Jared Harél’s Poetry Captures Family, Love, and Death on the Canvas of New York City [INTERVIEW]

Jared Harél is the author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, selected by Kwame Dawes as the Winner of the 2022 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (U. of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Go Because I Love You (Diode Editions, 2018.) He’s been awarded the ‘Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize’ from American Poetry Review, as well as the ‘William Matthews Poetry Prize’ from Asheville Poetry Review. Harél’s poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review and The Sun. He teaches writing, plays drums, and lives with his family in Westchester, NY. For more information, visit: jaredharel.com. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: “Let Our Bodies Change the Subject” is largely anchored on your experiences. What is your first memory of writing for pleasure, not because you’d been required to write for a school assignment? And when did you first discover poetry?

Jared: “Well, for me, those are slightly different questions. My initial foray into writing wasn’t through formal writing but through creating books. Even before I could write properly, I made these books, drawing on them, and my mom would staple them together. This was when I was very young, and it marked the beginning of my attraction to storytelling and language. Then, during junior high, I got into basketball, and my focus shifted away from writing. 

“It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I rediscovered my passion for writing, thanks to an English teacher, Mrs. Schmidt. She assigned us a poetry writing task, which coincided with a transitional period in my life. As a senior, I was contemplating my identity and interests. Realizing a career in the NBA wasn’t in my future, I gravitated towards poetry. It became a way to mark time, especially as everything seemed to be moving so fast. Poems became a method for me to capture moments and hold onto them a little longer.”

James: Wonderful. I had a 10th grade creative writing teacher that turned me onto poetry too. It’s a reminder for all the teachers listening that they can have an incredible impact with just one class, one moment, one interaction.

Jared: “One of the cool things about having my first book of poetry published was including that teacher in the acknowledgements. It prompted me to reach out to her, and now we’ve reconnected. We meet up for lunch every few months. It’s amazing how these relationships evolve and last.”

James: That’s wonderful. After 40 years of writing poetry privately for friends and family, a friend encouraged me to share my work more publicly. When I published my first book, I tracked down my English teachers, including that one, and sent them copies. Most were retired but thrilled. So yes, if your teachers have impacted you, reach out to them. It can make their day or even their year. I totally agree.

The opening lines of the first poem in this collection, “Sad Rollercoaster,” read:

"My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.
She wants to get it: how it tastes and feels."

What is your approach to crafting poems from your memories?

Jared: “You know, poems start where they start. Sometimes they come from my daughter – she inadvertently gives me some of my best lines. Often, they begin with a moment, an incident. Being around my kids, they naturally find their way into my poems. Sometimes it starts with a phrase. With ‘Sad Rollercoaster,’ it was inspired by my daughter, who was seven at the time. She was asking incisive, specific questions, trying to understand death. That poem was in my head for a while, evolving gradually. 

“It connects with various locations in the city, like Queens or Coney Island. The idea solidified when we were at a baseball game at Coney Island. That’s when I realized there was a poem there.”

James: I can relate to that. An idea rattles around in your head, then suddenly it becomes more concrete and demands to be written. I’ve experienced that too, where an idea is bubbling around but I haven’t found a way to capture it, and then it suddenly materializes and you start to work on it. 

Jared: “If an experience sticks with me for a week or two, I start to think there might be a poem in it. There might be something I want to articulate. I see writing as an act of discovery. If I’m still thinking about it, it means there’s something left to be discovered.”

James: “If I Never Find God” is an example of a very short poem that the reader is compelled to re-read a few times. You wrote:

"If I Never Find God

it may be because I search
like how my daughter dawdles
about our modest two bedroom:

dreamy, off-kilter, driving
me mad, too lucky to really look
for her elusive other shoe."

This reads as though the poem just appeared, effortlessly, but very short poems can be so tricky to craft, with every syllable exposed. How do you approach writing very short poems? 

Jared: “You’re right, James. Short poems can indeed take a long time to perfect. For instance, in my collection on suffering, I initially wrote a longer poem inspired by Wislawa Szymborska’s poem ‘On Death Without Exaggeration’. It was a poem about death, employing personification and dry humor. But as I was writing, I penned the line, ‘To be clear, I’m no expert.’ This struck me as the first genuine sentiment in the poem, and I cut the poem down to a much shorter poem.

