The Shore Interview #53: Jane Zwart

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Hi Jane, it’s an honor getting to interview you so close to your first collection coming out. Can you tell us a little about the creative journey this collection went on before its current state it’s about to be published in? I’m curious to know a little bit about your process of arranging your collection as a manuscript. Are your poems that appear in our issues a part of this collection?

JZ: Hello–and thank you, Ella, for inviting me into conversation. It means all the more because I’m so grateful to the crew at The Shore already. You all have introduced me to so many poems I’ve loved and for you’ve also been so kind to me and my poems. And there are poems I first published in The Shore in the manuscript I’m trying in open reading periods and manuscript contests now. But not in Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, which will come out in February with Orison Books.

Your question about arranging those poems is a good one, and it was undoubtedly a process wrangling into a book what was, to begin, a stack of poems that 1) I thought were keepers and 2) felt like they belonged to the same extended family or ecosystem. Only part of the process was mine, though. Along the way, I leaned a great deal on my poetry kin: W.J. Herbert gave me what I would describe as a master class in sequencing poems, Christian Wiman helped me do some important weeding and transplanting, and Luke Hankins urged me to think of the book as a triptych.

One of the memories that kept coming back to me as I worked on arranging the book was of making mix tapes in high school and college because the goals seem analogous: in a play list, you want enough connecting threads and you want some surprises. But I kept remembering, too, my high school art teacher, Gwen Potts, talking about the color wheel and specifically about how sometimes colors suit each other because they’re neighbors and sometimes because they’re opposites. Within each one of the book’s three parts, I wanted to have some of both kinds of relationships: proximities and rivalries. But, as Mrs. Potts would tell you, painters also use color in triads (imagine where the vertices of an isosceles triangle would land if you imposed it on the color wheel) and the relationship between the book’s three parts feels to me more like that.

EF: Your two poems, “Folding” and “Pink,” seem quite stylistically different on the surface and yet when read in conjunction, I was struck by their shared sense of, what I can only approximate as, urgent contemplation. The “I” in “Folding” differentiates people witnessing the tearing down of a Texas Roadhouse from those who continue to “lower groceries into cars’ trunks,” while the lens of the poem suggests the “I” falls into the category of the former, the “I” never definitively places itself in either, leaving the “I” in a tenuous liminality. In “Pink,” the “I” only emerges in the second stanza and is surrounded with conditionals, like the “as if”s in the first stanza and the “just in time” of the last. Have there been surprising instances that sparked this urgent contemplation, whether it was in a place or moment you didn’t expect?

JZ: “Urgent contemplation” is such a great phrase and I think you’re right about that cagey “I” as well. In “Folding,” the “I” is noncommittal and hides out in a two-part “us.” In “Pink,” the “I” sneaks into the poem from the past and then ducks back out of sight, turning the third stanza over to the rebukes it lists without explicitly claiming them as rebukes to herself. I suppose that unsettledness in the poems’ speakers has to do with the fact that whatever urgency they hold, it does have to do with contemplation, with taking something in, with perceiving it truthfully—much more than with reaching a decision.

Maybe part of what’s happening in those poems, too, is that the self’s urgent need to contemplate something outside herself crowds out the need to distinguish herself. In writing these poems, what felt pressing had very little to do with me. I didn’t need to take sides. I didn’t need to arrive at a conclusion. I only needed to bear witness to an Outback Steakhouse being demolished, in the one case and, in the other, I only needed to survey the contradictions inside a color. The “I” whose job that kind of thing is matters mostly for the attention she can pay. Her personality, for the length of the poem, doesn’t hold a candle to her perception.

EF: As a teacher of literature and writing, I’m sure to some extent there’s a reciprocal influence from your students on your work. Could you share some ways your work as a teacher has influenced either “Folding,” “Pink,” or your forthcoming collection?

JZ: There is so much reciprocity in teaching and learning, which, as far as the perks of my job go, I’d put near the top of the list. So much of influence, though, is invisible—so I’m not sure how my work teaching literature and writing has left its fingerprints on “Folding” and “Pink.” Not that I’d ever rule it out.

The title poem for my forthcoming collection, however, I know I would never have written were it not for one of my students. He wasn’t, as far as I know, a creative writer, but we were talking after class one day toward the end of the spring semester and I asked him whether he had a summer job lined up. He did, the same job as he worked the previous summer; he was a groundskeeper at a cemetery. I asked him if he liked it and he told me that what surprised him most was how often people who were walking through asked him whether he could point them to the strangest epitaph he’d seen or to the oldest stone in the place or the one that seemed most tragic. Or whether he had a favorite. And that was the seed of “Oddest and Oldest and Saddest and Best.”

Another of the poems in the book I owe to one of the students I taught at Handlon Correctional Facility through the Calvin Prison Initiative. That poem’s heart is something he said in a literature class about Doestoevsky’s Notes from The Underground. Sometimes, though, what I owe one of my students (like what I owe any other writer) is less easy to trace, though I can say that teaching writing I’ve been awed by my students’ daring and generosity again and again, without fail.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

JZ: There are far more than I can list, but in addition to The Shore, Tahoma Literary Review and On the Seawall are two I keep pretty close tabs on. Plume is another online journal I love, and even before Danny Lawless made a spot for me as a co-editor for book reviews, I spent time with it every month. And while I can’t subscribe to nearly as many print journals as I wish I could, I’ve been enjoying Copper Nickel and Cave Wall this fall and I think David Clark has done wonderful things with 32 Poems. I’ll also say that the journal Postcard Lit strikes me as a superb invention; it is true that to receive a set of postcards with poems on them is a tiny bit agonizing—to hoard or to send?—but mainly each issue is a delight.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JZ: I love this question. Choosing, of course, was another small agony, but two poems in this issue that I adore and can hear conversing are Melody Wilson’s “Singularity” and Mubashira Patel’s “disillusion.” Part of what they have in common is their vast reach: Wilson’s plumbs a black hole, and Patel’s grazes eternity. And part of what they have in common is their magnificent concreteness. “Singularity” describes a black hole as “the nostril of a horse galloping at night;” “disillusion” describes “used toys, faces worn / by the touching.”

Then there are the poems’ smaller serendipities. Both feature fathers and TVs turned on in the evening. And where Patel writes about “loneliness coming in through the drain, / not a scream, not a song— / just the sound water makes / when it doesn’t know where to go,” Wilson tells us that, about a black hole, “they say it’s very still, that it gurgles, // a baby practicing its vowels.”

Most potently, though, both these poems have to do with absence, both absence as a void and absence as avoidance. And Wilson and Patel are wise to absence, how it comes in different weights. Which is probably why each poem ends with a finality that lingers: closure, but closure for someone other than the poems’ speaker.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book reviews for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD and Ploughshares and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in February 2026.