“Time, Anticipation, Possibility” Press-Kit Interview with Jason Roush Author of Crosstown   Q: All of your books seem to have a very solid thematic focus. What’s behind that particular aesthetic decision you’ve made? A: While I’ve never intentionally set out or decided from the beginning that I’ll be focusing on a particular theme in one of my books, I do very much like the idea of recognizing or building a clear thematic through-line when I’m writing a book of poetry. One major weakness of far too many books of poems that I read today—and I read a lot of them—is that they’re fairly formless, have little or no clear unifying focus, and feel somewhat random to me in their construction, not to mention their lack of connection to other books in the poet’s body of work, apart from the writing “voice” perhaps. So for me, finding a connective theme for a book is all about paying extremely close attention to what’s going on exactly in whatever poems I’m currently writing. What sorts of images, ideas, and rhythms am I most drawn to at the moment? Which ones are standing out to me more than others and why? Once I’ve identified that, then I can begin to pay more attention to those images and ideas in the world around me. After about a year of doing this, I usually have a semblance of a book manuscript. Another poet recently said to me that it’s “convenient” how each of my books possesses a thematic continuity. His word “convenient” couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s about intensity of artistry and hard work, attempting to make an inner atmosphere match an outer atmosphere in some fashion. Q: What convinced you to focus on literal and metaphorical intersections as the central theme in Crosstown, your third book of poems? A: The poems in Crosstown came at a point in my life when I happen to be in my mid-thirties. So as life expectancies go, I’m very aware of being somewhere around the mid-point of my own life right now. I’ve been faced with many questions and dilemmas about where I want my life to go from here, and that affects a lot of the big decisions that I have to make about jobs, my art, where I want to travel and live. But more importantly, various kinds of intersections or “crossings” stood out to me because several of the cultural identity-based courses that I’ve taught at Emerson College for the past several years revolve around the notion that mixtures and hybrids are the most “natural” state of things. In a liberal-arts context, all fields and subjects feed into and intersect with everything else somehow. What exactly are those points of connection, and what do they represent? In a course that I teach on the evolution of queer identity, we start with Eve Sedgwick’s notion of tracing the etymology of the word “queer” back to an Indo-European root that literally means “across,” queer being a movement across various lines of ontological identification, especially lines of gender and sexuality. The movement of time itself perpetually forces us to move across lines of personal history that we currently perceive ourselves as living. The book opens with a short poem titled “Entre les Deux,” inspired by the classic American blues image of Robert Johnson meeting up with the devil at the crossroads. What does the location of their exchange signify? Where will this nomadic, traveling musical artist go from there? I suppose that these ideas about time, anticipation, possibility, and uncertainty are central to all of my writing, actually. But above all else, I feel that my new book has shifted my work from a fairly narrative and descriptive approach to a decidedly more painterly one. In that sense, the idea of intersections is more along the lines of demonstrating a certain motif from poem to poem, similar to the strategy or tactic that painters often use, consciously incorporating particular visual motifs and trends into series of their paintings or art works. Magritte had his bowler hat phase; Matisse had his leaves phase. On one level it’s about structure; on another level it’s about obsession. Q: Another slight departure from your earlier work is the more pronounced presence of shorter, succinct poems in Crosstown. What might account for that difference? A: Hmm, that’s an interesting one. I’m not so sure that there’s any way of accounting for it, really. Perhaps the shorter poems are a more “painterly” move on my part as well? I think my colleague John Skoyles, who was also my undergraduate academic advisor way back when, got it exactly right when he used the word “pointillist” to describe my technique in his jacket comment for the back cover of Crosstown. Pointillism was an impressionist school or movement in painting that relied on an almost pixilated style—hundreds and hundreds of colored “dots”—to develop or convey a larger picture. This is what poetry tends to try to accomplish often; its units are lines instead of dots. And because the individual poems that make up a book also have this cumulative effect, it makes sense to me that some of those poems should be smaller or more “dot-like.” The style of shorter poems usually feels more elliptical to me and perhaps works better with more surreal tones or images, as in my poems “Surrepetition,” “Improvisation,” and “Seven Dials.” Between the clearer intersections that are featured in the book, Crosstown tends to feel somewhat “unmoored,” just as life itself often feels between