Interview at Colorado Poets Center

January 29, 2023 Jennifer G Stewart

KW: You love words; obviously. You love names of places, paintings, people. Yes, you’re a poet and don’t all poets, but you show a wide and beautiful vocabulary: tessellation, bougainvillea, lahmacun, satsuma. I guess I’m sensitive to this because I get that darn free “Grammarly” and, every week, it annoyingly “shares" a “report” on my “unique” word usage. Do your words just pop out as you write? Do you research words? Use a thesaurus? Give us some advice on how you find the “bread and butter” for your poems. JSF: I don’t research words, and I try not to use a thesaurus much because I think if the word is unfamiliar to me, or something I have to reach too far for, it’s probably not the right word for the poem. That said, there are times when I’ll use a thesaurus because I want a synonym that meets the rhythmic demands of a line. The words you mention here are the kind of thing I pick up and jot down in my journal because they capture some specificity of a place. Naming things carefully is one of the primary jobs of a poet, I think. Many of the words that arrive in my poems come through traveling quite a bit in countries where English is not the primary language. Picking up specific names of plants, roads, foods, places feels to me like collecting souvenirs, just like keeping train tickets or postcards or pressing leaves into a journal. They’re evidence of having been somewhere.

Colorado Poets Center, issue #31