A.M. Juster served as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration before focusing on poetry.
Courtesy | Wikimedia Commons
A.M. Juster was a visiting fellow with the English department. He is a poet, a critic, a retired government official, and a lawyer.
Looking at your job history, you seem to be quite the Renaissance man. How did you get into poetry and editing?
I wanted to do poetry from a pretty young age. I published my first poem when I was 8. I won a contest in the third grade and my Arbor Day poem got into the local paper. And I was pretty intent on that into college. And then a number of things happened, including a very discouraging poetry workshop I took with a big-shot professor, so I stopped for about 10 years. Then I decided I wanted to restart, but it took me a long time and I was in my early 30s before I found my poetry niche and what I wanted to do.
Why did you want to leave government work?
Sometimes you don’t have a choice. When you’re a political appointee, you come and go with the administrations. My last job actually, I think set a record for durability because I’m the longest-serving Republican commissioner, and was the only one that did a full six-year term under the independent agency statute. It’s kind of a rough business so you don’t go in expecting long runs. So, from my vantage point, it was a good long run. I feel really privileged because I worked in all three branches of the federal government. I worked in senior positions for four presidents, and I reported directly to two different parties. It was a really interesting run. I don’t have any reason to complain.
Do you see any similarities between poetry and government work?
Oh, a little bit. Part of politics in poetry is persuasion. If you go back and look at history, you’ll get classical education. Training in rhetoric was believed to be the credential you needed to write poetry or to argue in court. To be a public servant, it was all basically considered the same. We segment things differently today, but I think a lot of the skills are the same. I’ve bounced back and forth and done different things using different parts of that toolkit. Early in my career, I wrote speeches and ghostwrote op-ed pieces for politicians. When I needed to, I would step in and write things.
What is your favorite line of poetry that you’ve written?
I guess the fact that I’m having trouble answering the question says the answer is probably no. I don’t go back and reread my own poetry a lot. I don’t have it memorized the way a lot of poets do. Sometimes I feel like I should, but that doesn’t feel right to me. So when I have time, I read the poets I admire.
What is your favorite line of poetry that someone else has written?
I’m not sure. The poem that moves me the most is Richard Wilber’s poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” For me, it feels like a religious poem. And one of the things that’s great about it is it’s moved by very mundane, everyday scenery, and yet as he looks in and reflects on it he just takes it to a whole other level. Because it’s something from the 1950s that you wouldn’t see so much anymore. It’s an urban setting where there’s laundry out on the laundry line, and yet it’s incredibly beautiful. I tend to fall for those kinds of poems.
How many languages do you know?
Well, it depends a little bit on how you count it. In terms of being really fluent, it really is just English. I don’t converse well in anything other than English. I have reading knowledge of French and Latin. I have a reading knowledge of Italian and a little Middle Welsh. With the Italian-Latin-French base, I can usually pick my way through Portuguese. It’s pretty close to Italian. With enough time I can usually pick my way through even Spanish.
Why did you decide to write under a pseudonym?
I talked about the pseudonym originally as a joke with a friend of mine because of new Office of Government Ethics restrictions on federal employees publishing their work, and then decided that it would be good for privacy. People at the senior levels of government business don’t really respect people that have artistic interests and poets don’t really tend to respect people that have those kinds of jobs. They expect that poets will be academics of one kind or another. So, I decided it was kind of a good thing to just keep my privacy.
