profiles in poetics: Jan Beatty
- photo: Jeff Swensen
Jan Beatty is a poet who provides elemental and mutable holders for the psychic reauthorship and dynamic agency of women's lives. As an advocate and guardian for women's writing, she worked for fifteen years as Director of the Madwomen in the Attic and Creative Writing at Carlow University, an organization for women ages 18-95. And also taught for fifteen years at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. She affirms, “The voices of women are thrilling, intense, humble, beautiful, sad, disturbing, and wildly brave. They need to be heard.” However, her experience exposed that daily, accomplished women were “plagued with self-doubt, damaged by abuse and incidents with male teachers and writers.” Her work was to create environments where women could “believe in their worth, the value of their writing, and to send their poetry out into the world.”
In the same manner of believing in women writers’ inner truths, in her book, Dragstripping, out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, August ’24, she similarly synthesizes her characters in seismic pillars between light and dark to do the same. She creates unique, often violent universes where women characters can shake the calm veil of their subconscious and conditioning. In doing so, they take risks beyond the traditional passive narrative, rescripting the ecstatic into open forms of possibility and self-advocacy. Her characters, no matter the harrowing circumstance, illustrate the complexity of this rescripting. She states, “the speaker is involved in saving her own life, in re-seeing a way to elation while things are crumbling around her.” There is wisdom here.
The wisdom in rescripting the ecstatic is more akin to the artist, who, Beatty says, “could have many visions, dreams involved in voice, in the playing of his instrument, or the enactment of his craft.” In fact, “No one can pin it down.” The wisdom honored and gained here cannot be expressed in rational terms. Todo so would be limiting, narrow, and make it false. She admits that while there is risk in moving forward, there is more harm in staying. After the emotional storm, she must rescript her vision in openness, something not yet known, but certainly one of courage and power.
Jan Beatty's work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Her eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024. She was featured in POETRY magazine in December, 2024. Beatty is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, 2021. Of her sixth book, The Body Wars, Naomi Shihab Nye said In the New York Times: Jan Beatty's new poems shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Other books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the international low-residency MFA program.
What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer?
I was always writing. I wrote as a small child as a way to escape, writing in locked diaries stashed under my bed. As an adoptee, I needed a place to “be,” and writing was, in a very real way, a location, a place to live. My childhood wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great, and I needed to detach, create new worlds. I won the poetry contest in first grade, writing a poem about floating away on a cloud. You see the pattern—escape, in any way possible.
Who have been mentor writers in your career?
I’m really grateful for the mentors I’ve had. I don’t use the word, “career,” and I’ve never thought of writing in those terms, or really any pursuit in those terms. As an artist, I’ve valued my freedom to create more than anything. As cultural obstacles interfere, I’ve worked to eliminate, sidestep, mow them down, etc.
With that philosophy in mind, I’ve been lucky to have some wonderful mentors. Of course, I started with the mentors of the many poets I was reading early on: Gerald Stern, Phil Levine, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Ai, Gary Snyder, Wanda Coleman, Diane Glancy, and of course, many, many more.
My teachers were amazing. I was fortunate to study with the brilliant Ed Ochester, who later became my editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sadly, Ed passed away in 2023, but his legacy inspires. He changed the face of American poetry as he published queer writers, writers of color, and women. His poetry champions the working class, and the deep humanity and vision of his work remains so important to me as a poet. As a teacher, Ed gave us room to be ourselves in poems, yet he was clear that the poems needed to be accessible, that there had to be a way for the reader to enter. His influence was life-changing for me.
Other teachers include the magnificent Lynn Emanuel, who taught me how to cut back on poems (we called her “the slasher”). Her precision, invention, and intellect in dealing with poems is stunning. She taught me to be tougher on my poems and to expect more.
One of my earliest teachers was the poet Maggie Anderson. Her depth of story, history, and community taught me so much. Her work moves people and changes the way they walk around the world. She is an amazing poet. I learned so much by reading her work, but also by learning how to write a poem knitted like a “loose sweater” and by taking a long walk in the lines of poems. The art of Maggie Anderson is a visionary art, connected to the earth and the people in it.
One of my long-time primary mentors has been the fabulous poet, Judith Vollmer. I have been beyond lucky to be able to read Judith’s work and to become her colleague and friend. We have been readers of each other’s work for many years and through many books. I don’t know how I could have written my poems without her artist’s eye to see and feel simultaneously. Her scholarly/visionary poems straddle worlds and open possibilities for the reader.
How has your own work changed over time and why?
My work has moved from the single stanza narratives of my first book, Mad River, to expanding forms, more bold voices. More white space has arrived in poems, more indented lines, many and varied speakers. I’m always working against any sense of self-censorship that might arise, which I think is a shifting, lifelong challenge.
I’m finding as time goes on that I’m leaping more in poems and that I’m on the border of sense in some poems. I’ve always believed in clarity in poetry, which I still do. But, with some new work, I’m leaning more into mystery in a way that is perhaps less clear. There’s always a way in, a way through, but some of my newer work is less narrative.
