RUTGERS MAGAZINE: You did a reading at the public library in your hometown of Willingboro, New Jersey, after you won the Pulitzer. What was it like going back for that?

GREGORY PARDLO: I had all kinds of anxieties going down there. My wife had to kind of talk me off the ledge the whole ride, but once I got there it was surprisingly nice. It just felt so natural and comfortable. They were so welcoming. The mayor showed up and read a proclamation recognizing me. It was really an honor. It was a nice kind of “this is your life” moment.

My family always did put a very high premium on education. My mother had me in the summer reading program at the Willingboro Public Library, which was right up the road. I would ride my bike there as a second- and third-grader. She wanted to make sure that I didn’t spend the summer goofing off and hanging out. My best friend worked in the library when I was in high school, and I spent a lot of time there then, too. I discovered blues music in the music collection of the library.

RM: What was your first stint as a student at Rutgers like?

GP: Frankly, I was an awful student. I had a horrible first semester; I would even go so far as to say it was tragic. I just wasn’t prepared to be on my own. No one in my family had gone to college. I had no idea how to pick classes. It was an entirely new culture to me, and I was in classes with people who obviously were prepared and knew what to expect, and it was just really intimidating.

I was thinking about my high school schedule, so I scheduled all my classes exactly the way my high school days would go, starting with an 8 a.m. class. None of my dorm mates had classes that early, and they all stayed up very late and we did a lot of partying, frankly. As a result I missed many of my classes because I didn’t end up getting out of bed until 10 o’clock, and by then it was like three classes down the drain.

To give you a sense of my innocence and naiveté, I go to my first class on a Monday, and I mistakenly believe that this is my homeroom class, and I show up for homeroom in the same room the same time the next day, Tuesday, but the class only meets on Mondays and Wednesdays, so of course no one’s there. I was terrified. I thought something’s horribly wrong, my class is somewhere without me, and I don’t know how long it took for me to realize there is no homeroom in college.

RM: And your second?

GP: I was taking expository writing again—I had failed it miserably the first time around—but now I had a teacher who allowed me to write a short story and encouraged me. I had never been given latitude to write the way I wanted to write. It was about meeting a girl at a frat party and then taking her out on a proper date to an Italian restaurant on campus. I tried to reproduce the dialogue we had over dinner. I remember being really jazzed about describing the place and the table and the setting and capturing the voices—her voice and mine. I started taking up poetry again. I thought, “Wow, if I can do this and I’m getting positive reinforcement for this, let me go back to writing poems on my own and for myself.” I started sending poems to campus weeklies.

RM: You managed a jazz club your grandfather owned in Pennsauken, New Jersey. How did the people there—the musicians and the patrons both—lead you back to Rutgers?

GP: Because of its proximity to Rutgers–Camden, a lot of Rutgers students came to the club and we were all the same age. There was a lot of conversation, and it was just oppressively obvious that I needed to be in school. I always looked forward to my friends coming to the club to talk about literature and art and politics.

My idea of a musician was Miles Davis—you either made it or you went on to do something else. Just being exposed to people who were doing the thing that they were passionate about on a daily basis and managing to feed themselves and shelter themselves was something of a revelation. I was embarrassed for them initially, that here are these men and women who had gone to college and studied and invested their lives so passionately in this work. After four hours of performing, I walk over and hand them each $50. I felt so sorry for them. But then sort of growing up in their company and hearing that they had a different metric for what constitutes success and what constitutes even a meaningful life—that was so impactful to me. I didn’t have to measure my life by the size of my car or television and that it could be rewarding. You didn’t have to be Miles Davis. There could be joy in doing the thing you love doing.

One of my waitresses was enrolled at Rutgers–Camden, and she kept encouraging me to go back and I was dragging my feet, saying “No, it’s been too long.” She finally convinced me to go down and see what I needed to do. And, lo and behold, there in the course catalog was this thing called a poetry workshop. I was still on the thing at the time where I wanted to be a lawyer, but I enrolled in professor Lisa Zeidner’s poetry workshop, and that was the final breaking point. I don’t care how much money I make. So my first semester now as an English major and aspiring poet, I was on the dean’s list, and I was pretty much on the dean’s list most of the way through.

RM: You studied at Rutgers–Camden and now you teach there, and you live in Brooklyn, both places deeply connected to Walt Whitman. What has his work meant to you?

GP: “Leaves of Grass” was mind-bending for me when I read it for the first time as a student there. Walt Whitman was one of my initial heroes, so I had kind of hung my flag, so to speak, on the fact that Whitman and I are both South Jersey and Brooklyn poets. Through that lens, I think about my own position in the literary world as at least attempting the kind of expansiveness that Whitman represents. And it’s not lost on me at all that the Walt Whitman Bridge is a big structure, literally and figuratively, and that the campus is in its shadow. He’s a constant presence, and I’m thrilled that there’s a statue of him in front of the student center on campus.

RM: How has the school changed since you were a student?

GP: I was really excited about the possibility of meeting someone very much like the way I was. But the reality is that the student body is also very different. The school has grown, and it has more traditional students. It’s kind of like coming back to New York after having been away for a while: it’s not the same place. As much as I romanticized the return, it’s still very much a new place that I have to learn and approach with an openness and a humility—that I don’t know what to expect, and I have to be open to meeting the students on their terms and not in anticipation of my former needs.

And I was an undergrad, and this is a graduate program. The students I have now are really smart and really accomplished. I would have been very intimidated to be in the classroom with them when I was a student. •