Jason Koo Talks Poetry vs Prose, Writing vs Editing, and Brooklyn Poets
TMR's former poetry editor returns for a catch-up interview.
by Audrey Dae Bush, Assistant Contest Editor
Jason Koo runs on New York City time, and when we linked up for a virtual interview in mid-May—graduation and the end of contest-reading season having eased me into a relaxing, yet distracting dreamspace—this embarrassingly slipped my mind. Koo is living not only an hour ahead of us Missourians, but has been quite active since his time as the Missouri Review poetry editor during his PhD program.
When asked to describe himself at the beginning of the interview, Koo didn’t immediately slip into specifics. Eventually replying that he could describe himself “in a thousand ways, probably” is indicative of his poetic mindset, and begins to encompass the wide scope of Koo’s accomplishments. While teaching creative writing and poetry at Quinnipiac University, he founded and executive-directored Brooklyn Poets, a poetry nonprofit, in 2012. Their first poetry festival took place in late May. Koo has also authored poetry collections More Than Mere Light, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island.
Jason Koo: So those are the two main things I do professionally. Usually I tell people I’m a writer, or a professor, and if they’re still interested after those two words… [laughing] I also run a poetry nonprofit. So yeah, the “writer” is the third hat—that doesn’t bring in as much money in terms of regular pay—I have been wearing for a lot longer. I have three full-length poetry collections that I’ve published. The fourth one will hopefully find a publisher someday soon. I’ve also done editing, like how I was the poetry editor at TMR a long time ago, as a grad student. Since then, I have been a co-editor of several different publications. The Brooklyn Poets Anthology we co-published with Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017—the co-editor of that. And then there’s a few other things that I've done, sort of multi-editor anthology things. Anyway, that's the short answer, which is probably plenty for you.
Audrey Dae Bush: How’d you come to be the poetry editor at TMR?
JK: I was an intern; I worked for the magazine through the program. […] I think altogether, I started my program in 2003 and started working/reading for TMR shortly after that. I would say maybe 2004. They had that internship course, so I took the course […] and then after that I just stayed on, reading poems, and [after] a couple years I took over as poetry editor.
I read a ton of submissions. I don’t know if they still have this system—we would get a little manila envelope. It’d have like, ten submissions in it, and you’d have to mark your evaluation of each one. Both as a reader and then especially as poetry editor, I would find stuff that I thought would be a good fit for the magazine and I would pass it on. When I was a reader, I would give it to [then] poetry editor [Steve Gehrke] and sometimes talk to him about it. And then he would either bring it to Speer or not, but usually Steve and I were in agreement about almost everything.
When I took over as poetry editor, I would be the one making the recommendations. I feel like most of the stuff I was really excited about, he took, though there’s probably a few that I can’t remember that he didn’t take. In fact, the one I remember the most is the one I was most excited about: I don’t know if you know the poet Matthew Dickman, but he went on to become pretty well-known in the poetry world. And we were one of his biggest first publications. Shortly after that he won a pretty big book prize, and then it seemed like everyone was reading Matthew Dickman.
Because we weren’t getting everything that we wanted in the magazine, and because we have the folio format at TMR, so it’s even tougher vetting—you’ve gotta have a good group of poems, not just one poem—and because Speer wanted me to do more online stuff, I came up with the Poem of the Week feature. That was a good way to publish people that I liked that didn’t make it into the print journal. Now it doesn’t seem all that big of a deal; everyone’s got online content. But back in 2007, it was pretty pioneering.
See TMR’s Poem of the Week features—including some of Koo’s own—for free online.
ADB: Talk a bit about the content of the poetry you would receive, what stylistic forms you would like, your tastes according to your trained eye.
JK: I think when I read TMR I would have a consciousness of: Okay, is this something that both I like and that I think Speer would like, too? Or is it maybe something that I am not crazy about, but think he might really like it? He tended to like more narrative poems, especially those that dealt with history. And we had taken a lot of […] sequences of poems—poems [that] kind of work together; Davis McCombs won the poetry prize, I think, while I was still a reader, and he had this sonnet sequence that was incredible. So I was reading with that in mind, but of course also reading for stuff that I thought really stuck out. And I have a pretty wide open taste. I think there’s definitely stuff that I leaned towards, probably at the time when I was in grad school, […] stuff that had humor in it, influenced by the New York School of poets. Stuff that was colloquially accessible, that wasn’t boring, that was alive and exciting. Referred to culture, pop culture, you know—but I was also really into stuff that was not like that at all, stuff that was linguistically intense or philosophical. I’m [also] personally really into long poems, so I was good for the job because I liked longer sequences.
ADB: At times I would get frustrated whenever we were reading a poem in class, and I would say: Hey, there’s nothing making this a poem but the line spacing. This could just be flash or micro-fiction. Our managing editor [Marc McKee] would have to tell me: Sit down there. Just give it a second.
JK: Just because something is a narrative doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use rhyme or meter. I’ve gotten a lot of the same questions about my poetry, like: Oh, what makes this a poem? And I’m just like: Uh, you would really have to read a lot of poetry to be able to answer that. [laughter] But then to be fair, sometimes on a technical level, there’s not necessarily a whole lot of difference, right? In fact, you can read prose writers that read like poets. Marcel Proust, Kafka, Henry James—their prose will often read like poetry. So, you know, I would say it’s more like a quality of the voice and the energy and the writing. It’s very different reading a prose-like poem than it is reading like, the prose of an email. […] I remember peers I had at the Missouri Review who would complain about Don DeLillo’s fiction because it was too much like poetry. They thought he was kind of like “a poet’s fiction writer.” But I really admire pieces that weren’t afraid to blur those lines—whether it’s genre, or even medium.
