AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Trickster God

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Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Trickster God.

I like reading poets’ memoirs. Maybe because poets understand white space, and how much you can say by not saying it. A lot is being left unsaid in Saeed Jones’s memoir from 2019, titled, How We Fight for Our Lives. In the opening chapter, Saeed Jones, who’s 12 then, and living with his mother in Texas, finds a Polaroid between the pages of a book. It’s a picture of a man he’s never seen before, looking straight into the camera and smiling. Jones writes, “the smile felt intimate, inappropriate, like a hand sliding down where it should not be.” Later, when his mother comes home from work he asks her about him, but she says nothing. “When I was younger,” Jones writes, “I would give up during Mom’s pauses because I thought the answer wasn’t going to come. Eventually I learned that she was just testing me, to see how serious I was about finding out.” And eventually she does tell him. The man was “a friend, from school. Not long after he found out he was sick and killed himself.” His mother is already headed for her bedroom, but little Saeed Jones can get just one more question in.

“Sick with what?”

“AIDS,” she says, and shuts the door.

The memoir is built around these brutal silences. Saeed Jones about being gay, his mother about being sick: she has congestive heart failure. But Jones doesn’t find out how bad things really are for his mother until, not long after he graduates college, his mother slips into a coma and dies.

For his new poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World, Saeed Jones turns his gaze from his own life to the end-times we’re all living in.

But first, I asked him about his memoir.

Helena de Groot: There’s one thing that I always wonder about when I read a memoir, and that is like, how do you create the persona of the I? Like, how do you create you, basically?

Saeed Jones: Mm-hmm. You know, so I think with poetry, it’s really like a snapshot or, you know, TikToks are kind of long, but like, when Vine was around, which was to say like those six-second videos, that’s how we would describe a poem. Like it’s a moving image, but you really only kind of have a couple of seconds, you know, to describe action and character. And so, that’s why a poetry collection is so great, because you can develop a character in brushstrokes over the course of several poems. With How We Fight for Our Lives, my memoir, yeah, I mean, first, I mean, in terms of creating the I, it was just, you have so much more canvas and time (LAUGHS) to work with. And so, yeah, I think, I think as a writer, because the book, for example, opens and I’m 12 years old, there’s literal distance, you know, I’m in my thirties now. And so, it’s more about what would I have understood or thought at the time? You know, what does a 12-year-old do when he’s anxious, for example? So yeah, I think, just kind of rooting it in the specificity of your 13-year-old version of yourself is gonna deal with anger, or sadness, or heartbreak very differently than your 20-year-old version, right?

Helena de Groot: Hopefully, hopefully.

Saeed Jones: Hopefully! (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You know, some people never get there. (LAUGHS)

Saeed Jones: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: And I noticed that those parts where you write in the voice of 12-year-old you, 14-year-old you, that it was extremely detailed, you know, like, what you saw first and then what happened and where you were and what that made you feel like. And I was just wondering, do you have an amazing memory? Do you have diaries? How did you do that?

Saeed Jones: One, I, personally, over the years that I was working on the book, and you can kind of define that between a decade to six years, depending on when you want to say I’m officially working on the book. You know, I know you know how these projects live with us for a very long time.

Helena de Groot: Yep. Yeah.

Saeed Jones: But over the course of that time, I managed to visit every location that appears in the book. So, you know, the opening chapter, for example, I went back to that apartment complex. So when I described Cody and his brother playing, you know, catch,

Helena de Groot: Your neighbors, mm-hmm.

Saeed Jones: You know, I was kind of, I was like, yeah, there’s the parking lot. Like, I’m not making that up. You know, the tree that my mother looks at, for example, I was like, okay. You know, like, you’re just kind of confirming those visual details. And then drawing—sometimes literally, like, drawing a map of the spaces where scenes would take place was very helpful. It was like kind of mapping out our apartment, it would also help me kind of think of other characters. You know, where would my mother go as soon as she walked in to the apartment after work, where would she go, as you see in the chapter, you know, to kind of, in “The Conversation,” she goes in her bedroom immediately and like, turns up the news on her TV. (LAUGHS) So, that was almost like, I don’t know, a theater director kind of like having your actors on stage. And you have to give everyone business. You have to give everyone something to do during a dinner scene. And so, it’s a delight to kind of think of the subtle details and kind of—you think of people’s routines. So I would just go, “Oh, well, what did I usually do, you know, during days during the summer when I had nothing to do? How did I fill my time? What would my mother do when she would get home from work? How did she usually feel when she got home from work, and I’ve just been like, eating all the food, using all the air conditioning, (LAUGHS) and she’s trudged through the heat?” You know, and then that sets it up because, you know, then, duh, she’s not really excited to have this conversation. (LAUGHS)