dispelling the myth of lonely writing

KARAN

Kim, thank you for these magnificent poems. It’s hard to describe what your work does without flattening it: sharp, sensual, irreverent, elegiac. There’s a bite and a purr to these poems — they mock cliché even as they risk sincerity. In “This Too Shall Pass,” you write: “When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up / on a platter of deviled eggs.” I laughed, but soon I found myself on a train “taking you where you never wanted to go.” Let’s start with humor. Do you feel like humor is a survival instinct in your work, or does it serve some other purpose?

KIM

I think humor is a survival instinct for all of us. Your question made me wonder, who told the first joke?  According to Google, the oldest joke that's been found has been traced back to 1900BC in ancient Sumeria; it's a fart joke. Where would we be without laughter? We need lightness; it makes the darkness bearable. So of course, if you're trafficking in difficult subjects, humor is one way you can lighten things up, hopefully without being glib.

KARAN

Do you ever laugh at your own lines as you write them? I’ve heard Kafka’s neighbors would complain because he’d laugh so loud as he wrote, which is probably bordering on the hyperbole.

KIM

I don’t think I have, no. Funny you should mention the deviled eggs line. It was originally “I want to throw up in the mouth of a right-wing Christian” or something along those lines. It was going to be used for the Poem-A-Day feature for the Academy of American Poets, and they objected to it, so I changed it. I think it’s a better line now, but I do secretly relish how “deviled eggs” is a bit of suppressed shade.

KARAN

Oh I like that original line a lot, haha. How has your writing process changed over the years, Kim — structurally, emotionally, spatially? Has it shifted across books, jobs, age? How do you usually begin, write, and finish a poem? Are you an obsessive editor of your work?

KIM

The simple answer is that I read, then I write. Reading stirs up something I need to address. Or maybe the answer is that I experience things that stir me to write, including reading what other people write. Everyone has a different process in terms of when they write, and mine's been all over the map: late at night when I was younger and had a small child, five mornings a week when I was working on novels, afternoons at a job I had for several months in graduate school, when I worked alone and got my work done much faster than my boss realized.  I liked to imagine I was getting paid to write poems.

Once I've got something started, I usually obsess over it for a few days, then put it away for a while. When I come back a week or a month later, I can usually see whether it's finished or not. I don't tend to share my drafts with anyone, though for years, when I was younger, I met with a group of other writers regularly every two weeks to critique our work.

KARAN

In your poem that totally transcended any and all audiences and has become wildly popular, “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall,” you write:

if you swam across a river under rain sang

using a dildo for a microphone…

...if you think nothing and

no one can/ listen I love you joy is coming.

That last line has long lived in my brain. So much of your work moves toward a stranger, toward the reader, in an attempt to recognize the other. Do you think of the poem as offering witness? Or as something lonelier?

KIM

I guess all poems bear witness to our consciousness--to our fears and hopes and imaginations, as well as physical experiences. I don't think of writing as lonely, though it usually takes a lot of solitude to accomplish. I think we're all having one big conversation. The dead have a lot to say, and so do the living. I take heart from other poets. We delight and console each other.

KARAN

Do you believe poetry can save someone’s life?

KIM

I know there are people who believe it has saved theirs, because I’ve gotten emails from high school girls saying that. I usually take it as a figure of speech, since I’ve never talked anyone off a bridge. Whatever poetry does, I believe it errs on the side of light.

KARAN

There’s deep grief here — grief for mothers, for friends, for daughters, for the world. But your poems rarely sentimentalize it. Instead, they feel like elegies with their teeth still in. “Little Elegies for the Year” offers a litany of losses that are mundane, absurd, biblical. In a sense, all poems are about loss — of childhood, innocence, loved ones, happy days, etc. What is it about poetry that is uniquely suited to explore grief?

KIM

I guess it's that aspect of consolation that we're looking for when we're grieving, that poetry can enact so well. So can music. So can love and friendship. And sometimes it's enough just to have some company in our despair. I think of Millay's "Dirge Without Music": I am not resigned. It's an elegy that refuses consolation, yet we can feel less alone in our grief by sharing that grief.

KARAN

“Pima Canyon” is a stunner — its quiet devastation sneaks up on you. You end with: “Maybe we should let our hair go gray… / Maybe, I say. But not yet, darling. Not yet.” So many of these poems feel caught between a dare and a refusal — to age, to surrender, to stop desiring. What is your relationship to mortality on the page? Are you preoccupied with death?