With ‘If I Never Find God,’ the process was different. It was never a longer poem, but I devoted considerable time to each word, given their limited number. The poem is, in part, influenced by the work of Yahushua November. Their work reflects a more secure relationship with Judaism and God, which made me reflect on my own faith, often marked by confusion and insecurity. The poem explores this fluctuating relationship with faith, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. The metaphor of searching without real urgency became central, and the poem naturally stayed short, encapsulating the title’s question.”

James: That’s fascinating. You’ve given examples of a poem that naturally demanded brevity and another that evolved from a longer piece through significant deletion. Poets, as they evolve, must overcome the fear of deleting. My own ‘deletion test,’ which I even apply in a business context, involves removing a section and then observing my reaction. If I forget about the deletion quickly, it was unnecessary. But if it lingers in my mind, perhaps it was more integral than I thought.

Jared: “That’s an excellent rule. I make it a point to keep all versions of my work, naming them sequentially in my documents. There have been times when I’ve over-edited a poem and had to revisit earlier versions to find its essence again.”

James: During the pandemic, I experienced many sleepless nights, leading me to write poetry on my phone using Google Docs. This shift from longhand writing offered an unexpected benefit: a complete revision history. I’ve used this feature to show students the evolution of my poems, from initial thoughts to final versions. It’s fascinating and also alleviates the fear of deletion, knowing you can always retrieve earlier versions.

Jared: “There’s this intriguing online journal now, called Midst. It offers a unique view of poem creation. Writers use their software to draft poems, and readers can either just read the poem or watch a video of its creation, including all revisions. It offers a detailed look into the poem’s evolution, and you can even revise it later, updating the video accordingly.”

James: Some of the poems in this collection view the world through the eyes of children, indirectly through your children and through your memories as a child. In “Behind the Painted Guardrail” you connect both views, you wrote:

"In truth, my mother knew little about me,
but loved both the me I was and wasn't—
a devotion so bright, I'd vanish in its glow."

How has having children changed and influenced your writing? 

Jared: “Having children was definitely a turning point in my writing life. Time becomes much more precious. Sometimes I paid a babysitter just for a couple of hours so I could write. It’s a time crunch. You’re not going to waste it on Facebook; you’re going to use it wisely. It was a ‘put up or shut up’ time for me as a writer. I had to prioritize writing. I became a more serious writer after having kids. The world also seemed scarier. With children, the fear goes up a level. This fear, and themes of love and loss, have become central in my work. ‘Behind the Painted Guardrail’ gave me a fresh lens into my childhood and my parents. I saw them as young people, making mistakes, just like I am. This poem reflects three generations—my mom, me, and my child. It was about realizing that my mother, for all her adoration, had a devotion that was almost blinding. Interestingly, I read this poem at my book launch last month, and she hadn’t heard it before.”

James: Oh, wonderful.

Jared: “Yeah, it’s a bit mind-twisting, reading these poems out loud and having an audience.”

James: For poets with young children, inspiration is abundant, but time is fractured. You have to be deliberate about the time you get. I know poets who scribble notes in between tasks, finding little moments, instead of having a dedicated hour for poetry.

Jared: “You become resilient. I remember revising poems in my head while pushing a stroller. Walks are a great time to keep a poem in your mind and turn it over.”

James: Yes, exactly. Poems can take a deceptively long time to write, despite taking up little space on the page.

Jared: “It’s tough. I don’t know how novelist parents manage. With the limited time I had, it often felt like just as I was getting back into the work, time was up.”

James: Your poem “Slow Dance,” capturing an awkward, special moment when boys and girls from two summer camps meet for a dance, is something most readers will have experienced. I have a similar poem in my first book, about a crush, and I love how audiences respond and relate the poem to their experiences. What do you learn about your poetry through the response of an audience?

Jared: “I do learn a lot from audience responses, especially now with my book out and giving readings. Sometimes people laugh at parts I didn’t realize were humorous, or certain poems strike readers in ways I didn’t expect. I believe readers complete a poem in a way. I bring a poem as far as I can, revise it, and then bring it out to the world. The reader, with their own experiences, completes it, making it something new. Seeing reviews, interviews, and responses at readings is super helpful and interesting. They often crystallize things I thought I knew about my book, giving them a different language. Some of that is intentional. I don’t want to know exactly what I’m doing while I’m doing it. After the book is out, it’s fascinating to see how people interact with it. I like that element of mystery, creating without being too aware of what I’m doing. This idea of writing toward discovery. But I do think the reader completes the poem.”

