Jason Zuzga

I grew up in a centerless suburban town named after its indoor shopping mall: Cherry Hill, NJ. Most of my poetry emerges to some degree from that centerless center which somehow made me who I am. During high school, I founded an environmental group named "Nature Defense," edited the High School art and literary journal (selected as best in the nation), wrote poems, and was accepted to Brown University.

My double interest in nature/science and literature continued at Brown in fits and starts; first I imagined I would learn the language of dolphins--I took classes in preparation, including, as a sophomore, a graduate-level psychology seminar on echolocation. Not wanting to focus forever on the quantitative physics of acoustics and increasingly drawn to story and human language, I took the year off between my sophomore and junior years to regroup and figure out what to do next, during which time I drove a horse-drawn carriage around the historic areas of Philadelphia giving narrated tours to passengers/ interned at the Ecco Press / sailed and crewed on a tall ship-research vessel where I recreated evolutionary biologist Geerat Vermeij's research on snail shell morphology / lived in Montreal and learned French. Somehow, this odd sequence clarified for me what I wanted to do: incorporate the history of the natural sciences into my study of literature. I returned to Brown and proceeded to mix biology into literary studies, reading bestiaries and ancient texts on generation, for example, until graduation.

Before rushing to graduate school of any kind, I decided that I wanted to experience life in New York City, a place two hours from where I grew up but seldom visited before college. All the while, from my days bicycling around the streets of Cherry Hill to my first job in New York, I wrote poetry whenever time permitted or incontestable inspiration hit. In New York, I first worked as assistant to the president of the Harold Ober Literary Agency, who had, among her clients, J. D. Salinger and the literary estates of others such as Langston Hughes, Pearl S. Buck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Random House then opened its doors to my persistent knocks, and I worked first as a editorial assistant at Ballantine and then at Knopf, the best place to work, the best possible job--working for two editors, Ann Close and the beloved, inimical Poetry Editor Harry Ford. I would be working with authors who were my utmost poet-heroes--Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin... I spent hours and hours reading every book of Knopf poetry I could get my hands on, including Sandover, and then, after several months, Mr. Ford passed away, which was devastating for me but much more so for his authors, to whom he was father, critic, and friend. After a number of months, Mr. Ford's replacement, Deborah Garrison, joined us, and I was lucky enough to be able to work as her assistant. The rapport I had developed with the authors in the meantime I hope added, in some small way, to the ease of the transition.

Then technology called--the Knopf website needed a full redesign, and I was given a new position in which I would coordinate the design of the new site and develop with the editors and authors various features, ranging from the poem-a-day email to animated movies to author-narrated-audio galleries of photos to the James Merrill Multimedia Archive http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/merrill/merrillarchive.html, which I developed with J. D. McClatchy upon publication of JM's Collected Poems.

Just as the Knopf website began to garner publicity and run full steam, I learned that I had been selected for a Fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. I lived there at the tip of Cape Cod for nine months. I had lived in Wood's Hole for six weeks midwinter before sailing on the tall ship, so winter on the Cape was welcome and familiar. There is nothing that calls to my heart, nothing, like the New England land/oceanscape, the wry smiles of everyone I met, and the maritime history (in Provincetown for example: the first encounters there between Native Americans and the Mayflower, the floating of all houses from the eroding tip of the peninsula over to the other side of the harbor where they still stand). I attended every hour of the week-long annual town meeting to see the year-round residents in action, went to the high school fish fry, came to know many of the storekeepers, gathered cranberries, explored the massive dunes.

As that time came to a close, I decided I should head somewhere far away to try to try adding a new element to my poetry, to challenge myself with a landscape completely different from the Northeast Corridor. I applied to grad school to work toward an M.F.A., which I am finishing up now in Tucson, AZ under the tutelage of Jane Miller. Tucson is my brutal experiment in waterlessness. In 2003, I was awarded a work scholarship to study at Breadloaf, and my poems have meanwhile been published in journals such as The Yale Review, jubilat, LIT, FENCE, VOLT, and Gulf Coast. May 2005 will bring the completion of my "double" M.F.A. I have completed a poetry manuscript under the tutelage of Jane Miller and am working on a nonfiction manuscript comprised of essays specifically about places where nature and culture intersect. The poetry manuscript has been chosen as a finalist for several contests and is under final consideration for publication at Wesleyan University Press.

I am still working through the same issues, language and nature, that have fascinated me since high school. The desert's air and sunsets, no matter what they might say out here, do not compare to those by the sea. I'd like to continue writing, developing my essays and poems. I want, more than ever, to be in a town by the sea.