I almost want to call it geologic? Or like, that feeling one gets when staring at a representation of the scale of geological time: glacial, hard, neither rapid nor slow, but like a steady and powerful pull. Rumpus: And does time have a different meaning to you now in comparison to when you were creating the work for this book?Ĭharles: I’d say time doesn’t feel different to me now, but going through that velocity on the page did affect me in the same way, I hope, it might affect other readers. I wanted the calendric element of division to be as arbitrary yet real as it is off the page. Because that’s how the speed of things felt for me, like it was in the air. I wanted this kind of slow, weighted, gravitational velocity. What inspired you to write an entire book around a year?Ĭharles: I think time is a constitutive part of poetries pretty generally-the line, breath, performance. Rumpus: “Clock time having lost all meaning” is a nice segue to talk about the organizing principle of your new collection, a Year & other poems, which is, obviously, time. It’s been a while! I’m in doctoral research mode and, I suppose, combined with the global pandemic, clock time has really lost all meaning, or, I currently am a bit removed from the things naturalizing it. The Rumpus: I’m so glad to spend this time chatting with you.

We spoke in January, exchanging responses in a shared Google document, about the power of allusion, how a year can be turned into a container for grief, and whether Sappho might be considered her contemporary. a Year & other poems seems spare on the surface but reveals a beautiful fractal structure, line and language in self-similar scales repeating throughout the pages. Currently, she’s a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine and teaches as a part of Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program.Ĭharles follows up her linguistically innovative feeld by beckoning the reader to come in close and read her day-book on love and grief.

Writer of feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018) a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016), Charles is a nimble and deep-thinking poet who is capable of enfolding a speculative homage to A Clockwork Orange and Chaucer in the same book of poems. For Charles it was a year marked by material insecurity, lyric recurrence, and personal change set against the backdrop of the California wildfires and the 2016 US election. In her new book, a Year & other poems, Jos Charles excavates what she calls “geological time” to explore the contours of a single year: 2016.

Feeld by jos charles