Interview: Jalen Eutsey
"There was a time where I foolishly felt like I didn’t have anything else to say about Miami..."
At the foot of the Pont Marie, a low, oblong building stands set back from the street, a bit incognito. It was built in 1965, and on close inspection this is obvious. But if, in the manner of most Parisians, you allowed it to pass you only in your peripheral vision as you kept your head down against the winds that rise from the Seine, it might not register as much other than a segment of the endless, occasionally Haussmannian wall of Lutetian limestone that straddles both banks.
There are over 300 artist residences inside Cité internationale des arts, and over 1,000 painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, playwrights, designers, and artists of every other stripe pass through it each year. One Wednesday evening last August, my partner and I found ourselves in the residence of a South African sketch artist. He had been there three months and was soon returning home. The wall of his studio was covered with pen sketches he had completed during his time in Paris, a number of them attesting to the direct view through the window of the Île Saint-Louis and its 17th-century mansard roofs. In many of his drawings, it seemed as if the scenes emerged from a single, unbroken pen stroke, as if the nib were glued to the page from the moment it made contact to the moment the image achieved completion. I wanted to ask him about this, but he was deep in conversation with the poet who had brought us to the Cité.
We had met Jalen Eutsey, a friend of another poet friend, in the building’s infinite hallways only a few minutes prior. Now, having said goodbye to the South African, we followed Eutsey through to the next studio. And then the next one. Most Wednesdays, some portion of the Cité’s artists exhibited their work. But it took a resident guide, I quickly realized, to navigate the labyrinth and find them. At some point, I found myself wearing a complex headdress made of speakers, sensors, metal, foam, and velcro. As I moved about the room, in each corner of which a much larger speaker emitted a composition of digitally screwed sounds, the headdress modulated its tune, and I was treated to a musical surprise completely dependent upon my ambulations.
Reading Eutsey’s poetry is another sort of surprise. His speakers are often inviting at first, even casual, but all at once he initiates some wild movement, or some staggering dilation of space, and you find yourself trying to balance something heavy in your head. (This one, in the Yale Review, is a good example.)
That’s why I wanted to speak with him. The following interview took place over a few weeks this past autumn and winter, after Eutsey completed his residency at the Cité. It has been edited with fidelity for the reader.
Jalen Eutsey was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and earned a BA from the University of Miami and an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He was a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Best New Poets, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Harpur Palate, and The Hopkins Review. His chapbook, Bubble Gum Stadium, was published by Button Poetry.
When, in your opinion, did you become a poet?
My mom placed a high priority on education as I grew up. I was the kid who would have school summer reading to do and then summer reading from my mom on top of that. I was in the fourth grade, and I got a paper back, and I got an A on the paper, but there were enough grammatical errors, enough marks on the paper that my mom was like, “Why did you get an A if there are all these marks on the paper? You’re never going to learn if you just get an A and you’re still making all these mistakes.” That speaks to the high standards my parents had for me, as much as any upbringing in poetry, I guess.
My mom worked at the University of Miami, which meant that I attended college for free. I pretty much grew up on the campus. I’ve had the belated realization that this fact might have something to do with my relative comfort in academia. I’m the manifestation of my mother’s abandoned dreams. Both my parents began working at 14 years old. My mother worked and paid her way through college as she studied at the University of Miami and made the decision to continue to work at the University of Miami for my benefit. I’ve learned that my mother, at one point, had an interest in acting, harbored some hopes of being a lawyer—which is to say, she had hopes and dreams she set aside for my sake.
To speak more to the actual writing of poetry, my dad has always been interested in language. He always had a big book of quotes in his car. He always had a quote or a quip at the ready. Growing up, he’d often turn to this language to motivate or relax me or one of my teammates in the car on the way to a baseball game. I just remember that sticking with me. And I’ve always thought my dad was very cool. He’s a cool guy. So there is something of a literary or aesthetic education there.
You mentioned this in the acknowledgements. You thank your dad, whose interest in language gave birth to your own.
My dad doesn’t consider himself a reader. I don’t think he reads much, but whether it was aphorisms, movie quotes, or language handed down through the generations, whatever it was, he always had fresh language at the ready. He’s from South Carolina. I’ve always thought about his interest in language being linked to his Southerness.
I remember when I was in high school, I had memorized all the lines to the movie Remember the Titans and could just pull them out at random. I was mirroring what my dad had done for me and my teammates as a kid. Even before I ever conceived of myself as a poet, I think I was interested in language.
While in high school, I performed in a talent show. I memorized and performed a spoken word piece, and that seemed to unlock something for me. When I got to college, of course, I had to choose a major. I was interested in psychology. I was torn between majoring in psychology or English, but I would have had to take a stats class to major in psychology, and I didn’t want to do that. So I majored in English with a concentration in creative writing.
