TIE Talks with Jordan Stempleman

Jordan discusses his most recent poetry collection Spilt, the expansiveness of poetry and how it can be used to explore layers of identity, and how the Fluxus art movement informs his approach to writing and teaching poetry.

Posted on May 6, 2026 in Interviews

This TIE Talks features Jordan Stempleman, a poet, editor, and associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute. In this interview, Jordan discusses how poetry can facilitate social connection and reduce marginalized presence, allow for layered explorations of identity, and provide a forgiving space to honor quiet moments and explore the materiality of language in all its vicissitudes. He also shares insights from teaching poetry, underscoring the magic that occurs when students’ creativity is ignited and the need to foster trust in the classroom to make it happen. He highlights poets like Ocean Vuong, Khadijah Queen, and Tomaž Šalamun, among others, whose work he draws on to encourage students to express themselves in new and innovative ways. To close, Jordan touches on the Fluxus art movement, which sought to blur the boundaries between art and daily life through its often playful approach, and speaks to how it informs his teaching and approach to writing poetry. This interview is an excellent read on the heels of National Poetry Month.

Be sure to also check out Jordan’s blog post for TIE, co-written with Dr. Marlee Bunch, about celebrating National Poetry Month, which includes a poetry prompt that Jordan often uses with students.

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Your recent poetry collection Spilt (2025) delves into topics of separation, isolation, and searching for connection. How do you engage questions of belonging through your poems, and how do you think poetry can create space for readers who may feel marginalized or unseen?

I see poetry as something that’s drafted in isolation, but done with the purpose of encountering and facilitating social connection. The poem is the rupture point where the aperture of the poet’s voiced mind is opened wide with the intention to meet the reader. This is where some real intimacy and understanding can take place. Poems are so great at resisting time and expediency and fast digestion. What I mean by this is that they want to be seen and heard repeatedly, not read once like a newspaper and then tossed in the bin. So, in many ways, poems mirror subjecthood as opposed to objecthood. They are these incredibly powerful, often concentrated ecosystems of language that do wonders in reducing marginalized presence and fostering engaged, empathetic presence. They reflect a human being who is deeply listening, deeply engaged in what’s being shared, spoken about, confessed, and in the slow process of working all this out. Also, my real belief is that the poem is always listening. The poem is my first reader, and vice versa. It is this living-language-being that sees and listens without judgment, encouraging risk and exploration. The poem is who I aspire to be outside of the poem.

In listening to your reading of poems from Spilt, it struck me how you imbue your poems and readings with intimacy and vulnerability, allowing difficult material to remain unresolved, especially when exploring death or loneliness or recognizing the limits of logic. Does that emotional resonance suggest a commitment to inclusivity, particularly in resisting easy narratives or single stories about identity, experience, or emotional truth?

Thank you so much for that astute reading of my work. Yes, again, for me, the poem-space is where I am both held accountable and given the endless potential to reconsider, explore, and redefine so much about the world and the self, which is always in an ongoing state of change and identity. Easy narratives work well for coffee orders. They are essential for transactional encounters, but in most cases, they are harmful for being seen, or for constantly seeing and defining the self and the world without restriction or imposed limits from outside.

Every spring at the Kansas City Art Institute, I teach a course called “Poetry Studio.” It’s KCAI’s version of a poetry workshop. What’s so great about this course is that it isn’t tiered, meaning the course is open to all students: those just beginning with poetry, as well as those who have written poetry for years or who are creative writing majors. In this class, I always give students a writing prompt that asks them to write in the third person, include their names in their poems, and explore themselves from the outside in. I encourage them to be, become, imagine, or bring forward any part of themselves that they might not typically include in a first-person poem. We read examples by Ocean Vuong, Khadijah Queen, Joseph Bradshaw, Patricia Smith, Mary Ruefle, Tomaž Šalamun, and others. Without fail, this “distancing” in the third person always creates openness, expansiveness, and closeness to self. Identity becomes broader. And when identity is allowed to expand, or any subject is free to do so, complexity grows. Not difficulty, but openness and possibility. Poems are perfect vessels for fostering a widening visual of the self, which is unbelievably freeing for the poet and for the expression of one’s identity, I think.

Several poems in Spilt honor quiet, ordinary moments, even while reflecting on the absurdity in the mundane. Do you see this attention to the understated as an ethical or inclusive choice, as a way of valuing experiences and emotional registers that are not often centered?

I agree. I see the mundane and everyday as the places where most of our work happens. I’m reminded of that coach-speak: character is what shows itself when no one is looking. For me, the overlooked or often under-observed or static moments in our lives are where so much of life lives and where the foundation of our social selves begins. There is something deeply ethical in paying attention to what the mind notices or ignores. How transactional the mind can be, or how it reacts to endless encounters with felt uncertainty. The space of a poem, for me, is always an uncertain space, but unlike my mind, it’s a more forgiving space—less self-effacing, less judgmental, less noisy. I love knowing that a poem about large ideas or political subjects can start in quiet, move through absurdity, acknowledge everything possible in the mind, and then allow the poem to organize some reframing of the mind. It is this reframing that, after enough drafts, often captures some lasting meaning, some slant truth, or an ambiguity that opens up further conversation, questioning, or poem-making.

