National Poetry Month Feature: Jeffrey McDaniel
An interview + writing prompt with the legend of verse.
I’ve had the wind knocked out of me, but never the hurricane.
—Jeffrey McDaniel
There is no poet quite like Jeffrey McDaniel. Jeff is known for his ability to capture a basic sentiment—desire, grief, self-recrimination—and turn it into the single most powerful, gut-punching line of poetry you’ve ever read. He is one of the most widely quoted modern poets in America, and almost every writer I know (myself included) envies the way his brain works, how it arrives at an idea on the page that most could only dream of writing.
Jeff has been a friend for two decades, and he’s a writer I have deeply admired for even longer. I’m not the only one: bands like Samia and Joan As Police Woman have been smitten with Jeff’s brilliant verse. Everyone from fellow poets to famous rock bands to students wish they could write like him. I share this to emphasize the far-reaching desire to write a single line as captivating as what Jeff writes. Take, for instance, this poem:
The Quiet World by Jeffery McDaniel In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
This poem can be found in The Forgiveness Parade, a book published by Manic D Press, also the publisher of my second poetry collection, Bang Ditto.
See what I mean? My jealousy knows no bounds when I read a poem as good as this. It’s no wonder that Jeff is a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship recipient as well as a tenured creative writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College where he has taught for two decades. Jeff is the author of multiple groundbreaking books that explore topics like shame, a youth fueled by drugs and alcohol, and growing up in a dysfunctional and emotionally abusive household, often in darkly humorous and humanizing ways. It is the way Jeff approaches these subjects that really gets under your skin and sticks with you, making you feel less like you’re getting to know someone and more like you’re going on a psychedelic trip with them: You’re Alice falling down the rabbit hole, holding Jeff’s hand into the strange underbelly of his psyche; or you’re Dorothy entering into the acid trip of Jeff’s technicolor from a world of black and white. Jeff is a playful, skilled writer who knows how to grab your attention immediately and never let it go. Here are a few of my favorite poems of his from over the years:
The Jerk
Objectivity
Letter to the Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back
Renovating the Womb
Dear America
The First Straw
Exile
The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy
Jeff is also a deeply generous human, teacher, and mentor. Years ago, before I lived in New York, I came to the city to do press for a film I was starring in, The Grudge 2. One afternoon when I had no interviews or photoshoots to do, I asked Jeff if I could visit him at Sarah Lawrence. He said yes and invited me to sit in on his class. This might not seem like that big of a deal to most, but because I had a very unorthodox education growing up on movie and TV sets in my teens and early twenties, I never had an opportunity to even entertain going to a college after graduating high school. Friends were going to college or enjoying a gap year—I was doing Joan of Arcadia. So getting to sit in on not only a college creative writing class, but Jeff’s creative writing class, was a big deal for me. I read poems, wrote a few of my own, and discussed the work of some of my favorite authors with Jeff and his students. It was heaven, and it would not be the last time Jeff would support me and my writing. He’s been instrumental in helping me get my work published and has done this for countless other writers I know. He is a teacher and a mentor, through and through.
Jeff’s latest poetry collection, The Thin Ice Olympics, is another dazzlingly exquisite example of a writer whose voice is beyond reproach. Below is a brief conversation as well as a writing prompt from Jeff, and of course, our Question o’ the Day to keep that creative grist going.