The University of Miami is where I met the poet, Jaswinder Bolina. Bolina was my professor, first poetry mentor, and a major influence on my writing at the time. I’d say he’s still a major influence. Really, his involvement, taking his classes and having him encourage me to pursue poetry was instrumental, life changing. One day, in the middle of a one-on-one conference, he said, “I think your poems are good enough to get into an MFA program. You should apply.” And here, all the elements of my “upbringing in poetry” sort of align. By the time Jaswinder encouraged me to apply to MFA programs, the deadline for applications had already passed. But because I was going to school for free, I was able to stay an extra year at the university, where I completed a senior creative thesis, which I then used to apply to grad school. I applied to 10 schools. I only got into one school.
You had an abiding childhood interest in language, and then you get to college, where that native interest meets the educational structure. Have you ever felt that your natural interest in language grated against the education you received? Or did you feel it was complementary?
That’s a great question. I don’t think I would be where I am today without my education. Both in terms of the credentialization that I received, but also in terms of the education in the craft of poetry. So I’m thankful for the education that I received, both at the University of Miami and at Johns Hopkins, but I do think there is a way in which people create a hierarchy in terms of education.
This is the simplest example I can give. While at Hopkins, I studied Emily Dickinson. But in terms of my development and interest in the full range of sonic echo, I think I’m more indebted to Lil Wayne or Kendrick Lamar than I am to Emily Dickinson. I don’t think I would be here without the education that I received, but I do think mixed in with that is a kind of de-prioritization of the education that we receive before we step into higher education. I think, If you just ignore everything you’ve learned before you get to a higher education institution, you’re seriously damaging your voice.
In the book, you lay out your influences—or poetic loves—clearly: Terrence Hayes, Ross Gay, Hanif Abdurraqib, Danez Smith. What has your encounter with their work been like? What has it done for you?
The simplest answer I can give is, a poet like Terrence Hayes and so many writers that I love, they give me permission. Reading Terrence Hayes’s work, I feel allowed to do things on the page. I can be a bit insecure, fearful, and a perfectionist. A lot of my struggle as a writer is the struggle to put something on the page, to see value in my work. And for me, reading writers that just, something in their work, just makes me say, oh, okay, I can do this. I can make mistakes, or I can err in this way, or I can try in this way.
Specifically, I’ll say Terrence Hayes’s book of sonnets, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is a book that was really permission-giving for me. I received a certain level of formal education in the sonnet, but maybe never quite felt comfortable in it. In looking back at old poems from my time in the MFA, I was surprised to see that I had written recognizably traditional sonnets. I don’t think they were great poems, but they were traditional sonnets, and they had some exciting, interesting lines. Those lines, I believe, were at least partly the result of the strictures of the form. But in Hayes’ book of American Sonnets, there are poems that you could copy and paste into the bio section of a dating profile. I really love that book, its pitch and range.
All these writers are permission-giving, but they’re also teaching me other things, of course. Ross Gay’s winding sentences, his asides; Abdurraqib’s cultural analysis, his ability to weave an almost allegorical narrative out of a wide range of experience; Smith’s voice, their ability to both say it plain and lean into metaphor and suggestion. I wish I were speaking more eloquently about these writers and their work…
You mentioned Hayes and the sonnet form. You’re polymathic with forms — tercets, couplets, prose poems — but several sonnets seem to hold up the chapbook like the piers of a bridge. You have one on page 28 that appears non-classical until you discover its infrastructure. It begins, “I hated that faux-urn arrangement,” before proceeding to the main image of a memorial service for the speaker’s grandmother. But we are brought back to the concern of the first line, not in the propositions of the subsequent ones, but in the resonance built up by the last line-endings of the final quatrain: “Jesus”, “rice”, “cheese,” and “Fanta.” The most striking point in the poem is midway through, when the speaker says, “I’m not gussying it up enough, am I, dear reader.” There’s a sense of anger with the reader, or some scorn, mirroring the opening line. Is this a challenge? How do you conceive of the reader when writing poetry?
That’s a great question, and one I don’t think I’ve been asked before. I love the reader because they’re reading my work, but I distrust the reader because they are often unable to experience the full force of my efforts. Or I am unable to make them feel the full force of my efforts.
I think I’m getting less precious as I get older, but I often associate “audience” with “the market.” I distrust the market. I’ve always written for myself mainly, for my family, for people I wanted to honor, people whom I wanted to thank and felt writing was the best way I knew how. At times, it seems like major commercial and critical success is most readily available to minority writers who bleed on the page. It often feels like a requirement from the market, the cost of that commercial success. I’m not distrustful of these writers’ success. I’m distrustful of that seeming requirement.
This poem is plainly about my grandmother’s passing, the hospital room where she passed, the faux-urn we received in the mail containing her ashes. But as I say in the poem, “there were no blood-curdling screams.” My grandmother suffered from the effects of dementia for the final ten years of her life and a recurrence of lung cancer is what ultimately killed her. The anger, I imagine, is an expression of grief, a questioning of the idea there is some catharsis in writing about this loss.