I view these changes as a natural progression—I want to challenge myself, to dig in to material in a new way and hopefully a deeper way. Much of my subject matter remains the same, as in origins, street poems, violence and ecstasy—but perhaps addressed in a more complex way or from a different vantage point or voice.
Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?
Besides poetry, I’ve been primarily influenced by nonfiction. I read memoirs or nonfiction about the West and the natural world. I’m obsessed with explorers, mountaineers of the past and present, such as Diane Glancy, Forrest Gander, Barry Lopez, Gretel Erlich, Gary Snyder, Ernest Shackleton, Jon Krakauer, John Wesley Powell, etc.
Reading them and traveling West for periods of time has influenced my work, as land and landforms guide my poems. Since I don’t know much about my origins, only that my birthfather was born in Winnipeg, I’ve spent a lot of time traveling western Canada on trains in search of connection through land. I’ve found a sense of home and family through this reading and traveling.
Poetry and music are my biggest influences. Some of the poets I’m wild about are Ed Ochester, Ai, Sandra Cisneros, Sharon Olds, Wanda Coleman, Diane Glancy, Etheridge Knight, Judith Vollmer, Allison Hedge Coke, Denise Duhamel, Nin Andrews, Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Bruce Snider, D.A. Powell, Forrest Gander, Bruce Weigl, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, and many, many more.
I go back to Ai for her unflinching bravery, how she enters places in her work that no one else approaches. I love the way Wanda Coleman combines words, creates new language. I can read a Diane Glancy poem and immediately have ideas for poems—her work seems to live between worlds. With Sandra Cisneros, I can feel joy and intense feminism moving together, which is so inspiring. Forrest Gander’s poems take me deep inside of land and body in a way no one else’s work does. When I read Bruce Snider, I feel a sense of being home and wanting to be inside the poem. Judith Vollmer’s poems travel to other countries, other worlds with atmosphere and ancestors, teaching me and opening possible paths of writing.
What are your plans for the future?
I’m working on my ninth book now, a book of poems, with hopes to submit it for publication soon. I’m also working on a book of essays that I’ve been writing for a number of years now. It’s a collection of talks and unheard essays relating to gender and writing risk, to what happens when women write into subjects that they’re afraid to approach.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing private teaching, and I’ve been traveling for readings all over the country. I enjoy consulting on full-length manuscripts of poetry on a one-on-one basis. A number of my students have published their manuscripts with good presses, and it’s a rewarding process all around.
What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?
Well, that’s really the subject of my book of essays. It would take books to talk about the continued roadblocking, misogyny, the discrimination by the wall of straight white male publishers, editors, writers—that still exists to block writing by women. Yes, progress has been made, but we are far from a level playing field. Many people would disagree. This misogyny lives strongly in the culture at large and affects the minds and bodies of women writers.
I worked for fifteen years with women writers as Director of the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, a wonderful organization for women ages 18-95. I also was Director of Creative Writing there, and I taught for fifteen years at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. I was the editor of MadBooks, a small press dedicated to publishing the work of women writers. My experience with women writers has been such a gift and learning experience. The voices of women are thrilling, intense, humble, beautiful, sad, disturbing, and wildly brave. They need to be heard. And yet, over and over I encountered accomplished women who were plagued with self-doubt, damaged by abuse and incidents with male teachers and writers. It was not rare, it was an everyday occurrence. A large part of my work was to help women writers to believe in their worth, the value of their writing, and to send their poetry out into the world. I celebrate the writing of women that has been published in the last twenty years, and I support their continued determination and courage.
Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?
Some of the amazing women out there with first books:
Adele Elise Williams, her first book, Wager, won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, 2024.
Emily Lee Luan, Return, Nightboat Poetry Prize, 2024.
Consuelos Wise, boy, Omnidawn, 2024.
Lisa Alexander, Throttlebody, Get Fresh Books, 2024.
If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?
If I would describe myself as a writer, I would talk about risk, movement into dangerous spaces, objections to categories, movement across land, blurring of the body and its genders.
I wouldn’t create a label of myself as a writer. I don’t like labels, since they restrict, they leave things out, they limit. A flexible label would still be a label with parameters. I wouldn’t do it.
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Blues music, as practised by most blues musicians, isn’t about embracing and expressing sadness, but moreover defying it. This is most seen in the juxtaposition of the first forwarding poem of Dragstripping and the last poem of the book.
This sentiment, who cares, “It’s one small almost death, in the many deaths –,” becomes the reason “you shift hard into 5th and take the turn rough”. What is the river of light? What are these new ways and how do they defy sadness?
I appreciate your looking into the lines and meanings here, but I’ve got a different view of it. The poems aren’t juxtaposed in the book for a reason. So that when you say that, “This sentiment, who cares, ‘It’s one small almost death, in the many deaths –,’ becomes the reason ‘you shift hard into 5th and take the turn rough’— it’s misleading. The first sentiment doesn’t become the reason.
Yes, they’re both connected to the mother, but that connection isn’t made. In the first instance: “…who cares?/It’s one small almost death, in the many deaths—/The women killed and never found…”, the speaker is comparing an attempted abortion to the killings of many women.
