Jennifer Franklin – Conversation & Five Poems
for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy
Carlie Hoffman & Tiffany Troy: Jennifer Franklin’s poetry sings homage to the artists gone too soon: “Only the earth / does not betray you,” she writes in “Letter to Sylvia Plath.” In “Nocturne with Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait,” she writes that the “greatest pain” was “that [Van Gogh’s] belief in beauty did / not save him in the end.” How would you describe the origins or influences of your language and voice as a writer?
Jennifer Franklin: The Romantic poets, especially the Odes of Keats, inspired me to begin writing poetry when I was in high school. In my first year of college, I took a comparative literature class called “Exile & the Conditions of Writing,” which focused on the poetry of Ovid, Du Fu, the Romantics, Dickinson, Celan, Sachs, and Rich. It showed me different possibilities of what poetry could do, as well as the way it could be a lifeline to poets living in extreme conditions. Soon after, I discovered the work of Carolyn Forché, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Richard Howard, and I have kept this entire constellation of early influences close as I have grown and changed as a writer.
CH & TT: Through the epistolary and ekphrastic poems, your speaker is powerful in her unwillingness to stay crouching, “cold, still, compact.” In that vein, what can poetry offer people today? What personal meaning does poetry hold for you?
JF: Poetry has been an important part of human life since people could recite and write. We are finding new proof of this every day. For example, archeologists have just discovered a mummy with a section of Book 2 of the Iliad from an excavation in Egypt that sheds light on the funeral practices of Egypt in Roman times. I see poetry as not just important in times of birth, marriage, or death but as an integral part of daily life. That is why the work of The Academy of American Poets and smaller sites that send a poem to the inboxes of their subscribers each morning is such a valuable tool. I believe what Baldwin believed, “we write in order to change the world…” Personally, poetry has saved my life more times than I can count. It has always been what I have turned to when I have experienced a crisis or a tragedy—the death of friends and family members, my daughter’s profound autism diagnosis, my cancer diagnosis and treatment. Poetry has consoled and sustained me through difficult times.
CH & TT: Is there a poem or poetry collection you believe everyone should read at least once—and why?
JF: I would recommend that everyone immerse themselves, at least once, in the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. I have learned so much about imagery, language, rhythm, and syntax by reading her poems and letters. Most importantly, I have learned about how one’s unique interiority and point of view can serve one’s own poetic voice. My mentor, Richard Howard, used to say, “we have yet to catch up with Dickinson’s genius,” and I agree.
CH & TT: Your poems are often in dialogue with other poets and writers (like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf) and mythologies, especially pertaining to goddesses or women protagonists or villains. Writers often build their own creative canon over time. Which poets, writers, artists, or musicians have shaped yours?
JF: In addition to the poets I mentioned earlier, Greek mythology and Greek tragedy has informed a great deal of my work. What you said about writers building their own creative canon over time. Two teachers with whom I studied (Lucie Brock-Broido and Gregory Orr) both recommended that we make our own anthologies of poems we love and add to them throughout our lives. It is interesting, over the decades, to see what poems we continue to turn to and how our appreciation of them deepens as we gain life experience. In addition to poetry, I continue to read and study the work of Woolf, Plath, Rhys, Joyce, Beckett, Ibsen, Rilke, Akhmatova, Szymborska, Carson, and Simic. My forthcoming collection is a series of epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath, and my new manuscript is in dialogue with the art of Ana Mendieta, Frida Kahlo, and Camille Claudel, as well as other women painters and artists.
CH & TT: What are your hopes for the future of American poetry and its place in our culture?
JF: I hope that poets continue to be, as Shelley asserted in 1821, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” As James Baldwin said, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world… The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” I believe that the moral conviction and courageous dedication to freedom of speech by writers are going to become even more important as our democracy is continuously threatened and eroded from within. The fact that Congress is not standing up to this administration is appalling. It is chilling that The Supreme Court has ensured that women and minorities have fewer rights in this country (with the Dobbs v. Jackson and the Louisiana v. Callais decisions) than in the year I was born. The cancellation of Stephen Colbert on late night TV because he wasn’t afraid to speak out against the administration was the canary in the coal mine about freedom of speech. The responsibility for poets and writers to stand strong against injustice, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and hatred of every kind is going to become more important, especially as the prevalence of AI obscures truth from fiction. The importance of a humanist education where students learn to think critically and create poems and art, using their own innate talents, should be upheld and celebrated.
