To hear with Poet Jared Stanley writeS for two overlaPPing audienceS: readerS of
contemporary poetry, and PeoPle who SPend a lot of time on
peavine mountain. by Brad Bynum bradb@ ne wsreview.c om
Ears is available in Reno at Sundance Books, 121 California Ave., 786-1188, as well as from all the usual internet suspects. For more information, visit jared-stanley.info.
PHOTOS/BRAD BYNUM
“F
rom The Sea Ranch,” a poem in Northern Nevada poet Jared Stanley’s new collection, Ears, begins:
My skin changes direction, migrates to sleep. ‘Sleep’ means ‘I tongue at my left eye as it slowly descends into its socket from heaven as if by a chain ’til my tongue won’t reach.’ Little honeybee sucking at the cup-shaped eternity: The left eye has its unbuilt plan, as if a city: Ecbatan Xanadu Cibola Winnemucca The looming of outskirts in starlight. To see Winnemucca named among legendary cities in this dreamy, poetic reverie might seem a bit jarring for those of us who have actually been there, but it evokes a definite sense of place and that dream logic in which the mythic mingles with the familiar. “I just got back from a bunch of readings in the East Coast, and nobody gets this,” said Stanley recently. “I love Nevada, and I love Nevada place names. I just love it here, so whenever I’m far away people don’t quite get what I’m talking about. I’ve had to stop a few times and ask, ‘Anybody been to Winnemucca before?’” He writes simultaneously for two overlapping audiences: readers of contemporary poetry, and people who spend a lot of time on Peavine Mountain. “I like the idea that I’m talking about Nevada in a language that’s, on the one hand, only recognizable to Northern Nevadans, and on the other hand, in a language that I can kind of work it if I’m in Philadelphia. … I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to be able to be a part of a larger national poetry conversation, but I also want it to be resolutely Nevadan work.”
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S o u n d S Stanley wasn’t always a Nevadan. He was born in Arizona and grew up all over California, primarily in the East Bay. He developed a relationship with Reno from there, visiting friends who lived here. “I went to Reno High prom in 1994,” he said. (He’s now 42.) “I’ve had this weird, long relationship with Reno.” He graduated from UC Berkeley and then the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he refers to as “fancy poetry school,” and then taught in Merced, California, before moving to Reno. His partner, Meredith Odea, is in the history department at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he’s an instructor at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village. He teaches creative writing, literary theory, composition, poetry workshops, and new media writing to undergraduates in SNC’s English Department and works with graduate students in the college’s interdisciplinary art MFA program. Stanley is interdisciplinary by nature. He played in rock bands in his youth and has, in recent years, collaborated with visual artists, including local artists like Megan Berner and Sarah Lillegard. He’s a writer who values his sensory perceptions. The poems in Ears are full of smells, sounds and tactile sensations. And the book title is reflective of that recurring theme. “That’s how it got that title,” he said. “I wasn’t even aware of that, and I’d done a reading, and someone’s like, ‘I like all the ears.’ It was actually pretty dumb and simple.” He describes hearing as a “sense that comes through the back of the mind. ... I like playing with the idea of difference between hearing, listening, filtering things out, what you try to ignore, how you try to not use your ears. … I like the idea of overhearing—when you hear something you’re not supposed to hear. Like when people will switch into a different language so that people around them won’t understand. That’s a very interesting thing to me because you can’t do that with your eyes. You can’t change the color of the earth to disguise something you don’t want someone else to know.” The sounds of words are also key to his poems. He says that he often starts composing his poems based on sounds alone.