ADB: What were some important things you learned, or important skills you brought to TMR, that you thought helped build you as a writer and as a critic?
JK: There’s a lot I learned. I don’t know what I brought to the team other than a good work ethic and being an amenable guy—and, I think, having a very open taste. I think editors are less effective when they have a very particular taste. I’ve never been very much into people that say: I know what I like. I’m just like: How do you really know everything that you like? You might encounter something totally different from something you [normally like, and you might love it.] I think that was a good quality I brought to TMR.
In terms of what TMR taught me, I mean, it taught me a lot—TMR was the first truly professional journal I worked for. [Former Associate Editor] Evelyn Somers taught me a ton about copyediting. […] When you’re a writer, you think you’re already just naturally an editor, and you kind of are, but you don’t know all of the ins and outs of copyediting that are also dependent on the stylistics or the in-house style of whatever publication you’re working for. I remember finding out that TMR doesn’t use the Oxford comma, or the series comma, which is something I agree with. Oh, I think commas are overused.
ADB: Controversial, much?!
JK: Yeah. But TMR has been so influential; I basically follow their in-house style for Brooklyn Poets, with our publications where we generally would follow Chicago style but don’t use the series comma like Chicago recommends. So, yeah. A lot of things would come up in the editing of poems or prose features, and Evelyn would go over something that was particularly tricky. I think Evelyn was the one that taught me about the difference between en dashes, em dashes and hyphens. Those are three different types of punctuation, and most people, even professional writers, don’t know the difference. And why would you really, unless you had worked for a publication that took copyediting seriously? So now I can always spot when a publication is really run by professionals or not.
And then, you know, when I [first] had books published, it shocked me to discover that the presses were not doing any copyediting. It was all up to me. And thank god I had had the training at TMR so I could copyedit on my own. That’s intimidating, but really that’s not good; you should have a second person copyediting with you. But at least I had that so I could make sure the text was clean. I learned a ton under Evelyn.
I think editors are less effective when they have a very particular taste. How do you really know everything that you like? You might encounter something totally different from something you normally like, and you might love it.
ADB: Talk about your current projects. You mentioned the Brooklyn Poets poetry festival coming up?
JK: Yeah, this first one will teach us a lot. We’re doing a Thursday-Friday-Saturday festival. I love festival ideas. […] Ours was built more on our former retreat model—we used to do a summer retreat, but it was at this house that got sold during the early days of the pandemic. Most of the festival ideas I see are readings and panels, and there’s not usually a lot of ways for the audience themselves to participate as writers. Ours has two generative workshops in the morning, two 90-minute workshops where you come in and you work with a teacher and you write something all on different themes. There’s six of those in total. And then in the afternoon, there are 90-minute craft talks, or craft labs. We have three headliners; they’re all the ones doing the craft talks. Jericho Brown’s gonna be there, and then Edward Hirsch and Eugenia Leigh are doing the other craft talks. We have an open mic hour on each of the three days for the participants, and then we have panels on journal publishing, book publishing, and one on professionalizing as a writer without an MFA. In the evening we have readings by the festival teachers and panelists. So yeah, it’s going well.
ADB: And what about your current book?
JK: Yeah, I have a fourth book that is ready to go. I’ve just been hearing back about it from both some peers and places that I sent it. It’s called No Rest. It’s a book of all long poems. You would love it. I’m sure you would look at it and be like: What makes this poetry? [laughter] And the whole book itself is fairly long—it’s like, 180-some pages in manuscript—so that makes it a tougher sell for sure. […] But all the poems in No Rest have been published. It’d be one thing if I was sending this thing out and I was having a tough time publishing the long poems or something, but I haven’t. They’ve all been taken and I know the book works. […] And I’ve had people read them and tell me that [same thing, and when] I’ve read them out loud, people don’t have the sense that it’s this super long, tedious poem that’s going on forever. That was the stylistic challenge of the book, because long poems are my jam. I [have to think] like, how can I write these long poems that move super fast? I’m interested in writing essays too, but essays take me a lot longer to write and they move a lot slower. So I was more interested in thinking: Okay, how can I write something that’s kind of like an essay but moves a lot faster? And that’s where what we were talking about earlier—the difference between poetry and prose—is sometimes there. A poem can move through many different subjects faster than an essay can, so I was really interested in that space between poetry and prose.
ADB: I’m sure you’ll have great luck with it.
JK: I’ve been in this game long enough to know that everything eventually gets published if you’re persistent enough. [laughter] It’s just now the question is: how good is the publication gonna be? Because now I’ve seen the other side of the business, I know how much that matters. I’m at the stage of my career where I want to find a bigger press that can really help me find more readers.
ADB: Any final words you have for TMR?
JK: It was nice to work at TMR and be in the graduate school scene, because there was such a compulsion to do that work. Because you were getting publications as well. Whereas now, outside of school, I don’t have the time to do that stuff anymore, especially running a nonprofit. But when I look back, I have a lot of fondness for that experience at TMR. It’s not just about the stuff I learned with copyediting or the poems that I got published. It’s also the work that I myself was publishing as an editor. I really enjoyed that work.
The Missouri Review has a lot of fondness for Jason Koo, too. We thank him for sharing his limited time and unlimited thoughts! Be sure to visit his website jasonykoo.com and check out Brooklyn Poets at brooklynpoets.org.