Jessica Greenbaum – Conversation & Three Poems

for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy

Carlie Hoffman & Tiffany Troy: Jessica Greenbaum’s poem teaches us to be present in even the most ordinary of days, when “the urgency to voice complaint and the urgency to apologize collide like hurrying pedestrians” and as the speaker goes about her day with her baby in her arms. 

How would you describe the origins or influences of your language and voice as a writer?

Jessica Greenbaum: As a poet writing autobiographical narrative lyric, I first took to the page because I liked triangulating between experience and thought. I sensed an enlivening energy when I could observe both the outer and inner worlds, have them respond to each other, and then find a reflective meaning from that collaboration. It seems I was gifted to have confidence in my own perceptions—another way for a young girl, then woman, then older woman, to be seen in the world. 

CH & TT: I felt that triangulation in your sensibility as a poet who begins with external observation (at the politeness and the generosity of the passersby) to land at the water canal (quite literally and metaphorically) “under our shoes” in “Living Moments in Peacetime.” I thought the water canal (the sole art object in the only art museum) counter-balances the burial of language/ culture that occurs even during peacetime. In your view, what can poetry offer people today? What personal meaning does poetry hold for you?

JG: As with other arts, I look to poetry to elevate our understanding of the human condition. I never lose the thrill of reading a description of something in the world, or something in human experience and newly recognizing the depth of it through the writing. We have been plonked down on this planet—perhaps alone in the entire cosmos—and thanks to human-ness we will never run out of dramatic material or colors or music or narrative which explores just what exactly that means.

CH & TT: Speaking of human-ness, is there a poem or poetry collection you believe everyone should read at least once—and why?

JG: Um, I’m not a prescriptive type. I thank goodness someone gave me John Ciardi’s I Met a Man when I was about 7, and that I later came upon Mason Williams’ Reading Matter. Trusting our delights, our own wit, our own fancy seems an important practice in trusting and following the subconscious, that Baker Street Irregular gang that goes out into the alleys and comes back with the poem’s next word. 

CH & TT: What guidance would you give someone reading poetry for the first time?

JG: O taste and see! And trust your tastes as you would with any other art form.  I didn’t read a whole volume by one author (aside from those above) until it was assigned to me as a college sophomore—and that was a revelation! But I spent my years before going from one anthology to another. The 811’s is where libraries categorize poetry and poetry anthologies, and many contemporary anthologies are shaped through themes; nothing to lose!

CH & TT: What are your hopes for the future of American poetry and its place in our culture?

JG: Someone besides the poets should underwrite poetry books. 

CH & TT: Writers often build their own creative canon over time. Which poets, writers, artists, or musicians have shaped yours?

JG: Fun party game! A sampling: my peers, Judy Katz, Stephen Ackerman, Daniel Meltz, Jeffrey Harrison, and my teachers, Marilyn Hacker, Kenneth Koch, and . . . with a low bow to the shelves of new books at the Brooklyn and New York Public Libraries, a few of my all-stars, Connie Wanek, Lucille Clifton, Paisley Rekdal, Wislawa Szymborska, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Hirsch (including for his stellar scholarships), and in other arts, Ruth Asawa, Melville, Tolstoy, Claire Keegan, Mark Rylance, Rajiv Joseph, Annie Baker, Samuel Beckett, Mike Leigh, Alicia Keys, Aya Nakamura . . . and on til morning. We’re so lucky! 

PRESENT MOMENT IN THE LIFE’S DAY

If asked when I was in my fullest season
I might mention that it was the same time as my most terrified one
The body jarred from its sitting place
The horse of experience galloping so
I almost flew off, a hank of wiry mane in my jouncing fists
Which happened more than once—in fear, in love,
Sometimes fearfully in love because there is such a thing,
And with the baby in my arms.

