Jack Bedell Interview by  Dixon Hearne

We would first like to thank you for agreeing to an interview. We are honored to spotlight you as Delta Poetry Review’s Feature Poet for the Summer 2020 issue.

DPR: Eudora Welty once said that one place understood helps us to understand all places better. You are a native Louisianian. How do you think cultural influences from the south play a role in your writing? How does that differ from regional influences in other parts of the country? What is particular or unique about the southern experience as it relates to writing—whether narrative or poetic work?

BEDELL: I was born and raised in south Louisiana in Terrebonne Parish. The people, traditions, values, ecology, and priorities of that place shape who I am and what I write. Every word I’ve put to paper has been written with an urge to honor my upbringing, my region, and my family.
          French Acadian and Creole cultures in south Louisiana don’t really fit into any definition of “southern” culture, except maybe in our reliance on the land and its resources. Our food is drastically different, our music is unique, and I truly feel our sense of family unity is special. I think I realized this at an early age, and have lived most of my life trying to preserve traditional folktales and stories in my work. Like the folks doing such great work keeping Cajun and Creole French alive and vibrant in south Louisiana, I’ve always thought it was my job to perpetuate narratives and family traditions, not just as an archive of experience, but as living, vibrant paths to the future.

DPR: How important do you think it is to experiment with form, or to at least have background knowledge of the way certain forms of poetry work?

BEDELL: I took my MFA at the University of Arkansas—Fayetteville. I went there specifically to study under master formalists Jim Whitehead and Miller Williams. Whitehead particularly gave me an appreciation of the beauty of language under the pressure of form. As an old football player, Jim was able to coach me in ways I understood to value design and to use structure to accomplish any goal I might have. What I learned from Miller and Jim, and my thesis advisor Heather Ross Miller, went well beyond accentual syllabic forms, though. All of these teachers helped me realize the power of the line to control meaning and pace, the value of beats in providing a pulse for language, and the vibrancy of movement caused by balance and enjambment.
          Of late, I’ve really been infatuated with use of space in my poems. Like Charles Olson detailed in his essay, “Projective Verse,” the page is a field of energy, and I really believe we should use every bit of it we can to bring poems to life.

DPR: You’ve been a teacher for over twenty years now. What, if anything, about teaching inspires or influences your own writing? Do you think that teaching helps your work at all? If so, in what ways?

BEDELL: Every day I’ve stepped on campus I’ve learned something. Whether it’s from students, staff, or co-workers, I’ve been blessed every day by their courage, their knowledge, and their spirit to grow.
          Teaching most certainly helps me as a writer. Every class I teach is based in community. My lecture courses, my form and theory courses, my workshops—they all start with building an interconnected community of sharing and learning in the classroom. When you create this sense of community, every member of the class (including me!) profits from the gains of every other member.
          In fact, I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been inspired by my class to try something new, some way of stretching form, or of using point of view, to execute a poem. My bank account would be as full as my soul!

DPR: Your poetry has been mostly grounded in your home state of Louisiana. Most recently, it seems as though your work has become more directly focused on the state’s ecology than it was before. Do you feel a sense of urgency, as a writer, to address what’s happening to our coastline? Does that concern have larger implications?

BEDELL: Like everyone else in south Louisiana, I’ve known about coastal erosion and wetland loss for decades, but it was all abstract knowledge based in diagrams and maps. It wasn’t until a family member sent me a photo of open water a few years ago that this awareness became personal. When I texted back to ask why I was being sent a picture of water, I was told it was a picture of where the point used to be that we used to navigate the base of Bayou Decade. The last time I’d been in that place it was a large land mass with buildings on it. Now it was open water as far as the eyes could see. More than anything, that moment made this whole issue personal. That lost land wasn’t color on a map; it was land from MY life. Writing about coastal erosion, preservation, and living through this crisis with our home in tact became an urgent task, and I set about writing the poems for No Brother, This Storm immediately.
          In the middle of writing poems for this collection, my mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. While I did my best to try to keep these losses separate, the notion of living through great loss, of preserving memories as well as futures, took over the book. No Brother, This Storm became a collection about living through storms, literal and figurative, and of finding ways of appreciating what’s left after great loss and what can be done to preserve resources for our future.
          How we live through our current environmental crisis has a direct impact on how we’ll be able to maintain our senses of identity and community. If we spend all of our time archiving nostalgia, we’ll wake up surrounded by open water. We have to do more than preserve memories; we have to restore and preserve the beauty that’s all around us. We have to find ways of appreciating what we have and what we can create. I hope this is what my poems are doing, always.

