Writing Toward the Soul

KARAN

Kelly, I was immediately taken by these poems. There’s this low, knowing hum of resilience throughout — a voice that’s been through motherhood, capitalism, burnout, and still says: more, please. American in their longing and movement, your poems often pause mid-motion to ask something small and tender of the self. Let’s start here: what’s the cost of becoming this honest on the page, and what does it give back?

KELLY

First of all, thank you to Karan, Shannan and the whole ONLY POEMS team for reading and discussing these poems with such tenderness and care, and giving them such a great home and for all the good vibes and stellar poems you are putting out into the world. I really appreciate the culture you all have created.

As for honesty, for me, the cost of not being honest has always felt higher than the cost of being so. I have seen what happens to those who are not authentic and honest about who they are; I have lived it. It’s not pretty and almost always ends in muddy footsteps toward my own destruction.

When I was writing my first book, Boat Burned, after I put some poems together and really thought about what I was exploring, I had a stark realization: I don’t love myself. The book then became an investigation to figure out why. What were the lies I was telling myself? About what I carried? The world?

Perhaps it’s not about the cost of being honest for me, but the payoff. Poetry often feels like the closest I can get to another human, including a past, present, or future version of myself. When I say the honest thing—the thing I know I need to say—I’m taking a messy, sometimes miraculous step toward being the most me possible, toward being as present as I can be in my own story. Sometimes that feels overdue. But it always feels wildly necessary.

Healing requires air. Truth wasn’t meant to be caged. I write poems to give things flight—light or dark, boundless joy and gut-punch tragedy. Honesty is the most necessary and vital gift we can give our writing: to not look away, to not deny what makes us human. If I can’t be honest—show up as my flawed, vulnerable self—in my own writing, then I don’t really see the point.

KARAN

What does your writing process look like — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you begin a poem, and know when one is finished? I imagine you’re juggling a lot (coaching, parenting, creating your own work) so how do you protect or shape a writing life amid all of that?

KELLY

This year I made an agreement with myself: any writing, drafting or revising has to come from a place of excitement, curiosity, or pleasure. The second I feel like I have to write a poem, that it becomes something on the to-do list, it already feels compromised. Lately, especially with the rise of sharing work on social media, it feels easy to confuse productivity with poetry—to try and compete with the noise, instead of turning away from it. Especially for me, a fiery Type A, Aries from Jersey, who can write herself to a nub. So the first step in the process is agreeing that this is a sacred space, and one I want to (and have the energy to) walk into.

As for my process, I’m going to give you a wildly American answer: how I craft a poem depends on the amount of time I have. If it’s hours, then I start with an idea and turn it over and over again, feeling it thump around like sneakers in the washer. If I’m short on time, I free write (without expectation) until a line tugs at me. Once one does, I underline it and carry it with me, thinking about it in the shower, doing the dishes, or picking up my child from preschool. I ask the line what bigger thing it is getting at without sacrificing play.

Saying something that feels important and real is a pressure I have always felt. I don’t want to waste the reader’s time. I want to figure out hard truths and try to make them brutally beautiful—not the other way around.

Once I feel like I have an idea or moment that brings me heart to heart with the reader, I start unpacking from there. Variation is important to me. Texture is my jam. I’m always thinking about how I can make what I’m writing as urgently human (complicated, layered, tender, honest) as possible. How can I reach out and touch, change, interrupt someone (myself?) with what I have to say? All I have ever wanted is to feel less alone. Poems do that for me, and I want my poems to do that for my reader (even if that reader is me).

KARAN

In “I Want To Stop Wasting Time Thinking About Wasted Time,” you write: “I want to be less scared and more / salt water.” I love that. How do you balance ambition with softness? How do you let the current carry you, instead of trying to outswim it?

KELLY

What a great question. I don’t know if I do. At least, I didn’t before now.

The past two years, I’ve been working on a novel, and I feel like there is no greater test of ambition and patience (and I’m not always patient). You don’t just write a novel; you shift inside it, like being stuck in a hall of mirrors for years; you stand alone, oscillating from terror to technique to the occasional triumph. You sit in a room alone, asking the hardest questions and feeding the hungry mouth of time. Unlike a poem, you can’t share it easily; you cannot explain its nuance; you can only believe—believe and keep on writing.