Spilt was awarded the Wishing Jewel Prize, which honors “a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.” Congratulations on winning this prestigious award! As a writer, do you typically carry with you a sense of wanting to expand or complicate notions of who poetry is for, whose experiences it can hold, or what is considered poetry, not only in this collection but across your poetry collections?

Thank you! I always want poems to surprise both the reader and me. I know one common belief about poetry is that it’s difficult. Another is that it’s pretentious or that it’s deliberately highbrow. And of course, some poetry does fit those descriptions. But the poems I love to read and write are never meant to do those things. They aim to be as clear as possible while also using language, and sometimes form, in surprising, inventive ways. This tension defines the craft. Through the poem, the poet shows the reader what freedom of thought and responsibility to clarity in language can look like in a line, a stanza, or an entire collection. It invites both readers and poets to play and explore, to see the materiality of language—the way it’s often wielded against us outside of poetry—and to imagine how, within the space of a poem, it can serve as an ongoing ethics of seeing and thinking. A book that exemplifies this potential perfectly is Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences. I love how Gladman essentially offers her readers poems filled with sentences about the future potential of sentences, what these sentences are capable of achieving, reenvisioning for us all.

In addition to being a writer, you are also a poetry instructor, and I imagine you work with students from different backgrounds who have different relationships with language. How has your teaching shaped the way you think about access, inclusion, and audience through your poetry, and how do those concerns show up formally or thematically in your poems?

Oh, teaching and being taught by my students over the past 20 years have deeply shaped everything for me. I started teaching in Chicago in my early 20s, working within schools to help students fill significant skill gaps in reading and writing. This experience was foundational in revealing how, once literacy is activated in students’ minds, it can spark profound change—bringing their language into the world and drawing in others’ language, common concerns, and unique lived perspectives. These early classroom experiences taught me a lot about the conditions that foster learning. By this, I mean the environment that makes learning possible. For learning to occur, students need to trust the instructor, feel challenged by the material, and see how the material or subject challenges the instructor (I know more conditions are essential as well, but these three are so important). I always aim to be honest about what I’m still unsure of and where I’m not an expert, so students can help shape this journey toward greater understanding, insight, and questioning. When it comes to writing, I believe the same conditions—these set and setting—are what I hold the poem responsible for maintaining. The poem and the classroom where poems and literature are explored are only as strong as the honesty and inclusiveness they demand. Otherwise, we’re engaging in something else: stagnation or indoctrination. No thank you.

In the TIE blog post, “Celebrating National Poetry,” Dr. Marlee Bunch mentions a poetry prompt you created, entitled “Leave the Painting & Steal the Language Walk,” that encourages students to interact with museum spaces in less conventional ways. In what ways does this practice speak to how poetry can give voice to marginalized or overlooked experiences, and in what ways can it encourage participants to expand the boundaries of poetry even further?

This prompt, along with many of my writing prompts, draws significant inspiration from the works of Fluxus artists and writers. For those unfamiliar with this movement, Fluxus was an international, mid-20th-century art movement that blurred the lines between art and everyday life, often through playful, strange, minimalist instructions, performances, and events. Therefore, this writing prompt aims to shift focus away from institutionally accepted forms of self-expression and toward action, score, chance, ordinary materials, repetition, interruption, and overlooked events. As I’ve noted, I believe that once poetry is no longer seen as a refined vessel for preexisting language expression, it becomes the embodiment for noticing what our habits of mind, as well as dominant cultural narratives, have conditioned us to ignore. Poetry is the literary form to revalue, rewrite, or question the minor, the disposable, the interrupted, the misheard, the domestic, the bureaucratic, and everyday gestures of survival. The prompt announces that all spaces are open to entry and engagement, and that even spaces seemingly fixated on aesthetic experience can and should be expanded and reevaluated as sites of broader inclusion. It’s a prompt that encourages remixing elements to transform the passive viewer into an active participant. It urges observation into action, action into voice, voice into art, and art into a foundation for radical modes of expression, allowing the process to begin anew, infinitely.

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More about Jordan Stempleman

Jordan Stempleman is the author of ten books of poetry, including Cover Songs (2022), Wallop (2015), No, Not Today (2012), and, most recently, Spilt (2025). He also serves as the editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. Since 2011, he has organized the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his editorial work, Stempleman is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.

This interview was conducted by Fatima Mohie-Eldin. She is one of the social science editors at Choice.

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Find more interviews, blog posts, and resource lists on Toward Inclusive Excellence.

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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