My relationship to the reader or audience might also be influenced by my early education in poetry, which focused on French surrealist writers, New York school poets, and other American writers influenced by French surrealism. I have my limitations and my hypocrisies as a writer and a reader, but that foundation means I’m comfortable with a certain level of difficulty or friction when I read or write a poem, and I hope the audience will be willing to engage with a similar level of friction.
Your book has a wonderful texture. It feels like being in the world of a child; childlike, but not childish. The illusion is well achieved, because one doesn’t sense the perspective of the fully grown poet out of which this world is drawn. When the speaker recalls feeling competitive with his school friend, the reader experiences the edge of competition, rather than the representation of it.
Miami, more the concept than the place, traces the bounds of this childlike world. Now that you’ve published a chapbook about Miami, what is Miami to you as a poetic subject? Has it changed since you began writing?
Miami is a place full of contradictions. When people think of Miami, typically, they think of a place of “good time fun.” They think of beach vacations and downtown high rises. They think of pastel colors, neon lights, and bikinied rollerbladers on Ocean Drive, and that, of course, does exist, but the quotidian world of Miami has always been my focus. A bottom-up approach to exploring Miami.
My focus in writing the book was to tell the story of quotidian Black life in Miami, particularly in this one enclave of West Perrine. I wanted to tell the story of my own adolescence, as well as the lives of those around me. The story of this semi-pro baseball team, the Perrine Hellcats, which is, of course, a story about my family too because my father played on the baseball team.
There was a time where I foolishly felt like I didn’t have anything else to say about Miami, about West Perrine, but I’ve since come to my senses. Which is to say, I want to go deeper and wider. I want to understand more about the societal forces that have acted on this place that is so dear to me. I think it’s more interesting to write poems about the texture of this place: the people, the food, the memories. But I’d like to dabble in a more academic study in order to have a better understanding. I also want to expand outward, out of the specific enclave, exploring the links and fractures with other parts of Miami and Florida.
You recently spent time as a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. What did that experience teach you? Did it affect your poetry?
It taught me a lot. During my time at the Cité, writing was a secondary discipline for most of the artists in residence. They were primarily filmmakers, painters, sculptors, dancers, pianists, etc. It was a blessing to meet so many artists working outside of poetry. I wrote some poems there incorporating French. I’ve done that in the past in college, but have never quite found a place for those poems. It was fun to return to that practice of mixing languages, to visit museums and write some ekphrastic poems.
I wrote a poem while I was in Paris, inspired by the photos and videos of Bouba Touré. Touré was a photographer, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Mali and immigrated to France, where he was involved in and documented migrant workers’ movements since the 1970s. I was struck by an exhibit of his work at the Cité Internationale. I started tapping something out on my phone, standing in the gallery, and it eventually turned into a poem that I like, and am trying to revise to satisfaction.
When I arrived in Paris, I was somewhat stalled creatively. My chapbook had recently been released and yet I was obsessing over what came next, how to claw my way from the chapbook to a full-length. At some point during my stay, I attended a virtual lecture by the artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, where she said, “I don’t come to an understanding of anything by using only one modality.” This talk and the consistent exposure to visual art, dance, theater, and nourishing conversations with other artists served as a welcome jolt.
Before arriving in Paris, I had convinced myself that I needed to become a different writer, maybe even a different person, to continue writing poems I could be proud of. Rasheed’s words, however, were a reminder, that there was more of me I wasn’t bringing into my poems, other modalities I wasn’t using in my exploration of art and life. Sometimes when you’re writing a poem, you just need more language, the language can help you transition, help you make another turn in the poem. Rasheed’s words were a reminder that extra language could come from the worlds of philosophy, art theory, French, or sports talk radio.
Living in Paris, I think a lot about the modernist moment of 100 years ago, when artists felt that what they needed to do was transform the forms of art itself, as well as coerce its subject matter onto new terrains; that the art was perfectible. By “perfectible,” I’m not referring to the belief that art can attain perfection, but more to the sense of perfection in the phrase, “the more perfect union”—we can always be tweaking and turning the dial. Do you have any sense of that with respect to our moment?
Hmmm, I’d be happy to produce an innovation that later becomes a “type” as Barthes might say, but doing so isn’t a preoccupation of mine. I find the project of writing a good poem to be so difficult and all-consuming that I don’t have a lot of room for other, grander designs. However, this question makes me think of my earlier answer about writers who are permission giving. Three of my favorite books of recent memory are Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Percival Everett’s Erasure, and Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language. I would argue that Everett’s Erasure has at least three “texts” in the book. There is a family drama narrative, a satirical yet slippery “urban fiction” novel, and an academic text. Binet’s Seventh Function of Language functions (pun intended) similarly. There are long passages of linguistic theory, but the book advances primarily through the movements of an espionage mystery.
Coming this late in literature’s long history, there have already been so many innovations. I’m not all that concerned with producing the next innovation, but I would like to be making things consistently enough to find my way to a natural embrace of some pre-existing innovations and experiments, to more wholeheartedly embrace a multimodal approach.
Now I have a question for you. Do these novels evince modernist or post-modernist sensibilities, I really don’t know? I’m eager for a diagnosis.