Embracing the Liminal

KARAN

Kathy, I love these poems for their powerful, paradoxical clarity. You look difficulty in the eye — illness, loss, despair — and find a language that feels steady, unforced. Let’s begin with the famous process question, Kathy: where do your poems come from? Do you have a writing routine? How do you begin, write, and finish poems? And most importantly, why poetry?

KATHY

Lots of poems from the past two to three books began as observations, images, phrases, sometimes even scansion-like marks in a notebook. Caring for my dementing Dad for many years and teaching full-time I rarely had time to complete first drafts in one sitting. That’s changed now but I still compose piece by piece, collaging notes into draft form when I feel, I don’t know, the urgency maybe, to make a poem. I begin with attention, then move toward making connections and shapes that please and surprise me.

KARAN

Your poems make time feel like a bodily force — something we remember with our teeth, our necks, our garden hands. “Blue Collar Devotions” especially moves across multiple decades and geographies with a kind of telescopic grace. How do you approach time in your work? Is memory a narrative force, or something more ambient?

KATHY

I love how this question segues into the answer I didn’t give to your first question, Why poetry? I don’t, in any aspect of my life, think in a linear way. Time itself doesn’t work with any recognizable linearity for me. I mean, clocks and calendars rule me as much as the rest of us,  but I tend not to track large blocks of time, and memories, likewise, feel available not as historic timepieces but as emotional experiences that continually evolve. My dear former therapist, a little exasperated with me once, said I couldn’t have become anything but a poet. To my mind of course it’s nothing short of miraculous that I did. I adore narrative, and I have become, as I age, highly conscious of mortality, my own and our planet’s. I’ve also come to think of decay as inevitable and generative. It’s Keats’s notion of negative capability that guides me—to hold both, or more, conditions at once and dwell there… Ambient, yes. Unfixed. Dynamic.

KARAN

The poems often speak from and to a lineage — mothers, fathers, Pop scraping “Twinkle Twinkle” on his fiddle, Nana scrubbing your face with lipstick-smelling spit. Even your own younger selves are characters, trying to use “bucolic” in a sentence, dreaming of flying with your arms out. What has poetry taught you about familial inheritance — what we take, what we refuse, what we become?

KATHY

Ha, speaking of dynamic! I was a working class kid, grandchild of immigrants, who was a first-gen college student against a whole lot of odds. I naively believed education and later the arts and academia would deliver me from all that I perceived to be hard in life. I was never interested in making money, but I longed for opportunity and experience beyond what a girl like me was likely to get. Long story short, I worked really hard for those opportunities and experiences—and I was still “a girl like me.” I carry my family and ancestors into my work proudly now, and with profound gratitude for having learned so much from them, my first teachers, and from every teacher I’ve encountered since.

KARAN

In “Catch,” you write: “the cat has a poem caught in its collar,” and later, “I’d wanted to sketch a cat not catch it.” I’m struck by that — the push and pull between observation and entanglement, between stillness and action. How do you know when to intervene in the poem, and when to simply let it watch?

KATHY

That is so often the dilemma, especially for those who are by temperament natural caregivers. And when one deeply attends to the world, as poets must, the abundance of detail, both painful and magnificent, is overwhelming. I haven’t thought about it thoroughly enough perhaps, but it’s possible that I err on the side of non-intervention in my poems as I grow older. I edit as I compose, always, and obsess about lineation always because I love what lines can do in poems. I fret over syntax, too, because you know: lines and sentences. Content I don’t guide so much as it guides me. Just with the phrases you quote in your question I can remember how delighted I was by the interplay of the words “paw” and “poem” and “sketch,” “cat,” and “catch.” Associations and discoveries are so much more likely to happen when the writer steps out of the way.

KARAN

Some of these poems move through museums, others through garden plots or memory chambers, and all of them feel deeply alert to beauty and to grief. “Pontormo’s Entombment & Annunciation” says: “I visit not because I believe / but because I need to understand / something about time.” That line stuck with me. Do you think of poetry as a spiritual practice? Or at least, a devotional one?

KATHY

In that poetry is, for most of its practitioners, an anti-capitalist literary art made to be shared, I suppose one could say that. And feel that. For me, it’s the work I do that makes me most alert and alive. To be absolutely present and open, immersed in the making of the poem and vulnerable to all that language suggests and to one’s own limitations and the momentary bursts of something that approaches understanding—well, it’s a lot of mucking around but when I’m in it I love it.

