Jim Krusoe: California Poets Part 9, Four Poems

Jim Krusoe

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Jim Krusoe

Four Poems

We Had

We had big ideas.

We were going to make the earth a paradise

(Though mostly for us, it’s true).

But still, we said the lion was going to lie down with the lamb,

the deserts were going to bloom,

and also we were going to visit Mars,

maybe even other galaxies--

Oh, and in addition, we were going to conquer all disease.

Remember those days?

And how, in the end, we couldn’t even save ourselves

from who we turned out to be all along.

Yesterday

Yesterday morning, the Uber driver

told me how his daughter

had been shot to death

as she attended a party

celebrating her graduation from college.

All that money wasted,

he said.

Sonnet: Los Angeles

One sleeps better

knowing that here

the emptiness of the soul

is the emptiness

of the soul:

mirrored perfectly

and without the distractions

other places

throw

along one’s path.

An open hand with

nothing in it.

Island, 2016

— after Wang-Wei

In the capital monsters beget monsters.

At the end of my street is the same island

that has been there for five million years.

Sometimes it disappears in fog.

Sometimes it’s back again.

Right now, for example,

it’s light purple with a line of gold fog

along its base, above the poisoned sea.

Interview

December 23rd, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Jim Krusoe, Novelist, Poet, Educator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: At SMC you ran creative writing workshops that were very popular. In addition, you’ve taught in Antioch’s low-residency MFA program. How did pedagogical approaches differ between the college and university contexts?

JK: Possibly the greatest gift I was given by SMC was the ability to add auditors to my fiction class (no one was turned away). In practice, this meant that some students attended for over 30 years, long after they had finished grad school and published books of their own. That amount of ingested wisdom made it so my opinions sometimes came as only an afterthought to what had already been said. In contrast, when people attend grad school (and pay for it) they are in a hurry to get as much out of their time as they can, so the pace is much faster, though the learning curve does not necessarily change.

DG: In your experience, who tends to take workshop criticism more personally—the poet or fiction writer?

JK: These days I don’t teach much poetry because the principles of poetry are more idiosyncratic; what is true for one person may be entirely wrong for someone else. I like to say that poets tend to start with the self and then move out to the world, while fiction  writers start with the world and try to understand it. I would most definitely agree that poets take criticism of their work more personally. I know I did. 

DG: You began your career as a poet and then transitioned into fiction. Which novel, would you say, taps most into your poetic sensibilities?

JK: I define a poetic sensibility as (in the words of Robert Bly) one that takes leaps. Novels that do that for me include the liminal world of Di Chirico’s Hebdomeros, the hallucinated worlds of Antoine Volodine (which is a pseudonym), and the sublime silliness of A Nest of Ninnies, a collaboration by the great poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler.

DG: Before the composition of Parsifal, written in the third-person, all your novels had been narrated in the first. Whether in poetry or fiction, readers often equate the “I” with the author and so many might say your fourth book is hence the least personal. Yet those who know your penchant for writing with a fountain-pen will connect this to the fact that the main character’s occupation in said book is a repairman of that aforementioned writing instrument. Would you say that Parsifal is your most personal novel?

JK: All my novels are personal because each one is an attempt to depict, if not answer, a question that is deeply important to me.

DG: Would you rather be the main character in a Kafka novel or the subject of a poem that very few know he wrote?

JK: I don’t know that either characters or subjects ever have the choice to decide where they end up. It would be nice to make the acquaintance of Kafka, however.

DG: In Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut famously graded his own novels, but that’s not where this question will go. Instead, like Ralph Ellison, if you could only publish one book as a living author, which would you choose?

JK: I can’t single one novel out. But when I finished my last, Sleep Garden, I told myself that I would be willing to let that one stand for the rest. Still, my favorite book is still unpublished because, at far as I can tell, nobody seems to like but me. Maybe it’s the fact it’s so unloved that makes it my favorite. Or, maybe the fact that it’s a comedy about the end of the human race makes it hard for some people to swallow.

DG: Tin House published your first novel in 2008 and you’ve entrusted the press with each subsequent manuscript. Could you talk a bit about what makes the publishing house an attractive place for your work and why you’ve chosen it as the home for your last five books?

JK: I loved working with Tin House first because they understood that I’m a really good re-writer. The novels they published, after their editors made their suggestions, are far different than the drafts they accepted. (Also, with one exception, they let me choose my covers!) From my point of view, I’d still be with them if they had not decided that the books they publish should make money.

DG: The completion of The Sleep Garden in 2016 marks the largest gap between novels, which, before, had not been longer than four years. Are you working on a manuscript at the moment?

JK: I am always working on a manuscript. The pleasure of writing is the attempt to make something as good as I can. That part never ends.

DG: In addition to novels, you’ve also published five collections of poetry. With regard to the former, the arrangement happens according to plot, and so the structure, one might say, develops more naturally, more organically. Given this, do you arrange poems in a book with a fiction sensibility, or is the order dictated by other considerations?

JK: I try to arrange poems so the tone will shift from one to another. Unfortunately, the poems I write these days are a bit stuck on dire.

DG: What are you reading these days?

JK: Actually I read about four books a week. But two of the writers I find myself recommending most are Lazlo Krasznahorkai, especially his earlier books, and Mircia Cartarescu, Solenoid. I don’t know what it is about those Eastern Europeans, but they speak to me.

Author Bio:

Jim Krusoe has published five books of poems, six novels, and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published five other novels: Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, Parsifal, and The Sleep Garden.