And about my present moment in the life’s day
After dawn when the first light separated the tree limbs
From the night in whose arms they have lain
Until late afternoon, when the penumbra of time’s boughs has grown wide enough
To hold the spectral soul of my childhood friend, my younger cousin, my father
And the spectral knowledge of sorrow
And the particulars of a faithful roof, a kitchen beneath it, and a soft bedroom beside,
The attempt, also widening, to reconcile all these

As samaras wing down to earth, as the pilot
Light of the stove delivers dinner to the very cells inside
The people at the table, when, while walking through the yellow woods of late autumn—
Its last small flames—you chat with a friend far away
And in that conversation you speak about your past together
So that space and time have both hitched onto language
When the young waitress laughs so that you see her, as she was, in braids
And the lines on one page dissolve like minerals in the earth

And the urgency to voice complaint and the urgency to apologize
    collide like hurrying pedestrians
When the old seaside town bathers, up to their necks in a circle, chat beneath clouds
When a mouse opens the pantry of a fallen sunflower
And the nurse returns to the room where her patient has been hoping
When a man wheeling his smartly dressed wife uses his palm to brush her hair back from the wind
And the tide goes out so far
And the tree’s throw of shade becomes the whole evening, complete with celestial guests
Who continue in conversation about beauty, fortune, sorrow, reconciliation.

LIVING MOMENTS IN PEACETIME

From here I can tell you the people are polite
and generous, they will never insist they were before you
at the butcher counter, even if you forgot to pull
a ticket, and if you admire their neckerchief
from the afternoon’s cider festival they may retie it
around your shoulders with a definitive pat.
The seaside restaurant’s crammed sidewalk tables
appear to have more diners than chairs, and the shrimp
stretch past the plate edge like someone too tall
for the bed. The old couples who have grown up
within the stone walls stroll past them, the man
with his arm gently leaning on his wife’s shoulder,
and the waist-high wall essential in another era
and now lining the street near the university is
where crowds gather across from a bar, chatting,
laughing, their drink glasses and bottles clinking
in punctuation. Inside the old market—it’s ironwork
façade ornate and light blue as a rusted bridge—
fish are slapped on ice, chickens clopped in half
by cleavers, and the nut seller uses a pincer to offer
the house specialty—a single cashew flavored
with cheese. The streets might have been knit by
a novice while a train rocked and through an
angled storefront you can see into the back room
of the haberdashery, dotted with cords, bands
and feathers. As for the one art museum, the glass
doors of the new addition encasing the old building
are open; there is no admission, no floor plan
or gift shop, just the 17th century water canal
also kept visible under glass your shoes tap on,
and as immediate, the surround of Sorolla paintings—
children racing the tide in sunlight that could
stain your clothes, then grape harvesters unloading
sacks of yellow-green baubles whose tang reaches
your breath, and glancing by accident to the present—
cropped neatly through the oversize window—

you see the café across the street and people
walking past it from their feet up, each with her one
complex nature and the self-doubt that may
change her life. We experience this living moment
one frame at a time for now, but hours later
the water canal still shows under our shoes and
residents, somewhere, again, lean over the edge
of new books, burying their old language.

ONE WORLD

Lifelong consequences in small degrees would follow, but first
I could go to the shoe repair in the marble basement hallway of
The office building on Lower Broadway and bargain for the complete
Overhaul of a pair of old boots worn by my daughter for years
Before me, then drop off books at an unheralded branch
Of the library, then continue north and across town
Because it was the kind of surgery I could go to by foot but was stopped
In my tracks because the little park is so beautiful in autumn
Then a cyclist pedals slowly under the orange tree like a man
In motion and as I point my phone to take a picture
A dog walker says there’s a hawk right above you, and yes she agrees
They’ve only been in the city here oh, the last twenty years after DDT
Was banned and the movie was made of the pair nesting on 5th Ave
And after that they became part of our lives
And then the hawk swoops, scythe-like, after a black squirrel
And by the time I walk into the lobby with my appointment I’m exactly on time
But in the waiting room looking in my bag for a pencil I see
The addressed, stamped, museum card I neglected to mail anywhere
In all those neighborhoods still holding the short note
To the acquaintance whose daughter died in her sleep.

About the Author:
Jessica Greenbaum’s most recent collection, Spilled and Gone, was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal . Recently her work appears in Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024 and in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia. https://poemsincommunity.org/