its high points. The smaller poems probably contribute to that feeling. There are some longer poems in the book as well, like “Northgate” and “Dancing Everywhere,” but Crosstown definitely includes more small poems than After Hours and Breezeway do. Q: The literal component of writing about intersections—street corners and gridded urban spaces, for instance—makes me wonder about the important position that “place” takes in your work. All three of your books have returned extensively to certain cities like Boston, Provincetown, New York, London, and Paris. Can you explain that a bit? A: I’m certainly just as intrigued by places that I’ve never been to—Germany, Italy, Austria, and Australia come to mind immediately, for some reason—and I’ll be curious to visit all of those places someday when my time and finances allow. But for now I’ve been content to return again and again to the places that I love most, not only to visit friends who live there, but because I find that I can penetrate a place far more effectively the more regularly I return to it. (Sorry if “penetrate” seems to be a sexist verb in some ways. It’s simply the most suitable word for this occasion.) Not only can I tap into the aura and history of a place more deeply by spending more time there, but I can also note the tiny changes that occur to a place from year to year, to capture the sense of how its history progresses. Sometimes the changes happen quickly and drastically, like the sudden disappearance of many second-hand record shops in London, for example. And always, always I’ll notice small things that I’ve never noticed before, similar to what happens when you watch a great movie again, or read a beloved book again. The 1995 movie Smoke, based on Paul Auster’s stories, captures this idea incredibly well, in that Harvey Keitel’s character lives on a street corner in New York City, a corner that he’s photographed literally every day of his life for decades, and he keeps photo albums of those snapshots so that he can look back through them and see what’s changed over time. Otherwise, living there every day of his life, the changes would be too gradual for him to notice. And of course, the people and vehicles moving through the frames of his photos are constantly changing. Another place-based inspiration about streets and intersections was Anne Winters’s wonderful “Sonnet Map of Manhattan,” which is included in her 2004 book titled The Displaced of Capital. I’ve found that many visual artists, like Paula Scher and Mark Adams, have been moved to include aspects of maps and intersections in their works of art, too. Q: Speaking of sonnets, how exactly would you describe “Star-Crossed”—the longest poem in Crosstown—which is comprised of six parts that are fourteen lines (seven couplets) each? A: You’ve hit on what I what getting at when constructing each part of that poem. I’ve referred to them as “split sonnets,” in that they don’t really follow the rhyme scheme or typical conventions of the sonnet, other than their overall length. And “split” is an appropriate adjective to describe them because the one formal aspect of the sonnet that they do maintain is the idea of the “volta,” the break or turn that happens toward the end of the poem. All six parts do honor that element of the sonnet in an approximate way at least. I’ve also described the six parts of “Star-Crossed” as thumbnail double-portraits. (Yet another painterly reference!) Basically, they’re miniature poem-portraits of friends of mine depicted as movie-stars or musicians or writers whom they either remind me of or whom they admire themselves. That longer sequence gives Crosstown its centerpiece or anchor of sorts, a type of longer poem that both of my previous books also contain. Q: Earlier, you addressed how you want each of your books to have its own cohesive structure. Overall, do you envision all of your books collectively having an over-arching structure as well? A: Absolutely. Not only do I intend for certain poems, themes, images, and moments to interconnect from book to book, I’ve also envisioned a much larger framework for a series of books, from the time just following my first book’s release. I’m working on what’s called an abecedarian, a formal literary structure whose name is kind of onomatopoetic, I suppose. An abecedarian is simply a literary work that’s arranged in alphabetical order, and you can hear that mission in the word “abecedarian” itself (A, B, C, D…). Having completed the initial trilogy of my first three books—After Hours, Breezeway, and Crosstown—I’m now almost halfway through writing the “D” book in the sequence, which is based around the idea of dispossession, in the sense of letting go of things, material and otherwise, as well as an attempt at some kind of emotional emptying, though it’s less heavy than it sounds. Because I doubt that I’d be able to finish 26 books in my lifetime, I’ll probably combine some letters for the titles of a few books in my alphabetical series. I have my “E/F” book in mind already, in addition to potential thoughts about my “G” book, and perhaps even the “P” book! But despite tentative ideas about the future books, I’m also keeping myself open to spontaneity and just going wherever that journey takes me when the time is right. Ultimately, I hope to leave behind some sort of literary legacy that distinguishes itself in key ways from most of the rest of the poetry