James: I’ve asked many of the poets invited on this podcast about their process for organizing and ordering their collections. How did you approach that challenge for “Let Our Bodies Change the Subject”, in terms of which poems to include, which to edit out, how to order the poems, and then dividing them into sections?

Jared: “My book lived in a single Word document for a long time. It was put together chronologically or somewhat haphazardly. When I thought I had enough poems for a book, I’d print everything out and spread it on the largest floor in my house, usually my kitchen. I knew some poems should be near each other, and others far apart. I would then look at the endings of some poems and the beginnings of others to see how they interact, linking them like train cars. If someone read the end of one poem and the beginning of the next, I’d consider what those poems do to each other. How do they commingle? There were poems I knew I wanted early in the book and others later. This process helped me make a first draft of the order. Then I’d read through and revise.

“I like having sections to break up the collection. I enjoy the frequent starts and stops of being a poem writer—the opportunity to write multiple beginnings and endings. In contrast, with novels, you only get one beginning and one ending every few years. So, having sections in this collection made sense. They felt like pauses or filling stations, offering a way to restart.”

James: In “Kin” you beautifully connect multiple memories of your parents, of your wife, of your five-year-old, loosely through the game of UNO. You wrote:

"But I remember after he won
and yelped quietly with delight—
how my son's small hands pressed
the scattered cards together, both together
and toward me to reshuffle the deck."

Talk about constructing this poem, how you created connections between disparate images to create a single poem. 

Jared: “Yeah, this one is the kind of poem I think of as almost like a collage. I’ll write poems that feel to me like collages, and I’ll know I’m in one when I have a bunch of moments or memories that feel kind of far apart, and I’m bringing them together around a single theme. This theme is obviously generational family, and I think the cards felt like a metaphor for that as well, but bringing the cards together toward a single unified whole and bringing the family together as a sort of unified whole, you know. And that sort of connection between a father and a son, the image at the end of that. That image at the end of that is a little bit to Larry Levis as well, and he had a poem which escapes me right now. I think it might be in my notes, and at the end of the poem, I think the son was pushing bread toward heaven or something like that. There’s an echo of it. And I don’t think I was consciously doing it when I wrote the poem, but I remember revising the poem and being like, you know what, I think that came from Larry Levis’s poem that reminded me of that, and I liked that, that also generational kind of passing down, you know. I think what I read in the poets who come before us is so much in the work that we write. I think reading and writing are these simultaneous activities for me. Writing is usually me reading a stack of books and then at some point, here it is.”

James: Yes. I have a similar stack.

Jared: “Yes, and then something sparks something in my own life. Sometimes I have a poet or two, or a poem or two that model what I’m trying to do. It always comes out different, you know. I think I was talking to Mark Doty once, and he said that sometimes when people think they innovate, they actually emulate, and sometimes when people think they emulate, they actually innovate. So, it always becomes different, you know, even if I’m trying to write a poem in the mode of or in the style of, it always turns out to be very different.”

James: If you want to write well, you have to read well. There’s really no avoiding that, and it can be enjoyable when I read a book where I get jealous in a constructive way of what a poet or writer has created, and use it as a challenge and an example. I interviewed Carmen DiBiase, who wrote a trilogy of sestinas inspired by characters in Shakespeare. He’s a retired professor, but his area of expertise was in Shakespeare, and they were just extraordinary sestinas that hid the form so effectively. I was determined to find an opportunity to write a sestina, which is an absolutely masochistic poetry form. And then, after like a year and a half, maybe two years, I finally found the poem where that would make sense, and I wouldn’t have done it had I not seen these wonderful examples. On the other hand, Dana Gioia wrote a critique about the academic nature of sestinas and that they tend to be university MFA projects and come off very stilted. So yeah, to write well, you have to read well, absolutely.

Jared: “Absolutely, and I say, whenever someone has writer’s block or just feels like they’re in a rut, I always say read widely, you know, and that’s usually the best antidote.”

James: Yeah, it gets you hungry. It gets you just hungry to create. I get that feeling too when I’ve read something that I really enjoy; it just makes you want to create.

Jared: “Absolutely, and I think the opposite is true too. Sometimes, if I’m in a writing rut, it’s because I’m in a reading rut as well. If I find that I can’t even read well, then I know that it’s going to be really hard to write as well.”

