem Valentine for Ernest Mann. That poem, it starts with the line, "you can't order a poem like you order a taco." That's the first line. And somehow it comes out of the poem, like Ernest Mann was just this high school student that came up to [Naomi] after a reading set for a workshop she led and he said, "Well, you asked us to write a poem, now you write me a poem," but she said that you can't order a poem how you would order a taco. But then it's like, yes, a really great one. But somehow that line's lodged in my brain. And in a way it was sort of memorable.  

And the poem is kind of about writing and like a way to find poems in the world. And that poem is going to stay with you. But I always, ever since that I've kind of always followed her work and read  some of her books, and I just love her work. So it was so cool, I've actually gotten to really, especially in the last few weeks, actually very recently, I've started corresponding with her a lot because first of all, she hosted the reading [for Poet’s Corner]. But then I got contacted by an editor and writer named Georgia Bird, and she is a young adult and children's author, but specifically does a lot of poetry. And she has an anthology coming out from a children's book publisher, middle-school, like sixth grade. And she did this all the around the theme of names. Like poems about your own name. Yeah. And Naomi told her to contact me and said, you should write a poem about your name because—and she says this in the video, too—she likes my name. She's like, “I can't forget your name. Jeffrey Bean. I just like the name.”  

So Naomi basically, like, commissioned me to make this poem about my name. So then I wrote about my name, and I sent it to Georgia, and I was planning to send it to Naomi when I heard from Georgia. [Georgia] had a couple of good, like, editorial things, like where she was really thinking about the audience of kids a little more than I was.

And so I did a little bit of revising with  Georgia, and then I was going to send it to Naomi as soon as I was like, “Alright, this looks great.” But then I saw Naomi at AWP in Seattle just this past March. There was a panel with Naomi. So I went to it, and I met her in person. She was super nice, and we talked after the panel, and I mentioned [the name poem]. But then I was like, "I'll send you my poem!" So I sent Naomi the poem, and then she wrote to me and she was like, "I love this poem. And I'm the keynote poet at  this poetry therapy conference in Denver this next weekend, and I want to read this poem at the  conference. Can I read your poem?" I was like, “Yes, please do, that’s so cool.” [A former student  of mine] recorded Naomi reading the poem, and I have the video of it.

But anyway, all of this is to  say, we've been talking a lot back and forth ever since then, and I think I'm going to bring her to  CMU next year. And anyways this has been an extremely long winded answer to, just talking about, yes, Naomi. I will not be this long-winded with other questions, but there was a story to tell here. That's been the best part for me is like this connection with Naomi, she's one of my favorite poets, and she's so warm and such a big supporter of my writing so far, you know? And that's by far the best part to me is, is that connection.  

Em:  

Yeah, that's incredible that a relationship could come out of the contest, on top of your book winning. I know you've a background in music, jazz music, right? 

Bean:  

Yeah.  

Em:  

Your poetry, even outside of Ella's Plan, pays a lot of careful attention to sound and rhythm. And even in Ella's Plan, music comes up a couple of times throughout the book. And I was just wondering how your background in music influences how you approach poetry or how deeply you think about sound or rhythm when you're writing?  

Bean:  

Yeah, that's something that I used to think about a lot more actively right when I started my MFA program, you know, because I graduated with a degree in jazz guitar performance. I didn't really think seriously about music [and poetry], but in a high school class I discovered that, yep, that's the class that got me thinking about how, I actually love poetry because the way that sound works in the  language of poetry, and this poetry that I was reading, I was just as excited about the music, maybe the language in the poems as I was about, you know, it's a lot of the same things I loved about instrumental jazz music.

So that was something that immediately I thought about even in my  earliest months of grad school, [my poems] would be about jazz or they were like specifically influenced by like, I would think of like jazz rhythms and try to do it some way in the lines. And so right in the beginning, I was immediately fascinated by the connections between poetry and specifically jazz music.  

I think in musical metaphors, like I'm going to crescendo here, or I want this to be really staccato. You know, there's a lot of, like, monosyllabic words, like the terminology blended with poetry terminology, or even I would think about song structure, or in a solo you kind of start, you gradually build an intensity to kind of a climax. That's really a narrative. And, you know, I was  always thinking about that. And a big one for me was the surprise. That was it. And it's an improvisation, the way that musicians talk about surprise being important is very similar to how poets talk about surprises being important like that.

And there's things that happen like that music, like a musician surprises you and takes a shift in harmony. So I would think about it all the time, especially, you know, my first book Diminished Fifth, which is the name of a musical interval, and I have a whole series of poems based on musical intervals, like they were titled Perfect Unison, Perfect Octave, Perfect Fifth, etc. My poet mind sort-of associated with those intervals because in  music school you have to learn to identify those intervals. So you have to be able to hear a chord and name it. But when I left music school, and was writing poetry, I started to realize that I was  hearing it everywhere in the world. But all of that stuff really stayed with me. Image might be the  most important thing in my work, I think, but in a very close second, is sound.  

