Anthony Domestico: You drafted the poems of your previous book, Midwood, very fast in the morning before your son woke up. When, and how quickly, did you write the poems in The Channel?
Jana Prikryl: Also early in the morning, but more slowly. The process was tentative; I imagined a certain amount of narrative information being titrated into the eleven long poems that structure The Channel, but I wanted those moments to surprise me, as if the voices might switch in and out without my directing the exits and entrances on the first draft. There was a lot of trial and error, including in my arrival at anything like that set of intentions. Though some days it felt like I’d hit a vein of ore; a remarkably good morning meant writing a whole stanza, seven lines.
AD: The collection opens with the line, “While the others spoke my meaning was coming through.” In a later poem, you write, “no voice I like / So long as I can say this is my voice.” You were born in Czechoslovakia and moved to Canada when you were six, with a brief stop in Austria. “English is my first language,” as you’ve put it, “but was the third one I learned.” How much of your understanding of voice, personal or poetic, has been shaped by your experience of linguistic in-betweenness?
JP: Quite a lot, or none at all—I’m not sure. I think my deep connection to a language as different as Czech might make me more impatient with generic modern syntax in English, which often distorts the truth or fails to make contact with any real individual experience. But that impatience could as well be supplied by an acquaintance with, say, Renaissance poets—and I think my compulsion to mess around with word order, to cut implied words, to rephrase certain lines until the diction is almost a decoy, because the wordplay itself is the point…I think I’d be obsessed with such moves even as a Czech poet, otherwise why be a poet at all?
It’s tempting to theorize that a delayed acquaintance with a language could heighten one’s interest in language as such, making one see the most intimate lyrical “voice” as a performance, and increasing the appetite to shape it, to stylize—but again, style is a poet’s most basic job requirement. Or anyway the poets I adored in my youth, when first chewing my way through the (poetic) canon, were notably theatrical: Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Berryman.
And Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad and Rosmarie Waldrop—any writers who had to trade in their mother tongue at a certain point in their lives—did not fundamentally alter their voices. (Though learning a new language when you’re six versus twenty-six or even sixteen is a very different proposition; at six, I think, it’s acquired with the force of a mother tongue.) Nabokov—who caught English very young (younger than me!) from his governesses—had also been impish and baroque in Russian, based on the translations I’ve read. I imagine that Beckett’s writing in French only made him more Beckett. Maybe that’s what a writer might gain in a new language, if they’re lucky.
AD: The book features several experiments with dramatic monologue: poems in which you assume the voice of a different person (say, Cordelia from King Lear) only to slide into another voice and then back again. “She tends to flicker / in my own person,” the speaker says in “My Teenager,” and there’s a constant flickering of personae in The Channel. What drew you to the dramatic monologue as a form? What were some of the challenges it presented?
JP: In one sense, the attraction was personal: I was deeply moved by Cordelia’s refusal in Act One of King Lear, when she declines to play the game her father has rigged up to coerce false adulations from his three daughters. I found myself continually returning to that refusal, almost as a source of energy. I had no idea why at the time, but it seems clear to me now that listening for her voice (which is famously defined by her repeated utterance of “Nothing”; it couldn’t be more of an absence!) enabled me to say things I could not have said otherwise, because I couldn’t tolerate feeling them. So in some deeper sense the attraction was structural: I needed to believe I was listening to another’s voice, inhabiting her predicament, in order to get anywhere near my own. The book is a sort of extended inquest into what “my own voice” might even mean, since consciousness is such a collage.
Meanwhile, I had an urge to disappoint my own poetic father figure (Eliot) and to go farther in a dangerously sentimental direction—a manner of feeling in Victorian verse that he (and perhaps a few others) had wisely swept up and put away in the dustbin of modernist rigor. And an urge to recreate the complicity with the reader that seemed available only in a long dramatic monologue or long narrative poem. By “complicity” I mean the kind of reading that’s more common with longer eighteenth- and nineteenth-century verse, in which narrative or didactic information often arrives obliquely, incrementally, while you’re swept along by the music of the lines: the reader is required to gather what’s “really happening” in a way that makes her coauthor of the poem’s meaning. This is a form of difficulty that modernism made extinct, to some degree, by moving the field of difficulty away from narrative or essayistic thought, away from meter and rhyme, and toward referentiality, abstraction, juxtaposition, the fragment. I longed to run around in that neglected field.