books that are out there. * * * * * “An Open-Ended Destination” Press-Kit Interview with Jason Roush Author of Breezeway Q: Your new second collection of poems, Breezeway, is the daylight counterpart to your first book of poems, After Hours. Does this mean that Breezeway is a sequel of sorts? A: Yes and no. I certainly intend for the two books to be a sequence, two halves of a whole, crafted with thematic and structural overlap in mind. Although both of the books contain poems from various stages of my life, with some poems written in my younger years and others written during more recent years, Breezeway feels like a more “mature” volume to me in a way, in that it deals directly with the subjects of memory and maturation, and more specifically, with the passage of a span of time and what exactly time means from a philosophical standpoint. After Hours marked the end of a period of growth, as I was entering my thirties, while Breezeway is involved with the beginning of my adult life, both personally and artistically, even if a good number of the poems in the first half of Breezeway focus on childhood experiences (“First Steps,” “Cartoon,” “Means of Comparison,” “First Lesson,” “The City of Musical Chairs,” and the long, four-part sequence titled “Films from Youth”). In addition, it’s important to point out that I purposefully wanted After Hours to be a short, succinct book; it’s meant to feel like a single night passing, or maybe a brief series of nights passing together, whereas Breezeway is almost exactly twice the length of After Hours, in the same way that the daylight hours, collectively, are just about twice as long as the night. Q: How exactly do the diurnal, day-versus-night themes play themselves out in Breezeway? A: As the daylight “counterpart” to my After Hours collection, Breezeway tends to explore what’s awake in the mind when the rest of the world is awake, too, as well as the interplay between individual thought and daily communal living. Just as solitude and stillness can heighten our perceptions at night, being surrounded by activity and movement also sharpens our perceptions during the daylight hours, but in a very different sense. My epigraph for Breezeway is drawn from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s fascinating phenomenological study The Poetics of Space: “In its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.” I seem to feel this particular wonderful contradiction more strongly, perhaps, when the sun’s out, when I’m at work teaching or just walking around the city, if only because I can more readily notice what’s right there in front of me during the daytime. And yet there’s a poignancy to Bachelard’s insight, too, since the compressed time that space contains only further accentuates how we’re constantly in motion, that we keep losing things as we progress through time, and that the “present moment” may not even truly exist at all from that perspective. It’s one of literature’s classic themes, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Prospero’s famous lines, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep”) to the comically haunting refrain of Elizabeth Bishop’s seminal villanelle, “One Art” (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”). Coincidentally, since the time when After Hours was published and I was completing my Breezeway manuscript, some fabulous contemporary musicians have also released double-disc CD albums with a night-and-day theme: Kate Bush’s astounding Aerial (2005) and Cocteau Twins’ guitarist Robin Guthrie’s breathtaking collaborations with keyboardist Harold Budd, After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks (2007). Q: Speaking of music, your friend and fellow poet Christina Pugh writes that your work has “consistently shown deliberation, and deliberateness, to be musical.” What role do music and musicality play in your poetry? A: A really tremendous one, and I’m so glad that you asked about that. Music has influenced me perhaps more than anything else in my life. From the age of 9 or 10, I’ve been almost dangerously obsessed with music, especially its more popular forms. I wrote music reviews for nearly a decade and still dabble in that branch of criticism occasionally. Over time I’ve amassed a library of about 10,000 CDs, literally. (In fact, my poem “Trick of Reason” in Breezeway examines the rise of online music downloading, and how it’s replacing the compact disc format, somewhat sadly.) I have music playing in the background constantly every day of every week; I go to sleep to music every single night, and I can’t get to sleep too easily without it playing. I remember interviewing the poet Thomas Lux for an assignment back when I was an undergraduate, and he commented (half-seriously and half-coyly, I think) that poetry has nothing whatsoever to do with music. While the distinction is an important one—poetry’s component of intellectual ideas often outruns the kind found in music—I’d still contend that music has always been foundational to my poems. I was first attracted to poetry as a young person precisely because of its musicality, just as I assume most people are at some point in their lives. Surrounding myself with music has clearly affected my sense of phrasing, syntax, rhythm, rhyme, and other sonic devices in my work. I think the most subtle, and perhaps most crucial effect that music has had on my poetry can be