DPR: Most of your newer work is much shorter than your older poems, more “elliptic,” to borrow from one of your own titles. Does working in a shorter form provide new challenges that you hadn’t anticipated? If so, what are they? What do you like most about writing shorter poems? And how does that fit into narrative writing?

BEDELL: I’ve always been a narrative poet, really focused on my poems having beginnings, middles, and ends. When I started work on the poems about storm damage and coastal erosion, I wanted to challenge myself to write in a style where the page had lost parts of these stories I was writing, where I was forced to move forward without all of my language. It really was an experiment in how much could be left out of a poem without losing its intent.
          Shorter poems create all sorts of frustrations for me: lack of space to develop ideas, loss of perspective, direct statement, etc. As Whitehead would put it, though, these strictures and limitations are pressure under which poems can do much more than we realize they can do.
          More than anything, I hope these shorter, elliptical poems represent the dilemma we all face dealing with loss. We all have to make sense of what’s left, of what’s there. We have to find beauty in what remains.

DPR: No Brother, This Storm is your most recent book publication. Tell us about this collection. It’s such an evocative title. Where did it come from? Does each of your published books influence the content or poetic style of subsequent poetry collections?

BEDELL: The title of the collection comes from a line in one of the poems, “Dark Current,” about seeing a snapping turtle stranded on its back in my backyard after a storm. A few years ago, we had a huge storm cause tragic flooding in our area, flooding that ruined the property and lives of a big percentage of our residents. Watching that turtle struggle to right itself in the aftermath of the flooding seemed like a fitting metaphor for the whole collection. I hoped the line would convey my belief that while the storm/flooding was certainly no friend of ours, no brother at all, it also didn’t control our urge or our ability to recover and to move forward. Like that snapping turtle, we all had to fight to right ourselves and get on with things. That storm, the flood, the loss—they all had an impact on people, but none of those things could control our responses, could not stop us from recovering and restoring our lives, with or without anyone else’s help. That really sums up what the whole collection builds toward.
          I’ve always written poems in the context of a collection or theme. Sometimes direction gets hijacked, broadened, or re-routed in the middle of writing a collection, but as I’m composing new poems it’s always within the context of a collection. I hold off writing poems that fall outside of this context while I’m working on a book. Whenever I feel a collection is complete, or a theme has run its course, I do my best to shift focus or form so I can start the next collection fresh.
          The book I have coming out at Mercer University Press in January 2021, Color All Maps New continues some of the themes from No Brother, This Storm, but the focus of the poems leans heavily toward modes of recovery and restoration, not just realization of loss and the need for moving forward. I’d say where the poems in No Brother, This Storm hold out hope, the poems in Color All Maps New celebrate successes and recoveries

DPR: In what ways, if any, has being Louisiana state Poet Laureate influenced or affected your poetry writing? What have you gleaned from this experience?

BEDELL: It was a tremendous honor to serve as Louisiana State Poet Laureate, 2017-2019. The term was full of unbelievable experiences and encounters. My production definitely ramped up during those years with all the writing I did with poets in workshops and writing marathons. I’m not sure being Laureate changed much in regards to what I was writing, but it definitely increased the opportunities I had to get to work!
          Traveling all over the state, I had the real privilege of bringing attention to all the wonderful voices Louisiana produces. Our state is so full of talent and spirit; it was a joy getting the chance to share stages with poets of all ages. There were great poets in every community I visited. The best part of the laureateship is helping to bring much-deserved attention to these poets, to their necessary voices.