Poets to Know: An Interview with Daniel Nester

Daniel Nester and I grew up in the same town in suburban New Jersey. But our first meeting was in our mid-20’s when we attended the same graduate creative writing program in New York City, taught poetry as a team in a residential hospital, and wandered around SoHo and the East Village experimenting with the urban chic of the life poetic. Daniel is one of the most approachable, prolific and community-minded poets I know. In the complexities of making a life and making a living, poetry seems to have stayed front and center for him in the fifteen-plus years that we’ve known each other. For this, I’ve held Daniel as a beacon of possibility for how I might stay true to my own course over the years.

Why do you write poetry? What brought you to it and what has kept you writing?

I was brought to poetry because I wanted to elevate my life with language. I think I wanted to use what I thought was a higher language than what I used every day. What has kept me drawn to poetry is the desire to make that higher language deceptively simple. I write poetry because I love to mess around with language and then see if it makes sense of my world. I like to make sense of my world and then see if I can mess it up with language. I like the sound of words, the way words that shouldn’t be next to each other sound next to each other.

 

You are a man of many literary talents and seemingly infinite energy! How does your relationship with poetry live alongside the work you do as journalist, essayist, poet, editor, teacher, and family man?

I am not sure about my energy level these days. I can definitely feel myself slowing down, especially to watch my kids do their thing and interact with them. I do like having a range of different projects in the works at one time time. That way, when I do show up at my desk to write, I don’t have any excuses. I can look at a poem, or an essay, look at my student’s writing, or work on some story I need to get done for somebody who wants me to write something. All these things use a different side of my brain, and keep my typing skills up to snuff.

 

These days, poetry lives around the edges of my projects. I love reading writer’s fragments, aphorisms, commonplace books. Random examples would be things like John Richardson’s Vectors, The Poet’s Notebook . New York Review of Books published a book from 18th century scientist Georg Lichtenberg called The Waste Books that is just terrific. 

 

You wrote an essay, Goodbye to All Them (that appears in your book) about your experience in the New York City poetry scene. I'm wondering if your relocation to Albany, NY has had any surprising influence in your poetic life.

Moving to Upstate New York was one of the best decisions my wife and I made. It gave me more time to write and space, mentally and real estate-wise, to do so. My years in New York City were terrific—I don’t regret living there for a minute. But I think my experience there ran dry. I was working too hard on jobs I didn’t really want. Moving out of the city gave me a chance to teach full-time, which I love to do.

I was growing tired of being around so many writers. The thing is, as soon as I moved to Albany, I started missing all those writers! The good news is there’s a good community of writers around Albany and upstate. There is enough of a scene to keep things interesting, and I have made friends with different writers I might not have met in the city. I also run a reading series at my college called Frequency North, which is a direct descendant of a reading series I started with Shanna Compton called Frequency. It gives me a chance to bring writers from out of town and have them visit classes.

 

What gets you in a poetic state of mind?

This might sounds smart-alecky, but: boredom? Silence? Also: a fresh legal pad page or Moleskin page. I still handwrite my poems, and I still think of poetry making as a very tactile experience. I need a good Uniball fine pen, a good notebook, and some time to myself. I just like making words with my hands.

How has your relationship with poetry shaped who you are today?

I am sure it’s kept me sane, as sane as I am, at least. It’s a cliché, but whenever I was feeling down or disturbed or couldn’t make sense of things, from a very young age, I would turn to writing. It felt it was a sacred, religious thing for me to write things down. There’s some on-the-spot self-mythologizing there, but we’re talking about me as an eight- or nine-year-old, taking out a notebook, and writing little rhymes.

 

How has your life poetic informed the development of your newest book, How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009)?

 

My practice as a poet, more often than not, has not been an organic one; I feel as if I loved poetry so much I sort of willed myself into being one. That being said, my life poetic has influenced how I see the world, how I translate that world into words. When I write poems, I look for what is seen by many as un-poetic: that includes popular culture objects, crudity, embarrassments.

 

The same applies when I write prose, which perhaps demands more of narrative and expository inclinations, sure. But there is still, ideally, a desire to compress language, make lasting images, and offer wisdom. There is a literal informing--there's the essay on leaving the New York poetry scene that you mention, and an essay on references to farts in poetry, which was in an issue of Humor: The International Journal of Humor Studies, guest-edited by one of my favorite poets, Denise Duhamel. There's an autobiographical informing--my life as an aspiring poet is covered in the book as well. I think when I thought about the sequence of the pieces, I thought like a poet; how, when writing a poem, I would think about images working before and after each other, foreshadowing and combining for the most effect.

 

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Daniel Nester’s newest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. He is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight, a collection of poems. His work has appeared Poets & Writers, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Bookslut. Daniel’s work has been anthologized in Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Isn't It Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. The former sestinas editor for McSweeney's, he teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

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