Em:  

I saw you had one poem after Catherine Wing, who is very musical in her work, a noisy poet, after I'm assuming her Countdown Song? That was a very sound-driven poem in her book and then also in Ella's Plan, which I love.  

Bean:  

Yeah. Hmm.  

Em:  

I was curious. How did the idea for Ella's Plan as one poem, and then as a series of poems collectively, come to you?  

Bean:  

Yeah, good question. I'm trying to remember the first. Oh, so I had written, in my last book, there’s a few "kid poems." But the “kid poems,” it's a parent addressing a kid. It's kind-of based on my own  experience, kind-of fictionalized. But the idea was that I was a kid and, you know, I have a daughter, sort of father-daughter, and to this day those poems are some of my favorite that I've  written, there is energy in those poems that I love. So then I was like, “Well, why don't I shift the perspective from the parents to a kid?” And I just ended up doing it in the third person instead of  first. And so I got a few poems, and I think I thought about trying to write a series of Ella poems, and I think the name Ella—I tried a few but liked Ella the most.

And so from the beginning Ella was a fictionalized character, and it's kind of based on myself, for example the babysitter poem. It is a  very true experience, it's something that is very close to what happened to me, and I was like  struggling with telling the truth, just exactly what I remember about the personal details from childhood. And some of it's based on my daughter. So it's kind-of like this amalgamation of different kids' minds, how the child is. But I like to write like that. And try the third-person thing. 

But it was a slow-go, I wrote a couple of them and then I was like, “This is great,” but I was very slow, like a lot of trial and error. And I spent a lot of time with them, sent them out, and then I got  tons of rejections. I almost gave up. And then The Southern Review, which is one of the best journals I've ever been published in, they chose two of the Ella poems. And that gave me a huge  boost of confidence to continue. And then, I got a lot more rejections. Those poems were hard to publish because almost always they were set-up in a pair, or three—they work better in a sequence. So what I did is, for example, I changed Ella to "the boy" or "the girl."

But it took about five years,  and I was working on other poems too, but I had the idea to make it a chapbook, but it didn't feel ready until the last poem I wrote, and was like now it's ready. What's Truth, that was the last, the newest poem in the chapbook, and it was like I didn't really want to write it, or revisit the  experience...it wasn't so much that, I just didn't know if it would be interesting as a poem for people to read. But then finally, I was like that's the poem I need to write. And now it feels complete as a  chapbook. It needed one more dimension that hadn't been there before. Yeah.  

Em:  

I thought this book was so unique because of the speaker being a young girl, but also the book  itself pondering, you know, truth, life, death, abuse, secrecy, containment, like all these really big ideas. And I was wondering if, well, did the use of the speaker who is not necessarily you, Jeffrey Bean, poet, but Ella, how did that become a vehicle for discussion about things that even most  adults have a hard time grappling with? Or what did using Ella as a speaker provide for you in your writing? I guess that's the question.  

Bean:  

And in fact, no one ever really, and I haven't said that about the book but it's so true. That seems kind of simple in a way, but it's so true that all those big questions and, you know, I never really fully articulated that. I kind-of got goosebumps when you said that. It's absolutely true.

And I think in your question, is the answer. I think I struggle to grapple with those things as an adult and using  Ella as a vehicle is what allowed me to get there. It sort of like because took the pressure off of me, Jeffrey Bean, poet, and the character, she can imagine these things. It's more like how would this kid think about these things. It's almost like playing with dolls, like a conduit — oh, oh, what's the word? Brain, hello? — Like a proxy? Proxy! It creates a way to remove yourself from it, gives you a  perspective you can't get to when you’re speaking from first-person I, the poet. And I never really thought of that in tandem with grappling with these big ideas. I struggle to do that, and that's why Ella was helpful for me.  

Em:  

In the book there is this delightful dabbling between imagination and reality, and I think sometimes  the reader's not even sure which of those realms Ella is in, which felt very intentional to me. But perhaps it's a play on, honestly, what it's like to be a kid where sometimes those lines are a little bit blurred.

And I think where this concept gained the most intensity was exactly in the poem you had mentioned earlier, which was the moment between the babysitter and Ella, where she tells her  parents what has happened and they don't believe her, but she doesn't blame them. And in a discussion about abuse, giving Ella, the child, the agency to forgive her parents while she's also  facing the abuse was really emotional to me as a reader. And so I guess what were you as a poet trying to get readers to understand in this relationship between imagination, reality, maybe even like  abuse itself or or just this moment of violence that a child is experiencing?  