found in how I’ve structured each of my books as a whole, how I’ve arranged the poems to create a kind of architectural form that’s not so different from building a symphonic movement, or more accurately (to borrow a couple of phrases currently on the wane), a “concept album” or song cycle. My emphasis on that type of form is many things at once: compositional, emotional, transitional, aesthetic, and also purely, physically tactile, all at the same time. I aspire to capture the sort of integrity that one hears in the most solidly enduring music albums, ones that move impeccably from beginning to end, like Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue or, to risk making a far more obscure reference, The Blue Nile’s 1989 album Hats. Each pristinely crafted song on those discs has a distinct purpose both in itself and in its placement in relation to the other songs on the album, so much so that the album would fall apart if you removed a song or even just shifted its place in the disc’s sequence. That’s how I hope my books and the poems within them operate. Q: How do you feel that the musicality and structural integrity you’ve just spoken of are now reflected in contemporary American poetry overall? A: With the advent of postmodernism, musical qualities have gradually become less important in poetry, the result of a lengthy backlash against the supposedly tired, “sing-song” sonics of more traditional verse forms. Alongside his infamous call to “make it new,” Ezra Pound wrote in his modernist poetic manifestos that when poetry gets too far away from music, it atrophies. I also remember a professor of mine in graduate school arguing that contemporary poetry has become almost completely “deaf.” While I concur with these views on some level and do mourn the lack of musicality and formal structure in contemporary poetry a bit (or a lot sometimes), I’ve still found that plenty of poets writing today are drawn to formal poetry and are finding new ways to expand, change, and respect received forms and meters. In my work I’m equally concerned with navigating the musicality of everyday speech and the more clearly “made” language of poetry. Poetry has always been changing and will always continue to change, counterpointing its more recent innovations with historically tested poetic techniques. What I admire most in contemporary poetry, when I’m lucky enough to find one, is a poet who creates books that are uncompromising in their wholeness of vision, someone who can plane away all of the filler and chisel a book down to only what really needs to be there in the end. Bruce Smith’s extraordinary Songs for Two Voices (University of Chicago Press, 2005) is an excellent recent example of a book that daringly upholds this standard of distilled cohesion in a manner that’s entirely unique, totally hip, and, to be blunt, fucking mind-blowing. Any number of poetry books by Alfred Corn, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, and Robert Pinsky consistently accomplish similar feats of prowess. And I inevitably return to the three poetry volumes by the late Lynda Hull (re-issued as a collected edition by Graywolf Press in early 2007) for the consummate instruction they offer on crafting a body of poetry that’s brilliantly conceived, highly individual, and soundly fortified. Personally, I think her work will last a century or two beyond her own lifetime. Q: Breezeway includes two translations of poems by the celebrated German poet and philosopher Hugo von Hofmannsthal. How do these translations fit into the overarching concept of Breezeway? A: The Hofmannsthal poem in terza rima titled “On Transience” (or “Terzinen über Vergänglichkeit” in its original language) was actually the poem that first gave me the central idea for how exactly Breezeway would fit together as a collection. Again in line with poets I admire like Mark Doty and Lynda Hull, I’ve always been deeply interested in the slippery idea of transience, evanescence, impermanence, and how the inescapable fact that our lives are relatively short and ephemeral can be simultaneously terrifying and comforting. I initially encountered Hofmannsthal’s work when I was taking a translation seminar in graduate school and began searching for a poet whose work I wanted to translate. My family’s background is German, and as a child I occasionally heard German spoken by my grandparents in their home, which prompted me to study the language in junior high and high school. It was a fun challenge to shake off the linguistic rust in grad school, to buckle down and try to understand what this long-ago poet was attempting to get across in German, then maintaining the spirit of his poems myself in what I hoped would have the aura of originals in my own language once the translations were complete. In that sense, the two translated poems themselves are metaphors for Bachelard’s idea that “space contains compressed time,” a code that I was trying to decipher when working on the translations; not coincidentally, both of the Hofmannsthal poems address spatial and temporal mysteries. They’re ideal vehicles, therefore, in helping Breezeway to arrive at its open-ended destination.

