“Each Other Moment”: Five Questions for Jessica Greenbaum
Jessica Greenbaum was born in 1957 in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel, Inventing Difficulty, was acknowledged in the Silverfish Review in 1998, her second novel, The Two Yvonnes, won the Gerald Cable Prize, and her third novel, Spilled and Gone, was named the ‘Best Book in Poetry,” by Library Journal in the University of Pittsburgh Press (2019). Additionally, Greenbaum co-edited, with Rabbi Hara Person, Mishkan HaSedar, the first poetry Haggadah, which was published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis and won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher book awards in 2021. Additionally, Jessica Greenbaum has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America.
Beyond personal poetry and novel composition, Greenbaum teaches at Barnard and Vassar Colleges, DOROT’s senior center, and Brooklyn Poets. Her poetry revolves around Jewish text. Since 2015, she has been creating poetry writing classes that delve into basic Jewish values at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue and in Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim.
Reviewing Best American Poetry (2024), Greenbaum’s poem “Each Other Moment” caught my attention with its view on life today, including components such as technology and discovering how we can find solace during strange times. With a Jewish background myself, I found Greenbaum’s literature to be very interesting and resonated closely with it.
In analyzing “Each Other Moment,” I found myself picking away at what Greenbaum might be trying to convey, as there were so many possibilities every time I looked back at her writing. Her writing style is so personal and vivid that you can imagine the picture of every word that appears on the paper. Excited to discover more behind the scenes of her literature, I decided to interview Jessica Greenbaum.
You mention, “Calculating the millennia before reefs could revive and species come back in colors we haven’t imagined.” Connecting to your writing career, have you ever had a moment where you could not possibly generate writing ideas you liked? (Known as the treacherous “writer’s block”). If so, what ignited and “revive[d]” your flowing ideas and literature?
As with the teacher who has set you on this course of close reading and investigation of poems, I was very fortunate with my teachers–a special mentor in high school, but, more formatively, my third grade teacher, Regina Stone—I call her “my Rosetta Stone”—now 103 years old and still my friend. I tell you that because I began writing poems in her class, and have continued on. Because of my good fortune with teachers, and with having a passion that made me feel more alive since a young age, I came to know, pretty early on, that if I wasn’t writing for a while, it was just part of the process, and somewhere down the line my experiences would begin to speak to each other, to hold a part of myself I wanted to shape into a poem. Why? Because writing poems if a life-giving force for me. The passage you mention above is really about our horror that the reefs—along with so much else—are being harmed by the carelessness of how human beings live their lives, and the speaker in the poem takes some solace through the imagination of a future rebirth of the natural world. If you consider poetry a form of making meaning, that passage might be seen as saying, “I’m not in control of climate change and pollution outside of the care I take in my own life, but I can express hope for the earth’s healing as a life-force for my own spirit.”
Music and podcasts are topics you include in “Each Other Moment”. Was there a specific genre or song you were thinking of when writing the lines regarding music and podcasts?
Alas, no. I was thinking of the surround-sound of the recordings available to us . . .
Although your poem describes many actions relevant to today’s time, it feels quite dystopian through your words. How do you feel about the sudden uprising of technology over the past few years? Has it benefited your writing in any specific way?
Well . . . I will always remember the night my dad came home from his lab (he was a research scientist) and described a machine that could change the order of words on the page! Until I was in my 30’s (I was born in 1957) I worked on a typewriter, and changing a line-break required either a new piece of paper, or white-out. The poets were really painters until laptops came along–constantly wiping out whole lines and trying to type over them to avoid starting with a blank page. So, hooray for technology! Although handwriting is a casualty of this . . . and I’m sorry for that because I love the handwriting of people I love in my life. And I’m not on FaceBook but I get a kick out of Twitter, which can serve a person well if she only follows those accounts she finds beneficent and funny. I get a lot of info about poetry on Twitter, and delightful animal videos, and once I wrote a poem about following the many dancing cockatiel videos as a way of avoiding the Trump presidency.
Turning your location on and off is mentioned a few times during your poem. How does this resonate to a deeper meaning behind your motives to write “Each Other Moment”?
Where are we in all this? Can we disappear from being held accountable? Can we walk into some society-adjacent woods and lose the burden of our complicity with the present threat of the world’s violent, malevolent forces? If you look at Jack Gilbert’s poem, “A Brief for the Defense,” which might be a poem my generation looks to more than younger ones might (as per a student of mine who did a fantastic job eviscerating it, after which I said, Oh, gosh, I might have to take the tattoo of this poem off my back) anyway, if you look at that poem and you look at Wislawa Szymborska’s “Under One Little Star,” you see the great poems that ask, How do we reconcile our own joys, our own finds of beauty with the world’s profound suffering? That’s what it’s all about for me . . .
Mentioning “the full moon” and the “big dipper,” nature seems to be a heavy focus in your poem despite being immersed in technology. If you could relate the genre of your writing to a certain country, state, or region with special natural features, where would it be located and why?
Well . . . My formative teachers (I mean after third grade!) were Kenneth Koch and Marilyn Hacker, and Koch initiated his classes into the NY City School of Poets merely by showing us how you could love them and they could love you. And I also tend to write about the northwestern most corner of Connecticut where we spend time in a summer cabin that myhusband built. It has no electricity so you end up . . . reading and . . . writing poems. This all reflects the great good fortune in my life to have time, space, and security. Sometimes, with the world as it is, I wonder how anyone can care about poems that come from such privilege. That can keep me from the page and then I go back to my shelves and read, and I read my friends’ work and I read the poets whose work I want to internalize because they are teachers. And then sometimes I can get back to the page just remembering that for me, poetry is a life-force, and embracing it has saved my life.