For over six decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has introduced exceptionally gifted young poets to a large audience early in their careers — including John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Larry Levis, and Solmaz Sharif, to name but a few. This year, final contest judges Rick Barot, Mónica de la Torre, and Patricia Spears Jones selected four winning poets — Alexandra Zukerman, Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, and Mag Gabbert. Each receives a reading at 92Y, publication in The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan and $500.
Over the course of the next month, we’ll be chatting with each of the four 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest winners ahead of their reading on October 22. This week, Alexandra Zukerman tells us about finding out that she was a Discovery winner at the Phoenix airport, coming to poetry through writing novellas, the story behind her poem “Quest 8,” and more.
Where were you when you found out that you were a winner of the 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest? How did you initially react?
When I heard the voicemail, it was as if the whole world were suddenly underfoot, not just the transiently-tread carpet of the airport terminal in Phoenix, where I was at that moment, following my unpredictable two-year-old around the floor with a bottle of hand sanitizer and a mask. We were on our way home from seeing my 97-year-old grandfather for the first time in over a year. The world had grown sick, incomplete, but news of being a winner of the Discovery Poetry Contest restored wholeness to my experience. My son and I joined my mother in line to board the plane and I shared the news with her. I tried not to cry.
At what point in your life did you know that you were a poet?
It was a slow evolution. By the time I began writing poetry, seven years ago, it was not a conscious decision. It feels cliché to bring up an early childhood memory in response to this question, but I have a clear memory of sitting cross-legged on the floor of a library, listening to a librarian narrate the life story of one author. It was the first time that I understood that authors were actual people and I could possibly be one (though I had not yet learned to write). I remember visualizing the author sitting at his desk and creating the book the librarian held in her hands, something that had not occurred to me before. I must have thought that authors were just names on picture book covers. By fifth grade, I started to write myself. I wrote a diary in the voice of an astronomer living in colonial times and one in the voice of a pregnant pioneer (we had been studying American history in school). I wrote novellas. As I got older, the stories grew more autobiographical and more serious. I became less interested in narrative and more interested in flashes of human experience, the feelings they left in me like clues and how I could capture them in the most condensed form possible. Communication to a reader, a fellow human, became the most urgent part of writing, at which point poetry is what I was putting down. It was no longer a choice.
You’ll be reading your poems at 92Y in the fall with this year’s other Discovery winners. What have you missed most about live poetry readings during the pandemic?
During my MFA at NYU, before going remote, there were weekly poetry readings at the Lilian Vernon Creative Writer’s House. And I went to readings by many of my favorite poets throughout the city. What I miss most is traveling through the work of a reading poet with other bodies, as though together in the belly of a boat.
Tell us a bit about “Quest 8,” published in the Paris Review Daily along with poems by this year’s other Discovery winners. When and where did you write it? What inspired it? What went into its composition that might not be apparent to a reader encountering it for the very first time?
I wrote my series of “Quest” poems during lockdown at the start of the pandemic. “Quest 8” is the most direct poem in the series. It is about prisoners dying during the pandemic. When I began, I was thinking about the heroic quests each of us goes on in our emotional lives to uphold and repair our faith in justice, which, when we were little, we were told exists and which seems continually under attack. For me, the greatest threat to that vision of justice has been the dehumanization and treatment of prisoners and their souls in prison. The series began as a chronicling of our visits to our father in prison from the time he first went, each visit being, simultaneously, a quest. As the circumstances of prisoners grew more urgent — with prisons going dark (we were no longer able to visit) and prisoners being denied the right to choose to live — the poems grew more vexed, as though I were speaking to a reader who was unreachable, who could not possibly empathize. But somehow I felt that the page would carry the message all the way, that it would reach someone, and I just had to get the poems down. I think that “Quest 8” exhibits the effects of this.
What do you think can happen in a poem that can’t in any other form of literature? What makes poetry special or vital to you?
To me, poems listen. Reading a poem is like being lost in the wild with someone and knowing that all you have left is your lives. There is an audibility between reader and poet that is most sacred in poetry.
Don’t miss Alexandra Zukerman’s reading with her fellow Discovery Poetry Contest winners from 2021 and 2020 at 92Y on October 22. This contest is endowed by Joan L. and Dr. Julius H. Jacobson, II.