Poems as Children of the Moment: Jane Zwart Interviewed by Amit Majmudar

Introduction

Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her personal, contemplative poems have been appearing widely for years in publications like POETRY, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review. Her long-awaited debut volume, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, appeared with Orison Books February 2026. This is a lightly edited for print interview with Amit Majmudar, Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism in which they discuss her new book, poetry, and the life of poets.

Amit Majmudar

Congratulations on your first book, a long overdue arrival on bookshelves after an impressive run of publications in magazines and journals. One of the things that aspiring poets reading this may be wondering about is your journey to this landmark—the perseverance, the disappointments, the glimmers of hope, and the success. For many, the prospect can seem daunting or out of reach. What was your experience like from beginning poet to debut volume? Is there any practical advice you can offer your fellow poets, or is it all a mystery-mix of chaos, chance, and kismet?

Jane Zwart

Thank you so much for your generosity to me and my poems. And thank you for being happy about the book. I’ll be honest; sometimes I feel a little sheepish about how long it’s taken me to get here. I feel like I’m turning up very late—not fashionably—to the party. I was 48 when my debut came out with Orison Books. This might be the most encouraging thing I could tell other poets who are waiting for their turn: stubbornness is rewarded.

As far as advice goes, then: be stubborn. Poetry is a small and not-especially lucrative world. For that reason, the doors to getting poems published—especially books of poems published—are narrow in size and few in number, and the lines outside the good ones are always long. But, yes, there’s also the kismet of the thing. You need the right poem to land in front of the right reader(s) on the right day. So, really, a writer can control relatively little. But you can keep writing (and rewriting) and reading (and rereading). You can keep getting in line.

And you can make friends in line. While you’re waiting your turn, you can decide to be glad for the people who are doing amazing work when their turns come. You can amplify what you admire in other folks’ work; you can find kin and common cause. That’s the biggest moral of the story for me: we can make room for each other. I don’t mean that the literary community should operate on a quid pro quo. I mean, rather, that the literary community, at its best, runs on a deeper reciprocity, where our joy depends upon seeing good work find its way. So many writers have made room for me, and I owe this book’s taking shape in the first place to so many poets—you chief among them—just as I owe its finding a spot with not only to my editor, who is also a poet, Luke Hankins, but to the poet, essayist, and editor, Christian Wiman, who helped me find a book in a big pile of poems.

Amit Majmudar

I agree with your take on the luck of this, not just at the level of recognition or readership, but also in the creative act itself. I suspect we’re both thinking of poetry as a lottery where it behooves the poet to play often, where every poetic act (reading, writing, rewriting, sending out, publishing) is like buying a lottery ticket that may or may not “pay out” in terms of readers or publications or prizes—but which often rewards us in the moment, in that energizing feel of play and the satisfaction of concentration. As a poet gambling with words, how do you make your own luck? How have you arrived at these poems, and how have you made room for poetry writing in your full life as a mother and wife, teacher and reader?

Jane Zwart

Jane Zwart

When it comes to getting work published, I feel like the luck involved in that game is out of my hands. And plenty of my life at work (teaching, administrative stuff) and at home (family, ring-mastery) is beyond my control, too. I rarely get to dictate the rhythm and volume of what needs doing, and sometimes that makes writing poems less possible—not just because I’m short on time but also because—well, I was going to say, “because I’m not in my right mind,” which isn’t quite it, but it’s close.

Sometimes I find myself unable to write poems because I’m not in the right rooms in my mind. The right rooms are quiet; that’s part of it. Or, when they’re not quiet, the acoustics suit the kind of echoes that poems run on (of other writers’ voices, of music, of memory). In those rooms, the play you’re talking about, the gambling with language, is possible.

There is a luck of getting into that space where you can make, to an extent. Part of it, for me, has to do with the habit of noticing, of sifting the world around me for oddities and beauties. And part of it has to do with the poem being, like the Sufi in the saying, “the son of the moment.” For me, that means not sleeping on the strange little germ of a poem, if I’m lucky enough to find one, knowing it has a life of hours, not days.

Amit Majmudar

The germination of a poem, from seed to stem to flower, is a process often just as mysterious to the poet as her readers. And it works differently for different poets, no doubt. Have you been able to demystify that germination process for yourself at all? What can you say about your own compositional process? Whether it’s an observation, suggestive dream, soundplay, or some serendipitous tercet-snippet that pops into your head, how do you goad that beautiful oddity to blossom?

Jane Zwart

This isn’t the most direct answer to your question, but I’m thinking about this strange and wonderful online journal, Midst. They publish poems, but for every poem, there’s also a time-lapse movie of its composition, so that as the writer types and deletes and leaves placeholders and fusses over line breaks and shuffles the stanzas, you see the poem take shape.

I think that in the time-lapse movie of my writing process, nothing would happen for the whole first half. I spend a fair bit of time puddling around on the front end of a poem, not writing. It’s not that I’m thinking about the poem, about its claims or logic or sentiment, so much as I’m thinking from the seed of the poem, trying to figure out the rhizome of it, free-associating, rummaging through all these adjacent images and ideas and phrases until I find, within that every-which-waywardness, where the poem wants to head next.

If I drive without any noise in the car, sometimes I can mutter myself into a first line. Not necessarily the poem’s opening line, but the little string of words that is itself an opening, that tells me what music and gait the poem needs. Or from that line, I can see (to shift metaphors completely) a little island off in the distance. I can see it just well enough to begin rowing toward it, the next landing place. My husband tells me I mutter all the way through once I start writing.