In the second instance, “she is skimming away//the reason you take a train West/the reason you shift hard into 5th and take the turn rough…”, the speaker is referring to the unknown mother and the anger involved in abandonment.
So, saying that one becomes the other isn’t accurate or represented in the book.
In the poem, ‘the river of light is all we have’, the river of light isn’t defined. I would say that it’s a running stream of light that runs alongside experience. As is said in the poem, the new ways aren’t known yet. They seem to be new ways of being. I don’t know that they defy sadness? It’s not clear what they do.
Returning to your earlier statement about the blues: “Blues music, as practised by most blues musicians, isn’t about embracing and expressing sadness, but moreover defying it. This is most seen in the juxtaposition of the first forwarding poem of Dragstripping, and the last poem of the book.”
That’s one way to look at it—some musicians say that they play the blues to chase the blues away. If you listen to Muddy Waters sending his voice out into the world, you might be feeling deeper sadness. Whatever you hear, it will be authentic. The way I see it, an artist could have many visions, dreams involved in voice, in the playing of his instrument or the enactment of his craft. No one can know what that is for the musician or artist. It could be all about grief. It could be about sadness and defiance. It could be about loyalty to craft and study. No one can pin it down.
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The back of your book is framed in the title: “Rescripting the Ecstatic in the Midst of Violence”.
Ecstatic is defined as, “feeling or expressing overwhelming happiness or joyful excitement,” and “involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence.” This statement in itself could be triggering because it is in the midst of violence. However, we cannot ignore “The unknown bodies of women” nor we can deny her sky.
Like the blues, how do we defy or face this sadness. The poem, “The Body’s River” reads, “I was born for betrayal—/ When my mother left me in the orphanage, // I invented love with strangers./ And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there, // until the crash, the revelation. / They say blues is three chords and the truth— // And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive into the body’s costly river. Firstly, how do you see risk participating in the Rescripting of the Ecstatic in the Midst of Violence? And secondly, how do you see poetry and music participating in this dialogue. If the new ways are not yet here, are they found more in the truth of music or the lies of poetry?
Again, I appreciate your diving in to the poems and offering connections. I don’t think, though, that you can analyze the poems in this way. Certainly, you can refer to definitions and juxtapositions, but each poem lives as its own world, its own universe, with varying rules and ideals.
In answer to your question: Firstly, how do you see risk participating in the Rescripting of the Ecstatic in the Midst of Violence?
Of course, risk would be involved whenever there’s violence. To rescript the ecstatic, the speaker is involved in saving her own life, in re-seeing a way to elation while things are crumbling around her. She’s moving forward with a belief in another way to live before she can envision it. There’s definite risk of harm there, yet there’s more risk in doing nothing, in not trying to rescript her vision.
In answer to your next question:
“And secondly, how do you see poetry and music participating in this dialogue. If the new ways are not yet here, are they found more in the truth of music or the lies of poetry?”
I’m not looking at it like that, with that separation, that sense of either/or. As we said, the new ways aren’t here, and are unknown. So, to discuss where they may be found isn’t possible. Also, truth and lies and all shades in between can inhabit all kinds of art. I’m feeling the limitations inherent in your question, rather than an opening of possibility, which is what I was writing at the end of the final poem: “the new ways not yet here,/not visible or known.”
There is a concentration of melopoeia, poetic music, in the line breaks and momentum of your poems. In terms of stylistic employment, can you describe how you utilize the line in order to create this potent visual and auditory impulse? Are these musical lines meant to interact and or mimic the Blues?
I would like to focus on your poem, ‘When Rape Was An Ocean’. Can you also describe these new directions and how does one participate with them?
The lines here were meant to feel like the content, like the movement of water throughout. This is most obvious in the lines:
ocean water coming in/ water going out.
This movement of waves is echoed by the falling of the speaker:
She was dropping down,
her body falling
Also, the many couplets in the poem support this doubling movement. I’m always interested in the music in a poem, and I’m happy that you felt an interaction or mimicry of the Blues here—but I can’t say that I was actively writing to create that specific connection.
Your question about the new directions refers to the speaker’s changed vision. After the rape, her way of apprehending the world is different. The physical world is no longer the physical world she knew before the rape. So, she is reorienting herself. She is learning the rules of the changed world. What meant “safety” before no longer means that. She is making decisions about what to hold onto and what to let go of. Her choice, based on the violence she suffered, is to “swim headlong away.” “She wants to find sky,” meaning she wants to find a way out, an opening. “She wants to be sky,” meaning that she needs to find a new self that has power. “She swims headlong and larger.” She is the one who is saving herself.
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Thank you for being here,
xxo
Jillian
🌻 Jillian is a multi-age private teacher for English & ESL with a cross-cultural focus. She teaches language acquisition, literature, fluency, test prep, business English & creative writing. She has 15 years of experience teaching in the US, DE, TH, KR, CN, PT, & Globally Online.💫
For more information about Jillian & classes, please visit culturalcompassenglish.org and reach out directly. 🙏