 |
Kristine Rae Anderson’s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Entelechy International, Phase and Cycle, the anthology Active Voices IV, and elsewhere. She has written book reviews recently published in Dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing and Alehouse. In 2005 Kristine was awarded a Tomales Bay Fellowship in poetry, and she was awarded a Fishtrap Fellowship for 2006. She teaches English at Riverside Community College (Riverside, California).
***
Melissa Cossey: First of all, thanks for granting me this interview. Congratulations on your first place prize in the Southern Indiana Review's Mary C. Mohr poetry contest. When reading your work, the thing that strikes me the most is that you have a very formal way of writing—I don't want to say “traditional” because it doesn't carry those feelings—but there is something very precise and deliberate about your word choices that makes it seem less flimsy. Do you think you write based on a set of criteria (what you love to read, what you admire the most) or do you think it is more of an inherently internal process?
Kristine Rae Anderson: Thank you, Melissa. It's an honor to receive this award from SIR, a magazine I greatly respect.
Your question intrigues me. Frankly, I haven't thought about my word choice or my writing process in quite that way, and I'm not sure what might account for the diction or formality or my poems. I do think that all writers are influenced by what we read, especially whatever literature draws us in. Such texts are places we choose to spend time, and like our physical environments, they can't help but rub off on us. Although I may be attracted to the techniques employed in the poetry and prose I enjoy, I don't consciously attempt to reflect any particular qualities. Having said that, though, I must admit that I am aware of the craft of others' work, and I am constantly learning from what I read.
In each poem, I'm attempting to bring an experience to my reader, even perhaps—if I may be so bold—a fresh awareness. So I choose language based on that desire. I want to present the reader with something authentic, a life and condition that is honestly rendered. When I was a first-semester MFA student at New England College a number of years ago, I heard Li-Young Leecharge us, as poets, to "say something" in our writing. By this he meant that the writer's
task is to say something worth saying. Every time I sit down to write or to revise a poem, I hear Li-Young Lee's words in my mind: "Say something." I choose words that, I hope, will be the best to communicate what the poem needs to say. My word choices are, I suspect, careful--but, I hope, "careful" in that they're chosen with care, not stiff or stuffy.
MC: No, I wouldn't call it “stuffy” by any means—I just feel like a lot of poets publishing today that are causing some hype (Richard Siken, for example) are writing outside of the narrative. I really like it, it appeals to me—but there is something more solid about your work that reminds me of the more powerful devices that are available to us in telling a story. I always find it difficult to rationalize the use of strange languagewith the straight narrative. Do you think that the emotional truths or other weighty values of a poem arrive naturally out of the experiences on which they are based, or do you tend to begin with the awareness you are trying to expose and then build the scenario to support that?
KRA: Like all of us who write, I love the music of words—the rough and sharp
noises as well as the soft or lilting progressions or even the bumper-car antics of sounds crashing into one another. Like most writers, I also enjoy the provocative ambiguity that language can provide. But for me, ultimately, it's always about the individual: the individual subject, the individual reader or listener. Even the most sweeping events of history take on meaning as they affect one life at a time. What is a natural disaster or successful surgery if not the individual disaster or miracle? Why is it that every young person who falls in love feels like this never could have happened—not like this—to anyone else in history? So, yes, I think there are narrative impulses in my poetry, though some of my poems are more story-like than others.
I really like how you refer to "the more powerful devices that are available to us in telling a story." It seems to me that the desire for "story" must be programmed into human DNA. I've yet to find anyone who doesn't love a good story. If I say to a classroom of college composition students, "Let me tell you a story," they momentarily forget about who's walking by the window outside, or about who might be texting them at that very instant, and they're attentive. I like stories as much as anyone, so I'm drawn to the human element when I write. I think the "character" comes first for me. I might be mulling over something a person/character thinks or feels, but the concept is grounded in a character. Thoughts and emotions spring from characters; they don't exist independently.
MC: I'd like to talk some more about what you were saying about sound in poetry. You don't hear a poet speak very often about the conscious decisions of sound; some poets are clearly more concerned with phonetics than others. It does create an intrinsic depth in a poem when it makes a good noise. In workshops, Rodney Jones would say every word has a sound—which even though it sounds simple now, to us as undergraduates it was pretty mind-blowing, because he meant every word has just as much gravity as any other word, and the careful placement of them together was serious, careful work. I hesitate to distill the idea down to an “orchestral” metaphor, but do you think, after some time, you become wired to consider sound in every poem you write—or are there some poems where the germ is so impatient you allow it to do what it wants to do? I'm curious if you think the former is a mark of maturity, and if the latter is a less experienced poet’s pipe dream.