KIM

Oh, death. That's just part of a poet's job description. Show me one poet who hasn't written about it. Of course, getting older makes it feel more present, especially when people around you start getting felled by sniper fire. That's how I think of it: we're being picked off, one by one. I grew up in a house with two parents, one grandparent, and four brothers. They're all dead now, except for one brother. Writing is partly an attempt at recovery, an effort to hold on to people and places and experiences, not to lose them to the inevitable. It's got that memorializing aspect. Life is change, and art does its best to rescue a few things from that relentless river.

KARAN

Are you afraid of death/dying?

KIM

Sure. Though when I’m depressed or in pain or very, very, tired, I think, okay, one day this will all be over, and it’s not a terrible thought. Mostly I’m afraid it might be painful. I’d also like to stick around to see what happens next. FOMO.

KARAN

Leonard Cohen (whose birthday is the publication day of this interview) said this in his final interview: “It’s not death I’m worried about, it’s the preliminaries.” Let’s talk about sound. Even in the more prosaic of your poems, the music is unmistakable. Do you read your poems aloud while writing? What role does musicality play in your revision process?

KIM

I eventually read them aloud, though at first I just hear the music of the language in my head. I've got a good ear; I grew up playing music, and I play various instruments. I tell my students to put their ear down to each line and listen hard, which is what I do.

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. Of course, as with all great poets, I can see all of these elements at play in your work. But if you were to place your work in one of these categories, where would you?

KIM

All of them. I don't think I belong up there with the truly great, but I do feel I'm doing some of my best writing lately, and I hope I haven't reached the limits of my abilities yet.

KARAN

You’ve published a dozen books and taught generations of poets — frankly, you’ve played a vital role in shaping contemporary poetry. What advice would you give to younger writers who are trying to cultivate both nerve and longevity?

KIM

Fuck the self-doubt. Do the work. Keep going.

KARAN

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

KIM

Sure. Write a poem using sound imagery. We often think of imagery in terms of the visual, so the idea is to move away from that. Write about one sound and see how many ways you can characterize it. Or create a portrait of a person or place or a time in your life, focusing on sounds. If you want more of a framework, make it 14 lines. Here's a sonnet that appeared in my first collection, The Philosopher's Club:

‍

THE SOUND

Marc says the suffering that we don’t see

still makes a sort of sound--a subtle, soft

noise, nothing like the cries or screams that we

might think of--more the slight scrape of a hat doffed

by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back

to let a lovely woman pass, her dress

just brushing his coat.  Or else it’s like a crack

in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress

and slippage going on unnoticed by

the family upstairs, the daughter leaving

for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh

when she sees her.  It’s like the heaving

of a stone into a lake, before it drops.

It’s shy, it’s barely there.  It never stops.

KARAN

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

KIM

Right now, I've got "Ashoken Farewell" in my head, a lovely little song that was written for the soundtrack of Ken Burns's documentary series on the Civil War. The tune recurs often (frankly a bit too often). It feels like a few notes of grace and sanity amid the carnage. There's a beautiful film by Jane Campion, "An Angel at my Table," about the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. She spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals, and she strikes me as a troubled but indomitable spirit. The Chloe Zhao films I've seen--"Songs My Brother Taught Me," "Nomadland," "The Rider"--seem to me suffused with poetry, which is what those fabrications we call poems aspire to, as well.

KARAN

And finally, Kim, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets that have influenced you most?

KIM

Some contemporaries whose spirits have guided me: CD Wright, Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, CK Williams, Denis Johnson, Franz Wright, Diane Seuss, Dean Young. None of those in person, by the way, though I did have a class with CD in grad school, and I was influenced by her early work, along with Frank Stanford. Other spirits have included Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, Whitman, Millay, Larkin, Dorothy Parker.  Lately I've been diving into Vievee Francis's Forest Primeval, and Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems, and a wild and wonderful translation of Catullus by Isobel Williams called Switch. She's fascinating. I've been dipping into Hesiod's Works and Days and The Iliad while listening to a book on Greek mythology. I probably won't get through those last two--I'm not a devoted scholar--but I wanted to get the flavor of them. I could probably name names for a long time.