LETTER TO SYLVIA PLATH—
All autumn, I want to bury
regret—worry,
wormwood, words. I want to dig
a shallow hole behind your grave
to leave you
a message. Soon, it would wash
away with October rain. Clouds
drift where
I wish I could arrange my hands
on your vandalized stone.
Every year
at this time, I bury what I know
in the damp ground. Only the earth
does not betray
you. I send my words over the ocean.
Now, the soil opens for a moment
and seals shut
again without a sound.
VILLA OF MYSTERIES, POMPEII
I have always been both—hunter,
hunted. Hungry for words. Daughter
of desire, hungry hunter, hunted
through red rooms of my youth—
museums, classrooms, cloisters, ruins—
running away from men who wanted
to trap me, make me a meek version
of myself. After what has been done
to me in the dark apartments of this city,
I am both the faceless woman in white
and the fawn flung around her shoulders—
facing the ground with stunned, lifeless
eyes. All around me, music from the flute
fills the frescoes. My blood red walls warn
of what I have had to kill to keep all this
intact—roosters, fish, fawn, goat,
a freshly gutted boar. You will never know
what wickedness waits behind these closed
doors—what alchemy I’ve honed in these
rooms wrested from worry and words,
from washing and writing. You will never
know what I have given up—waiting, watching.
Righting everyone’s problems. All the while—
whirling white-wardrobed initiate, hell-bent
on preserving wonder. Bent on keeping watch
over whatever mysterious will blooms in me
like these walls and walls of painted fruit
that will not ever rot.
NOCTURNE FOR AMERICA
Listen, you cannot say this
is not you. This has always
been you—binding wrists,
stealing land, fists closing
throats. Desperate to dominate,
performing power. The sun
has been setting for an hour.
I watch the sky turn from pink
to red. Leafless trees, tops cut flat,
loom behind the locked gate.
Dogs walk the circumference,
whining to gambol in the grass.
The air smells like snow.
Winter refuses to end.
NOCTURNE WITH CLAUDEL’S CROUCHING WOMAN
When I think of myself, she is the me
I picture—crouching near the ground,
arm covering my neck and the left
side of my face. You cannot see
but my eyes are closed, hair pulled
back, trapped by my hands. I am not
crying but I was once or I will be
soon. I am cold, still, compact.
I take up as little space as possible.
Feral, fallen, failing, I can smell
myself as I wait for hot water
to shower down on me. I lean
on my right leg, gather strength
to stand again and face what is to come.
NOCTURNE WITH VAN GOGH’S SELF_PORTRAIT
The great pain is not that he cut off
his ear or even that he shot himself
in the chest and died two days later.
No, it’s that his belief in beauty did
not save him, in the end. He said
it was his duty to work in the garden
to see flowers growing. And to paint
the rich and magnificent aspects
of nature. He apprenticed himself
to the world. Saw the way color
throbbed when built up and intensified.
It is only a myth that he courted
madness—he yearned for harmony
and calm. It was not his fault he
could not quiet his mind—spokes,
sharp and numerous as sunflowers.
His life, he told his brother, was
attacked at the very root. In his last
months he painted seventy paintings
in seventy-five days. He would
never know the throngs of people
who would wait in line to photograph
his paintings. Believing himself a failure
when he sat in the wheat field he had
just painted, his sky filled with crows,
he could only hear when he tilted
his one good ear up towards the sun.
About the author:
Jennifer Franklin is the author of four poetry collections, including A Fire in Her Brain, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, January 2027). Poems from the collection (epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath) have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The 2025 Pushcart Anthology, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology.
