Tending the realness of things

A conversation with Jenny George ’02

By Kiera O’Brien ’18

As an emerging writer still finding my creative footing in the world, I consider myself exceedingly lucky to share at least three uncommon affinities with writer Jenny George ’02. We are both poets who came to our craft by way of human ecology; we both now call the high desert foothills of Santa Fe, New Mexico home; and we both spent four years soaking up words and ideas—about literature, gardening, the world that is and could be— advisees of COA Lisa Stewart Chair in Literature and Women’s Studies Karen Waldron during our separate stints at COA, more than a decade apart.

George’s stunning debut collection, The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press), was published in 2018, the same year that I received my degree from COA. I read it with a mingled sense of awe—at its artfulness, humor, and precision—and gratitude for its sheer existence. I didn’t yet know George personally, but reading her poems I felt less alone, bolstered by the evidence that someone else had so eloquently set out to be a working poet and a degree-holding human ecologist. It’s not as common an undertaking as perhaps it should be.

In the conversation that follows, George reflects on what it means to be a poet trained in human ecology, the ethical imperative of remaining “tender and permeable and aware” in the midst of a world that increasingly compels us to be otherwise, and her remarkable new book, After Image, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2024.

How did you find your way to COA, and to poetry?

I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. But then it turned out I get sick on boats! Also, I thought I wanted to study biology because I was interested in how life works, in the deep nature of our world. At 18 years old, when I arrived at COA, I had only this one idea of how to take up that inquiry: I’ll be a scientist, and I’ll look really closely at the world, at animals, and plants, and ecosystems, and so on, and I will find answers. Then I did a summer internship where I spent many hours tucked up inside a tiny bird blind on stilts, a few feet from the ocean, and I was meant to be counting birds, acquiring data for a research project. But I spent most of those hours daydreaming and writing poems in my field notebook. My actual allegiance to the hard data was tangential to say the least! In the end I was most interested in the questions themselves, and in the experience of asking. So I switched my academic focus to literature and poetry writing and philosophy.

How did your time at COA shape or inform your writing life? What does it mean to you to be a poet trained in human ecology?

Human ecology is the best training I can imagine for being a poet! Or maybe what I mean is… poetry is the best training for being a human ecologist? Because what poets and human ecologists both know is that there is a meaningful relationship between the individual and the context, between the subject and the environment and the moment. Both poetry and human ecology understand that everything is situated, that everything real must experience the constraints of place and time and the entanglements of relationship. I try to write poems that honor and evoke the realness of things, through language.

What do you still carry with you, from your time at COA?

Something like: Each little thing matters. An understanding—although it’s not purely intellectual, it’s more of a persistent hunch—that everything is stitched to everything else. Interpersonally, ecologically, spiritually, systemically… it’s all reciprocally connected. I carry that from my ecology and biology classes, but also from the principles that pervade life and learning at COA. How lucky are we to come out of an institution and a community like this—that has such an ethic of caring?

Writing, and perhaps poetry especially, are often framed as solitary art forms. Does this hold true for your practice? How does reciprocity feed and enliven your poetics, if at all?

Reciprocity is fundamental to my practice, absolutely. It’s true I am usually physically alone when I’m working, when I’m actually writing things down in the particular way we call poetry. But I write for real others. I write towards the people on the reading and listening end of the literary encounter. The practice would have no meaning without them.

You know how they say a good relationship is 50/50, like with a friend or partner, when it comes to sharing labor or space? For me, the ideal relationship of poet to reader is 100/100. Meaning I try to be fully there when I’m writing, 100% present on the page and in service to the endeavor. And I hope the reader can be fully there, too, in the encounter with the poem. That is to say, I hope my poem invites and earns that depth of engagement with others. If it’s a good poem, then I think it can.

Tell me about your new book, After Image. What central questions animate this collection of poems?

A few years ago a very significant thing happened in my world, which was that my partner of many years died. That experience was—whatever else it was—incredibly mysterious, upending, radical, and baffling. It left me with big questions: Who does death ask us to be? What could it look like to be totally uninsulated from knowing about mortality? What are the limits of transformation? These preoccupations led to the poems in the book.

As much as it is about the irrevocable absence of a loved one, this collection is crowded with non-human presences: from bees, to snow and wind, flowers, the seasons, an orchard, a garden. How did these particular presences come to populate this book?

The short answer is that those beings were actually there when I was working on this book… the bees visiting my garden, and the fruit trees coming into bloom, and so on. The more-than-human world is always present, no matter where we are or what we’re paying attention to. And also because it’s hard to show loss in a poem. I hoped that by describing the presences around the edge of it, the feeling of absence would be more palpable.

Nature abounds in your writing, but it is a proximate nature, not quite pastoral but not romantically wild either. There’s intense intimacy in the way you write about the natural world. I keep returning to the line in Mushroom Season: “Everything has a voice, / even if low, diffuse—or / outside human hearing.” Does poetry allow for a different kind of hearing, an orientation towards voices other than our own?

There seem to be many forces these days attempting to deaden our senses. It’s one of the projects of capitalism, of empire—to numb us and de-sensualize us, so we are better consumers and more obedient subjects. In contrast, the project of poetry is to wake up our senses. To make us tender and permeable and aware. We can use poetry—both the writing and reading of it—to keep our senses tuned. Which of course is also a political practice; a person with all her senses open to the world is less likely to stand for its ruin.

There is so much language these days surrounding us and numbing us with endless blah-blah-blah. On social media, in advertising, in mainstream politics, and so on. Mechanistic, transactional language. If the blah-blah-blah is like a veil that keeps us from aliveness, then poetry is a rip in the veil.

Tell me about the title of the collection: After Image. How did you arrive there?

Well, an afterimage is a phenomenon from optics or photography where an image lingers even after the stimulus is gone. It seemed like a good metaphor for the impact of certain kinds of extreme human circumstance, when particular images or events remain in present tense, with a kind of hyper-clarity. When it came to the experience I had of intimate loss, I tried to capture what was not just the retinal afterimage, but the imaginal one.

Jenny George ’02 is the author of The Dream of Reason and After Image, both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as the chapbook, * (Bull City Press). She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Kiera O’Brien ’18 is a writer and artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A graduate of both UWC Atlantic College and College of the Atlantic, she holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared most recently in Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and New Delta Review. She is a proud alum of the COA Bateau Press editorial crew and now works as education director for Radius Books.