Jason Labbe is one of many wonderfully accomplished poets and writers coming to Olbrich Gardens on April 22 for ALL’s Earth Day event, Intersections 2018. Join us!
Born in New Britain, Connecticut and raised by a machinist and a waitress, Jason Labbe earned his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. He is the author of a full-length collection Spleen Elegy (2017) and a handful of chapbooks, including Blackwash Canal (2011) and Dear Photographer (2009). His poems and prose appear widely in such publications as Poetry, Boston Review, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and DIAGRAM. Also a drummer and recording engineer, he has worked with many artists in New England and New York City. He splits his time between Bethany, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York.
ALL: How did you choose poetry? Do you have an origin story?
JASON LABBE: Although my mother taught me to read when I was four, I grew up in a working class household in which my parents worked a lot and seemed to read very little. My mother's brother, however, was a poet. He lived very far away, and I did not know him well and saw him very little over the years. Whenever he published a new book he sent my mother a copy, including several editions of an anthology he edited, a popular college textbook. My mother was very proud of him. Anyway, when I was a senior in high school, I discovered the many books he'd sent over the years, and I read them all many times over. They were interesting and mysterious, but I had no interest in being a poet. A few years later, at the state university, I took Intro to Poetry Writing in hopes of an easy A. There, I discovered my talent and committed myself to writing every day. (And the A seemed like the easiest thing in the world.)
ALL: Do you find yourself tracing certain themes throughout your work? What are they, and what draws you to them?
JL: Much of my work concerns itself with trauma/recovery, addiction, the increasingly digital American landscape, and music. I am not drawn to these themes so much as they are all I have. They are my daily life.
ALL: You’re also a drummer and a recording engineer—are you ever thinking about drum rhythms while you’re writing (or vice versa)?
JL: That's a great question! I still do not exactly know the ways in which these two practices inform one another, but they do. I find their rhythmic vocabularies to be different in nature, and so they are not directly transposable. I definitely have rhythm on the mind when I am writing, that I know, but it's more the rhythm of speech. I was a drummer long before I was a poet, and studying a musical instrument taught me how to practice, which has helped my writing life immeasurably.
ALL: You’ve taught writing at the university level too. How has that influenced your work?
JL: It requires me to never lose sight of the fundamentals. As I address them with beginning writers, I re-address them in my own writing.
ALL: What’s your favorite thing about the poetry communities in the two places where you spend the most time (Brooklyn, NY and Bethany, CT)?
JL: I'm really only in NYC for work, so unfortunately I'm not as involved in the poetry scene as when I lived there full time. The scene in New Haven comes and goes, and these days most of the readings I attend are (for better or worse) at Yale. For a few years some friends and I ran a non-academic reading series that brought lots of fantastic younger writers, and we held the readings in pop-up galleries and DIY spaces. Eileen Myles even read in a greenhouse, which was fun and amazing. But that series ran its course (alas) and nothing seems to have taken its place. I don't really see a "scene" per se in New Haven, just a constellation of poets who know and help one another, for which I am grateful.
ALL: You just published your first poetry collection last fall (congratulations!)—any advice for aspiring poets and writers?
JL: Read and write every day with intention and purpose.
