An interview with Charlotte Jung

Charlotte Jung is a concrete poet and experimental playwright. She’s originally from Stockholm, Sweden, and today she divides her time between the Stockholm countryside and her adopted hometown Chicago. Charlotte’s debut collection C was published in 2019, and she has since then published four chapbooks; MBRYO (Puddles of Sky Press, 2019), (SEED) (Timglaset Editions, 2020), HOLE BEING (NoPress, 2021) and ABCDE (Trombone, 2021). Please see www.charlottejungwriter.com for more information about Charlotte and her writing.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?
My wife is a poet and she greatly inspired me to start writing. I had been reading and commenting on her manuscripts for some years, and this sparked something in me.
            The creative act is a strange thing. For me the writing comes in waves, I can’t force or steer it, and in some ways every poem is a gift. 

Given you work in text and visual mediums, how do the two sides of your writing interact? How did you begin with visual poems at all?
For a poem of mine to truly take form and enter into its own being, the meaning/content of the poem has to be in correspondence with its graphic expression. At times I find this creative channel/condition to be quite narrow, too constricting, but at the same time it’s this interaction of language and image that gives birth to the poem.
            The visual form developed gradually. When I started out writing I wrote super short poems, often just a sentence or two, or some word pairings. It was not until the visual component entered into the text that it fully blossomed. At that time I had not yet come into contact with concrete or visual poetry, so I had no idea that this was an established literary genre.             

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?
In the beginning I wrote almost in isolation. I had no idea that what I was aiming at, and that which was slowly developing, was called concrete poetry. Not to mention that there were many other writers creating in this hybrid form of poetry. My first contact with something similar was when Primary Information published Aram Saroyan’s coffee coffee in 2010, and a Swedish literary journalist mentioned it in an article. Reading Saroyan gave me much needed validation. I had by then been rejected several times with the motivation that “it was too little” or considered as “art” rather than literature. 

What do you see as the difference between your visual work and your work in experimental drama?
That’s such an interesting question. To me both of these forms experiment with and disrupt structure. The absurd drama, in how it (among other things) doesn’t conform to “reality’s” time and space bound conditions, and concrete poetry in the way the text goes beyond the structure of langauge and enters the image.
            I would say that the biggest difference for me between the two forms is that my poetry comes from a silent, still source, whereas the drama pushes forth from a whole world of talking and moving highly energetic energies. 

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you begain publishing full-length collections?
So far I’ve only written one full-length collection, C, this was also my first publication (self-published in 2019). In C the poems were tightly interrelated, and followed one after the other, almost by necessity. After C this changed, and I started to explore and work with the poems more like independent entities, each poem creating a world of its own. Sometimes they come to me in themes, which then creates some form of narrative. These suites have then been published as chapbooks. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if another full length collection will come my way. 

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?
Like I mentioned above, a large part of my writing has been done in isolation, it’s only just recently that I’ve entered into this amazing community of visual poets around the world. It’s been a great inspiration and I’m so grateful for all the exchange and opportunity this has given me.
             When it comes to support I’d like to mention Amanda Earl. She was one of my first contacts internationally, and she was very supportive and encouraging. I’m also very grateful to the Swedish graphic artist Lina Nordenström. She spotted my work via my chapbook (SEED), (Timglaset Editions), and has offered to teach me letterpress printing, an amazing opportunity and something I believe will be truly inspirational. Especially when it comes to developing my writing further toward art – which I think in some ways may be the poems’ true form and expression. Several years back I saw an exhibition of the feminist artist Sarah Lucas’ work at Tate Modern, something I later realized gave me my guiding vision for my poetry writing: “There has to be a way to communicate in language, as powerfully and instantenously as she does in her art.”

Can you name a poet you think should be recieving more attention?
I’m right now, together with my wife, in the middle of translating the exquisite minimalist poetry of the Canadian poet Nelson Ball. He has such presence in his writing, and a wonderful feel for how to combine a detailed description of something, on the surface to be considered as ordinary, with a profound eternal subject matter. When Ball’s writing is at its best, it’s truly genius. When we started with this project we were really surprised to see that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page on Nelson Ball.