Poet and Berkeley English Lecturer Jesse Nathan Explores Poetry Through “One Question, Short Conversations with Poets"

One question, one answer—it’s so simple. And yet it has this sense of immense possibility, like one life. The feeling, partly an illusion, that you can go anywhere with that one query.
Jesse Nathan
May 6, 2026
Dana Swensen

The Department of English is pleased to announce the publication of , a new collection by poet, editor, and 91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English Lecturer Jesse Nathan, now available from McSweeney's. Drawn from Nathan’s widely admired interview series published over several years at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the book gathers together a remarkable range of contemporary poets in a deceptively simple form: one poet, one question. The resulting conversations are compact and vital.

 I find poetry to be very freeing because the process can be so aleatory. But during the pandemic, I resisted writing the way I wrote before—which is to create these elaborate worlds—and to just write daily poems, because our sense of time and the daily was upended. Memories are carved when changes of space occur, but if you’re in the same space, on Zoom, how does that affect memory? 

- Excerpted from in One Question

The collection features conversations with many of the most influential living poets writing in English and in translation, including Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart, RaĂşl Zurita, Robert Hass, Cathy Park Hong, Ross Gay, Safiya Sinclair, and Fady Joudah, among many others. The book, says ˛Ńł¦ł§·É±đ±đ˛Ô±đ˛â’s, “loung[es] at the intersection of conversation and poetry, of essay and dialogue,” capturing not only the voices of individual poets but also a larger portrait of contemporary poetry itself. Nathan, whose work often explores the relationship between poetry, criticism, and public conversation, has long been recognized for his ability to create intimate and searching exchanges with writers. In One Question, brevity becomes the form itself. The conversations are compact enough to read in a single sitting, yet expansive enough to linger. 

I admire poetry that invites the reader in as a co-creator of meaning, atypical to the vertical plunge of some contemporary constructed poems of acceleration which does little for hearts and minds.

- Excerpted from (1991-92 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at 91¶¶Ňő Berkeley English). 

Published for the first time in print together, One Question: Short Conversations with Poets offers readers an unusually immediate encounter with some of the defining poetic voices of the present moment. The Department of English congratulates Jesse Nathan on this publication.

One Question Book Cover