Interview: Andrea Janov, Author and Poet

We recently caught up with punk rock poet Andrea Janov, featured in the latest Ten Poets #3 (Earth Island Books), to discuss her creative process, core inspirations, and recurring themes, as well as her favorite writers and writing techniques.

Order her books:

Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots
Mix Tapes and Photo Albums
Ten Poets #3

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Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. How have you been?

Hey! It is a pleasure. I am doing well, trying to enjoy the last bits of the summer weather.

What was the initial spark or catalyst that first drove you to start writing poetry, and how does that early impulse compare to what pushes you to put pen to paper today?

Wow. The initial spark, I am not sure. I usually tell the story of meeting poet Hettie Jones who was a professor at my college and after taking her class, I knew that I wanted to be a poet. But that is not entirely true, in high school notebooks were filled with both fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. So, it has to be before then. In high school though, which is when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Though I don’t think that I can remember why. I was always a reader, so maybe it was a natural progression. I was reading everything from Dostoevsky and Marianne Moore to Irvine Welsh and Anne Sexton to DIY zines all with the same appreciation and attention. And I think because I was so diverse in what I was reading that I didn’t even think about having constraints on my writing, so I was writing poems, stories, little essays. Also, back then, my only outlet for publishing was an article in my local paper and the zines that my friends and I were making, so I got to write whatever I wanted. So, yeah, I went to college for creative writing, met Hettie and decided that I wanted to be a poet. I even started to take my stories and essays and edit them into poems. I felt that they were even more authentic, poignant, and powerful once all the extraneous words were stripped away. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I had this impulse, this need to document the world as we are living it. To slow down enough to take it in. To share the specific experience, places, and people to honor them. To share the universal feelings in a way that people can connect and remember their specific experience, places, and people. I am not sure exactly when I realized that that was the impulse, but the feeling itself has remained the same since I was first writing. 

How has your background, involvement, or affinity with punk rock and DIY counterculture shaped your approach to poetry, performance, and creative expression? 

Punk has helped shape my life as a whole. I was always kind of a weird kid and finding my local punk scene helped me come to not only accept, but embrace that uniqueness. So, in my formative years, I had a whole community surrounding me that was built on doing things yourself, encouraging individuality, and consciously questioning what was accepted as the status quo. Those are powerful life ideals. We all age and progress through life, but those ideals are at my core, and stayed with me. It has kept me writing, reminded me why I write, gave me confidence in what I was writing, especially when that was not what was popular or trending in publishing. And in another way, that community is deep in my heart and a big part of my writing is trying to show, to illustrate, to try to make people see and feel what it was like. I feel obligated to tell the stories, show the beauty, speak for the kids, advocate for punk in my writing. I really want to show the substance and heart of a scene that so many people write off either as dangerous or a fad. And if no one but me likes what I create, fuck em, the important thing was that I was able to create it. 

Can you walk us through a typical writing session? Do your poems usually start with a sudden line of dialogue, a rhythm in your head, a specific image, or a deliberate theme?

I am not sure that I have a typical writing session. I am one of the “I steal the hours when I can find them among all of life’s obligations and responsibilities” type of people. But in general, my writing process starts with an idea or line or phrase or feeling scribbled in a notebook. Those scribbles that I think can evolve into something are then eventually transferred to a Google Docs file, where they sit anywhere from a few days to several years. The reason for their indefinite purgatory in Google Docs is, I write to a collection instead of completing individual poems. When I am ready to start a new collection, I go to that giant Google Docs folder and start pulling together what feels like a theme that I can really pour myself into for the next year or so. Next comes the brain dump phase, and I emphasize brain dump. I always overwrite the first draft and I never pay attention to form. Sometimes it has line breaks, sometimes it is a giant run on sentence, sometimes it is bullet points. The main goal is to work through how I think or feel about whatever is on the page. Sometimes I don’t know myself until I am several paragraphs/lines/bullets in. Sometimes I don’t know until I go back weeks later and read through all of that throat clearing. After I edit it enough that I feel like I know what is going on in the poem, I print onto an old school 8 ½ by 11 piece of paper and start to hand edit. After the collection starts to take shape, I totally switch this process and start writing to the gaps. Where does it feel off, where is the pacing strange, where does a transition not make sense? Those types of things. Those poems take the longest, simply because there was never that burst of inspiration, it is instead an assignment I am giving myself. 

