Meet the Poets: J-T Kelly

J-T talks to us about his poems "Nub" and "Desert Dreams", James Schuyler, gives us his reading list, and tells us what draws him to making poetry

You can read J-T’s poems, and listen to J-T read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Nub and Desert Dreams both come from my time in New Mexico. I moved there to make what would be my last serious attempt at finishing a college degree. It didn’t take, but I stayed for several years. The mountain desert does for me something like what everybody I know says the ocean does for them. Both of these poems came out of a 3-month period of prodigious output and creative rejuvenation brought on by reading Joe Elliot’s Index, an 11-page poem of fragments and jumps. I wouldn’t say my poems are anything like Index, but Elliot’s poem broke loose something in my head that let these poems out. Here’s a stanza from Index:

Like unfinished ease, this business goes
The part of you that’s a part of it and it wants to be conscious
The dandelion was not redundant
We don’t lack people here on the effortless coast
The face on fate, a lifelong acquaintance
The difference between manipulation and setting a boundary is
“How do you do?” for a living

Index from Oqposable Thumb (Subpress, 2006)

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

To be “in dialogue with” implies the conversation goes both directions, yes? There are poets I talk to a lot online, and we talk about poems, about poetry, we send each other poems and opinions. Then there are the poets, some dead, who I read and take seriously and whose work becomes part of the smell of the house. There are poets whose work I admire when I’m at work.

Here are some books I like very much by some poets I like very much that I think you might enjoy becoming more familiar with:

• Shell Game by Jordan Davis (Edge Books, 2018)

• The Ghost of It by Kyla Houbolt (CCCP/Subpress, 2024)

• Holy Fool by Henry Gould (Lulu.com, 2023)

• Light-Up Swan by Tom Snarsky (Ornithopter Press, 2021)

• What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart (Bull City Press, 2021)

What’s your favorite text about the sea?

I love this James Schuyler poem, The Edge in the Morning. It uses the word cenotaph, which means a memorial grave for someone buried somewhere else or whose body has not been found, and I always confuse the word with otolith, which is a tiny bone in your ear that sounds like a monument. James Schuyler always sounds to me like a man half dreaming, but then you catch on to how quick he is.

The edges of the bay are thinnest at high tide.
It is low tide. 
[...]
[The wind] crumples the bay and stuffs it in a stone pocket.
The bay agitatedly tries to smooth itself out.
If it were tissue paper it would need damp and an iron.
It is a good deal more than damp.
What a lot of water.

What’s on your bedside table?

I just returned a large pile of books from my bedside to the library after having kept them too long. But that has left me with some texts that I am returning to or hovering over because I still have some questions to ask them.

• Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets

• Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (positively slim at around 100

  pages!)

• William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All

• John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

• Gwendolyn Brooks’ Blacks

• Gertrude Stein’s How to Write

What draws you to writing poetry?

One of my persistent experiences of life is That’s not quite it. Another is How on earth does all this higglety-pigglety hang together? And while that may turn out to be somewhat true for everybody, I find that I experience it most in language. Or at least, I experience it most pointedly when language is at the centre of my experience. Poems are objects made of language. Also they can be beautiful. And beauty is hardly ever what you think it is. And it’s never what you say it is. If any of that makes you want to read a poem or write a poem, then I may have answered your question.