"Roush Hour: An Interview with Poet Jason Roush" by Gregg Shapiro (from Outlook Weekly, Ohio's LGBTQ Magazine) If you judged a book, not by its cover, but by the blurbs on the back cover, then Jason Roush’s debut poetry collection, After Hours (Windstorm Creative, 2005, $9.99), comes very highly recommended. Poets Alfred Corn, Eileen Myles and Robert Pinsky all had something favorable to say about Roush’s work. An educator and arts journalist as well as a poet, Roush’s book, which begins and ends at night, takes the reader on a tour of after dark locales ranging from cities and nightclubs to cars and dreams, and delivers them back safely at the finish. I spoke with Ohio-raised Roush just prior to the release of the book. Gregg Shapiro: When did you first start writing poetry? Jason Roush: I remember first being interested in poetry back when I was 12 or 13 in junior high school in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm not sure what drew me to poetry exactly. Something about the form, its compact beauty perhaps, moved me, as did the musicality, since I'd always loved music from a very young age. The first "serious" poem I wrote, about Anne Sexton of all people, won a little prize during my sophomore year in college. So that's when I started to pursue reading and writing poetry more ardently. GS: Do you also write fiction? JR: I attempted to write a couple of short stories back in college. Some teachers seemed to like them, but the stories felt more like oblique journal entries to me. I've always been more interested in language and form, in evoking emotional states and moods and atmospheres than in telling stories themselves. Strangely, a good number of my poems are narratives, though they're more condensed in form, obviously. I do love reading fiction, however. Short stories often interest me more than novels. I'm intrigued by economy and clarity, writers who don't waste a single word, like the great Southern writer Flannery O'Connor or the Canadian writer Alice Munro. GS: What about creative non-fiction? JR: I've tried my hand at personal essays at times, more of those than fictional pieces. A writer acquaintance of mine, Richard McCann, has half-jokingly referred to this sort of writing as "creative non-poetry," a description I like. If an idea seems too large to fully capture in a poem, I'll try an essay. For instance, I wrote a long essay tracing my love for trashy pop music. I grew up in the late '70s and early '80s, after all, so that particular genre of music is my nostalgic weak spot. I've occasionally written about things like that in non-fiction form, and my music reviews also fall into that category, I suppose. As Oscar Wilde proposed, all criticism is a type of autobiography. GS: What do you teach at Emerson College in Boston? JR: I've taught writing, literature, and cultural studies courses at Emerson College for the past seven years. I'm assistant director of the Honors Program at the school. I teach a year-long course titled Literature and Culture of the Americas for the first-year students in our program. I also teach a course on cultural constructions of identity, as well as a very enjoyable course on the evolution of queer identity. In the past I've offered courses on multicultural literature and international women writers, and some expository and creative writing courses. I was an undergrad at Emerson over a decade ago, so it's fun to know the college from both sides of the desk. For the most part, I know fairly well how my students' minds work, how the administrative minds work, how my colleagues' minds work. As a communication and performing arts school, it's a highly creative place. The job demands a lot of energy, but I really love it. I approach it as an opportunity to share and wrestle with ideas. I think that should be the primary focus of any academic institution. GS: You also have a career as a journalist, as you mentioned. How did that begin? JR: I've written book reviews and music reviews for the past ten years or so, and I've also interviewed some musicians and artists and theater folks here and there. For the past six years, I've contributed pieces to a CD review column for Bay Windows, a newspaper for Boston's LGBT community. I was entertainment editor of my high school newspaper long ago, and I was also a DJ at an old-school roller-skating rink back then, so my interests in writing about the arts and sharing music stayed with me over time. The result has been an insane amount of CDs and movie/concert ticket stubs and theater Playbills (laughs), but I'd say that's probably what I live for more than anything else. My boyfriend is art, so I might as well write something about him in the process. It's a service to the community, and yet another way to wrestle with forms and ideas. GS: “Luxor” and “Paradise,” two poems in your book After Hours, are about gay bars with names that suggest other places. JR: I'm not a bar person at all really. In fact, I've never even been drunk in my life. I treasure my clarity, as I mentioned, so I guess that's part of it. But any openly gay man living in an urban setting will end up going to bars and clubs at some point. I figured rather than just letting that time in my twenties slide by, I might as well say something about it. So I'd often find myself writing poems in my head in bars and clubs, a few of which made it down onto paper eventually, or sometimes later the very same night. Luxor used to be a video bar in Boston; it's since been renovated and renamed Dedo. But I had a specific memory of going to Luxor back when I was still underage. Luxor is also an Egyptian city, so the bar had some