Bean:  

Yeah such a smart question. You're such a good reader of this book; I'm so impressed. Yes, that's exactly I mean, that's what I was very conscious of, the blurred lines between imagination and reality, that has to be it. I think that's why the babysitter poem is read as this dramatic poem, like  exploring the relationship between imagination and reality with bad experiences. This is something I learned, having that childhood perspective, that perspective helped me understand my own mind  especially when I was a kid, that I was often overwhelmed by my imagination. And I often found it  just as powerful as the empirical reality, sensory output, I was getting from the world, and often it would overpower the literal details of my life. So I started to explore that a little too, but that was another reason why Ella allowed me to take a deeper dive into it, really. I wanted to explore that for myself because that is something I was like haunted-by as a child, and I got a lot of anxiety about  my imagination as a child.

Let me give you an example. So one day, I decided to go to the bus-stop  on my own, it was the Eighties, and it was a three of four block walk in the suburbs. I left my house and immediately, I was like, "Oh God, here it comes," and I felt this feeling of dread and I thought, the leaves were going to blow a certain way, and then they blew that way. And then I thought, that tree's going to bend and then it went sideways, and then I had a feeling nobody was going to be at the bus-stop and there was always people at the bus stop.

I rounded the corner, and there was no one at the bus-stop. And I had this feeling of, "Here they come, here they come." Then a big, big rusted brown car with a roaring engine pulled around and these guys had ZZ Top beards, and they kept saying, "Get into the car. Get into the car." And I just couldn't say anything. But another kid  came from around the corner and they took off. But I was like, "Did that really happen?" Like, I  really wasn't sure. But to this day I swear it really happened. So if a ZZ Top car pulls up and tells you to get in, don’t. 

Em:  

I won’t. 

Bean:  

So I wanted to explore that aspect of childhood—the feeling of that strangeness, of having a big imagination. I felt more nervous as a kid, but also excitement, of course. And then it was a way to escape. And then the babysitter poem, I was actually really conscious of what was going to happen  in that poem as I wrote it. It wasn't so much about how I escaped it through my imagination, but instead, more like how it actually happened. And then turn this abusive situation into something different that there was a sort of beauty, tenderness, and dealing with the situation. But also just that idea of truth, the truth of the imagination. And how there is truth in imagination.

And by giving the truth of imagination equal weight to the truth of reality, allowed a sort-of escape. And I was like pissed off when I was writing it, I didn't want to write it. I felt really like, "I do not want to write today." And then I got up and forced myself to to write it. And normally you think like a good  poem wouldn't come out of that but I kept forcing myself to get to the end, and I thought it felt so fake, and then after I reread it, I barely revised it. I was like, "Wow, this is great." It felt like I was forcing the poem, but it was the opposite. I was forcing myself to let it out, let the experience, and  the truth, out.  

Em:  

Another motif that pops up a few times in the book is nourishment, hunger. There are these repeating images of eating or juice. And I think, the concept of eating is obviously a basic human need. But to have a child speaker talking about hunger leaves me really feeling apathetic for what Ella craves or desires, whether that be the actual nourishment, freedom or whatever she's getting at. Does Ella's hunger reflect anything specific in what you're trying to do with your poetry? Or, what are you craving from your work in this collection or in general? 

Bean:  

Wow. These are such good questions, I can't get over it. You know, that's something I've never noticed in the book. Wow, it's kind of blowing my mind because I've never really thought of it. You read it better than I did. So I think where that came from is that basic need, I think that's kind-of the parent side of me, like they're born, wanting to be nourished.

I think about that more as a parent, I think. But I did, as a kid though, have a sense of longing, and I'd be up all night thinking about stuff. And Ella does that a lot. I've always been a night owl, a bad sleeper. And that feeling of craving, I kind-of liked it, but it was also uncomfortable. And sometimes I didn't know what it was I was longing for. It was kind-of overwhelming. So I associated that feeling of longing with being a kid. I do think that a lot of those scenes are connected to natural images, like longing in nature.

I think I have an active craving and hunger to connect with the natural world. And I often feel like there is this barrier I want to break through to get to something in the natural world I actually can't get to. It's like, when I look at trees it's like I want to enter the tree, but I can't fully get to that thing. Yeah, engaging with the natural world, having a connection I can't fully fulfill.  

Em:  

Yeah, there's so much beautiful imagery. I mean, obviously the animals, the trees, the flowers, water, the birds, it's all there. And it was such a fun part of the book. I think.  

Bean:  

Thanks, yeah.  

