Inside the Shell is a new feature from Reference Mollusk where we interview past contributors to learn more about their art, their practice, and themselves. Our first interview is with Jake Leonard, whose poem “Anatomy of the Hand” was included in Vol. I. They are also the new poetry editor for the mag!

on truth and voice in their poetry

I tend to think that the abstractions of our lives (something like a “personality”) emerge from a physical reality (don’t come at me, math nerdz). I care deeply about the materiality of language, the bodily origin of speech, how a string of sounds feels in the mouth. To get sorta pretentious, I really dig and have been thinking a lot about the Charles Olson’s motto of “from the heart to the breath to the line,” and I’m always thinking about Roland Barthes’ idea of the “grain of the voice,” that somehow some part of our body and who we are can get lodged in the art we make if we’re lucky.

Also, I’ve just got a real weird idiolect, always mixing language from different parts of my life together, and that tends to give off a very “Jake” sound, ya know? Ultimately, I always want to write from an embodied truth, even when trying to get at the immateriality of the mind. This sounds so self-aggrandizing, but I really want my writing to get at the truth, even when the truth isn’t something I especially want to hear. I’m really trying to be brave these days.

on what led them to poetry

I love poetry because I’ve always felt like a failure (these days I view that as something to celebrate). As a clinically slow processor (happy to break out the psychoeducational testing if you’d like), I’ve always struggled to say what I mean in the moment. As a dyslexic, the spellings of words have always felt so esoteric, arbitrary, estranged from the sounds my mouth makes. Truthfully, I really wish I could be a musician, but I’ve got very little rhythm. Poetry feels like the closest thing to music that I can make. When I was 12, I picked swimming (to follow in the footsteps of my older brother) instead of learning to play the saxophone (what I actually wanted to do). Instead of playing the saxophone, I’d recite the poems we had to memorize for English class during swim practice in my head during distance sets. Poetry dug its teeth in me and became part of me, and just about nothing brings me the same solace that a good poem does when it hits you just right.

There’s a tension, for sure: my poetry, all poetry, is imperfect and a failing, but also feels like my path towards salvation. And that’s where the practice of poetry comes in: we’ve just gotta keep trying to get to perfection with imperfect tools while we know it’s an impossibility. I’ve shied away from ideas of faith after my needing to distance myself from the Catholic dogmas I grew up in, but I’ve been realizing the practice of poetry very much is an act of faith for me. I could keep rambling, but I guess I’ll just end with a snippet from Charles Simic’s essay “Reading Philosophy at Night:“ “Error is my first love. I’m shouting her name from the rooftops.”

on their piece “Anatomy of the Hand,” from vol. I

I eat shit a whole lot (fall often), and ate shit even more frequently before my prefrontal cortex “fully” developed. This was one of the first poems I wrote when I was diving back into poetry after a couple year hiatus from writing. There was just something about these two experiences that felt complimentary, and their connection and language had been gestating in me for a long time. The two parts of the poems talk about two separate instances of dull rocks opening up my hand.  The first instance, some shiny, pretty quartz crystals got stuck in my palm after I fell off my bike – this foreign body was inside my body, something decidedly not me became part of me.

In the second, I slipped and sliced my hand on this sliver of metasedimentary rock, had to hike 8 miles out of Shenandoah’s backcountry, and needed 27 stitches across the entirety of my palm. I bled all over the woods, left a bunch of what’s so often thought of as a person’s (my) defining life force all over my campsite. A lot of my favorite poetry talks about the permeability of self, both the physical and metaphysical self, and I think those two instances of cutting my hand, of dull rocks breaking my skin, this barrier that feels and is thought of as so solid, felt like opportunities to explore that porousness of self.

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Jake Leonard is a proud Baltimoron. They take workshops in spaces like Brooklyn Poets, The Clifton House, and Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. Their writing has been supported by the New York State Summer Writers Institute. They fin joy in reading on their favorite bench and wandering around the woods of Appalachia and its piedmonts. Read “Anatomy of the Hand” in Vol. I of Reference Mollusk