Three Questions for J.I. Kleinberg

What inspired your choice of medium, genre, and/or form for "a metaphor," "It's disconcerting," and "what"?

The making of found poetry is, in a way, parallel to writing in a diary: I discover what I’m feeling and thinking as I move through the process. I don’t have to know where I’m going or what I want to write about; the words just show up, waiting for me to discover them.

What was your creative process for the work?

The process is a near-daily practice: a pile of magazines in front of me (the magazines come from a share bin at the local library), I begin the search for the accidental pile-up of words that comprise each poetic fragment. I follow my own “rules” — the words must be entirely liberated from their original meaning and they must be physically connected (no physical or digital glue).

I tear the words from their page, tag them with the magazine’s title and date, and set them out on my work table, where they get shuffled many times, paired and grouped with other lines, until they finally seem to cohere as a poem. From any session of one to three hours, I may or may not end up with a finished poem. (I have, literally, thousands of lines stored by subject for future poems.) Once I’ve glued the pieces down and scanned the poem, it’s done. Unlike other forms of poetry, there’s no editing, so each poem has one chance to stand or fall.

What is the significance of this work to you?

I continue to appreciate the surprise of the process, of finding these words, and discovering how relevant they are to what’s going on in me and in the world. The poems are very simple collages and I value that blending of the visual and verbal, a small cascade of words recombined toward unexpected meaning.

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Her work has been published in print and online journals and anthologies worldwide. Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; a full-length volume, She needs the river (Poem Atlas), was published in 2024.