kitschy little Egyptian relics scattered around as I recall, and I let those objects and ideas playfully enter the poem on some level. Even the "ziggurat" form of the poem is a nod to that. Paradise is a much seedier place across the river in Cambridge. I've always liked the shamelessness of that club -- amateur porn, male strippers, not much embellishment. At least people are being honest about why they're there. Yet there's something very un-paradise like about the setting, and the vicious, mindless cycle of flirtation, drinking, sex, techno beats, when most of the guys there are really in search of something loftier and more stable I think. So the final line of that poem lightly alludes to John Milton's paradisiacal works. The club poems were the seed for my overall concept of the after-hours book, and they also owe a debt to a few poems by gay Provincetown-based poet Mark Doty, who wrote beautiful pieces about long-defunct Boston clubs like Playland and Sporters, as well as New York locales like the Adonis Theater and the YMCA. His 1993 book, My Alexandria, was very influential to me. His friend, the late Lynda Hull, also wrote fabulous poems about nighttime cityscapes and abandoned, crumbling hotels. Her poems mean a lot to me, just as Hart Crane's poems meant a lot to her. GS: The poems “Starlings In The Bakery” and “Sop” share a baked goods theme. JR: That's an interesting connection, and an observation that I probably wouldn't have made myself (laughs). I guess I've always liked my baked goods and fresh homemade stuff, having been a vegetarian for the past 15 years. "Starlings in the Bakery" is a dreamlike little poem that was based on the Au Bon Pain cafe in Harvard Square, right in Holyoke Center where I used to work at Harvard. These little brown birds were always flying around in the rafters there. They were probably sparrows and not starlings, but I went with the starlings in the poem since those particular birds were brought over to the United States long ago by the Shakespeare Society, who wanted every type of bird represented in Shakespeare's plays to live here in America. The starlings were mean-spirited and territorial enough to run out all of the other birds. The other poem, "Sop," combines a specific memory of my father with my own fondness for sweet things, though my sweet tooth is rather unusual I guess. Honey, cherries, cashews. I prefer those sorts of foods to the naughtier vices like chocolate and liquor. GS: “Dream Diptych” cites both Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop. Would you say they are influences on your work? JR: Absolutely. That's why I included that little poem as a central transitional piece in my book. Bishop is all about order and sensibility, despite a radically subversive undercurrent traveling deep in her poems, whereas O'Hara is all fast-paced chat and colloquialisms, despite his occasional contemplative moments. I lean more towards Bishop's order, structure, and clarity, so it's helpful for O'Hara to shake me up a bit. Derek Walcott, a professor of mine from grad school, told me to "find my opposite" in my writing, and in some ways that's Frank O'Hara. He's my opposite in some ways and just like me in others. O'Hara and poets like Frank Bidart and Eileen Myles have been important in helping me push beyond where I would normally go in terms of language, prosody, and syntax especially. GS: I also liked the use of form in the poem “Protest.” JR: The form of that particular poem is called a pantoum, a measured, highly structured form that's a cousin to the villanelle. I'd read a news story about the subject of the poem, a gay man who'd set himself on fire on the steps of the Vatican to protest the Pope's inaction on a series of brutal, unsolved murders of gay men in Rome. The pantoum works well to capture the journalistic repetition and menacing drama of the incident. I've always been deeply attracted to form in poetry, whether or not an individual poem is technically "formal" or not. All poems, including prose poems, have distinct shapes. As my friend, the poet Alfred Corn, brilliantly observed, "Meaning is only a moment contained, but form is legion." Ultimately, form trumps content in poetry, not the other way around. I rarely write a "free verse" poem that doesn't fall into stanzas at least, unless it's something like a "letter poem" or requires a free-fall feeling to make its impact (as in "Sop," for example). In addition to some poems in rhymed quatrains in After Hours, my second manuscript, titled Breezeway (forthcoming from Windstorm Creative in 2007), includes several sonnets, some formal translations, and even some poems written in terza rima. GS: In addition to your book of poems, I have been reading Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground, in which Boston, and gay life there, comes into play. What does being in Boston mean to you and how does that translate into your work? JR: I've heard about Aaron Smith's book, I'll have to check it out. I've lived in Boston for over 12 years now. It's the biggest college town in the world, provincial in the best sense of the word, a great academic city that supports somebody who wants to do something like write poetry, at least enough to get by if one's lucky. I've always felt very comfortable here. The city's compact and manageable, with quaint sensibilities that echo my Ohio upbringing. More so than New York or