KRA: 
Another interesting question, Melissa. Frankly, I have to answer “yes,” which may seem more like fence-sitting that responding. But both impulses exist—sometimes co-exist. At first, I think, a poem needs to rise to the surface and speak up. I need to write through to find out what the poem has to say. Wasn't it E. M. Forster who said something like “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” Usually sounds emerge during this process, too. But generally it's in tinkering with sounds later that they begin to fit snugly or loosely together, depending on the needs of the poem.
I really like the concept of every word having its own sound; it's true. That awareness allows us to choose our words jealously, as poets need to. In writing poetry, I pretend that I have to pay for every word—like paying for every vowel on Wheel of Fortune, but more so. The truth is, where there's a glut of words, each word isn't able to do its own, best job, and if each word isn't doing a job—an important job—it ought to be fired, anyway.
Some of this process of “orchestrating” sound and meaning is intuitive, and some is deliberate. And every poem is different. That's the magic, isn't it?
MC: Oh yes, truly. Speaking of magic, I saw Joyce Carol Oates at AWP, and in her interview section she was asked to give some advice to writers. Her final, resounding note was “You can't write if you don't read.” Which is, I think, at the very center of the truth for a writer. But my question to you is more about what we read. It seems most students are only exposed to “anthologized” writers, who wrote their stories so long ago that, and I'm not discounting their relevance here in the scope of things, the students might be better served to know what is being published today. To me it seems it would be less of an intimidating experience for young students to be regularly exposed to contemporary writers to get a sense of what is being written right now. This is especially so for creative writing students, because the shifts in tone that they are comparing themselves to may have been written 70 or more years ago. As a teacher and a writer, what do you think?
KRA: Of course, reading is where it all begins. Certainly writers should be reading what's happening now in the literary world and, frankly, in the world of popular culture, too. We need to remind ourselves that Shakespeare was writing for the masses of his day, not for the highbrows of the future. That's why he's so good.
Reading establishes context. We find out what our contemporaries have already done and what's fresh and new. In fact, if our context stops at twenty, thirty, or forty years ago—or even further back in time—we're not writing to our audience. That is probably why new writers sometimes use words like “e'en” in their poems. The context is out of date.
At the same time, though, writers benefit from the scope of literary possibilities and precedents (I might say “tradition,” with a nod to T. S. Eliot). It's our cultural and artistic genealogy. The more we know about that larger context, the more we can control which influences we would like to carry on and which we'd like to shrug off.
Education tends to be quite good at providing the historical contexts, and it's important for literature and writing courses to do so. For most of us, reading Shakespeare for the first time feels like an exercise in learning a whole new language. Having a guide for that experience is invaluable. With any luck at all, the guide is not only knowledgeable but enthusiastic, and the texts of a great writer become a lifelong delight and inspiration.
But it's the task of writing courses to introduce students to great works of the present, too. For the most part, literary magazines are the place to find this emerging work. Certainly some current anthologies include fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from recent decades, but to find out what's hatching now, one needs to look to the incubators—the literary magazines.
MC: Speaking of new work, what are you reading now? Are there any “new” poets that you have found exceptional?
KRA: Right now I'm reading a new book by poet Lynne Thompson, Beg No Pardon, published by Perugia Press in 2007. The language and craft of Thompson's poems draw me in, and the Caribbean landscapes of her family's history rise vividly from the lines.
Next I’ll be reaching for a recently released collection of poems by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), translated by poet Sholeh Wolpé. I heard the translator read some of Farrokhzad’s poems at a conference several months before the book’s release (the book’s title is Sin), and I was taken by the lyricism and deep honesty of the work. Today, more than ever, sharing ideas and experiences between cultures holds great power and promise—in fact, it may help our little planet survive. That sounds rather gloom and doom, I know, but it really is the little things—the respect for each other as human beings, for instance, or conversely, the shorter and more dangerous vision that comes from only looking inward—that are the big things, that motivate not only individuals but societies.
Without being overly dramatic, then, I think that literature matters, and I find myself drawn to writing that speaks to real lives and issues. For that reason, I’m a fan of Brian Turner’s collection Here, Bullet (2005), written from his experience as a soldier in Iraq, without politicization but with a human and compassionate eye, a poet’s ear, and an artist’s—as well as a soldier’s—sensitivity. As I open literary magazines—which I read often—I enjoy “meeting” new writers’ work and, at the same time, am always delighted to see the work of favorite writers: Steve Kowit, for instance, and Charles Harper Webb, and many others whose names will come to me as soon as I’ve finished answering your question.