Writing is an act of faith. So is living. Writing can also be a brutal, ruthless industry, and at one point, I spent days (months) worrying I might be wasting my time, that I was going to pour years into a novel that would never sell. I still do. But, to counteract the anxiety, I decided two things:

1. I never want my passion to turn into punishment. Writing is what makes me most alive. So I have to be soft with it, in how I approach it. But let me tell you, it has been a journey. I’m a three on the Enneagram, which means I value myself based on how I perform. When I was in my MFA program, I would sometimes write for eight hours a day and still feel like I hadn’t done enough. I broke out in stress rashes. I felt like I had failed my vision. I now see that the writing wasn’t bad; it just needed more time. More patience. It needed softness.

2. I want to love writing, even if it doesn’t love me back. There is a saying, “You are entitled to the labor, not the fruit,” and I constantly remind myself of that. I never want to be a writer who gets consumed or destroyed by rejection, because I would still do all of this even if publishing didn’t exist. I did in high school, before I knew about the Big Five or top-tier journals, I scribbled in the margins of notebooks, on diner napkins.

For me, creativity, the act of making, has to be the only reward. And it has to be fun. If it wasn’t, why else would I be doing it?

The poems that I’m writing now act as a map—a reminder of how to come home to myself if I ever get lost again. They are trying to reverse the damage, the pain, and the pressure I put on myself for so long. They are a constant chant, a reminder, a mantra to be soft. Then softer still.

KARAN

One thing I love about your work, Kelly, is how it refuses despair, even when life is brutal, boring, or stuck. “No Matter What Happens” insists that hope can be as simple as a child learning the letters of their name. It’s a gorgeous, strange psalm. And “I Want to Stop Wasting Time Thinking About Wasted Time” practically hums with refusal — of regret, of scarcity, of being anything/anywhere but the present. Do you think of your poems as speaking directly to your future self? Do you write toward hope? Or does it just show up uninvited?

KELLY

I don’t know if I write toward hope, but I definitely write towards love. As for speaking to myself, 100%, to past, present, and future me. Although how I speak to myself dramatically changes from book to book.

Most of my books are so different; you would question whether the same poet wrote them. The one thing they have in common is that they all started as a challenge I assigned to myself.

Future Tense, my second collection, forthcoming next year from Alice James, started because I wanted to challenge myself to write a memoir in verse. The collection tells the story of trying (and failing) to become a mother while losing my own. At the age of 68, my mom moved across the country to be near her future grandchildren, which, it turns out, I couldn’t have.

As soon as she got here, she was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer. Being a grandmother was her dying wish. Back then, things felt so dark that there were months I didn’t believe in hope. It had already broken my heart so many times.

But just before my mom died, we adopted my daughter, Nova. My husband and I were chosen quickly, thirty days after signing up with the adoption attorney. The four months Nova and my mom spent together before she died were some of the most miraculous of my life. But I carry it as both a brutal tragedy and the greatest love story ever told. For years, my relationship with hope was still pretty shaky.

However, after I finished that book, I didn’t want to write a book that focused on myself.  I also wanted to explore who I was as a poet outside of sadness. I gave myself two prompts:

1. Write a whole poetry collection without using the word “I,” which became Odd Animal, a manuscript in progress that uses odd animal facts to explore our behavior and biology.

2. Write about joy in a way that felt both honest and unsentimental. Sadness suddenly felt too easy. Too routine. I wanted to reject scarcity, make peace with circumstance, and live loudly inside it.

Loud Beauty, my manuscript in progress, was a dare I gave myself: Learn to write about joy and don’t make it suck. I wanted to discover who I was as a poet when I sat down with beauty, self-compassion, the struggles of midlife, and my constant quest to fall more in love with myself.

KARAN

There’s ache threaded through these poems — this grind of motherhood, ambition, womanhood, and late-stage capitalism. But there’s also reverence: for the ocean, for gin, for chairs named Second Chance Park. There’s joy in your work that doesn’t feel naive or saccharine. “Peace can be a habit, too,” you write in “I’m a Sucker for Poems that End with Spring.” It’s quite a reversal: to imagine peace as a muscle. I’ll allow myself to be silly and ask this: does writing offer you escape from pain, or does it bring you joy?

KELLY

Thank you so much. I don’t know if writing offers escape from pain, but it allows me to see why that pain is necessary—to examine how carrying it changes, guides, and deepens me. And writing brings such great joy. When I’m inside a poem, it feels like I’m nine, on my bike, racing downhill, hands in the air, summer in my hair. It is the thrill of feeling fully alive and being pulled by the universe. Writing is a chance to make my own wind.

Writing makes me clearest about who I am, what I want, love, need, where I’m going next, and how I might be standing in my own way. This is probably why, when I was little and upset, I would shove notes under my mom’s door. It was my way of saying, (and I’m gonna get cheesy here) I can’t exactly tell you what I’m going through, but let me show you, hold my words up to your heart and ask if you can feel it too.

