From shy Hamilton teen to celebrated NYC poet
Reviews for The After Party unanimously superlative
She lives in New York City now, where she’s senior editor for The New York Review of Books, but Hamilton is the tug of her past, down to the Pleasant Valley specifics of a remembered school day, so we can be felt vibrating along the taut lines of her poetry.
We’re there, I think, in the dwarf maple and “floating albino basketballs of hydrangea” in Ontario Gothic, the first poem in “The After Party.” I picture the careful lawns of Ancaster and Dundas where Jana Prikryl grew up.
“The After Party” is Jana’s first book or poetry, and it came out last summer, impressively, with its metrical feet strong and sure enough not just to walk at birth but jump hurdles.
“... one of those rare debut volumes ... in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice,” wrote Paul Scott Stanfield in Ploughshares.
The reviews — everything from The New York Times to The Paris Review and The New Yorker — have been unanimously superlative. John Ashbery, a towering figure in American verse, compared her to Wallace Stevens, calling the book “a complete, selfcontained universe of its own, totally original” and “truly moving.”
Jana and her family, Czech immigrants, arrived in Hamilton when she was six. Her mother, Marcela Prikryl, is a well-known artist whose courtroom drawings regularly appear in The Hamilton Spectator.
I asked Jana how she got from here to there, there being Manhattan and the New York Review, once called “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.”
“I lived here until I went off to university at 19. I was a pathologically shy teenager but I had a few close friendships that were really formative. And I still think back on a couple of my English teachers at Ancaster High, who I admired for their wit and seriousness.
“And a place like the old Broadway Cinema was important to me; through my most severe loner periods I’d see a film and then go over to the Bauhaus Café and sit there alone digesting the movie and feeling very nervous and stoical.”
She loved the landscape here, the bend of the escarpment around the lake and long aimless drives.
But she knew there were other places for her, unfamiliar geography.
“I think my compulsion to leave had a lot to do with my family’s history of immigration. I always had the feeling that in order to develop I had to physically move, go to a city where I didn’t know anybody and sort of test myself. I came to New York for graduate school. When I graduated, I started interning at The New York Review, which led to a job. A typical day involves reading and editing a few of our pieces. It’s a quiet environment and solitary, which suits me perfectly.”
As a poet, Jana is at once playfully inventive and austerely rigorous with form, and both beautifully lucid and hauntingly oblique in content (“I pried the lid and under petals of bubble wrap your eyes open, blue as an infant’s and equally foreign.”).
There’s a poem recounting a visit to her school, Pleasant Valley in Dundas at the time, by the “fluoride ladies” who taught about dental hygiene.
It reads coherently backward and forward and leaves the reader with an apprehension of mysterious meaning and undertone that transcend action and context. The book is full of such achievements.
Some poems you want to hold by the shoulders and shake until they cough up some direct meaning; when they don’t, the pleasure, you discover, is simply holding them. The book is not “easy.” Why would it be? Is life? But its difficulty is seductive, gracefully intelligent and rewarding, with crazy ranges of reference from Buster Keaton and Roland Barthes to George Kennan, from the hills of Rome to Lake Ontario and NYC.
Jana gave birth to her first child, son Nicholas, a month after her book came out last summer. She speaks of family.
“My parents and my brother, who died in a car accident in 1995 at the age of 27 (“The After Party” is dedicated to him), gave me the sense I could do anything I imagined. For a person as innately timid and quiet as I am, that feeling of being absolutely believed in, especially given my cockamamie plan to be a poet, was crucial.”