Maritza Estrada Interviews Jake Skeets

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed, 2019), was selected by Kathy Fagan for the 2018 National Poetry Series. Winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and a 2020 Whiting Award, Skeets teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, located in the Navajo Nation. 

He spoke with Poetry Editor Maritza Estrada when Skeets visited the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in October, 2019.

From Poetry Editor Maritza Estrada: Thank you so much for your time, Jake. First, I wanted to say congratulations on Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, which was the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, chosen by Kathy Fagan. This is beautiful.  

Jake Skeets: Thank you. 

ME: In reading the book, the first poem, “Drunk Town,” struck me right away. In my notes I wrote that “it’s almost as if by naming the place first, it allowed the speaker to open the doors of a place or places themselves.” I think of family and futurity with your line “If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror, the bottle caps we use for eyes.” Was place essential to the existence of this poem? How much do we carry ourselves from place to place? 

JS: That’s a good question. For the collection specifically, place is—I don’t want to say a character because, for me, it was more than a character. As we’re walking around wherever we go, we don’t say, “Oh, this place is a character in my life,” because saying that assumes you are at some center. For me, place is more an experience, or this energy that exists simultaneously with you, but not necessarily at the center. I really wanted to place the reader inside of that kind of space. “Drunk Town” was the obvious choice as a first poem because it places the reader within both this created world and the very real one of Gallup, New Mexico. It’s both real and constructed. I thought about time a little bit as well. I did like to play with time and how it lineates throughout the collection.

ME: I like what you were saying about a center. That’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. A center is evident in the beginning of the book, and then as the collection progresses, the center deviates. Some of the other themes I noticed in here have to do with color, the landscape, or the place shifting, the time. So, color—there’s a presence of it and not necessarily a direct naming of it. Rather, it’s an element or component of the speaker’s time and place. In the poem “Swallowing Kept Secrets,” for instance, it says, “Mornings turn out green thread. Alder/and safflower—wilds of this ilk—//bloom in bloodstream.” By saying green in the first line, it creates this pre-rupture. And because of how “bloom” and “bloodstream” are working together, “red” doesn’t need naming anymore—color is part of it. I wonder, too, about how much of color’s vibrancies are within and without us? And, that brings me back to element and energy and place, too. So, color?

JS: Yeah, that’s a great observation. With regard to color, I didn’t necessarily think of it in terms of naming. It was more, like you just said, element and energy. A lot of the collection and the poems inside of it were written in reflection. They were written in the small time I could find to write. I was living here, actually, in Phoenix, during the majority of the book’s construction and I was working full-time here at ASU. So, I had to figure out how I was going to do my full-time work, but also attend my MFA full time. It was really in those small instances of commuting on the light rail or the buses that I was able to find time to write, and when you’re working in those types of spaces, colors are everywhere around you. It’s in those small moments of reflection that I was able to find time to write and those the elements just found themselves in the poems. So for me, it wasn’t necessarily my conscious decision—maybe it was my subconscious in those times of reflection. But, also the fields—I mean, if you just go out to Gallup or go up north you see tons of different colors.  

ME: What an honor that is to be able to move through different places and just see the shift in tones. My friends in the Midwest are telling me it’s raining and in the fifties and here we’re in the nineties. It makes me think a lot about distance and the linearity of it. We feel so connected to each other. And that brings me to the poem “Drift(er).” I remember you reading this last night and mentioning that it’s the only poem in conversation with your book’s cover art, which is an image of your uncle, Mr. Benson James. And before I go into the poem, I know you talked a little bit about what it was like navigating poetry with family connections and bringing some of that information into your work. So, what is the risk of returning to the past and bringing new knowledge back into the survival mode of the present? How much is gained or lost or felt in doing that kind of work?

JS: I think, there was a lot of uncovering of unprocessed trauma and grief. When I was doing the research for the book, I had to ask my parents about that particular portrait and the circumstances around it. And I remember a few times my mother ended up crying only because she had to remember. It was a place that she didn’t want to recollect. So, that was definitely an issue when I first came across that portrait and decided that this is what I want to write about. It was with care and attention that I drifted into the collection, and specifically into that portrait and that story. What’s gained, I think, is the collapsing of time, where the present is not our only reality. We are also existing as our past selves and those past selves do carry trauma that we left unprocessed. But it’s also through that collapsing of time that we are able to go back and process it and also look towards the future in terms of how we process future trauma or future grief. That’s the survival mode you were talking about, I think. There’s a lot to gain when we think about it that way because we’ve been told that time itself is linear—there’s the past, the present, and the future, but within all communities of color, and more specifically indigenous and native communities, time exists a little bit differently and we have this power to navigate within all of that using language, talking with family. Story is a huge part of navigating that. 

