10 Questions for John Hennessy
- By Franchesca Viaud
In another life, I join the hierophants
of New Jersey, drink petrochemical winds
swirling across Route One, a new Delphi,
speak their ethylene mysteries. Called back
by my inexorable childhood, it becomes
impossible to ignore my sons’ own strange
gifts: smokestacks stop smoking, chimney
fires burn green as pine trees, then flare out.
—from "In Another Life," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In my last year in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, I dressed up as the Greek demi-god Pan for Halloween. It was quite the costume, involving both mud and makeup, a leather jacket with no shirt underneath, and red maple leaves crushed into my hair. An Ozarks take on the satyr, very Scorpio Rising.
At some point that night I lost my friends but found my way into a bunch of different in-town parties where I was toasted by everyone I met. I toasted them back, completely taken over—totally inhabited—by my new friend and persona, sweet giddy Pan. In the end I settled to sleep with a crowd of other merrymakers on the floor of the last house I visited.
Sunday morning I woke with those revelers and headed home, still in my costume. I passed God Stadium, the enormous mega church on the edge of my Fayetteville neighborhood, and the punters waiting for services called me names, threatened me, threw a few stones. It was quite the shift from the party atmosphere of the night before.
I understood finally Pan’s other side, the one from which the word “panic” derives. (The Greeks feared crossing Pan in the woods.) The church crowd were not greeting the sunrise or me with the affection I’d come to expect. My response was to write a poem about the encounter, which was unusual for me; I was studying fiction writing in Fayetteville and hadn’t written a poem in years.
I made it home in better shape than Pan does in the poem we wrote that afternoon (once again, I was completely taken over by Pan, he co-wrote the poem). The congregants, unlike the ones in our poem, escaped that meeting unscathed. But God bless the imagination. Pan and I wrote what could have been.
That became the first poem I published, “Pan in Arkansas,” in Poetry Northwest, and I haven’t stopped writing poems since. I still see it as a gift from the god. I remain grateful.
What other professions have you worked in?
Many different jobs in the Food Service Industry. I’ve washed dishes in three different countries, worked the floor in restaurants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. If you haven’t participated yourself, I hope you’ll consider doing so. Restaurant work can deliver an education in empathy for those who serve.
Teaching English as a Second Language, as it used to be called, was a great way to work with adults from other cultures and countries in my twenties. And everyone benefits: even the densest teacher can be helped to learn their own language in a manner that is simultaneously full on direct and pitched at a useful angle.
What did you want to be when you were young?
Herpetologist.
My first travels were to collect reptile specimens, in fact. When I was 8, my aunt Camille Cusumano, then a very young writer, was driving her van from San Francisco to Mexico, with a lengthy stop in Tucson, Arizona. She invited me to join her and her friends for the southern part of the trip, knowing that Arizona for me was Mecca—it seemed virtually every species of lizard inhabiting the USA could be found there. And Mexico was home to my spirit animal, the iguana. (We lived in an apartment in Rahway, NJ, too crowded for cats and dogs, but my parents did allow me to raise Charlie—named for my grandfather, Calogero—a sophisticated and placid pet-shop iguana who won the Rahway Pet Show.)
When they say, “Make America Great Again,” I wish it was those days and ways, the Disco 70s, they wanted to revive. No long lines at the airports, ease at the metal detectors, and kids were people too. Imagine, 8 years old, the first person in my family to get on a plane, and I flew back from Arizona alone. Except, that is, for the Fence Swifts I’d caught by hand and smuggled on board in a Nilla Wafers box. Imagine also the surprise of my excellent laid-back seatmate—thirtyish, big curly Mediterranean hair like a dandelion ready to blow, ironic eyes and serious moustache—whose friendliness and enjoyable conversation earned him a look at my lizards. “Hey, check it out. Look what I’m bringing back from Arizona,” I said, opening up the Nilla Wafers.
When he’d recovered from the shock he laughed and praised me for my ingenuity. Who would suspect? And back home my father and I built a chicken wire habitat for the lizards, who adapted surprisingly well to their vita nova in New Jersey.
What inspired you to write this piece?
My friend’s awakening to Islam inspired me to write “Tutor to the Prophet.” And I’ve been writing about the Green Man, the Tutor, al-Khidr, in this case, for a long time. One Sufi belief is that he visits everyone at least once in their lifetime. “Bootsy’s synth-like bass” is a phrase used with permission from my older son; among his many talents are language and the bass, so I asked him for help describing the sound on this record. His and my younger son’s talents inspired the other poem here, “In Another Life.”
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Rahway, NJ, in particular (Rahway Prison, Merck, refineries on the outskirts of town), the entire industrial corridor, in general, have influenced my writing. I find the industry, active and dead, in daylight or lamplight, to be both beautiful and horrifying, a renewable energy source for poems and prose.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I write in my elaborate psychedelic dressing gown, modeled after the one worn by Gustav Klimt, with perpetually moving paisleys. Coffee is good. No other stimulants or solvents.
I used to run in the woods when I had a block or an especially difficult time with a line, phrase, ending, etc., but I had to recently downgrade to walking. It doesn’t bring the same endorphin rush. Or quite as quickly flood the brain with the solutions, surprises, and breakthroughs that come with running.
My spiritual advisor suggests that the meditation has helped.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Who carries that burden? First and foremost, the goddess Ru Freeman. My beloved friends Lawrence Joseph, Nathan McClain, and JJ Starr have also done hard time that way. The poems published here were read and critiqued by all four of them.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Music production. With a career as long, broad, and deep as the one Nile Rodgers continues, ideally.
Barring that, it would be great to compose and play piano with the mixture of comedy and sadness we find in Erik Satie. Or Ryuchi Sakamoto.
Or to paint with the exuberance of Gustav Klimt and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the ecstasy of William Blake, the newness of the Etruscans.
What are you working on currently?
Two books that are coming out this year:
EXIT GARDEN STATE, a collection of poems that includes the two presented here, will be published by Lost Horse Press in September.
I’m also finishing a book of translations, my third project with Ostap Kin. SET CHANGE, Selected Poems by Yuri Andrukhovych, will be published in December in the NYRB/Poets series.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading ENTER GHOST, by Isabella Hammad, which is about a production of HAMLET in Arabic translation set in Palestine.
MEMORIAL DRIVE, a memoir by my friend Natasha Trethewey, the former Poet Laureate and a UMass alum, is something I’m reading for pleasure now, and I will probably assign it to my non-fiction class next year.
Mornings I try to read poetry, and the collections I’ve been immersed in while answering these questions include: my New Jersey brother Gabriel Spera’s TWISTED PAIRS, one of the smartest and most heart-breaking books I’ve read, GIRL IN A BEAR SUIT, by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, a gorgeous, painful, and often funny reimagining of Callisto’s trials, and OUT OF SRI LANKA, Bloodaxe’s expansive new anthology of contemporary Sri Lankan poets. Tomorrow I will finish reading MURAL, the last poem(s) by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami. I recommend all of these books with enthusiasm.
JOHN HENNESSY is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The Huffington Post, Jacket, The New Republic, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry at Sangam (India), Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, 2021, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP). Their new translations of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych have appeared in NYRB, TLS, and The New Statesman. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