AD: Your poems are in conversation with many other artists, everyone from Éric Rohmer (“my absolute favorite”) to Wordsworth (“a bore / Who cannot see himself”). But the most regular interlocutor is Shakespeare. He has been important to earlier collections: The After Party quotes The Tempest (“This Tunis sir was Carthage”), while A Midsummer Night’s Dream was important to Midwood. But King Lear is the central text for this new collection. What has been your relationship with the play over the years? Why read it, and write through it, now?
JP: After I finished Midwood in 2022, I found myself responding to King Lear in a way I couldn’t quite explain, and I think it was because of its almost total absence of love: it is a mirror of our time, and it happened to be a mirror of my own life then. I was hungry for what it said about the human animal, both politically and intimately; it tells the truth without any irritable reaching after comfort or consolation. It’s also insanely beautiful and desperately alive with wit, with pure intelligence, so paradoxically it became a generous companion during a scary couple of years.
It’s a commonplace that King Lear came to be seen as Shakespeare’s “greatest play” only in the twentieth century, after its cataclysms made the text look realistic, like proto-Beckett. Unfortunately we might be even better prepared to appreciate it now, as we’re living through a great disillusionment regarding democracy and basic human rights—the very things the twentieth century was supposed to have taught us—with so many eager to vote for far-right authoritarians, and with genocide in Gaza, war in Ukraine, our own war in Iran, AI accelerating climate change—and even the value of the humanities seeming near death. (If the humanities cease to be taught, will future generations be human?) The individual’s decisions can seem meaningless, and in this light, Cordelia’s refusal reads as an urgent question. How can an ordinary person operate in a time of such generalized corruption and violence?
So I thought…yes, I want to hear more from this young woman. She encapsulates a healthy adolescent rage at what one finds when one first recognizes what the adult world is really like. King Lear literalizes the feeling that our parents have lost their minds, that we’ve inherited a world run by witless geriatrics, that we ourselves were formed by these blind (or blinded) individuals. It can become a painful disillusionment about oneself. To see reality seems like the first step in every kind of mess, public and private, and Cordelia is someone who refuses to deny reality. Even her last line in the play—“Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?”—is an attempt to face the problem in front of her and her father at that moment, when they’re being marched off as POWs. If Lear had listened—if he’d faced reality—the play might have ended differently. But then it wouldn’t be a perfect work of art.
AD: In “Fool on Edge,” you describe the textual controversies surrounding the differences between King Lear’s 1608 Quarto version and the 1623 Folio: “A printer’s error grown canonical / Mistaken for so long I demonstrate / Intelligence that wouldn’t coalesce / With human will.” Later, in “Insomnia at Anchor,” your speaker claims “belief that error’s a constituent / of what may later prove worthwhile, up to / a point, up to a point.” What’s the role of mistake, or accident, in your own writing? How do you see poetic intelligence and human will interacting with each other?
JP: I’m quite distrustful of the conclusions that a person, merely thinking, might arrive at on this question. It feels sort of unanswerable, but also historically contingent. You could say that “accident” generates poetic intelligence, and I often feel my strongest poems arise from my having no idea what I’m doing; in a sense, or ever since the modernists, this is what separates a poem from a paragraph in a novel. Writing a poem feels like performing an experiment—and I realize that’s a science metaphor, though the sense of the poet’s submissiveness is almost religious. The poet is a meteorologist merely reporting on the satellite maps, and the wind and temperature and dewpoint are the genuine sources of “poetic intelligence” or authority. As Auden said, in his sonnet comparing novelists and poets, the latter “can amaze us like a thunderstorm.”