London, two other places I love visiting and that have made it into my poems, though I'm not sure if I could live full-time in either of those cities. Boston has plenty of artistic resources and working writers and artists, with an exodus of students and an influx of new ones each year, as regular as the tide. It's the youngest old American city. I live in Cambridge at Porter Square, and I love walking through the residential part of my neighborhood to Harvard Yard in the early evening when everything is still and quiet. I've been writing some poems about that lately, including another pantoum, actually. It's a liberating place to be, both physically and intellectually. But I have to admit that the longer I stay in Boston, the more frequently I need to escape. That's what Provincetown is for (laughs)! GS: The poems “Disappearances” and “Christmas Eve,” in which the “I” in the poem is both young and traveling in a vehicle, bracket the book. Was that your idea or an editor’s idea? JR: That idea was mine entirely. In fact, my Master's thesis at Boston University began and ended the exact same way, with those same two poems. When the book opens, I'm being driven away from home; when it ends, I'm being driven back home again, but by different people. There's also a poem in the center of the book, "After the Movie," about a memory of driving in Ohio. I left my Ohio childhood home a long time ago, almost 15 years ago now, and I finished After Hours when I turned 30, looking back over that span of time. So the leave-taking and returning are literal and metaphorical. As far as driving goes, one needs a car to get around in the Midwest. I don't need one in Boston at all, thankfully, though I do love to drive whenever I get the chance. That's the ultimate symbol of American freedom and individuality, isn't it? Hitting the open road, with no boundaries or restrictions. Just you and the vehicle and the road. That's why so many contemporary folksingers sing about driving their cars from city to city and venue to venue, just as the traveling blues singers in the 1920s sang about walking everywhere and hopping freight trains to reach their destinations. My book is meant to be a trip to an old place and a new place, as well as a trip to the stars. * * * * * "Professor Publishes 'Perceptive' Poetry Book" by Lauren Johnson (from The Berkeley Beacon, Emerson College’s Newspaper) Strobe lights flashed in a Boston nightclub, illuminating dancing bodies and striking the partiers’ faces that shone neon in the darkened room. Pounding music made conversation impossible, but that didn’t stop patrons from pairing up, whether on the dance floor or at the bar. It was 1996 and Jason Roush, then a writing, literature, and publishing major at Emerson College, was enjoying a night out with his friends. While other partiers may have been thinking only of the music or how much money was left in their wallets for another round of drinks, Roush was busy taking mental notes about the people who surrounded him. Watching their movements and interactions with one another, he began to compose stanzas in his head. Ten years later, his observations have been compiled in a book of poetry, which came out last month. “After Hours is a collection of poems that looks at the different personas that people and cities take on at night,” said Roush, who currently teaches writing, literature, and cultural theory classes at Emerson and is the Faculty Assistant to the Director of the Honors Program. On February 15, Roush will read from his book at Emerson. The collection of poetry is inspired by his childhood in Cincinnati and from experiences he later had in Boston, New York, London, Paris, and Rome. Always at ease with the nighttime, Roush’s poetry reflects the places he has lived and visited between the hours of twilight and daybreak. “There’s something pedestrian about cities during the daytime,” he said. “At night, cities seem to put on sequined costumes that reflect the people who live there. People interact in ways they normally wouldn’t during the daytime.” As a gay man, several of Roush’s poems recall memories of flirtations with the men he encountered in his past, but he said he draws a line between writing a risqué stanza and being explicit. For example, in “Edge of Soho,” Roush recounts making eye contact with a male prostitute in the window of a London sex shop and describes the man as having “Roman hair” and “magazine eyes.” However, the poem itself is a distant remark in which Roush imagines what this man’s life may have been like and whether they could have met had they lived in different circumstances. “I don’t write about sex,” he said. “I think that even when it’s good writing, writing about sex often ends up mundane. I’d rather maintain an aesthetic distance and describe something as an observer.” Though many of Roush’s poems take place in clubs, he notes that he was always more of an observer in these settings. “While I visited gay bars and clubs, I was never a big party person,” he said. “For me, it was really about the observations.” Having lived in Boston while earning a BFA degree at Emerson, he compares the city to other famous urban areas in Europe, like Paris and London. “Boston is definitely more conservative,” he said, “but it’s not as overwhelming as a place like New York or London, where there’s sensory overload. There’s something safe about Boston.” He notes that while