ME: Beautiful, yeah. I’ve been thinking about the word grief a lot because it’s been entering my own work. I looked up the etymology: the word grief comes from grievance. There are words like grief-exhausted, grief-harmony, and when you talk about grief as reliving, I think grief isn’t just one reaction or response. I hope it can have a sort of harmony or resonance—we carry it with us and that prepares us to go back into the present so when grief happens again it will be maybe easier to navigate. So, thank you. 

So, there’s something that’s happening in this middle part of “Drift(er)” that I find so fascinating. Over several pages, it says, “a train//passing through//I try to hug him//through the spine”—I made a few notes: “the page becomes a body within a body”—the spine of the book becomes a human spine. It embodies our desire to be in conversation with the uncle through the spine. And, then it ends with a mirror: “the mirror/frees him from the page//my uncle leaps from the” and it just stops. This language absorbs us into the text, into the body of the book. It made me look at the spine differently. And the question I have is, what was the process of creating these leaps? Because I would say that this moment created a rupture—its language and form and body begin to loosen. So, I wondered how the process of writing that release was.                         

JS: I think that release comes from Sherwin Bitsui. He talks about weaving and how weavers create these moments of release so that the weaver’s essence isn’t trapped inside the rug. For me, the release was the moment of releasing grief and trauma, letting it out onto the page. The page is a moment of reflection for me and so it’s an important part of processing and allowing myself as a poet and as a person to find ways to escape my trauma a little bit. Because poetry calls you to have a deep sense of self. You’re sort of vulnerable and holding yourself up to a mirror. It’s extremely intimate so it gets very uncomfortable at times, so for me those moments of release are a way for me to get out of a particular poem. Especially if it’s one that deals with heavier content, heavier stories. I try to open up and break apart the language and allow space to come through.                

ME: I’m actually curious to know, in working on the book, what books were you reading or what music were you listening to? What were you in conversation with? 

JS: The collection I kept revisiting was Bone Light by Orlando White. He’s now my colleague at Diné College and I showed him my copy of his collection—it’s starting to come apart at the spine. He gave me new copy, so that was really cool of him. Bone Light was such a huge part of this collection and I also kept returning to Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui, to help me think about how to have a through line in my collection, how to keep movement alive page by page by page. And, even outside of the collection, how to create moments that leap out of the collection, off of the page, into the reader’s reality. Bone Light, again, was one of the books, and Flood Song, but I read a lot of first books, by people like Ocean Vuong, as well. I definitely read to get an idea of what the first book is and how poets navigate first publications. Then Joan Kane, who is one of my mentors, stopped me in my tracks. I was only focusing on first books and she asked me, “Are you just going to write a first book?” It took me a little bit by storm. She forbade me from reading first books for a while. She was like, “Let’s focus on second, third, fourth, fifth books now.” Because you have to think about longevity when you are a poet. You can definitely have time between your collections, but you want to see yourself publishing multiple collections. First books have definitely become such a huge part of poetry today and I am thankful to be given permission to think, “Oh, I can see myself with a fifth book or a sixth book down the line.” 

In terms of music, I listened to a lot of Bon Iver while writing this collection. I listened to his album 22, A Million in particular because I was very interested in the signs and symbols that went into naming the different songs. Just the idea of noise becomes a huge thing in the collection. I was playing with sound and that particular album plays with noise in such interesting way. I do also have a public playlist on Spotify specifically geared towards this question, comprised of songs that informed my writing, but also of songs that I found after completing the collection that speak to it. It’s important to understand process—when I was writing the collection I became obsessed with poet’s biographies and just understanding their timelines, their narratives and where they came from. 

ME: That’s awesome. Bon Iver, who would have thought! That’s so cool. And it brings me back to the “I” in your poems. I think sometimes poets either step away from the “I” by making it a “you” or a plural “you.” But in the poem “Dear Brother” we realize the “you” is a direct address to a specific “you.” I was wondering, is there a risk in naming? How much might it allow us to center ourselves, coming back to the “I?” It feels like in naming something, we’re much more vulnerable in that we’re saying, I am feeling this, or I am not okay, or I am writing this about you, possibly. So, risk? 

