“I was wanting to push against… that resigned, cynical and arrogant moneyed view of the world.”
Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023)
A question from Anna Laura Reeve: Do you understand your role in society—as a poet—to be influential, critical, observant, or something else?
All poets are witnesses. The question is what you choose to see and how you write about it. Everything is a choice, which means that all poems are politically observant, even the poets that are agnostic or neutral. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean poems need to preach or be overtly polemical. A good poet/poem is one that observes in a way that holds up something to be witnessed for the first time or in a novel way, a way that allows the reader to fully engage with it.
How do you contend with saturation? The day’s news, the disasters, the crazy things, the flagged articles, the flagged books, the poetry tweets, the data the data the data. What’s your strategy to navigate your way home?
I am first and foremost an eco-poet primarily because I was getting inundated with climate data from the doomscroll and the books and news I read. Writing is a way to process my grief (as anticipatory as that might be). So I’m not great at shielding myself, but I am getting the hang of taking the angst and finding beauty underneath it.
A question from Shome Dasgupta: How are you doing?
It is April, so I am still in the thick of the school year before it turns into the final stretch, so I’m stressed, but I’m getting closer to the end and summer, so there’s a little bit of hope that the weather turns and the days will be sunnier.
How did you decide on the arrangement and title of your book?
Who Will Cradle Your Head comes from a line in “The Sasquatch Explores Fresh Kills,” a poem that responds to the detritus of a defunct landfill: a doll’s head makes the speaker think of children and who will be left. What I didn’t know at the time was that that speaker is a sasquatch roaming the climate apocalypse looking back over the last remnants of a human world (The original poem was titled “Fresh Kills”). He serves as the spine or stitching throughout the collection, but the organization is largely around types of climate focus (water, fire, parenting anxieties, and a hopeful turn toward the end).
What’s the oldest poem in your book? Or can you name one piece that catalyzed or inspired the rest of the book? What do you remember about writing it?
“Fresh Kills” is probably the oldest, but the moment I knew I was writing a book about climate change was after writing “Living Happily at the End of the World,” which is about a couple of upper-middle class people trying to find leisure and comfort while things are almost literally burning down around them. I knew that this was what I was wanting to push against, that resigned, cynical and arrogant moneyed view of the world. After that I began searching for targets and topics to write about.
Which poem in your book has the most meaningful back story to you? What’s the back story?
I love the true poems. The ones that are almost exactly what happened. The opening poem is “Animal Crackers,” about a time when my daughter and I were eating animal crackers out of a giant tub shaped like a bear. We named the animals before eating them and it just felt like we were doing some sort of reverse Noah’s ark and I thought about the endangered species list. The poem practically wrote itself.
What was the final poem you wrote or significantly revised for the book, and how did that affect your sense that the book was complete?
“Gasteranthus Extinctus” was the last poem I wrote. I didn’t write it in the original submission of the manuscript but when I wrote it, I knew it needed to be in the book. It fit with many of my other father oriented poems, but it also expresses “I don’t want to grieve for the planet anymore,” which was something I felt very much at that point in time.
A question from Summer J. Hart: Do you work in any other artistic media? If so, how do the varied disciplines intersect, overlap, if they do at all?
I think I wish I could paint or create amazing collage art. I love visual art and I think it is this frustrated visual artist stance that allows me to focus so intently on visual imagery. I do try to wed the two in several experimental poems, where I take words or phrases and mold them into shapes by orienting them a certain way or layering them on top of each other. I had a lot of fun doing this and it worked as a sort of palate cleanser once I found my traditional work becoming a little stale.
What are you working on now?
You know how I said that I was tired of grieving the planet and that that poem was the end? Well, after a short interlude of writing chapbooks about poets enjoying Dunkin’ and ghosts returning from the dead to do mundane things and a new MS on my life and identity as a patrilineal Jew, I have come back to climate and am in the middle of a book that thinks about how the world is mediated and what our proximity does to perception.
What question would you like to ask the next author featured at Speaking of Marvels?
What topic(s) are you most afraid to write about and why?
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Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the MCU poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and the forthcoming Poets of Queens Anthology, Vol. 2 (2024). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, EcoTheo Review, River Mouth Review, and elsewhere. He is a Poetry Editor at The Weight Journal and Managing Editor of Porcupine Literary. You can find him at www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.
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