The Writing Life: An Interview with V. Joshua Adams

The Writing Life: An Interview with V. Joshua Adams by Jane Luckett

The poet V. Joshua Adams recently published his debut collection of poetry, Past Lives, with Jackleg Press. Though written at different times, the poems appear in a singular volume and are divided into three sections: First Life, Second Life, and Third Life. The book offers the perfect balance of straightforward and humorous pieces and offers readers many high-intensity, thought-provoking moments. 

Adams is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar of comparative literature. In addition to Past Lives, he is also the author of the chapbook, Cold Affections (Plan B Press, 2018) and Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2025. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Styx, Swing, Modern Language Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Bennington Review, Posit, Chicago Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Imagination, nonsite, and elsewhere. He published a series of poems in Issue 10 of Miracle Monocle. 

Upon finishing the book, I was filled with curiosity and couldn’t keep myself from exploring different, possible interpretations. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to correspond with Adams about the collection. The following is a transcription of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity:

The book divides the poems into three sections labeled as "lives." Is there a general meaning or metaphor for each life, or do these titles simply represent the time they were written?

VJA: The sections have some chronological coherence, but they are held together more by style. So, each life is, if you will, a style of life. Readers have suggested that the third section is a kind of fusion or development of the first two, and I think this is generally correct.

Your poems, especially in First Life, feel like several thoughts and feelings strung together. They appear to be the speaker’s stream of consciousness, in a sense. If, as you indicate, these poems represent your past, how did you recall the memories of your thoughts and feelings during the moments you wrote about? Do you recall a general feeling, or are you able to remember and articulate the different feelings and thoughts you had at the time?

VJA: I am unsure if these poems always represent my past. But they were triggered by events in my present. I think this is true of memory generally. It is always a representation of the past from the point of view of the present. In that sense it is an interpretation or potentially even fiction. People misremember things all of the time. Sometimes I recalled a general feeling, other times specific thoughts and images. But other times, things are invented, intentionally or not. 

“Autocorrect” struck a chord for me, personally. I grew up in and out of courtrooms. The poem itself seemed a bit ambiguous, and I had many interpretations of it. Can you give some insight as to what you wanted your reader to take away from this poem? Was it a poem about a day in court, or was it more so some type of metaphor for the “trials” of your upbringing?

VJA: The poem is metaphorical. I am unsure if I have ever been in a courtroom. Once I contested a traffic ticket, so maybe. My own upbringing, as you can probably tell, was a privileged one. All of us face trials of various sorts, of course. But the poem is a little ironic about mine, and about the entire class of people whom I might be said to represent. 

I found Second Life to be more abstract and more metaphorical than First Life. There wasn’t as much straightforward, or cut-and-dry language in the latter section; instead, there are more adjectives and similes, and you also experiment with form. What does the shift from First Life to Second Life mean or represent to you?

VJA: The poems in Second Life are driven more by sound—or at least as much by sound—rather than by speech. They represent a different way for poems to proceed and to make their discoveries. 

In “Come What May,” what is the significance of the person arriving at one destination, then announcing they arrived at another? What is the difference between “your sister and her children,” and “your friend and her lover?” And who does the Angel of Death make his victim?

VJA: I would prefer readers of this poem to draw their own conclusions about the first two questions you raise. However, about the last one: what I will say is that Past Lives is interested in the problem of living in time, and one of the reasons that living in time is a problem is that we are all mortal. The Angel of Death comes for all of us and can come at any moment. This is a very old theme in lyric poetry. It produces the whole tradition of carpe diem poems. "Come What May" is part of that tradition.

Past Lives is available from Jackleg Press or your favorite local bookstore.