Interview: Jed Myers’ Anyone’s Dust 

Tassneem Abdulwahab: There’s a recurring theme of contrasts between childhood, love, death, and violence. How do juxtapositions inspire your writing? 

Jed Myers: I believe you’ve nailed the essential factors that play on the struggle of just about any self in the world—childhood’s shaping the sense of self, the need for love and the dread of losing it, the sense of death’s imminence, and the dangers of risking an authentic presence in a violent reality. I don’t feel I’ve been uniquely preoccupied with these themes, but maybe more consciously than is usual! It’s poignant to me, how in a single moment, a person might subjectively be both an innocent child seeking affection and an aging soul regretful of past choices and facing life’s end. The simultaneity of these factors in the rich complexity of a human moment is endlessly compelling. 

TA: The varying formats throughout the chapbook are thought-provoking. How did each poem inspire its particular format? 

JM: I’d like to believe—I try to keep the faith—that if I listen, as a poem is emerging, it will suggest its own optimal form. Even though my default is a rough tetrameter or pentameter, a poem might call for something else. Often, I see, or hear, an early line-break that leads into a new stanza, and this begins to shape the poem somewhat uniquely. 

TA: Family has a strong presence in the chapbook—what does family mean to you in the realm of your poetry? 

JM: I’ve had a career practicing and teaching psychotherapy, and I’ve come to appreciate the profound shaping effects of family dynamics on our emerging personalities. I also believe these effects replay in our partnering and parenting. My own family was riddled with centuries-old dreads and tensions that got worked in over many generations of struggle before my grandparents came to America. In my time, these persisting tensions were being played out in everyday family life, so I absorbed them. Poetry has been one way to work with this inheritance—a way that might be of use to others as well. 

TA: Can you tell us more about the thread of introspection present throughout the chapbook? 

JM: I’ve always been introspective, and I think it began with the convergence of three factors—I was lacking the emotional attunement I needed so I tried to supply it to myself; I found it was adaptive to be a good listener to my terrifically anxious mother; and, I developed a useful ability to speak of my own internal processes, still hoping to feel understood by another. Ultimately, introspection facilitated evolving empathy, and this in turn became the basis for much of my writing. The world seems to be asking us all to practice what might be called “empathy at a distance.” 

TA: Why did you choose Anyone’s Dust as the chapbook’s title? 

JM: There is the poem by that name in the collection, and in that poem the matter is literal—the destruction going on in Ukraine making dust of so many lives. But the pivotal business here is 

that any one of us might have committed the violence in evidence, depending on the life circumstances one inhabits. This poem—and, I hope, this little book—invites the reader to identify across any and all life circumstances, identities, or patterns of action. We are all made of the same dust! 

TA: What do you hope readers will experience or take away from reading this chapbook? 

JM: I began writing committedly after the events of September 11th, 2001. Watching the people leap from the burning heights of the World Trade Center, it struck me that the U.S. would be drawn into a maelstrom of intensifying retaliatory mass murder, and I could see no response better than whatever creative expressions might help us remember our oneness across all the bloody differences. That has remained my artistic purpose. That’s my hope for what might be conveyed through the collection Anyone’s Dust. 

TA: “Trouble’s Voice” focuses on auditory descriptors more than any other sense—can you speak to the significance of that choice? 

JM: The household I grew up in was a loud reverberating crucible of voices in conflict—arguments, harsh accusations, sarcastic plaints…these were the sounds that often filled my young ears. This is what I got used to. Such sounds became the music, the normal accompaniment, behind my thoughts, moods, musings…. It’s what I’d fall asleep to. And it could be said that the auditory sense, is, after all, as with music, what most powerfully lends emotional context to experience. Think of the movie soundtrack! I think I learned to creatively dissociate to the stimulus of all those raised voices. To this day, I prefer the buzzing of a crowded pub to the quiet of my home for writing! 

TA: You touch on social justice issues in “From Pictures of Beautiful Bakhmut” and “The Tradition.” In what ways did these issues inform your poetry? 

JM: I believe I’ve been bringing this matter up in answering some of your previous questions, but please let me add here, it’s terribly clear to me, as I’m sure it is to many, that there can’t be much real social justice until we collectively, societally, trade in our righteousness for compassion. The word justice, I believe, in our culture, rings with a sense of righteous indignation, rightness, correctness, moral superiority, and so on—whether spoken on the right or on the left! And it’s a doomed spirit, righteousness. It’s what starts and sustains wars. The only hope is empathic interest in the other, including especially the threatening or injurious or rivalrous other. I hope all our poems and songs and paintings and stories can contribute to the possibility of a culture of actual compassion across differences. 

TA: Parents are referred to as “gods” in “Little Believer” and “Trouble’s Voice”—can you tell us more about this specific word choice? 

JM: To us as very young children, I’m quite sure, the providers of our care—the ones who literally keep us alive during the long helpless dependency of human early childhood—really are our first gods! I think our ideas and representations of our religions’ gods are based implicitly on impressions and fantasies of our early caregivers. In my case, the gods argued, fought, cursed each other…not unlike the Greek gods who were in their time like fractious family. Growing into 

one’s own mind and unique sensibilities means giving up the fundamentalism of blind belief in one’s parents. But very early on, we need to believe! 

TA: What’s the significance of the journey between past and present in “Unveiling”? 

JM: I think this poem, as much as any in the collection, draws on my sense of the past in the present—the activity of memory, conscious or not, in the experience of the moment. I’ve always wanted to better understand my mother, and that’s continued these years after her death. Standing before her gravestone with my brother, I let myself see my memories, of her, of us with her, even of her stories, her memories…all as part of the ongoing venture of evolving my empathic appreciation. It can take a long time for us to realize our parents were helpless little ones before we knew them—it’s hard to acknowledge and accept the child that remains in a valued loved one. I find writing in this domain, where the past lives in the present, very helpful. And, of course, this spirit can be important for us with respect not only to our elders but regarding our adversaries, our authorities, our presidents…. It is too much to expect that anyone in our lives can transcend childhood completely or throw off early conditioning. Each of us brings the impingements, gifts, hauntings, and encouragements of the past with us into present encounters. Accepting this, seeing this, might be a help in working things out across the divides.