Courtesy of Amazon
Lewis & Clark student Azula Margaret Dubbs Jaggar ’27 has quickly become one of the Pacific Northwest’s rising poetic voices. This year, the English major received the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ Florence Kahn Memorial Award for her chapbook manuscript “Confessional,” a collection of poems that explore faith, intimacy and art through precise imagery.
In an interview with The Mossy Log, Jaggar said that when she learned that she had won, she recalled feeling both surprised and proud.
“A very dear friend of mine was actually the one to find out that I had won it, and so it was also nice just to have that interpersonal moment of, ‘Hey, you won this thing.’ That was really cool,” she said.
The Florence Kahn Award, which recognizes outstanding chapbook manuscripts, placed Jaggar’s name alongside emerging writers across the country, and launched her work into publication. For her, the recognition affirmed that she was moving in the right direction.
“With anything in the writing world, it’s always a series of stepping stones. You’re always slowly working up to something, and so I’m thrilled to have gotten something published, and also, now that I know that I can break into it a little more. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities,” she said.
Jaggar first heard about the award through Amy Baskin, who is the administrative coordinator for the English and history departments.
“Amy Baskin sent out an email and encouraged writers to apply. It was a 10-page manuscript, and then she and I just got to chatting one day and she really encouraged me to apply for it,” Jaggar explained.
The encouragement paid off. After the announcement, Jaggar’s peers and professors offered steady support.
“It’s been really, really lovely,” she remarked. “People just keep saying such wonderful things. Some people are buying the book. That’s always fun. I know there’s a copy in Watzek, and I saw that it got checked out and I was excited.”
The chapbook’s title, “Confessional,” draws inspiration from a line included in the chapbook’s dedication by the Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Ávila included as the chapbook’s dedication that reads “Harto he dicho. Lo demás no es para carta, ni aun para decir,” which translates to “I’ve said enough. The rest isn’t worth writing, or even saying.”
Jaggar’s poems intertwine mythology, art and contemporary life, a synthesis that mirrors her creative philosophy.
“I’m a really, really big fan of any kind of acrostic work. I think in a lot of ways, that’s a place that I often write from, and I get a lot of inspiration from. I look at a lot of art, I look at a lot of dance. I talk to a lot of people. And all of those are kind of places where I get inspiration and that’s also part of the way that this book ended up getting woven together,” Jaggar said.
Among the poems in “Confessional,” one of the most striking is a retelling of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac. Jaggar was drawn to the story’s tension between faith and trust, and discussed it in depth with her grandmother.
“During Rosh Hashanah, we always read the Akedah. It’s this tale of the binding of Isaac. My grandmother and I had a really long phone call one day, just about how conflicted we always feel. But the story is: Isaac gets brought up the mountain by his father. And my grandmother and I, we’re always really conflicted of this idea of however God may or may not be interacting in the moment,” Jagger said. “I was really interested, and I subverted it a little bit, and the trust that Isaac must have been able to have in his father in that moment. The poem is really set from a third-person perspective. There’s an angel that watches them and then eventually stops this potential sacrifice from happening. And so that’s the narrator that I chose for the poem.”
Though her subjects often involve love and spirituality, Jaggar aims to write with precision and restraint rather than sentimentality.
“There’s a concept in poetry that we talk about often,” Jaggar shared, “which is this idea of coldness, of not leaning really, really hard into something that is sentimental. There’s a poet who was working on writings about war, both in a journalistic sense and also in a poetic sense. He talks a lot about the images that are the most important are not these vast images of bombings — they’re the images of a child’s toy lying in the middle of a road. I think that’s where I’ve kind of found the line for myself between sentimentality and also kind of keeping some things and keeping that coldness.”
Jaggar often opens her readings with “The Binding Of Isaac,” and closes with “So You Told Me of the Wasps and the Figs,” which she calls “a special poem” rooted in friendship and spirituality. Jaggar shared her thoughts on the former poem, and her writing process that went into it.
“With ‘The Binding of Isaac,’ there’s a line that I include, where I say, ‘brave boy, he was so still.’ I think that was one of the places where I really felt like I was able to touch an emotion that I didn’t know that I was trying to write toward until I got there,” she said.
Jaggar says another of her favorites, “Modigliani,” is more private.
“‘Modigliani,’ I’ll be coy about,” she added. “It’s about someone who’s very dear to me. It’s also the one poem where really (there are) only two people that know it’s about them.”
For Jaggar, winning the award meant entering the publishing process for the first time. She worked with an editor to refine the collection.
“Once I got the award, I got an email from my editor, Jessica. She and I went through each poem, we fixed some egregious misspellings as it sometimes happens. So we fixed those, we changed some punctuation, and then really Jessica was in charge of putting together the whole book,” Jaggar said.
She also designed the chapbook’s visual and textual details, including the cover image and epigraph, both inspired by St. Teresa of Ávila.
“It’s funny because I’m not Catholic, but she really does call to me in some way. She’s a patron saint of headaches, which I find ironic,” Jaggar remarked.
The process moved quickly. Jaggar learned she had won in May, and by July, “Confessional” was in print. Since publishing “Confessional,” her work has continued to evolve.
“I’ve shifted away stylistically from some of the things that I was exploring in that book,” Jaggar said. “At the moment, I’m just writing, and, you know, it can always go in a direction if it feels like it’s gonna go in a direction, but I think sometimes it’s nice, especially being this early in a career, to give myself the grace and the time, and just see how things play out. I’m thrilled that I got this award and I’m also not going to put too much pressure on myself to put something out immediately.”
When asked what advice she would offer undergraduate poets, Jaggar gave two seemingly opposite principles: patience and boldness.
“Really take your time. Make sure that you’re coming from a place where you feel you are really in yourself and prepared for this writing to be shared. And the other side of that is to put your writing out everywhere. That is how you start developing an audience, if you would like to develop an audience. It’s how you begin to connect with more writers… just to continue sharing writing,” she said.
In “Confessional,” Jaggar writes as if she is balancing those very impulses: to reveal and to withhold, to confess and to keep silent. Like her chosen epigraph from St. Teresa, the book seems to whisper, “I have said enough.” Yet her work suggests that this is only the beginning.
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