Em:  

All right. I tried to wait to talk about form, but I can't wait. When I was in undergrad, you let me join your form/prosody class that you taught to graduate students. And I think it was probably that class that… I have, like a strange obsession with form and constraint in poetry. And I did notice you have, like, a few formal-ish poems or constraint poems some with line length or stanza length or rhyme schemes and a few, I'd say fit into like a sonnet mind, or there is the villanelle in the book, Ella's Fairytale, and I loved the villanelle form did to that poem in particular with the natural images, how we got that repeated in new ways. Why did you choose villanelle to be part of Ella's story, or what do you think that form does in this collection? 

Bean:  

Yeah, it's interesting to connect it to craving the natural world. Man, it's really making me think about [the poem] in new ways. But there's a sense of danger, and the mother dies and there's like death in that poem. Yeah, there's a warning, heeding the warning.

Okay, I'm sort of psychoanalyzing myself, maybe that weird craving I always feel to break the barrier, maybe it's death, man. I never really thought about that. Testing of the waters of death without actually going there. And then it's kind of this fever dream, a dream poem. And the warning signs present in fairytales.

It was the idea of the warning being repeated and then very quickly, it was deliberately written as a villanelle. The warning keeps coming. This is what I feel makes it dream-like and fairytale-like. It's like you have to go through puberty. You have to grow up. You have to die. A lot of fairytales engage with things  we have to do, the pain, and facing that in reality.  

Em:  

I noticed even in that place and in that poem and other places where you used form, you didn't stick  strictly to the "written rules" of the forms. What is your relationship with form now in your writing,  why not stick to the "rules"?  

Bean:  

Yeah, well, do you know the poet, Kiki Petrosino?  

Em:  

No, I don't.  

Bean:  

Oh, you'd love her work. I think the book I taught was Witch Wife. Yeah.  

Em:  

I love the cover! 

Bean:  

Yeah, it's a very cool cover. And this is book has a lot of form in it, yeah, tons of villanelles. I was also under the influence of Kiki Petrosino, now that I'm thinking of it. She messes with the form a  lot, and we interviewed her, and she said something like, "I've always been interested in bending the rules of form just because, who cares."

But then again, the thing with constraints is it can be generative, and help you find things you wouldn't normally find. [A lot] of these forms came from the Italian or French. And when they were brought to us, and English, they got messed up anyways. We can mess with them too. You know, someone invented those forms, they're still growing and changing and evolving. It's fun to break the expected pattern.  

Bean:  

But I think varying the line is really important to do in a contemporary villanelle. It makes it so much more interesting to me, change it just have a word or two. But that's the whole idea. It varies a little bit. And these are things I learned to do in music school—to improvise—set-up a pattern and  then deviate from it in a surprising way.

Em:  

For those who maybe don't know or don't have a physical copy of Ella's Plan, but they are all printed and assembled by Richard Wright Smith, a letterpress printer. And on the gatefold covers, the cover flaps are these beautifully pressed images of nature. It's one of my favorite parts of having a physical copy of this book. And it's in silver ink, which I'm sure was a purposeful choice with Ella's affinity with shiny, sparkling, sizzling things. Right?  

Bean:  

Yeah.  

Em:  

Yeah. Did you take a part in designing this? I'm just curious what that process kind of looked like.  

Bean:  

So, I did take part in it initially and Richard was like, "Do you have any ideas for the book?" And I was like, "Nope." I'm so bad with design. And he was like, "I've got a lot of ideas." And he told me his ideas—the images, perspectives, colors. And I thought the ideas sounded amazing. 

Em:  

Wow. When I got this book in the mail and I opened it, I was literally a little bit blown away. I was like, wow, this is like—-I don't want to bend it, I don't want to write in it. It's such a beautiful book. It really, really is.  

So, finally, I find that when I get wrapped up in a project, I get really obsessed with its ins and outs. And then I complete it and to actually take a step back and see why the project became part of my collective writing, or how the project influenced where my writing will go from there. Why do you think it's important for Ella's Plan to be a part of your collective writing, and how do you think it has directed where your writing is now headed?  

Bean:  

That's a great question. So I think that was important because it got me to a new place of understanding imagination and reality, my own childhood that was important personally, but also just poetically, like my poetry, I felt like I took that to another level. And also, I feel like Ella's a real person too, now. I did it for Ella too—I know that sounds woo-woo. I want to get Ella's story out, honor her.

And in terms of how it connects to my writing now, I had a sabbatical—I did a ton of writing. I think I needed to get through the Ella stuff, to write new poems. And I think I'm starting to put together another chapbook, move away from childhood, and engaging in new stuff. I think the craving for the natural world carries on too.  

Em:  

Alright. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview, and for writing the book. I loved it.  

Bean:  

Thank you, this has been the best interview, seriously.