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 poemTraveling 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 NPRabout 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’savailable 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.

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A Year of Growth

Jonathan Fink

 

My youngest daughter does not know

that each tree ring marks a year of growth

when she selects a piece of scrap wood

 

from the sawdust and shavings

that have covered our back patio

and carries the board inside to color

 

the rings revealed by the saw blade,

my daughter filling the arching semicircles

until a rainbow appears as her sisters

 

lay other scraps across the floor to make

a path on which to leap from board to board

to furniture and back again in a game,

 

I imagine, every child in history has played,

the game requiring only the belief

that the ground is not as solid as it seems,

 

that a misstep or tip of balance will lead

to peril, whether lava or river or canyon below,

even though, while laughing, they jump again,

 

shrugging off each demise, protesting

only when I collect the boards

and insist that the world be ordered

 

over their appeals to fairness,

the mantra of childhood, to which

I and every parent I know responds,

 

Who says the world is fair? mostly resisting,

though sometimes not, to itemize,

while wielding a clothes-less Barbie

 

or broken toy like a judge’s gavel,

every slight from work and love

and politics both foreign and domestic

 

as the neighbor’s dog howls at the burgeoning

moon and the kids give each other that look

meaning, What’s got into dad—all we meant

 

was we were having fun? which is when

I see myself reflected in the glass

of the patio sliding doors and realize

 

how large I must seem to them,

large, though clearly not authoritative,

as the youngest starts spacing

 

the boards again behind my back,

and I lift one and point to the rings

in the grain, and say, see, this too

 

was once alive, how, though rooted,

it turned it leaves to the warmth of the sun

and drew water from the earth, its limbs

 

not unlike yours when you lift the hems

of your skirts to hop through puddles,

or wave to me from the treehouse

 

we are building together, a project begun

before the passing of their grandmother

though intersecting now with her loss

 

as grief permeates all things, and they ask

the questions one would expect

(if she looks down on them from above

 

just as they, from the tree, look down on me)

and the questions one doesn’t expect

about how the tree feels holding

 

the remains of another tree in its limbs,

transformed, though it is, to a house,

and I tell them trees aren’t capable

 

of abstract thought or have feelings

like we do, though what do I know,

thinking of Michelangelo’s Pieta,

 

and Mary, though stone, holding

her deceased son, and how the body

is itself a house of memory and love

 

and loss, as my wife and I explained

to our daughters, that the sadness they feel

is sadness, yes, but also love transformed,

 

that grief is love for the one who was lost,

just as my wife expressed on the day

before her mother died, after a month

 

of hospice at her mother’s home and the gift,

my wife said, to be there with her,

to measure and administer the morphine

 

when the great pain came, when any touch,

even a blanket, became unbearable,

to honor the effort at the end for her to stand,

 

holding to the walker, and request what would be

her final bath, and my wife, afterwards,

drawing a comb through the fineness of her hair,

 

never more beautiful, my wife saying

that night, and again the next day

even after the workers had come so quickly

 

to take her, to gather and remove

any remaining meds, count every pill

as her final breath still hung in the air,

 

and our daughters cried unceasingly

so that when, that night, we drove away,

the trees that lined the road seemed to bow

 

to the car, to lift their limbs in the breeze,

the undersides of their leaves lighter

than the backs, like the palms of hands,

 

which, I believed, if they could,

they would place on our car, on the shoulders

of my wife, or interweave their limbs

 

as a canopy above us, their petals

below, and the road would no longer

be a road but a tunnel, to where it ascended

 

I did not know, only that we were

like breath released at last from the throat,

becoming the words we were unable to say.

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Among Schoolchildren

Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.

 

As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.

 

Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.

 

How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.

 

To be sure, the children had cause to worry.

 

Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.

 

There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.

 

Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.

 

For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.

 

The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.

 

A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.

 

Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.

 

When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.

 

The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.

 

Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.

 

On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.

 

“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.

 

In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”

 

The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.

 

“Joey!  We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.

 

For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.

 

I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours.  Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.

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