KARAN

Many of your poems sound like they’re talking to someone — a lover, a child, a younger self, an audience of ghosts. Do you imagine a listener when you write? Or is the poem its own conversation, happening in the dark?

KELLY

In almost every poem I write, I’m talking to myself—I would be lying if I said otherwise. But lately, I also want to write for non-poets. For the woman struggling to feel beautiful. For the kid lost somewhere in the midweek grays.

Institutions (mainly academic) can often approach poetry with an exclusive, elitist perspective. That is not my jam. I came to poetry because I was a high school English teacher who got a grant to coach spoken word to a group of sophomores. My goal was always to make my students felt alive with language, to find the power in telling their own story.

And as they did, something shifted: some students stopped showing up high; some learned that there isn’t always a right answer. Whatever their experience, poetry bloomed each of them into a better version of themselves.

I got jealous. I wanted that. It was a hard period in my life; I wasn’t being honest with myself, and I could see the consequences of that coming for me. One night, I found myself in the back of a cop car because of it.

Because I started teaching poetry to high school students and writing poetry as a middle schooler, I’ve always wanted to make poetry as accessible as possible—to make it for everyone and to fill the process with joy.

So, to answer the question: yes, I’m writing to myself, but I’m also writing to whoever needs my words most. It is always my hope to offer poetry as even the smallest comfort, as honest company—the way it’s always been for me.

KARAN

I feel like “After the Beach, I Take Myself to Birthday Oysters” should be required reading for everyone who has ever had to relearn how to celebrate themself. It’s exuberant! Really, that poem radiates with self-permission. Do you think poetry has changed your relationship to agency, or perhaps helped you reclaim it?

KELLY

First of all, thank you! And also—oh my goodness, yes. Poetry has taught me how to love myself probably because it first permitted me to ask why I didn’t. I don’t know if I would’ve had the agency even to admit that if not for writing.

For me, poetry is a permission slip to stand naked in front of life’s most significant questions and try to look, try to answer, until I stop flinching. It gave me the courage to engage with nuance, to hold two opposing truths, to ask sharper and sharper questions. It also taught me I can be anyone I want on the page—so why not be more me?

I wrote that poem the day before my forty-fourth birthday. I rearranged my schedule and took myself to the beach. All I wanted was a window-down, cliffside drive, an empty beach, and a date with silence. I wanted to sit with the reverence of the tides and time and let it all wash over me. I remember thinking: now I’m 44, my life is half over, and there’s still half left. There’s no more time for bullshit. I don’t want to write anything that’s not the truth, that’s not the most “me-est” it can be.

How you love the world is how you love yourself. In that poem, I wanted to build my own freedom, to spoil myself in solitude, to document that I finally have the sacred relationship with myself that I always craved.

KARAN

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 moving to a different direction?

KELLY

Now I’m gonna ask every poet I meet this question—I love it!

Two years ago, I would have said I tend toward the poetry of the body—that the body has always been an area of tenderness and tangle for me. From infertility, to eating disorders, to my mom’s cancer, to my own chronic illness, the body has been a complicated home. I’m constantly trying to love it while grappling with my lack of control.

Now, I think I’m moving toward the poetry of the soul. I want a poem to be a place where my soul can wander around, in purest discovery—the freest expression of my passion and purpose. If that purpose is eating oysters, doing mushrooms in the bath, or learning more often to say no, then bring it on. Lol. I want to be at home in my poems, and my soul feels like the best compass I’ve got.

KARAN

Kelly, as a poetry coach, you’ve helped many other poets grow in their practice and voice. What have you learned about craft from being inside other people’s drafts? What advice would you give to emerging poets?

KELLY

Coaching poets is one of my favorite things in the world. To help someone birth a great poem or book into being, to see their face the first time they hold it, to watch them finally prove to themselves that they are capable of the thing they have always wanted to do, and have done it because they put in the heart, the effort, and they did it damn well. Well, frankly, it’s magic.

When I was an early writer, I was often told to work on craft, but rarely given clear directions on how to do so. My goal has always been to break down the mystery of craft without losing its magic. It doesn’t have to be this big secret. I value giving actionable feedback and clear, concrete tools and techniques.

My Substack, The Poetry Coach, is dedicated to providing easy strategies that offer step-by-step guides on exactly how to improve specific areas of craft.

