J. L. Yocum is a musician and poet living in Brooklyn. He holds a B.A. in English Composition, concentration Poetry, from the University of North Texas. His poems have appeared in Albatross, The Orchards Poetry Journal, ionosphere, The Big Windows Review and The Broken Teacup, and are forthcoming in $ Poetry Is Currency, The Comstock Review, Pinhole Poetry and Thimble Literary Magazine. His musical endeavors span a few decades and a handful of projects, including work on the soundtrack of at least one award-winning film. He pays the rent working in a fine-art-adjacent industry and splits the bills with his wife and their indolent marmalade tabby.
You can read Where the kittens hide in the October 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
“Where the kittens hide” was written immediately after a particularly vivid and moving dream. I woke with pangs and aches in my heart, then worked quickly to try and capture the ephemeral marrow of the oneiric bone I’d just finished gnawing. It felt like grasping at tissue or gossamer, and when I finished the first draft I cried. It made for an interesting morning at work.
Is there a collection of poetry that never leaves your (perhaps metaphorical) nightstand?
Orphic Songs by Dino Campana. Campana’s story — the loss of his original manuscript, and the stuttering way he rewrote it from memory alone — is like a perfectly balanced, three-legged pedestal that the whole collection of poems rests on, an ecstatically dark swaying sculpture on its plinth. The first time I read any of it was as excerpts in Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s fantastic twentieth century anthology Poems for the Millennium more than twenty years ago. I was swept away like an unstringed kite at the beach. I got my hands on the whole thing as quickly as I could, and every time I read it to this day my chest swells with the same incomprehensible storm as the first time.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Hypotheticals are, by their very nature, impossible to pin down with any exactitude, so I can’t be certain. But I play music, which I’ve also been doing my entire life, so if I had to roll the dice and bet on some alternate reality in the multiverse where there’s no poetry, I’d put all my chips on that. But maybe I’d paint. I’ve always wanted to paint, and will probably do so (badly) someday in retirement.
How do you revise your work?
Once a first draft is up and running, puttering like a muscle car’s engine, I will read and reread it compulsively. If there’s anything clumsy that catches my ear — backfires, stalls, whining belts or whatever — then I look around the part of the poem where it happens and I tinker. Sometimes the fix comes to me like a flash when I’m doing something else, sometimes days or months or years later. Even my poems that have already appeared in print are not safe from this.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I do not have any children, but I’ve heard much said about the immense pride a parent can have in their offspring when they’ve done something utterly astonishing, beautiful, impressive and somehow outlandish. The awe and wonder that something came out of you and then went off and did that. When I read one of my poems and feel this way, that is creative success.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Dangerous territory here; I don’t want to scare off the squares. I’m fond of psychedelics, punk shows, experimental noise (both live performances and recordings). Ambient music. Performance art. I also love eating four courses at a Michelin star restaurant, drinking Meritage at a coastal winery, attending the opera or the symphony, art fairs and artist lectures at storied Manhattan galleries. One of my favorite indulgences is to have a lobster roll with oysters and prosecco for breakfast. I am a practicing Buddhist and meditate daily at a Mahayana altar. I find great peace and clarity from chanting sutras, and the mythic incantatory nature of their English translations has certainly left an indelible mark on my writing. My wife, too, is a great source of joy and inspiration for me. If I am in the mood for a goof, she will endure, say, the grotesquery of my plump body dancing artlessly wearing nothing but a sleeveless T-shirt that’s half my size, and even laugh and even kiss me afterward. There is nothing remotely cool about me for her to appreciate, so I am very lucky to have her.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Usually it stems from a particular phrase I have said or thought that catches my ear, and it spirals out from there like a fractal or cutting a path through a thicket to make a hedge maze. Other times it will rise from a dream right after I wake, like “Where the kittens hide.” Still other times a poem will land in my head fully formed like a letter arriving in a mailbox, and all I have to do is transcribe it before I forget it. This latter sort tends to be my favorite, though not always. Sadly, they are rare. There’s no way to force that kind of thing.