The Department of English is pleased to announce the publication of One Question: Short Conversations with Poets, a new collection by poet, editor, and UC Berkeley English Lecturer Jesse Nathan, now available from McSweeney's. Drawn from Nathan’s widely admired interview series published over several years at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the book gathers together a remarkable range of contemporary poets in a deceptively simple form: one poet, one question. The resulting conversations are compact and vital.
I find poetry to be very freeing because the process can be so aleatory. But during the pandemic, I resisted writing the way I wrote before—which is to create these elaborate worlds—and to just write daily poems, because our sense of time and the daily was upended. Memories are carved when changes of space occur, but if you’re in the same space, on Zoom, how does that affect memory?
- Excerpted from Jesse Nathan’s interview with writer and UC Berkeley English Professor Cathy Park Hong in One Question
The collection features conversations with many of the most influential living poets writing in English and in translation, including Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart, Raúl Zurita, Robert Hass, Cathy Park Hong, Ross Gay, Safiya Sinclair, and Fady Joudah, among many others. The book, says McSweeney’s, “loung[es] at the intersection of conversation and poetry, of essay and dialogue,” capturing not only the voices of individual poets but also a larger portrait of contemporary poetry itself. Nathan, whose work often explores the relationship between poetry, criticism, and public conversation, has long been recognized for his ability to create intimate and searching exchanges with writers. In One Question, brevity becomes the form itself. The conversations are compact enough to read in a single sitting, yet expansive enough to linger.
I admire poetry that invites the reader in as a co-creator of meaning, atypical to the vertical plunge of some contemporary constructed poems of acceleration which does little for hearts and minds.
- Excerpted from Jesse Nathan's interview with poet Yusef Komunyakaa (1991-92 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley English).
Published for the first time in print together, One Question: Short Conversations with Poets offers readers an unusually immediate encounter with some of the defining poetic voices of the present moment. The Department of English congratulates Jesse Nathan on this publication.
