Jonathan Koven grew up on Long Island, NY, embraced by tree-speak, tide’s rush, and the love and support of his family. He holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from American University, works as a technical writer, and reads chapbooks for Moonstone Arts. He currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife Delana, and their cats Peanut Butter and Keebler. Read Jonathan’s poetry debut Palm Lines (2020), available from Toho Publishing. His fiction debut Below Torrential Hill (2021) is also available, a winner of the Electric Eclectic Novella Prize.
Q & A with Jonathan Koven
Jonathan Koven’s manuscript The Mystic Orchards was highly commended in the 2022 Animal Heart Press Collection contest. Our art editor and designer Amanda McLeod decided to find out what makes him tick…
AM: Let’s start with the usual – what draws you to poetry as a writing medium?
JK: Poetry is a vessel that feels a little like prayer. It’s the closest I can get to letting my soul speak for me, and a lot of the time the early creation process is allowing myself the freedom to write what I don’t yet understand. For those first drafts of poems, it’s a raw, somewhat meditative experience sensing my way through language—dipping into whatever dwells in the spirit, ready to be freed in words. Then, I decode and channel that into a message that feels true to the original source, while making it functional as a literal poem.
So, poetry is cathartic to me. It’s also a means of understanding myself, my unconscious, and what the universe is trying to speak through me. Poetry is also fascinating to me in that it reimagines language and what can be done with the space on a page, how so much can be evoked in so little, how transformative it can be to readers (and writers)!
AM: A lot of your ‘day job’ writing is in technical fields. How do you think this influences your poetry writing?
JK: Being a technical writer demands a precision of language and an ability to grasp complex concepts, rewording and delivering them to a wide audience. With both my poetry and tech writing, a patience and deliberation over word choice is important. While key to listen to intuitions, it’s sometimes more helpful to collaborate with others and relent control. Interesting, I never gave it much thought how the two seem to go hand-in-hand.
AM: You’re a fiction writer as well as a poet. Can you speak a little to how those intersect for you in your writing?
JK: I love poetic novels, I love poetry that feels like fiction, so I enjoy blurring the lines with my work. For me, so much of my fiction mirrors poetry; in form, sentence-level to even the narrative framing of a long prose piece; in voice, it all just emerges as poetic or musical and becomes whatever it wants to be afterward. I could point to a handful of passages of Below Torrential Hill and The Bridge that started as “poems,” how even their structures reflect poetry, or how a few of my poems arguably could be defined as flash-fiction. I think in the end, with either fiction or poetry, I’m trying to resolve something on a spiritual level with my chosen art—with all the tools of my imagination, painting with words.
AM: Verse novels fascinate me. I’d love your thoughts on the mechanics of telling an entire story arc through poetry.
JK: I’d like to try writing a novel-in-verse one day. I imagine it requires an extraordinary attention-to-detail. Of course, my fiction is language-driven and touched with painterly imagery, but I do believe there is a difference.
With Below Torrential Hill, there are word-threads and moments of lyrical refrain. By this, I mean passages that are worded to reflect one another, despite being separate. For example, when separate moments or arcs in the plot align, a specific refrain might establish a connection—between two characters, or two events occurring in one setting over time. When the character Lucy visits the woods after her husband’s death, she notices the moon in the daytime sky; then toward the novel’s end, years later, Lucy’s son Tristen visits the same place—the poetic description mirrors itself—and a connection forms.
I also enjoy reading novels with lush imagery and emotional description, novels that heighten the prose as the plot thickens, or when there is a rich musical quality throughout that never grows stale. To me, these elements should be shared in both poetry and fiction, whether or not it’s in-verse.
AM: Your poetry collection ‘The Mystic Orchards’ was a runner up in our 2022 contest. Tell us a little of the backstory of how that collection came to be.
Who are your poetic influences?
JK: Thank you so much for reading and for considering The Mystic Orchards so highly in your contest! It’s truly an honor.
The collection started as a chapbook and the poems’ first drafts were written several months into the pandemic. I wanted to create a “dreamier, darker, nature-oriented yet more political” follow-up to my debut Palm Lines, and after a while of submitting it as a chapbook, I realized the “story” I hoped to tell probably required a much longer arc. I revised and revised again, adding several more poems (and hybrid pieces) including the eight-page “I Preserve You,” and organized everything into sections. It’s a project that now means so much to me and I dream of finding it a home so I can share it with the world!
As for poetic influences, while writing this collection, I enjoyed a lot of Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath. Though, I’m a voracious reader and I’m sure many voices snuck their way into my head. A great many I adore and aspire to the reaches of are Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Glück, W.S. Merwin, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Joy Harjo, and—not to also name authors of fiction—so many others.
AM: Wow, an eight page poem. Writing long form poetry is something I’ve been working on myself lately. Can you speak to the experience of working in a longer length? (especially given we tend to edit so much in poetry, to keep the language under pressure)
JK: Good point about keeping language under pressure! I think striking a balance between form and content is key. A long poem essentially asks the reader to sustain their attention and energy, but I don’t think it necessarily means the piece itself is more challenging or less approachable than an average-length poem. Writing in blank or free verse is probably easiest in terms of structure. Organizing the long poem into sections is a good way to have it appear less daunting. Also, like you mentioned, considering the length, it may not suit the poem to frequently use overly sophisticated wordplay or grandiloquent abstractions.
On the other hand, the Romantics did exactly that and with great success. Whitman, Browning, Eliot, all their long poems are complex—all masterpieces… Ronald Johnson wrote a postmodern book-length poem that is, in its entirety, an abstraction. Not to undercut my own answer to your question, but in truth there are no rules. The best advice I can probably give is to be unafraid and take risks. That, above all else, is what I tell myself when writing something long like (the eight-page) “I Preserve You” or (the four-page) “After Light’s End.”
Jonathan Koven wrote the following poem exclusively for his author feature with FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art.
Shade in Meteora
I believe in a reunion. Earthen
spires outlast millennia of sea-births.
To return without recollection,
in craters olive-lush, poppies blushed,
my legacy in a fusion
with history labyrinthine. Elder oceans
nobody recalls, I ask
was I never vaster than a body?
I may not have fallen out the shining
sky, but I still dream of rebirth
in valleys under endless rain, craving
ruin a creation, too.