Amit Majmudar

This idea of muttering the pre-existence of a poem into being is interesting. What do you see as the phonetic or musical principles of your composition? What relationship does sound have to your sense of the individual line, or the poem as a whole, being “finished”? Do you think of your poems as best read aloud, or best experienced on the page?

Jane Zwart

The short answer is that I play by ear. Muttering lines as I write, I can feel a missing syllable, and I can tell what sound I want a line to end on, either because that sound is necessary to the line’s sticking its landing or to its tipping, after an eighth rest, into whatever enjambment follows. As I write, if I can’t find a verb, I’ll know how many syllables it needs; say it’s two, I’ll type “verbverb” by way of a placeholder.

So I can almost always intuit my way through a poem’s music–as a reader, as a writer–but I’m far from fluent in poetry’s music theory. I envy poets fluent, not just in verse, but in scansion. My shortcomings there notwithstanding, I want to write poems that work not just on the page but on the air. I don’t mean that I’m trying to write only poems that a reader could understand, exhaustively, in a single hearing. After all, as a reader of poems, I often want both: the voice and the page. But if there’s no song in a poem—no spondees, no inner rhyme, no assonance, no pseudo-onomatopoeic phrase—then whatever I’ve done in that poem is less than what I hoped to do.

I do care about the shape of the words on the page, too, though. Shape poetry isn’t my thing, but some poems need to be airy–with blank spaces to breathe in–and some want to be as dense as little fruitcakes. Some want to have a lot of horizon and some to be narrow. The shape of a poem does function partly as musical notation, of course. But often there’s more to it than that, something almost hieroglyphic.

Amit Majmudar

We both agree that politics mystifies us—so let us escape that this-worldly mystification and divagate toward mystery, mysticism, the Mysterium Tremendum. Though not all of your poetry engages with overtly religious symbolism or scriptural allusion, you are involved in running the Festival of Faith and Writing, and your volume’s advocate and publisher—Wiman and Orison Books—both have a strong, religious bent. What is the relationship of your faith to your writing? How do you incorporate that into your poetry, in the context of a secularized literary culture that conceives of “creative writing” as something separable from the Word?

Amit Majmudar

Jane Zwart You’re right: sometimes my faith comes into my poems. Sometimes I call God by one of God’s names. Sometimes I write an appeal that is, overtly or not, a prayer, and you could inventory my poems for Biblical figures–for icons and angels, for stained glass and saints and Edens and hymns–and get a pretty good tally going.

But when I say sometimes my faith comes into my poems, which implies that sometimes it doesn’t, that doesn’t account for where my poems come from. And I want to be careful here: I don’t want to make it sound like I have special access to the divine. I don’t. I will say, though, that my poems, like the whole of my breath and my being, come from God. All of it gets tainted in transit, of course. That does not make it less than sacred, less than grace.

In my faith community, “common grace” is a phrase people use to try to capture the belief that every means of light and delight in the world is a divine gift. One of which is a poem. That said, more broadly, common grace claims that our being in the world is a gift that all of us receive and none of us could earn. And that God is the giver, acknowledged or not. Further, my theology says that all of us, consciously or not, bear God’s image. Bearing God’s image–it is why we create: our creativity is a shard of the Creator’s creativity. It is also why none of us are without some measure of goodness, why none of us are incapable of grace.

Sometimes, then, God, the Word, enters, visibly, into my poems. But it is always true that without the Word that is God, I would have no poems, and neither would you. I know you’re with me on this even though we come from very different religious traditions. I know a lot of writers who aren’t, too. Still, I have no other way to understand their creativity than as (to borrow from the Apostle Paul) a dim mirror of the divine.

Amit Majmudar

“Through a glass darkly,” as we foresee all our unwritten poems...and, perhaps, read the poems of others. What poets have served as mirrors of the poet you want to be? What poets have you been reading to better understand and withstand our moment? Are there poets you read to escape it?

Jane Zwart

I remember consciously thinking “I want to do that” about certain poets’ work already in middle school. And though I don’t think I’ve ended up sounding much like Emily Dickinson or Langston Hughes or e.e. cummings, I learned that you can play language like a game or a song or a trick, that some poems have colors and others architecture. As for the writers whose poems I’ve copied down in order to know them better, ro trace what they’re up to (and how), Szymborska is high on that list (even though I’ve only read her poems in translation). Hopkins, too. But there are living poets, too, to whom I want to apprentice myself.

I’ve been pretty lucky in that endeavor when it comes to you. Our “mirror writing”—taking turns sending one another titles, at least one a day, then each writing a poem to suit and sending it to the other person—that has been a revelation for me. I’ve learned how to write a poem by another method: not from seed but by filling in a set shape. And I’ve learned by envying your gymnastics with language, your ease with rhyme, your thunders and precisions. I would covet your poems if I weren’t so glad that they exist. And I could say that about poems by others, too: Christian Wiman, Jane Hirschfield, Patrick Rosal, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Dana Levin, Danusha Lameris, Catherine Pierce.

That said, I don’t think I read poems as a form of escape. I read novels for that, sometimes, but my love of poems: well, it’s what Richard Wilbur said, that it “calls us to the things of this world.”

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book reviews for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, came out with Orison Books in February 2026.

Amit Majmudar is Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. Majmudar’s essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His most recent collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). He is most recently the author of The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024) Later Adventures of Hanuman (India Penguin, 2024), The Book of Vows: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 1 (Penguin India , 2023), and The Book of Discoveries: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 2 (Penguin India , 2024). The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India. Learn more at www.amitmajmudar.com. X@AmitMajmudar