But this also falsifies a complicated business, and in The Channel I was often playing with narrative and didactic forms, trying to think like George Crabbe, who always seemed to know where the story was going. Maybe it’s truer to say that there are two voices in play: one voice surprises you (accident!) and the other goes in with this or that education, this or that history of reading, and makes judgments about what to revise, cut, “say more” about, so at a certain point the conscious will becomes decisive. And yet: once you begin cutting, revising, rewriting, and really listening to the page…that unexpected voice steps in again, surprise!
AD: “Small Hours” begins by talking about “belief or excess / of feeling, a surplus of cloth.” In a poem from your first book, you similarly describe belief as “a style of ampleness.” In “Small Hours,” your speaker also mentions prayer: “But once upon a time in Ostrava / Teta Vanda taught me a Polish prayer / I heard about later”; “Is not the impulse to pray the one and / only inconvenient hint of an ear?” Could you talk about your understanding of the relationship between poetry and belief? Between poetry and prayer? Emily Dickinson provides one of the book’s epigraphs, and I wonder if her words in a letter draft resonate with you: “on subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings…we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”
JP: Those are such good connections between far-flung poems—thank you. I stole the first line of one of the long poems in The Channel from George Herbert—“My comforts drop and melt away like snow”—which sounds like the start of a prayer. Of course, he wrote many prayer-poems, though I think this one is weirder than that. It’s like a toast he’s giving at a dinner he crashed, full of former friends: it sounds so ringingly immediate, so “modern” (whatever that means), because he’s tracing the route of his own thought/feeling very meticulously (privately), indifferent to whether he sounds hurt or weak or even vain; i.e., he’s not striving to concoct a decent prayer. He’s prosecuting a case, aware that the judge is the blank page.
Early on in writing The Channel, I devoured A. C. Nuttall’s Overheard by God. I’m not a believer (Nuttall doesn’t presume his reader is) but I found the book helpful because it keeps circling the question of the poet’s more-than-one-voice, the incessant way these voices talk to one another—and then the moral/logical/theological implications if one of those voices is presumed to be God’s. The question of belief seems incidental; the point is the structure of interactions set up by the poetic voice(s). Just as, if at times of crisis I might mutter a fragmentary “prayer,” it’s a byproduct more of my having language than of my having faith. In this book, I couldn’t seem to look away from the human drama of longing to be in dialogue with the everything outside oneself, the whole cosmos, and longing for there to be a helpful cosmic father, and having to supply his voice ourselves, and somehow getting on with such a split consciousness despite the fact that, as Nuttall wonderfully says, “prayer is otiose.”
AD: In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Nick Laird described “what a line break actually does”: “Making one’s way through the pauses and surprises of a lineated poem demands that one exist suspended for a moment in doubt, in ambiguities of sense.” What does a line break actually do for you? (In a poem from The Channel, you suggest one possible answer: “Line breaks uncork a privacy we share / with pteropods just winging it so long // ago four hundred years appear a hint, / a syllable, make cousins of us all.”)
JP: Yes, those lines seem to be thinking through the geological prehistory of England (ergo, of English) before turning, briefly, into a sort of love poem to William Shakespeare. That’s the kind of thing I doubt I could “say” in prose (am I saying it in the poem?), so in some sense line breaks allow me to write. They enact Cordelianic refusal in the most basic way, because, as Nick suggested, they’re a flight from what’s just been declared—the ultimate in self-denial. They embody the playfulness or the conjectural, conditional quality of thought, before it’s nailed down in assertion. They’re a constant “as if.”
In fact, they give me a break: in real life I often hesitate, not sure if the ticker tape in my prefrontal cortex ought to be given utterance. So line breaks humor my instinct to say Nothing. They also allow me to jump over the more boring stuff of explanation or exposition, and this can generate intimacy with the reader. We both know what the prose writer would say here: let’s skip ahead. (That might be a quick definition of modernism.) Or the meaning of a first line can be transformed by the second line, without anything explicit having been said—a leap writer and reader take together, which is magic. (That’s a move I associate with Victorian poetry.) So the “return key” is a technology that keeps me in touch with some true voice (always returning to an inner source that seems to operate alone, beholden to little in the way of prose convention), while the line break produces effects in “real time,” as the reader reads, that somehow create a public space for this privacy, where—ideally—we can feel things together?
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