» Interview

At the Whistle, Begin: A Conversation with Jonathan Fink

Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart
Jonathan Fink
Dzanc Books
$17.95 (paperback)
Publication Date: January 28, 2025 

David James Poissant: Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart is your third book of poems. How has your thinking, about life or about art, changed from one book to the next over the years, and how have you grown as a poet? What does this book offer that your earlier books couldn’t?

Jonathan Fink: Kurt Vonnegut described an author reviewing their sequence of works as looking back at their path in the snow, and that feels accurate to me (though we don’t get any snow in Florida)—you can see the path that brought you to where you are, though you’re not in the same place. In my current collection, I am in some ways reacting to the compression of my previous collection, which was a collection of sonnets about the Siege of Leningrad. I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible—as welcoming as possible of material and expansiveness—while maintaining and challenging form. There are a lot of one-sentence poems in this collection, and I find that if I can focus my attention grammatically and structurally on something like the expansion of a single sentence, the thematic elements of the poem can rise organically from the material. I am also hopefully continuing to expand my openness to ideas, connections, and the rhythms of voice and music that I can embody most naturally.

David James Poissant: One of my absolute favorites here, “Gorbachev’s Birthmark,” a poem that recalls the bad old days of grade school gym and murder ball misogyny, ends with the lines: “‘you have but one life to live. / Be vigilant. Be bold. At the whistle, begin.’” These lines put me in mind of Mary Oliver’s celebrated “The Summer Day.” I’m curious if that poem was on your mind. And whether it was or wasn’t, who are your poetry lodestars? Do you consider your poems in conversation with the work of others?

Jonathan Fink: I didn’t have that poem in mind, though I do very much like the courage and stance of Mary Oliver’s poems. Her openness is challenging and encouraging. In my poem specifically, I was thinking back to the decidedly unpoetic experiences of middle-school gym class in 1980’s West Texas juxtaposed against the middle-aged boredom of professional jobs where some days you just wish someone would set up a wrestling mat or obstacle course like the old days and you weren’t just answering emails or pushing paper around all day. I always encourage my students to explore a memory where you can structure two competing points of view, the persona in the past and the persona in the present currently looking back, and the moment where those points of view intersect or are at tension. 

I have lots of poets and writers that I find myself returning to for their literary encouragement and example. I frequently return to the contemporary poems of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Philip Levine, Natasha Trethewey, Matthew Olzmann, B.H. Fairchild, C. Dale Young, Yusef Komunyakaa (the list goes on and on), as well as writers I think of as “poetic”/lyrical, fiction writers like Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann…. 

David James Poissant: Many of these poems concern place, but not one place. We travel from New York City to West Texas to Spain to Boston, and on. How does place inform your work? Does a place ever dictate the form you choose for a poem?

Jonathan Fink: I feel like both place and time are essential to the success of many poems. Not all of the poems in my book are set in time and place (some are more traditional lyric poems), but the benefit of defining time and place in a poem is that you immediately have a past and future in the poem and a “here” and “there” landscape. As I mentioned above, once you have a past and future, you immediately have a past and future persona—you can bring in competing points of view and show change and argument in the persona, not just a singular perspective or momentary viewpoint. Place also gives you rich sensory and experiential details. An apartment in an early 20th century building in Cleveland overlooking the Cuyahoga River is going to have different sensory details from a modern condo in Miami or a flat over a record store in Lawton, Oklahoma. 

David James Poissant: Speaking of form, this collection contains poems with numbered stanzas, poems composed of couplets, a prose poem (“When You Least Expect It”), and all manner of poem lengths, from ten lines to over a hundred lines. The variety is stunning. How do you juggle so many shapes so deftly on the page?

Jonathan Fink: I feel like much of the process of writing is trying to find the right shape and form for the piece you are creating or the story you are trying to tell. Broadly, I encourage students (and myself) to be open to the expectations of a piece. These expectations aren’t just rhetorical, but are also tonal, imagistic, and structural. They build and generate through the process of writing. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty has three elements: wholeness, harmony, and radiance; and I like how these concepts work together—the wholeness of a piece’s architecture and content/inquiry, the harmony of how everything works together, and the radiance of how the piece moves beyond its singular existence in an expansive and communicative way. So, I hope I can remain open not so much to me dictating a form for a poem but to whatever form might arise to fulfill those elements of expectation and beauty. 

David James Poissant: As many of our readers are also writers, maybe you could speak to the mystery of line breaks. What’s your rule of thumb for breaking lines? How do you instruct the beginning poets in your courses at the University of West Florida, where you’ve taught creative writing for many years? Are we all overthinking line breaks, or do they deserve even more reverence?

Jonathan Fink: There are lots of different reasons for line breaks—how they look on the page, tone, rhythm, formal meter, among others—but my favorite types of line breaks are where the reader creates an image or scene in their mind based on the line and then there is a slight pause as the image holds over the line break and transforms with the beginning of the next line. William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark” has a great example of this. The first line is “Traveling through the dark I found a deer,” and in the reader’s mind (at least mine) this deer blooms alive in the night and holds there until the beginning of the next line which follows, “dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” In my mind’s eye the initial image suddenly revises. I am struck by surprise, as I imagine the persona was as well, that the deer is not alive, but dead. It has been alive this whole time across the line break. A lesser poet would have written, “Traveling through the dark I found a dead deer / on the edge of the Wilson River Road”—same information but lacking the surprise and emotional investment of the persona in the line break as Stafford has written it. 

