Seattle-based poet Jed Myers sees his writing and his day job as a psychologist as part of a continuum. “It’s a path of exploring human nature,” he says, and understanding how people relate to each other has long been his passion. “We’re all kin on this tiny, tiny island in the vast sea of space.” 

In his most recent collection, The Marriage of Space and Time, he again explores human nature, bringing in the science that he’s studied throughout his medical career. The book’s title is a reference to poet William Blake’s 1794 work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “In Blake’s time, that was the most visionary paradigm,” Myers says, and while we’ve developed more scientific ways of describing the world, “we still don’t have the equation” that brings it all together, he says. “Poetry is the closest thing we’ve got.”

Myers, who also trains psychiatrists at the University of Washington, is the author of six poetry collections and has been writing since childhood. “I was kind of musical, and I liked rhythm and rhyme,” he says, and encouragement from a supportive elementary school principal gave him confidence to develop his craft. He “veered” into science in college and medical school, “all the while, writing and reading poems.” Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Seamus Heaney, and Sharon Olds were among the formative poets of his youth. But Myers points to a date many years later, well into his adulthood, as the most pivotal one in his development as a poet: Sept. 11, 2001. 

“I’m watching my 10-year-old kid in front of the TV,” he says, and he felt a new urgency as he struggled to understand and explain the world. “In those days, I began to write with a new, deeper drive,” and although 18 years have passed since that day, he still considers it a defining moment. Writing poetry “is the single purpose I can hope to serve in the world,” he says. 

With his renewed focus on that art form, Myers became part of the Seattle area’s open-mic poetry community, and he still finds speaking aloud to be as important to the poetic process as putting words on paper. “When I’m writing, I have to say it,” he says. “I move my lips, and my vocal cords get involved.” A poem, Myers says, “isn’t fully alive unless and until it is voiced and heard.”

Presenting his poems at live events gives Myers valuable feedback as well as a sense of completion. “I love live readings,” he says. “When I get to read my work myself at a gathering, it can feel like a fulfillment.” And sharing his work helps him to answer the question that’s key to his writing process: “Am I letting the poem sing as it wants to sing?” 

Myers had been sharing his work for many years before he published his first collection, Watching the Perseids, which won the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Press Book Manuscript Award. “It’s a book that chronicles my father’s dying,” he explains. He worked on the poems while the illness progressed, exploring family history and dynamics and capturing his father’s personality on the page. “I was going to write through the experience,” he says. “I was going to partly cope that way.” It helped him to process his grief, he found, and he was gratified to learn that others had the same reaction: “People along the way told me it’s helped them handle their losses.”

Myers continued to explore emotions in his 2014 chapbook, The Nameless, which he calls “an exercise of empathy at a distance,” with poems that imagine the lives of strangers. He links The Nameless to The Marriage of Space and Time, which he says is “in some respects a continuation of the theme of empathy and distance,” this time using poetry to investigate the physics concept of nonlocality and human relationships. “It’s very different from the old Newtonian world,” he says, adding, “imagination travels faster than light.”

That imagination travels far in The Marriage of Space and Time’s “The Truth Takes Lunch”:

I’m the tide rising higher, acidified

shoals, young oyster shells decomposed.

And the odd legions of rain last week

off the sea that settled your dust,

and, yes, mine are the clear-cuts’

mudslides. I’m the buried road. 

Try to keep me in line. I twist

like a river. I don’t follow your signs.

“Frequently, quotidian tasks give way to metaphysical musings,” writes Kirkus Reviews in an assessment that calls this collection “both cataclysmic and comforting.” Some poems are focused and personal while others, like “Asylum,” have clear links to contemporary news headlines and the history of immigration in Myers’ own family. He says that not all of his poems are explicitly sociopolitical in their approach, but he believes that “everywhere is a portal, every moment is an entry” that allows the writer and reader to connect over their shared humanity.

Those connections form the core of Myers’ work. He encourages readers to see themselves as part of the natural world—“I’ve always been interested in nature itself, and I think we forget we are nature,” he says—and as part of “one feeling being.” He hopes that his words will encourage people to build “a more peaceful world in the foreseeable future.” He also builds connections to fellow poets through his work in the open-mic community, and he’s pleased by its growth. “I love to see how many people are writing these days,” he says.

And Myers plans to continue to be one of those people, making poetry part of his daily life. For him, poetry is not just a hobby, but a calling. “I get up in the morning and I’m working on poems,” he says. “I go to bed at night and I’m working on poems.”

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller outside Boston.