Boston may be more conservative in terms of how late venues are open, it is accepting of and comfortable with the gay and lesbian community. Roush considers Boston to be the most European city in America because of its quaint sensibilities, and the way it has less of a grid-like layout, as opposed to a city like New York. Though Roush said he prefers these cities in their unstructured nighttime personas, he considers his approach to writing more systematic and his actual poetry orderly. “I keep organized, and this reflects in my work,” he said. “I like to keep poetry clean-cut, and I’m interested in form and how sentences and stanzas fit together architecturally.” Having been both an Emerson student and professor, he has witnessed changes in the school throughout the past decade, and despite recent disagreements within the faculty, he believes that the school has changed for the better. “All institutions have to deal with administrative arguments,” he said, “and we’ve definitely come a long way over the years with the new buildings, new dorms under construction, and becoming the Campus on the Common.” Roush also believes that the types of students that are attracted to Emerson have remained similar to when he was in college. “I think cell phones and iPods have caused some change and made people a bit more isolated, but despite that, there’s really no difference. Everyone’s just trying to find their footing,” he said. “Everyone’s asking who they are.” * * * * * "The World Is Reborn at Night" Press-Kit Interview with Jason Roush Author of After Hours Q: Why did you decide to focus on the dual themes of nightlife and nostalgia in After Hours, your first book of poems? A: After writing poetry throughout college and graduate school in Boston, I noticed that many of my poems explore subjects of memory and desire, a pairing made famous by T. S. Eliot in the opening lines of "The Waste Land." I also realized that, due to having a student's hectic daytime schedule for several years, I'd written almost all of my poems at night, and usually fairly late into the night, once I'd gotten my other work done. Occasionally, the nighttime setting of the poems was imprinted in the act of writing them. The "after hours" sequence presented itself naturally as the unifying concept for a book. Q: You dedicate After Hours, uniquely, "to the night." What is it about nighttime that inspires you? A: The world is reborn at night. Unlike many people, I've never found nighttime to be frightening. Life feels calm, contemplative, and protected when everybody else is asleep; my mind can drift forever. I've lived and traveled in a few different cities, and something really intrigues me about the solitude of urban life between dusk and dawn. City streets are relatively hushed and shrouded at night, of course, but there's also something broken and manic and intoxicating about those scenes, and the wild array of lights and creatures that dwell sporadically within them. Q: Your Ohio upbringing and early family life are well-documented in After Hours. How did you intend the childhood poems to intertwine with the urban nightlife poems? A: The title of my book obviously refers to the notion of "after hours" clubs and nightlife, but it also refers to my Ohio poems in a very different way. I finished After Hours when I turned 30, so there's a lot of retrospect involved in the majority of these poems: looking back over my youth and estranged family situation, grappling with my emerging gay identity as a teenager in the Midwest, the years of change and growth I'd experienced since leaving Ohio for Boston ten years before. I had plenty of blissful and tumultuous memories to sift through. The book recounts how I got to where I am today, after hours and hours of time passing over me. Q: So does that mean that the "I" in After Hours is always you? A: No, definitely not! That's a very common misconception about contemporary poetry, that the subjective voice or speaker in the poem is always and only the poet himself. Although some of the poems are clearly based on my personal memories and experiences (the childhood reminiscences of "Disappearances" and "Christmas Eve" that bookend the collection, for instance), the "I" in the poems is oftentimes a kind of persona or character, an extended or fictionalized version of myself. Some details in the poems aren't even true to my memory of the events, they're artistic elaborations. As Freud perceptively noted, when we talk about the past, we lie with every breath we take. Q: Do you feel that your poems describing gay life and nightclub settings are consistent with the way other gay men have experienced them? A: For me, that's one of the most distinguishing elements of After Hours. Readers are sure to recognize some of the popular gay clubs and locales in the book (Luxor, Paradise, Provincetown's A-House, the Christopher Street piers, London's Soho district), though I'm about as far from a typical "club kid" as you could get. Many gay men go to clubs looking for particular things—love, sex, dancing, other physical highs—but when I go to clubs with friends or alone, I often find myself just relaxing and observing, wondering what sort of authentic, meaningful outlook I can take away from the experience. While I've lived a kind of gay life that overlaps with the lives of other gay men in some ways, I certainly have my own individual perspective to assert.