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Of course! Sculpture, painting, photography, music. When I was a formal student of poetry at the University of North Texas, I often would trudge down the street to my high school friend Brad Cowan’s apartment with a magnum of cheap red wine and a typewriter. He was studying in the art school at the time, and he would paint and I would type poems and we would drink the wine and smoke cigarettes and joints and bounce ideas off each other. This was in the late 1990s. A decade or two earlier the AbEx painter Joan Mitchell was spending more time with poets like Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler than with other painters, and even collaborated with poet Charles Hine on a book called Smoke in 1989. I don’t know if Brad and I were even aware we were following in similar footsteps at the time, but it hardly matters because it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to us. Joan Mitchell’s tendencies say that we were in no way alone in this.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I always have a book of poetry or a poetry journal issue nearby to read when time opens up for reading. I keep the tools of my writing (digital as well as pen/paper) at hand 24/7. When the poem comes asking for me, I stop what I’m doing and I answer the call. I’m not routine-oriented when it comes to poetry. When a chink in the chain link of the day opens up, that’s a space in which I can engage with poetry.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
The most striking collection I’ve come across this year has been a chapbook called Medea in Corinth by Ben Morgan. It was initially published in 2018, though the second revised edition came out January 15th of this year, by the small press Poetry Salzburg. In many ways it reminds me of the aforementioned Orphic Songs by Campano, though it’s certainly more structured and disciplined. Morgan’s chapbook explores the classical Greek story of Medea in a vivid and striking contemporary tone. Just some of the best poetry I’ve ever read, and very inspiring.
As for watching and listening, those are two birds that can be answered by the one stone of Gary Huswit’s film Eno, which is an experimental film made about and in collaboration with Brian Eno. Eno’s music has always been a source of deep solace and inspiration for me. The first track of Ambient 1: Music for Airports is sacred music to me.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
A few things have stuck with me for decades. I honestly can’t remember who said them at this point, but here’s two off the top of my head: #1, if you are trying to get a message across, don’t write a poem — write an essay. Poetry is the wrong medium for that. #2, if you’re in the revision process and something is bothering the jitters out of you, and you can’t figure out how to fix it, then look at the line before it or the line after it. More often than you’d think, that’s where the real problem is — and where the real fix should go. Back to point #1 above, I am a big fan of Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” which kind of gets at a similar point.
Do you have a trusted first reader and how did they win the honour?
That would be the aforementioned Brad Cowan, former painter, paramedic, lifelong friend and a prolific producer of drawings, sculptor of sculptures and fabricator of odd objects. He currently lives in Halifax, and he is the first person I send a poem to once the first draft is completed. He is a talented prose writer in his own right, and has always occasionally dabbled in poetry. He does not give me workshopping advice, but rather an unvarnished first gut reaction. That is usually enough to tell me what, if anything, needs to be changed.
Do you write by routine or do you wait for the poetry to visit you?
There is no routine to it. If I realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, I will open a document or grab a blank page and start chucking words at it. This almost never, ever results in anything usable, but it re-attunes my ear to the music of words and reminds me to keep my butterfly net at hand so the next time a poem flutters by I will be armed and ready to snatch it greedily from the ether. After a lull in productivity, I might throw together some garbage word soup on a Monday, say, and then usually by Thursday I’ll have started a handful of new works.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
I honestly can say I don’t remember. I was helping my father and my brothers clean out my parents’ apartment last year in preparation for a move. My mother had died several years earlier, and I found a poem she had saved that I’d written at probably around age four. I have it now here in New York. I have no recollection of writing it. It isn’t very good, naturally, but it shows that I’ve been writing poems for longer than I can remember.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
Categorically: No. I’m of the firm belief that poetry doesn’t need to explain itself, at least not if it’s any good. I may take heat for this, but I have always thought that convoluted theories about “What is poetry?” are the territory of people who can’t write it, or who at least need to stop faffing about and focus more on the nuts and bolts of craft. The music of it. How words sound next to each other, how they feel in your mouth. Scan each line, identify the feet in it, count the feet, draw lines connecting the internal rhymes. Subtract some unaccented syllables, let it get stompy and ugly. Implore the act of writing to surprise you, both in content and form. After that, what is there left to ask?