In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
Welcome back to Water~Stone! You had a piece last year, “Learning to Live With a Clockwork Orange,” in Volume 26. This year, your poem, “Half-Life of Krill,” puts oceanic and celestial imagery on the page. What gave you inspiration for this piece? Where did the title come from?
Thank you! I’m so glad to return to your excellent magazine. This piece is quite different from the previous, but now that I’m looking at them together, they are both rather anxious poems! Half-Life of Krill started life during a trip I had taken, back to a beautiful place where I was once young. My connection to the scenery seemed at once seemed far away, but also parallel, to the way my younger self has experienced it. That distance between moments in time looms quite large in my own life, but from the broader perspective, the gaps between the person I was and the person I am is actually rather brief. The title likely plays on this idea too, with the notion of a half-life as a measure of time and decay. That’s where it started anyway—this poem did end up taking a few turns.
There’s a lot of natural imagery in here, and you’ve said that you like to add nature into your work. In this poem, there are many references between sea and sky. What drew you to using these aspects of the natural world?
Indeed, I like to see nature shining through the organized, civilized world, such as when you watch a hawk hunting over a city street—it provides some elemental sense of fundamental creation in structuring our carefully constructed modern life. Some of this poem is rather literal—images lifted from places I’ve seen or moments that stood out for a particular significance. I think poetry sometimes is about picking out elements, what you see as important or meaningful, and fitting them together into a coherent mood.
Can you speak to the sense of fragility throughout the piece—not only mentioned at the very beginning, but later on through lines like, “bones swimming / taxidermic,” which gives an image of something delicately put together?
It is interesting that you point to that element as a bit of motif. It’s there, I think, not just because life itself is fragile—our bodies, the short lives of the animals that inhabit the world—but also because of the random nature of experience and our tenuous ability to communicate it. All of these things can give the appearance of solidity, but solidity is often an illusion. Still, fragile things can also be surprisingly strong, like carefully made lace, as well as adaptive and competent at surviving.
I love how you end on the phrase “the dowser’s bobbin,” as if there’s a question, some continued searching. What led you to that ending—or did you have it in mind when starting?
As some inside baseball, the end of this poem came about for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted something brief and punchy, thinking it would have more impact given the overall somber tone. And, I wanted to include some phrasing around taxidermy, which has a kind of morbidity about it while also being a craft of genuine skill. There’s something about how taxidermy captures an animal in motion but is produced by their death, that seemed appropriate (and just a little gruesome).
“Jawset” is taxidermy terminology, but I couldn’t find another requisite part with the right sound drawn from that jargon. So, the last two words of the poem are indeed a phrase I had set aside, and thought they had the right mood. Dowser’s relates to dowsing, a kind of divination or magic, while bobbin is drawn from, in my mind, sewing. Sewing and leatherwork are adjacent to taxidermy as crafts, and I had always found comfort in the sound of my mother’s sewing machine when I was young. Since I find this poem a little dark, or at least resigned, I was glad to end it with an image that seemed warmer and offered the possibility of carrying on. After all, what we can do is keep going and keep making.
Do you ever find your poems as a continuation of others, interlinking in their ideas or characters?
There was a time when each poem was pretty much its own separate world, but these days I am happy to embrace repeated ideas, images, even characters. Sometimes poems seem to cluster around an idea because there’s too much to say without crowding, and I think I’ve gotten better about letting the language breathe a little. So, one piece may start to bud off into other related pieces, and I’ve learned to let them develop and then separate them out when appropriate. I also sometimes get taken by a particular word, so individual words or even very brief phrases have a way of creeping back in from prior work if they really speak correctly.
What have been some of your favorite pieces or authors that you’ve read in the last few years?
I read literary mags as I can, especially while writing and submitting myself, and there is terrific stuff published all the time. I always notice the beautiful work of Sarah Ghazal Ali and have recently been enjoying some of Tony Hoagland’s later pieces. I’ve been reading a lot of fairy tales recently, sort of as research for a few poems but also just to appreciate their fascinating texture.
What are you currently working on?
A fair number of what I hope are strange and moving poems! I also write some academic philosophy in the area of political theory, and am doing publishing submissions for both areas. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
JC Talamantez is a Tejano poet whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, Nimrod, Guernica, Colorado Review, and others. She was a longtime student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