James: In “Primal,” you visualize the poem in short segments, one to three words each, staggered in two columns, snaking down the page. During the revision and editing process, how does the visual form emerge in your poems, using this poem as an example?

Jared: “There are two poems in the collection that have that staggered look, ‘Primal,’ which you mentioned, and ‘Self-Portrait as Nature Preserve.’ Both of these poems started as single-stanza, uniform poems, as most of my poems do. I changed them out of necessity; they didn’t feel right in their current form. With ‘Primal,’ for example, it’s about being afraid of the dark and the primal idea of how it’s built into us to be afraid of what we can’t see. I liked the idea of having space, of having that sort of pop-out effect in the poem, and I felt like it needed to be more staggered, more irregular on the page to convey that feeling of something coming at you out of nowhere. In a single stanza, regular free verse, it didn’t properly convey that, in my eyes. So it comes out of necessity. It’s not my go-to mode to lay out an experiment on the page, but I felt like that’s what craft is, it’s a tool in your tool belt. Not every tool you use the same amount, but those two poems in the collection needed that particular tool to feel like they were working in their best form. I also like when collections every once in a while throw a curveball, do something a little different.

“I was talking to the poet J.C. Todd a couple of nights ago in Philadelphia. I did a reading there, and she said one of the things she likes about those kinds of poems that break the normal form for a writer is that they then make the regular form that the poet uses a determined choice. It shows that what they’re doing 80, 90 percent of the time is a determined choice and what their thought process is behind those as well. So it’s kind of the contrast, the relief as well.”

James: I had a poem in my first book where it was very zen and image-rich and conceptual. I had this Tibetan singing bowl on my desk and when I hit it, it just chills me out; it’s a beautiful sound. I added that image in, and then I thought, “This poem needs to look zen,” and then I ended up making it sort of expand and contract, almost like a sound wave, but a zen sound wave. With that idea, I had to edit the poem to work without cheating and using different line spacing. The visual form on the page is sometimes a critically important tool.

Jared: “Absolutely. Yeah, and I think the visual also informs how the poem works rhythmically as well. For me, rhythm is very important, and I always edit out loud. I read the poem over and over again, and that’s how I revise. So, I’ll take the cue from the line breaks, the spaces, and how I read the poem, and how I work my way down the page. If something feels off, if there’s a kink in the rhythm, that’s how I usually find it, through reading out loud.”

James: “Dolls Can’t Talk” is a wonderful poem to close the collection, and as poems should do, ends with an opening. You wrote:

"                                        I've tried
to stay near you, but not interfere,

grading essays or now writing this poem.
Your fingers trace their smug, ageless

faces. How long have you suspected
we might be alone?"

What was your thought process for selecting which poem should close the collection?  

Jared: “The decision to open the collection with ‘Sad Rollercoaster’ was made early on. It was important for me to set the tone with themes of family, love, death, and the vibrant backdrop of New York City, where much of my poetry was written. I knew that poem was my opening, especially with its line ‘my daughter’s in the kitchen working out death,’ which resonates with the closing question in ‘Dolls Can’t Talk’ about loneliness and existence.

“Choosing ‘Dolls Can’t Talk’ as the closer took longer. I had to sift through several potential final poems, considering how each one would converse with the rest of the collection. The process involved reflecting on how beginnings and endings in my poems speak to each other. Natalie Shapiro, a poet I greatly admire, saw an early version of the manuscript and suggested ‘Dolls Can’t Talk’ as the closing poem. Initially, I wasn’t convinced, but upon revisiting the poem and Shapiro’s suggestion, I realized she was right. It tied the themes together and provided a thoughtful conclusion to the collection.”

James: What have you learned through your writing students that has influenced your writing?

Jared: “My students have immensely enriched my life and worldview with their diverse experiences and perspectives. They’ve broadened my reading and understanding in many ways. In our workshops, I often tell them that participating in critiques can be as enlightening as receiving feedback on their own work. This process allows for a cognitive distance that’s invaluable.

“One of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is nurturing a love for poetry among my students. I often teach introductory courses in creative writing or poetry, where students might initially think of poetry as enigmatic puzzles only teachers can solve. Dispelling this myth and helping them discover the joy of poetry has been a fulfilling experience. It continuously rekindles my own passion for poetry, influencing my writing and approach to the art.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear Jared recite selections from the book.