JoAnna Novak is a writer of memoir, fiction, and non-fiction. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, and her essay “My $1000 Anxiety Attack” was anthologized in About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times.

Her poems have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere, and she is co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy. Her most recent book of poems, DOMESTIREXIA, was published by Soft Skull Press in July of 2024.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

The first three poems in Domestirexia are “Dear Ornamental,” “Dear Unfeeling Martinis,” and “Dear Aries.” I read them as explorations of endearment impacted by different types of distance: physical distance, temporal distance, and emotional distance. In the lyric tradition, odes and elegies, for example, similarly take up themes of endearment and emotional proximity. What does endearment mean to you, personally and poetically?

Your question sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary, where I discovered that the earliest usage of the verb “endear” dates back to the sixteenth century–“to enhance the value of; to render precious or attractive”–and seems connected to two slightly later uses: “to render costly or more costly” and “to represent as valuable or important, to lay stress upon; also, to exaggerate.” The OED categorizes these three usages as obsolete.

I’m not sure I believe in lexicographical obsolescence. The prevailing usage–“to render (a person) dear, to inspire or create affection”–seems to carry the residue of those earlier uses. If I inspire affection in X, don’t I also enhance the value of X? Render it precious? Certainly, I represent X as valuable. I’d go so far as to say that inspiring affection in X might also lay stress upon X: I’m emphasizing X.

This may be close to the way I understand endearment poetically–a non secular kind of exultation. My personal understanding might be more gestural, an enfolding fondness; self and beloved make contact.

In “Dear Ornamental” in particular, the speaker refers to a “second self,” who is later revealed to be her child, “demanding a future” (3, 4). As a mother, how do you reckon with a child’s separateness from yourself, knowing that the world will impact them in ways you can’t necessarily foresee or change?

Pun acknowledged, I didn’t conceive of the “second self” as a child. This series of “Dear” poems, like so many of the poems in the collection, was drafted during quarantine. The bulk of my quarantine took place in a very downtrodden, rural Midwestern town, where the selves one could show up as were severely limited–remember the articles bemoaning sweatpants, the Zoom meet-ups where folks donned cocktail attire? There was no going to the gym, no going to work, no meeting a friend for a coffee. More than thinking about a child, this poem thinks about a self with access to ornamentation and reason to ornament.

In “Abundance,” you accumulate images and meanings over the course of 13 stanzas and pages. I was struck by the way you used alliteration, assonance, and different types of rhyme to create complementary pairs and contrasting ones, to a great effect. For example, praying/prying, patina/ballerina, and chair/pair in the first stanza alone (15). What advice do you have for a writer who wants to become more comfortable using sonic techniques in their work? How do you judge whether the music of the poem is helping or distracting from what you want it to do?

Ear training happens differently for all writers. For a long time, I’ve been inspired by rap and music that borrows from rap (I mean, Fiona Apple raps at times), incantations, great unfurlings of language–when the music is working, it propels the poem in the best, tumbling way.

Advice? Read the poem aloud. Again. And again. Begin with lines that have some pleasing rhythmic or sonic quality, whether that’s metrical or alliterative or assonantal. Don’t be afraid to edit or revise toward music rather than toward message.

Also in “Abundance,” one of the stanzas lists “a cake for Monet / a cake for Bosch / a cake for Dalí…” (22). What does art have to do with abundance? Is art a necessity? Can it be practical? Or can we only make and enjoy art during periods of abundance?

I wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that abundance is a precondition for making and enjoying art, if we’re talking about abundance in a material sense. The abundance this speaker writes towards is an abundance of spirit, I guess. When I wrote this poem, there was no visiting a Monet in the museum (or tracking down a good patisserie for cake), but how profoundly grateful I was to be able to imagine that art, its riches and pleasures, to know it existed, to feel a deep longing for it. That longing, by the way, was not limited to viewing art. Olives and oranges and the cardinal, right there out the speaker’s window, provoke such longing, too.

Another long poem in the book is “Knife with Oral Greed,” which I found suspenseful and cinematic, in part because each stanza appears on a different page. I imagine the poem would read differently in a more traditional format with each stanza written after a break. What appeals to you about long poems, and why write a single stanza on each page?

I wrote “Knife with Oral Greed” while playing with my baby and flipping through Maria Tatar’s big, gilt annotated Brothers Grimm. We’d play, I’d jot a tercet in my notebook. Play, tercet, play, tercet. Each tercet seemed to capture an impression or an image–sort of Cubistically collaging a very, very loose narrative: maybe a warped domestic fairy tale? What’s not appealing about long poems? Epics, some of our oldest stories, are long poems. I love stepping into a world constructed of language.

These poems were extremely vivid; I read a few of them aloud and even sketched what I imagined some of the stanzas might look like visually. You’ve written short stories, a novel, and a memoir. When you begin drafting a new work, how do you decide what form it will take? Have you ever considered working in different media, for example film?

Wow! I’d love to see your sketches!

Very rarely do I feel like I’m deciding what form something will take–the forms seems embedded from the start, in the idea’s DNA. Right now, for instance, I have three ideas for short stories. A couple of these ideas have been lurking for several months, and at no time have I thought, oh, the story about…the hanging garden…should actually be a poem. I’m fairly confident that when I sit down to write the story, I won’t wonder whether it’s a poem. Or an essay. Etc.

I would love to work in different media. When I was much younger, I used to draw and paint and collage; I played an instrument and sang; I was a terrible actress but I did it occasionally. And when I’m working on a long narrative project, I often think in images that I envision working as shots in film.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.

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