When you look back at the body of work you contributed to Ten Poets #3, what are the central obsessions, conflicts, or truths you find yourself continuously returning to?

My poems in Ten Poets #3 are part of a larger collection that I am actually submitting right now. The whole collection takes a look at youth and the moments that made you you and raises a toast to them. Many of them are mundane moments, but with some lasting impact. The collection is divided into 5 sections, each cheering a moment then letting it fade into the ether. A lot of what I write is about those everyday moments that shape us, yet we only really see in retrospect. I have always connected with coming of age stories that treat those years with reverence, those that don’t “talk down” to kids, those that show a true respect for those years. I want my work to fall into that category, to document a time and a place that happened, that mattered to those that were living through it. That even if we outgrew a piece of who we were then, it was still a building block of identity. I expect that this will remain an obsession. I am not sure when I became an adult, the only reason I know is because of my age and the fact that I pay a mortgage. So it feels natural to examine my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood as I write now. While at the same time, I am saving those notes, lines, ideas about what is happening now. I am curious about this stage in life and society,  the people, the culture. What will I try to capture? What will represent how we feel now? Some writers are really skilled about writing from within the moment. I am not one of them. I always say that I am a slow processor, that I need time to sit with things. With my approach to writing, I not only have to live through it, I need enough time to give me perspective.

Which authors, poets, or underground writers have left the deepest scars on your literary style, and why do they resonate with you so strongly?

Oh man, I am going to forget someone super important, I just know it. I will start of with Hettie Jones, I am not sure I would be a poet without her. In addition to being an amazing human, her work is excellent, and often overlooked. She was part of the beats in New York, yet you rarely see her name. Which is a shame, her work is so immediate and so accessible she makes you believe that we are all already poets, we just have to want it. Being able to study with her when I was an undergrad was so valuable to me as a poet, both as I was just starting out, but also all these years later advice she gave me is just being illuminated. When I was starting to really take poetry seriously, the poets I read the most were Kim Addonizio, Jim Daniels, and Jeffrey McDaniel. They all have, in their own styles, perfected this balance of knowing how to properly write a really great poem with an irreverence for that formality. Their work is about the common man, the streets, the working class, the messy, but they use poetic techniques to elevate it and control your emotions. You can feel the female body and spirit in every single thing that Kim Addonizio writes, Jim Daniels’ working class childhood, neighborhoods, and factories are places that I feel like I have been, simply through his work. Jeffrey McDaniel’s work shows that even the grittiest subjects can be beautiful. If I ever feel like I am in a rut, I pull out a random collection by one of these poets to give myself some inspiration. Fiction writers, I adore Arthur Nersesian. I read The Fuck Up in high school, back when MTV was publishing books and I have read every single book he has published after that (and his plays and poetry collection). His work is so gritty you almost miss the insight. Also, there is this feeling of New York City of the 80s and 90s that is ever present in his work that is so organic, it is almost a character. That is something that I try to emulate. A later addition here is, Elizabeth Crane. I can’t remember how I came across her work, if it was a recommendation or if I read an essay, whatever it was, it opened the floodgates. She mostly writes fiction that seems to almost maybe be pretty close to non-fiction at times. While I enjoy her short stories, her characters, and the interesting situations she puts them in, what I am most in awe of is her versatility of style and approach. While each book feels like an Elizabeth Crane book, you never know just how that voice is going to come out in this one. And she does it all so well. It is authentic, not a gimmick. It is truly inspiring. Then we have the punks, anyone who ever made a zine themselves has a special place in their hearts for Aaron Cometbus. Also, Ben Weasel’s Punk is a Four Letter Word, which is just a collection of his writing from zines, has always been a favorite, his voice is so irreverent yet smart. Whenever I feel like I start to write for someone else and maybe sound a bit inauthentic and like I am trying too hard, I pick that up. 

If you had to pick a single book that changed your worldview or completely altered how you understood the written word, what would it be?

