Jacqueline Suskin is L.A.’s patron saint of poetry. Here she chats with friend and actress Jena Malone about breaking rules, breaking through, and breaking hearts wide open.

Jena Malone: Describe poetry in a metaphor.

Jacqueline Suskin: Well, it’s as if I have this perfect apple—that I grew, that I nurtured, that I fed. Perhaps the rest of the tree didn’t really work out—the worms got that apple, the birds got that apple, that apple’s not ripe yet. And I get to do the labor, not only of growing but also picking, and then I get to bring that apple all the way down the mountain into town, and I get to see someone eat the apple and it’s this very clear direct connection. Once they hear me read the poem, once I hand them the apple, they’re like, “Oh wow.” And they have total awe, total amazement, total pause in their quick, fast day. And it just takes that one bite, that one thing that’s just for them, and then they can appreciate the whole of it.

JM: It’s like walking through a redwood forest. There’s no way I could take the redwood forest with me, but what a poem does is it creates a distillation of what the redwood forest means to me. So that I’m driving down the freeway and I remember four lines of the poem and instantly, I’m back in the redwood forest. It basically allows these giant, hard-to-carry, hard-to-understand, hard-to-love-fully things in life and distills them down to a smaller degree that still carries the whole universe of it. It’s like you can give someone an entire redwood forest in 10 lines, and that’s so beautiful.

JS: Yeah, and I think that a huge part of the merit of poetry is the hard work of it. It’s hard work for me to create it. It’s hard work for the reader to put it all together. And yet the gift itself isn’t difficult at all. There’s nothing difficult about letting that feeling fill up your whole body, you don’t have to name it.

JM: I was thinking about the importance of poetry throughout time: how it’s been used politically, how it’s been used to build societies. How it’s been used to hide the myth and the truth of a generation, to encapsulate what people are feeling. There are so many dead voices, and the fact that a poem can speak as the voice of someone that no longer lives is beautiful. Basically they’ve sewn their thoughts into a specific time period: Hafez, 14th century; Mary Oliver, ’90s. All these different people are writing, talking about their time, and that’s the hidden politics of every generation.

JS: And poets used to be revered. I mean, poets used to be thought of as “These are the people who are figuring out the undercurrent of what is happening in our day and age.” And for so long in society, poets were kept, they were held, they were nurtured, they were given a room, they were told, “Don’t stop, we need your work.”

JM: They were elevated. They were praised. They were like god figures to a lot of people.

JS: Yeah, and I think that people got so much from each and every poet in that process of holding them up and nurturing them; the poets were rewarded greatly because they just got to write. They didn’t have a distraction, they didn’t have to do anything else but create and think about what it was to talk about the world and talk about the real, true feelings beneath the surface. And so many people, especially wealthy people, took care of the poets and said, “You can live in our house and you’ll be our poet.”

John Keats lived with these really wealthy people, and they totally supported his masterpiece. And I think that that is an interesting thing about being a poet now—how fast everything is and how quick people are to just look at me and think that I’m cute or a novelty. And then when they come closer, and they ask for a poem and I write them something that isn’t funny and isn’t flippant and isn’t cute—it’s not what they thought it would be at all. I can see them kind of tap into that: “Oh, right, poetry...this is really important. This is serious business.” They’re moved to tears.

I’ve never, ever done Poem Store without someone weeping, and it’s just interesting to see people reconnect to the importance of that work. And that’s not me. That’s me and everyone behind me. I always feel that come out, every time there’s a person who gets a poem and you can see them reconnect to the history of poetry. They’re like, “I’d forgotten about this.”

JM: It’s almost like you’ve found a way to become a respected heretic. Because hundreds of years ago, poets without a publisher, without a “job,” they were just wandering the streets channeling God. There were madmen and lovers and they were all speaking the same language of poetry. I feel like you’ve been able to transcend the “Yeah, I’m a cute woman and I have this cute typewriter and I do these things,” to be like, “but I’m also talking about very important things.” You’ve allowed poetry to be safe and accessible, but maybe if you lived in another era, you would’ve been a heretic as well.

JS: Oh, for sure. There are a lot of people who are very skeptical of me. And oftentimes I am in a public setting, like the Hollywood farmers market where I’m in the mix of a bunch of really wild, strange people, and that’s what I love about that place. But I can see the hesitation. People walk up and they’re like, “What is this? What are you doing?” The instant I tell people that it’s been my only job for six years and that I don’t live on the street and that I support myself by being a poet and that I have books published and I give this connection to being a person in society and I pay my taxes...you can see their entire face change.