David James Poissant: Some of your poems feel deeply personal. Others concern recent or current events and stories from the news. Others are engaged with the history of a place or the examination of a painting. And plenty, like “A Year of Growth,” first published by The Florida Review, defy categorization, allowing subjects to overlap in intriguing ways. Do you begin a poem knowing its subject matter, or do poems ever surprise you in the turns they take as you compose?

Jonathan Fink: The poems definitely surprise me, which, as many poets have said, is the essence of writing. I’m not writing blindly, though. I find that there is often a balance between having a triggering idea combined with a general sense of architecture, while also being perpetually open on a line-by-line basis to see how the poem moves and transforms. (I always like the conceptual idea of “yes, and…” used in improv comedy.) In that poem specifically, it’s true that I was building a treehouse, and my youngest daughter colored the end grain of one of the 2x4s to reveal a rainbow. I was surprised by this and liked the image, and I felt like the image had narrative and metaphorical/symbolic potential. I like the Ezra Pound quote that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” and I frequently begin poems with a symbol I hope to explore, as in the case here. As the poem developed, though, much of the subtext started to work its way to the surface as an elegy for my mother-in-law who had recently passed away. 

Another way of stating this concept of expectation/form/beauty, etc. is to say broadly that when I write, I am thinking about how I am using language to map/explore neural pathways. Not long ago, I heard a good feature on NPR about how neuroscientists were studying how sensory language traces similar pathways in the brain to the actual action described. So, when we say we “feel” it when someone writes that they accidentally stepped on an exposed nail, piercing their flip-flop into their foot, we actually do “feel” it in the sense that our brains receive that sensory language in a similar neural pathway pattern to the action itself. So, in my writing I try to remind myself that I am not just writing symbols or words, but I am building neural pathway scaffolding. Strange, I know, but I hope conceiving writing this way has helped me to write better poems. 

David James Poissant: New Testament stories appear with some frequency here, often in the context of paintings. Did growing up in the church leave an indelible mark on your art, or have the stories taken hold as you’ve grown older?

Jonathan Fink: Absolutely and both, and this is something I actually think about a lot. My mother and father were amazing examples to me, as they have always lived their lives in a radical way, taking Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount literally and instructively. This of course is the hardest thing in the world to actually do. My father, after retiring as an English professor, works daily serving meals to anyone who needs a meal in a small town in Texas. Through their church, they make 400 meals a day. My mother was an elementary school counselor before retiring, and much of her day was spent finding shoes for kids or driving to pick them up when their parents couldn’t be there or contacting social workers, etc. They’ve lived their lives motivated daily by the literal and instructive teachings of Christ. My parents are deeply intellectual and soulful people with deep conviction, and they found and instilled great purpose in our family by trying to follow Christ’s example literally. The fact that religion has been so manipulated and bastardized locally, nationally, and internationally by those in search of political power and social control is a great and real frustration for many people, I believe, who find wisdom and beauty in things like Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. So, yes, these things are inescapable in my writing. 

I always loved Flannery O’Connor’s statement in “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable” where she says, “Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be apparent. The assumptions that underlie this use of it, however, are those of the central Christian mysteries. These are assumptions to which a large part of the modern audience takes exception. About this I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story [“A Good Man is Hard to Find”] could be read, but none other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.” For me, it’s not necessarily “belief” that is the engine behind perception in my writing, but the framing of a moral understanding of the world and the mysteries of a person’s “soul” informed by the example and guidance of my parents’ lives and convictions. 

David James Poissant: As a father of daughters, like you, so many of these poems resonate deeply. If, in the future, your daughters should read your poems, what do you hope they’ll find there?

Jonathan Fink: It’s interesting in that they do read them now, in a sense. My daughters are eleven, eight, and five, and I am reading the Harry Potter series to them at night before bed. I read through the books several years ago with my oldest daughter, and now the younger two, who share a room, are interested in reading each night before bed. I read to them from a Kindle, and sometimes the battery is dead, and they’ll ask if I can just read them one of my poems (preferably one that features my daughters as characters) instead. They’ve heard all the ones, I think, about them in the new book, and now they ask for new ones, and it clarifies my limitations that I can’t just pull these things out of thin air. As for what I hope they might see in the future, I hope they see our love for them and the world. 

David James Poissant: In closing, what is next for you? Are you already conceiving of your next book-length project?

Jonathan Fink: I completed a poetry project for Joshua Tree National Park as an artist in residence last year about the musician Gram Parsons and his life and legacy and the botched cremation attempt there at Joshua Tree after his overdose. My wife did the art for the project, which was a lot of fun. It’s available for viewing for free on my website. I’m also currently thinking about trying to do a book-length poem structured around a central initiating event that spirals out in different directions. Hopefully more on that soon. 

Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida. His most recent book of poetry is Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart (Dzanc, 2025). He has also received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions.