Jerome Ramcharitar’s debut poetry collection The Riddle of Three Crimson Door (Cactus Press, 2025) is about language’s role in our consciousness, with meditations on dreams, animals, and the grotesque. His previously published poetry chapbook The Wrong Poem and Others Like It blended meta-poetry and standup comedy, winning the ExpoZine Award in 2022. I spoke to Ramcharitar at his home in NDG on April 3rd, 2025.
Matthew Rettino: I noticed while reading The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors that each poem is like a riddle. What is the relationship, for you, between riddles and poetry?
Jerome Ramcharitar: For me, riddles and poetry are intrinsically related because I’m an English speaker, and some of the oldest Anglo-Saxon poems are riddles. They’re both directed and loose in the sense that while they’re giving you information, they’re intentionally throwing you off, which I think is a really fun and, dare I say, erotic, experience. It’s about the experience, the dance, and the language. You have to master a certain awareness of sound and invocation whenever you write a riddle.
MR: You wrote some “animal song” poems for The Wrong Poem, but they continue here (in “Ravensong,” “Spidersong,” “Batsongs” and others) with a vengeance. Your thesis at McGill was based on nineteenth century reactions to the theory of evolution. Would you say that you are continuing to engage with scientific ideas of the animal world and evolution in your poetry?
JR: One of the things I spent a lot of time doing is talking to plants and researching animals. Every single line in the first part of “Batsongs” is actually a scientific fact put into a verse. Kind of like what Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, did with his findings. He wrote scientific theories in verse about physics and microorganisms. The opportunity I get in poetry, and with these songs, is that I get to look at consciousness as filtered through verse and through the lens of an animal. By exploring the limits of another perspective, I necessarily become aware of my own. Animals are part of our reality. And, to be honest, we don’t spend enough time talking about them. Maybe talking with them.
MR: You also engage with religious archetypes in “Batsongs.” What interests you in religion?
JR: I think that our relation to bats is necessarily spiritual in many ways. They occupy a shadow-esque role. They’re mammalian, like us, but they inhabit a totally opposite spectrum of light.
I was looking for a structure and style for “Batsongs” that would be fun to read but would also have an element of redemption. At this time, COVID was still pretty bad. Everyone was blaming bats for it. I [also] read Jan Jorgensen’s the House of Healing the same night I wrote most of “Batsongs.” Jan Jorgensen is such a talented poet for taking the story of Christ and kind of reworking it in the same way Milton reworked the Roman and Greek myths into the story of God and Satan in Paradise Lost. Jan Jorgensen did something similar with the story of Mary Magdalene. I’m not trying to espouse a religion in my work, but I think it’s really neat to use religious structures and have respect for that tradition.
MR: Could you speak a little bit about whether you invoke Jungian symbolism deliberately?
JR: Sometimes it’s really, really helpful to recognize a Jungian archetype literally, an archetype like the shadow, and play with the role that it has in a poem or story. I did my work on Gwendolyn McEwen in my undergrad and not only was she a big fan of Jung, like myself, she also was very aware of what it meant to invoke a name or a symbolic presence. I try to do something similar, coming up with a symbol that recurs, one powerful enough to kind of have a magnetic field, psychologically speaking.
MR: What poems in this collection were specifically inspired by a dream?
JR: Sometimes I can’t tell if I had the idea when I was waking or dreaming. I’m not saying I walk around in a dream-like haze, but, you know, there are days where creativity kind of bleeds those two realms together. “Dream Phone Call” in the collection was a total dream I had.
MR: From 2014 to 2018, you ran an #EveryDayisPoetry series on Facebook, about overheard conversations. Do you still find that there is a poetry to everyday speech?
JR: So the #EverydayisPoetry project was indeed my attempt to do what Wordsworth wanted to do, which was to show that poetry was with everyday people and their speech and the English that they spoke around them. I want things to sound like the way people speak because I think people speak beautifully. I think they speak in a way that doesn’t have to be poeticized. Though a poem can do its own work of evoking images underneath all that. That interplay’s fine, where you have a sonic dialogue layer and you have an unconscious, invoked layer just underneath.
That’s one of the reasons why I was so disappointed with the Venom film. Because I feel like Venom, as an otherworldly creature, has to speak differently than earthly creatures.
MR: Your poem “Canvas” is about a Zdzisław Beksiński, a Polish artist of horror and the uncanny. Whenever I picture the twisted, crimson doors, I like to picture it as a Beksiński canvas. Tell me about your inspirations in his work.
JR: I’ll start by giving out a shout out to Steve Athanasopoulos, a good friend of mine, a Magic player, and a very, very gifted graphic artist, who agreed to do renditions of the doors. Hopefully everyone who gets a copy of the book will be able to see at least one of the doors.
Beksiński inspired, like, a million heavy metal album covers. There’s this amazing YouTube video called “The Nightmare Artist” (on the channel In Praise of Shadows). I watched it in 2021, and it’s a really great look at this man’s wonderful career, including how he managed to capture humanity in its most effectively brutal form.
He grew up in Poland. He was in one of the most Jewish communities in Poland in the 1920s and 30s. And you can imagine, these are communities that were not decimated, they were annihilated during World War II, and even a little before. He came out of that conflict looking at humanity very differently.
He has all these neat little references to these dark urges we all have. There’s a paradox of, like, “What commits these atrocities? Is it actually a human being, or is it a monster?” And of course, an even scarier answer to that is the human being is the monster. And the monster is the human being.
He used to be a photographer. He would make these surreal, I want to say, proto-Lynchian images, of emptiness or the hollowness of the human body. I have to say, “Canvas,” my poem that is dedicated to him, is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever written.
MR: What poems do you look forward to reading at events?
JR: I want to read the riddles. Because they’re so short, I can take a really, really long time just reading them, and people have to hang on them a bit. And certainly “Batsongs.” I mean, I think the whole reason I wrote this book was so I could have a home for “Batsongs.”
Jerome Ramcharitar teaches English as a second language, has a master’s in English lit from McGill, and lives in Montreal. The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors is his second book of poetry, and his first full-length. His debut chap, The Wrong Poem and Others Like It, was published by Cactus in 2021.
Publisher: Cactus Press
Matthew Rettino is a poet and speculative fiction writer from Montreal who reads the Accent Open Mic. His interviews have appeared in PRISM International, Cult Montreal, and Scrivener Creative Review. His debut poetry chapbook Pilgrimages is due to published in the fall.
