Conversing with Jason Montgomery
September 2023
Arteidolia Press: Your upcoming book of poetry, These Latest Apocalypses, will soon be released by Arteidolia Press. Why don’t we start off with what’s behind the title.
Jason: I first started thinking about this title during the pandemic. I remember feeling as though people were wandering around, talking about this being the end of the world, or that being the end of the world, and thinking that for many of us the end of the world has already come and gone. Sometimes—particularly for those of us with indigenous heritage—the world has ended many, many times over. From there I started to think about endings, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always from a place of after.
Arteidolia Press: Can you tell us more about your indigenous heritage and how you as a writer, a visual artist and a community activist, have been shaped by it.
Jason: My indigenous heritage comes from a variety of Southern Calfiornia and Northern Mexico people including the Kumeyaay, Chumash, Tepehuán. I consider myself to be a de-colonial artist. My hope is to explore the process of decolonization as a living and breathing movement that focuses on guided synthesis as a path to liberation. I think that, in part because I am mixed raced, that I see synthesis as such a powerful and important tool to decolonization. The act of taking and reshaping all the aspects of my identity to form something new feels liberating.
Arteidolia Press: Yes, I can totally feel that energy in reading each poem. How did you go about selecting and sequencing these particular poems for this collection?
Jason: Well, I knew I wanted to start the book with nonet and end it with nonet, and then fill in the in-between moments. It’s really one of my favorite styles to write, and I love the short form and honestly have written hundreds of them at this point. From there I wanted to touch on moments where I felt a fit, the idea of an apocalypse or an ending, and move through kind of the pace of my own life and my own experience as well, also trying to make it accessible to the reader.
Arteidolia Press: Your explanation in Nonets says it all.
Nonets
Someone asked me why I write nonets.
I wish I could have explained that
they are how I see the world.
flashes of memory
fleeting clarity
drifting away
bit by bit
Until
Gone.
Both you and Alexandra Woolner at Attack Bear Press have been named Easthampton Poets Laureate (2021-2023). How has this honor interacted with your writing? What are some of the projects that Attack Bear Press has engaged with local artists and writers?
Jason: Being Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts was an incredible honor and actually had me writing up a storm! I created a project called Text Poems. By texting the word “poem” to (442) 336-poem (7636), you could get a fresh off the press poem back from me! I primarily wrote nonets for this project, as you’d imagine, and it was tons of fun to text people not just in my local community but all over the United States, little poems to brighten their day.
Attack Bear Press, since our start in 2016, has done a variety of projects. This includes the No-No Project, music and poetry collaboration, poetry on demand, in which a poet and a typewriter head out to the world to provide poetry to people on the streets, and one of our favorites, the Poetry Vending Machine Project. This in particular is really interesting, as we have received poems from poets all over the world, and it lives permanently at Amherst Books in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Arteidolia Press: I’d like to hear more about the project you did Save the Man: memorial art installation and community poetry reflection on native residential schools in the USA and Canada, where poems inspired by community participation were sent to lawmakers calling for an investigation. What kind of responses did you get?
Jason: Oh, that’s tough. Not only was the subject matter personally very difficult to address, but while the overwhelming number of responses were heartfelt and positive, there were some surprisingly ignorant and hateful messages left on the memorial. Apparently, even the idea of addressing colonial atrocities is just so difficult for some people that I think they react in the poorest way possible. Taking that and working with it to create poems whose call to action is further investigation of the residential school sites is still one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done as a writer. In the end, I am glad that I was able to affect even a small level of change both on the community level and hopefully with the lawmakers who received the poems.
Arteidolia Press: We all need to continue working towards change in trying to shift and expand the conversation and the narrative. I see that you have an exhibition space 50 Arrow Gallery and recently had a show there titled Sky: Native Art. What plans do you have for this upcoming year?
Jason: 50 Arrow Gallery is actually planning for a very exciting 2024! I’m happy to announce here first that we’re moving to Suite 136 on the first floor of Eastworks, a converted mill with a diversity of spaces for artists & creatives. This move will triple the gallery’s floor space and allow us to do some really exciting new shows. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements.
Arteidolia Press: Sounds great! Jason, you’re also a visual artist. You did the cover art for These Latest Apocalypses. Tell us more about 7th & Alamitos.
Jason: 7th & Alamitos is one of my digitally altered mixed media collage paintings. They normally start as part of larger installation pieces that I collage and paint on, and then I find small sections of the collage that I really like or that really speak to me, and I take high-resolution photographs, and then I use Photoshop to digitally paint over that, and that’s what you see here. That way you get a mixture of actual paint, textures and colors mixed with digital paint, textures and colors that create something altogether unique. Or at least that’s my hope. As for Seventh and Alamitos, those were actually the cross streets for my first apartment in Long Beach, California, and for some reason this piece really speaks to me about that place in that time.
Arteidolia Press: Do you see any connections between your art & your writing? Do they speak to each other? Inspire each other?
Jason: It is funny, but I actually feel like my writing is so much more straightforward than my visual art. I think that when it comes to subject matter—the desert, home, family—the two forms do inform each other a great deal. That said, I tend to work in the abstract with visual art and feel much more comfortable expressing the formless there as compared to writing.
Arteidolia Press: Did you just pick up a pen one day and start to write?
Jason:Kind of! I actually didn’t start writing until I returned to school in my mid-20s. I started off as a playwright (thanks to Karl Sherlock at Grosssmont College in San Diego) and did my graduate study at UCSB.
Arteidolia Press: Are you still involved with playwriting? And do you think it had any influence on how you approach your poetry?
Jason:I haven’t written for the theater since 2010, but, who knows, I may have another play in me. I do think that my poetry works in the same way that my theater does. I’d like to create scenes in my poems. Memories. I’m very concerned with people.
Arteidolia Press: After These Latest Apocalypses is out there in the world, what are you hoping the response will be, and what’s on your upcoming radar?
Jason: I hope people can read through this book and understand a little bit more about me, about my heritage, about our own history and understand in a strange way, that no matter how hard and difficult things seem right at this moment, life goes on. As for what I have next, I have an art exhibition at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, called The Death of Lake Cahuilla, opening in October.
For info on These Latest Apocalypses
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