KARAN

There’s an emotional exactitude to these poems that never veers into spectacle. Even in the hospice poem (where a life is clearly ending) we’re not told what to feel. Instead, we’re given [a parent’s shoes]: “Keep them, / They fit you well.” In a sense all poetry is about loss — of innocence, childhood, loved ones, etc. What is it about poetry that is so well-suited to explore grief?

KATHY

Yes, it seems absolutely true to me to say that poetry embraces the liminal—even if it is fully grounded in the physical world, as most of the poetry I love best is. That’s a wonderful paradox, and I think music and visual art possess some of the same power. The complexities of life and thought—and in the case of poetry, the intricate complexities of language itself—challenge our meaning-making brains and pattern-seeking bodies, and in that uncertainty we may actually feel something. Love, sadness, rage, joy, and all the weathers of  fleeting in-between spaces.

KARAN

I love how your poems reject the flatness of moral judgment or nostalgia. “Roses” wrestles with complicity, rage, and the desire for peace without ever turning away from the world. Do you think your poetics have changed over time in how they address the political? What are your thoughts on political poetry?

KATHY

Was it Amichai who said all poetry is political? Language is heavily freighted, is one reason why. And as writers we transmit our biases and neuroses through our words—but also our compassion and our pain. I came up as a student of poetry during a period when even the older activist poets I knew—those who opposed the Vietnam War or Reaganomics, say—weren’t particularly keen on poets whose work was overtly “political.” Often those poets were women, queer, or Black. If we as young poets read them it was only because we claimed one or more of those identities for ourselves. I was very conscious of that issue when I became an educator, and as a feminist and bisexual I deliberately sought out the voices that had previously been unavailable to me. I teach a wider variety of poetries than I was taught, and urge my students to subscribe to at least two online poetry venues, such as your own, so they can discover their own best influences. So yes, my poems like my politics have matured—and by that I mean they are more fully informed and less timid.

KARAN

There’s a tactility, too, to these poems — spit, soil, lipstick, rosemary, ragged breath — that resists abstraction and brings the philosophical into the body. This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it shifting?

KATHY

Oh, when I was in grad school I so wanted to be a poet of the mind! Smart and lofty and difficult. Honestly, I think my work includes all of the elements you list, depending on what the poem requires, but my sustained attention is almost always aimed outward, toward other humans and the problems and the beauty they create, and the earth and sky and the creatures that live in them. It would be altogether too lonely for me to do otherwise.

KARAN

As someone who has published collections that are well-acclaimed, what’s some of the advice you’d like to offer emerging poets?

KATHY

Pay attention. Show up and keep showing up for your work and for the work of others you love or admire. Read. Stay curious. Allow yourself to be surprised and vulnerable. Life is really hard—you don’t have to be.

KARAN

Would you kindly offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

KATHY

I have often asked my students to use at least three obvious elements from any poem they feel strongly about and try to use them in a poem: repetition or other device, line breaks and stanza shapes, syntactical patterns or unique turns of phrase and imagery—that kind of lift. Imitation can often get us closer to something new, something we may not have thought of on our own.

A strategy that comes naturally to me because of my note-taking is akin to the braided essay: link a personal experience, a work of art or popular culture, and a fact-based bit of research that permits you to nerd out a little bit—discover how you can connect them. Maybe you aim to make a small poem, maybe a numbered sequence, maybe an Aracelis Girmay-like list poem or Larry Levis-like narrative.

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art — a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone would sit with.

KATHY

I have been obsessed with Ali Smith’s novels. She’s a genius; she’s also funny and queer and really pissed about global neo-fascism. LOVE her! I also highly recommend Wim Wenders’ film “Perfect Days,” which, among other things, is about finding joy and meaning in your work.

KARAN

And finally, Kathy, since we believe in studying the masters’ masters — who are the poets that have shaped your sense of what’s possible in language, your strongest influences?

KATHY

Many dozens of poets alive and dead have strongly influenced my work. Frost, Clifton, Yeats, Hayden. The presiding angels of The Unbecoming, out next year, are Dante and Shakespeare. Louise Gluck’s Winter Recipes from the Collective gave me the courage to be ruthless in my selection of poems for the book; it also showed me how to give the book’s framing sequences the space and time they needed to be most effective. I learn as I go, seeking out the poems and books that will help me toward my own.

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