JS: I think there’s huge risk. I mean, it’s a very vulnerable moment in the collection and that vulnerability actually impacts me even after publishing the collection. For the longest time, every time I read I would sort of burst into tears a little bit. Well, not a little bit, a lot. During my defense, I cried through the whole thing. That poem specifically is one I still can’t read; I just stop in my tracks. So, for me, it’s something I’m still working with and negotiating and processing, that moment in the collection itself. But, that’s one of the risks that comes with writing in the personal “I.” The poet and the speaker start to move closer to each other, whereas in a majority of the collection I try to keep some distance between the poet and the speaker in order to have more freedom and more space for negotiation, for navigating trauma and grief. That’s one of the moments where the speaker and the writer sort of come together, so, for me, it felt like it was important to include that poem. I was putting that speaker in close proximity to other speakers in the book, the voice of the uncle, right? Those voices are side by side: “If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror.” You have the uncle and the speaker face-to-face. For me, it was an experiment with intimacy: how close we can get to ourselves, how close we can get to other people, how close we can get to the masculine figures in our lives.

ME: That line, “I learned to be a man by loving one,” still breaks me. Something I’m really curious about, too, was how last night at your reading at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore, you acknowledged the land that we’re standing on in Arizona. It makes me think a lot about this landscape. You added that this land isn’t always going to be with us. It made me think of the futurity of land, time, and language. What’s the futurity of language, of poetics, and what are we in need of, like our land needs us, like we need it too? What’s next?  

JS: For me I think the poetics I’m very interested in are the poetics in which the self and the “I” are not necessarily at the center, where something else is at the center, whether that’s body or that’s land. I think queer poets already often uncenter themselves from the body, so that’s why I was drawn to that sort of poetry and those types of collections. But also, what I’m interested in now is understanding how we can then center land in our discussions or center it in our poetics. What that ultimately means is removing yourself from the page a little bit and allowing those fields to populate the collection for you. That process is hard because you want to be in there, you want to tell a specific story. But, at some point the land itself will shift the ideas that you have about poems, that you have about stories. So, when you’re talking about futurity, I think in the future American poetry will, hopefully, be able to embrace other types of poets who are not necessarily interested in—I don’t want to say fame, but not necessarily interested in publication. A lot of my mentors write one book every fourteen years. Now we have poets who are writing a book every year—which is great! I think poetry has room for everybody to be at the table. But, for me, it feels like there’s this systematic or machine-like quality of production, rather than of experiencing or cultivating or letting whatever energy that triggers poems find its way to the page. Sometimes that’s a long process of self, a long process of negotiation. And other times, it happens in a moment and you’re able to write a poem.

So, I hope that American poetry learns how to center land in its conversations. I acknowledged the land because it’s the truth. I learned it from Layli Long Soldier, actually. We posted on her Facebook about land acknowledgements. But you should also mention to the audience that the land they’re on is not going to be returned even if you acknowledge it; we’re still occupying those particular lands. And so, what does that mean, then, for American poetry that our institutions are benefiting off of displacement and disappearing? It’s kind of an interest sort of negotiating we do, because poetry is a lot of grief-work, a lot of self-work, a lot of learning how to navigate the world. At the same time, what we thieve for, like publication and books, means supporting these institutions that either consciously or unconsciously benefit off of displacement.

ME: Thank you. That was my last question. This was so good. Thank you so much, Jake.

Maritza N. Estrada was born in Toppenish, Washington, to Mexican parents, and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She earned her BFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Nebraska Omaha, where she received a full academic scholarship as a Buffett scholar. Estrada is currently residing in Tempe as an MFA candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) and teaches at Arizona State University. She is the Poetry Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and is the Co-Artistic Director for Borderlands Poetry and Reading Series at ASU. Estrada is a 2020 CantoMundo fellow. Her honors and awards include the 2019 Virginia G. Piper Creative Research Fellowship, 2019 Virginia G. Piper Creative Engagement Fellowship, winner of the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award, Mabelle A. Lyon Poetry Award, Swarthout Award in Poetry, alumna in the 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop and 2018 Winter Tangerine workshop at Poets House. Her work can be found in Pidgeonholes, Blue Mesa Review, Río Grande Review, The Flat Waters Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets, Misbehaving Nebraskans Anthology, and 13th Floor Magazine.