Unless you cut me off, I am cheating. First, I will say A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That book is so full of heart that my chest feels heavy thinking about it. Man, what a fucking awesome power. When I read that book I felt very seen, but more importantly, it showed me what a book can do. Books can connect with someone across years and geographies by writing to the root of the human condition. Then in parallel, I have Sonja Ahlers’ Temper, Temper and Harmony Korine’s A Crack Up at the Race Riots. They were essentially zines in book form. I saw their publication as a signal publishing was limitless and that it wasn’t restricted to the traditional typesetting that we were all used to. Howl, I mean, if you are a poet, that frenetic energy is enough to inspire you every time you read it. We can all aspire to write something with that same type of impact. 

Many punk-associated poets write with a distinct spoken rhythm in mind. How do you balance how a poem feels read silently on a printed page versus how it hits when spoken out loud?

Actually, I don’t believe that all poetry needs to be read out loud or gets better when read out loud. And most of my poems fall into the, they were meant for the page category. I believe in the margins, the white space, where words are placed on the page. I take these into consideration as I am writing and editing, and they are also lost when reading aloud. I recently had a discussion with a magazine editor recently because they wanted to publish one of my poems, but after a table read they wanted to remove a significant amount of punctuation. This poem is from the same collection as the poems from Ten Poets, and this collection is quite staccato. I believe that the poems read really nicely on the page by the eye. There are several periods marking hard stops throughout, because as we read silently we tend to rush and skim. A period makes you stop intentionally. But, when reading out loud you speak slower and tend to skip over a lot of the punctuation in favor of natural speech, simply out of habit. So, I recently decided that I firmly believe that a poem doesn’t have to work in both ways. It is okay if a poem only works on the page as it is okay if it only works as spoken word.  

Writing and independent publishing in the underground scene often comes with its own unique hurdles. What keeps you motivated to keep creating and sharing your work in a climate that often overlooks poetry?

I think that publishing in general overlooks poetry. I never had an illusion that I would ever be able to make a living off of publishing poetry simply because the major publishers or agents weren’t interested. Poetry has a better rep and a more engaged audience in the independent publishing world. The readers of independently published writing are those who are searching for something specific or something different from the mainstream. No matter the genre, independent publishing is a great place to be because you find authors you have an affinity with and readers who will genuinely connect with your work in a deep way.

Without giving too much away, is there a particular piece of yours featured in Ten Poets #3 that holds a heavy personal weight, or has a specific backstory behind its creation?

Each of the poems included in Ten Poets #3 is from a collection that is super personal to me, but This one is for our glory days kind of sums up my sentiments. It is a bittersweet poem, with a lot of internal tension. It reminisces about the moments that were mundane yet also remarkable enough to shape you. While, being aware that though the past was remarkable, the speaker never wants to be someone who believes that their glory days are behind them. It calls out that trope that we struggle with, seeing the past with rose colored glasses, being discontent with the present, and hopeful for the future.

Now that this collection is out in the world via Earth Island Books, what is next on the horizon for you creatively? Are there broader writing projects, chapbooks, or performances we should look out for?

Right now, I am submitting that full collection to publishers in the hopes of getting it published. This is always my least favorite part, because there is always so much of me in the collection, and this stage is so vulnerable. I feel like every cover letter is just saying “hey stranger, please love me”. Which is hard enough, but I also know that they are getting hundreds of similar cover letters that are attached to work that is equally as good and as important to its authors. I am also just starting to pull together the next collection. It is at that very beginning stage where I am pulling those scraps of ideas into to a theme. It is one I have been putting off for a while, simply because I didn’t feel ready to really tackle it, but I think now is the time. It will explore a small town that held on to that old fashioned feeling a bit longer than the rest of the world. I want to capture a lot of the quaint ways of life that endured in places through the 90s that we are losing rapidly now. The corner penny candy stores, mom and pop restaurants, playground games and songs, what they meant and how they anchored us to previous generations. It feels like we are living in a time when generations and trends are cycling faster than we can even notice and means that I should capture these things before they are totally forgotten.

1That’s it. Thank you for your time. Anything you would like to say to our readers before we wrap this interview?

Thanks for the chat! I love to share mix tapes and love letters. And by love letters I mean collaborate and share ideas with artists or those who appreciate art of all kinds. You can find me on instagram, andrea.janov.poems or my website andreajanov.com.