One of the things I have learned about being inside other people’s drafts is based on Gregory Orr’s framework from his essay on the Four Poetic Temperaments (it’s dense; here's the cheat-sheet version). He believes that any poet has a natural tendency toward one of the four elements:

• Structure
• Story
• Music
• Wildness/Imagination

When a poem or manuscript falls flat, it’s often because these ratios are out of balance. A poem must excel in each aspect to create a significant impact and stay with the reader. So frequently, poets are obsessed with music but neglect story. Or they spend so much on imagination that there is no structure. I always ask poets to self-diagnose their poems—score their draft in each category. Once they have a clear understanding of what is present and what is missing, they often have a roadmap to revision.

As for emerging writers, I have tons of advice, but here are the most vital things I find myself saying over and over again:

1. Make sure your reader is an active participant. Don’t overexplain or overwrite. Let them do the work. Be confident. Less is more. Don’t chew your reader’s food for them. Let them walk around in the poem, savor the experience, and fully experience it without being controlled or forced into an idea or feeling.

2. A poem should be a call to action. It should inspire your reader to do something: call their mother, confront the test results, and finally sort through their dead father's things. Ask yourself what you want your reader to feel at the end of the poem, then get to work earning it. Is there movement in the poem? Do we start in one place, and then go on a journey where an idea or feeling becomes larger than it was before?

3. The worst thing your reader can be is confused. If they are, they will spend the whole poem trying to understand what you are saying instead of experiencing the beauty. To test this, ask a non-poet to read your work. Do they understand it? Can they at least tell you the dramatic events or what happened in the poem (a trick I learned from Jericho Brown) and how it made them feel?

4. Reading is the best teacher you will ever have. You don’t need an MFA. I was 43 and had two poetry collections accepted before I finished mine (shoutout to Randolph College, best program EVER). Plus, I studied fiction.  You can learn all you need to know from strategic close reading, sacred curiosity, and relentless attention. When something undoes you in someone’s poem, ask Why. Then How. Take it apart like an engine, then try to rebuild the same machinery using your own words.

5. Lack of revision is severely limiting your potential. Don’t stop drafting until it is the best it can be. Have patience. Take your time. This might mean reaching the end and starting a new draft from there. Be willing to break something open. Or throw it out completely and start fresh.. If you are not willing to take risks, or not willing to discover new things, it will be difficult to grow.

6. Imposter syndrome is a waste of time. No one got better by telling themselves how much they suck or that they don’t belong.  It’s unfair to compare yourself to someone who has practiced more. Choose action over ego. Keep your head down, be kind, and do the work. Maybe you’re not there yet, but your slow, small steps mean you're doing something about it.

7. Enthusiasm outmuscles discipline. Everyone I coach constantly says that my love for writing is infectious—it makes them want to write more. The trick is not to win awards or write a bestseller, but to be in love and stay in love—process over product. People can feel your energy; your electricity, if you’re excited about your writing, chances are they will be too.

KARAN

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

KELLY

Begin a poem by observing something closely, examining the nuances and textures of it, and what you learn from it. Then, halfway through the poem, insert an element of fear. You wouldn’t believe how dropping fear into the middle of a poem raises the stakes and closes the distance between speaker and reader. After you add fear, then create a recipe of pain, pleasure, and then pain. Or vice versa. Constantly switching back and forth. This creates hold-your-breath tension and feels authentic to life. It asks, What beautiful and ugly things are sitting next to each other? How is the space between them constantly blurred?

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.

KELLY

I recently went to see AJR this July. I have never been to a concert that let the listener so closely into the creative process (they broke down how they compose a song for us!) as well as the vulnerability of what it takes to put a piece of yourself into the world, and negotiate your relationship with how it is received, and how you feel about yourself as a result of that. So much of their music grapples with how to be comfortable with who you are, even when you are still on the road to who you want to become.

AJR’s song “Inertia” has been on constant repeat in my headphones and heart. It feels like one of the most sincere and tender accounts of wanting things to be different, but at the same time, making peace with (the annoyingly slow, sometimes self-sabotaging) process in getting there. It touches a lonely yet inspired place I’ve been many times before; the contrast and complexity remind me how easy it is sometimes to slip back into doubt, or stagnation, or just wanting a different life.

Even my four-year-old has become obsessed with the chorus:

I'm an object in motion, I've lost all emotion
My two legs are broken, but look at me dance
An object in motion, don't ask where I'm going
'Cause where I am goin' is right where I am

Perhaps I like this song because it grants the permission I seek in my poems—to stand in the center of your own life and witness yourself exactly as you are right now, and know (or at least convince yourself) that is enough.

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