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May 2025
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Interview With A Poet- Mike Jurkovic
Ulster County, N.Y. Poet Laureate |
SoFloPoJo: You’ve recently been named Poet Laureate of Ulster County, NY. Congratulations! What can poets there expect from your leadership?
Mike Jurkovic: I was hoping the first question would not be the hardest. First let me shout out a gracious Thank You to my friends, peers, and Arts Mid-Hudson for the honor of being named the 2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate.
I will continue my outreach with Calling All Poets, which now, on either of our monthly events, we have folks joining in from two or three different continents and several states across the nation.
Outside of a few live/Zoom hybrid-themed readings, I hope to hold throughout Ulster County (ars poetica, political protest, poetry as humor) I'm hoping to stage at least two JazzOetry events. Stay tuned.
But on a more lasting note, I hope to establish through the county or a permanent Poet Laureate In Memoriam. Many great writers and poets have made the Hudson Valley their home and their muse. The first poet. I would like to memorialize would be Donald Lev. I am willing to wager there is not one writer under the age of seventy who has not, in some way, been affected by Donald's humor, honesty, perseverance, and spirit. I would then hope that successive poet laureates would add other names.
The second thing, and believe me, if I just get the conversation rolling during my tenure, that would be great, is to somehow establish a Hudson Valley Poetry Archive. Either through the county, then the state, or vice versa. However, I believe it is culturally, socially, historically, politically, and artistically a concept that has to happen. We have lived through many unprecedented times, and the poets of the Hudson Valley and beyond have chronicled quite the oral history. Maybe it is something for one of the larger NYS colleges or the library system; I don't know how, but I know it is a necessity. CAPS alone has thirty years of audio, video, digital files, photos, books, etc.
Then there's the Woodstock Poetry Society and Albany Poets and all the voices in NYC...we are an abundant resource.
SoFloPoJo: What was the catalyst that made you a poet? And when did that take place?
M.J.: Dylan. Let's just blame Dylan flat out. Sure I was intrigued by the Beatles, Stones, Smokey, etc . . .but Dylan is the cause of it all. "Mr. Tambourine Man" specifically.
I was what, Ten? Eleven? We had just come back from shopping at a now defunct Hudson Valley department store - Caldors - where I bugged my mom to get me the new Bob Dylan which would have been "Bringing It All Back Home" I heard the Byrds version of course and wanted to hear this one right away. So I put Side Two on first and heard:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
And appropriately enough I threw up! No Lie! I tossed whatever breakfast had been near the portable turntable in my bedroom. The wordplay twisted my little brain into so many knots I couldn't find my balance and hurled. It was then and there that I wanted to try and put words together in rhythmic ways.
But I was always writing before that. Short stories mostly. Believe it or not I was an A+ student in grade school and my report cards were, if I may take a moment of braggadocio, stellar. It was alway either yours truly or a real, Irish, South Bronx grade-school cutey - Mary Alice O'Cullen - at the top of the class. As a reward for the great grades, my folks would buy me the original Aurora superhero or monster models —‚ Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy; Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman --
I'd make 'em, my mom would paint 'em when I messed them up. My room was full of them and I wrote about them. I had a whole collection that would be worth Lord knows how much today but most of them got smashed beyond hope when we moved north from the South Bronx to Garrison, a sleepy little Hudson River town in Putnam County in late 1969 early 1970.
SoFloPoJo: I can relate to that. Did you "study" poetry anywhere, with anyone after that?
M.J.: Well I’m not sure study is the right word. I'd study the lyrics, the rhythms and patterns and broken rhyme schemes of the music.
Once in high school the names started crossing my fields of interest. Vonnegut, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whitman, Ferlinghetti. I had a great creative writing teacher who would excuse me from class to peruse the library for titles... In college I was never in class which is why I never got any degrees... I would just immerse myself in Ursula K. Le Guin, Denise Levertov, Patchen, Snyder, Jane Kenyon... Tom Waits and Randy Newman and Ricky Lee Jones.
While in Mercy College I had a English writing teacher who, when he missed his train from the city, let me teach the class. You can imagine how that went.
Anyway, did I ever study poetry? I guess in an obtuse way. Formally no. But to be honest I learn from hearing and listening to folks like yourself and the many grand voices we're fortunate enough to be exposed to, either by technology or gathering around the fire at readings.
SoFloPoJo: You love jazz, yes? Does it seep into your poetry?
M.J.: O absolutely! music - jazz, rock, hip hop - they all seep in rhythmically.
I've written songs with rock and folk musicians since this whole journey started. (just as an aside, I have over 100 songs copyrighted) I try to perform as often but not often enough with our awesome jazzoetry quartet. If you think of your words as an instrument that gets to solo within the group the buzz is visceral and to an extant, ethereal.
When your words follow your own melody strange things happen... You begin to play with the words more, maybe even abandon perceived meaning or the meaning you thought you were going after.
If becomes a whole other creative process and the poem becomes something more than words on a page... They become words with an immediate edge. Words that own the moment.
SoFloPoJo: So let’s talk about CAPS-Calling All Poets Series. Who started it, when did it begin, how does it work?
M.J.: I wasn’t at the very first CAPS open mic in March of 1999. I was hosting my own traveling poetry carny — Voices of the Valley — in various venues throughout the Hudson Valley. We were featuring many of the same voices though. Jim Eve, the founder of CAPS, would come to my events and I’d go to CAPS and we became good friends. CAPS was housed in the beautiful Howland Cultural Center in Beacon. Built in 1872, there wasn’t any place like it. We continued on, Jim always nagging me to blend Voices into CAPS and me nagging him vice versa.
In January of 2003, after another creative endeavor of mine hit the skids, I relented and said sure, let’s join up. So the two became one and CAPS continued along its merry way gaining supporters, advocates, friends. CAPS became a foundational program for the Howland Center. My trips into NYC and Albany brought folks in from outside the region. It was fun.
In 2014, Jim and I decided to create a non profit organization and thus CAPS, Inc was born. We’re still a non prof but between you n me n probably Musk and his meddling minions, we’re hanging in there. Also around that time we hooked up with some more tech savvy poets and we started videoing and recording and what not.
The snag came in 2015 when the Howland flipped because we went non profit and tried, in reality, to extort more rental money from us. I mean Jim and I and our wives were on the board of directors and they were trying to not double, not triple but quadruple our rent. It was crazy, so we moved across the street for a while but then their rent went up which meant so did ours and we were suddenly homeless.
Emily, (my wife), our cousin Susan, and I were strolling down Main Street New Paltz in 2016 when they decided to go into one of the shops and I decided to check out the new gallery. It was perfect for CAPS and we hit it off and Roost Studios became the home of CAPS until covid. At the Roost we started live-streaming and getting a college audience and really picking up steam.
It sounds crazy to say covid was a good thing for us, but it was! Once we started zooming, the world opened up and we met great folks like yourself and Performance Poets. We hooked up with Patricia Carragon and that whole crew at Brownstone Poets. We hooked up with Sandy Yannone at Cultivating Voices. Now CAPS features voices from three different continents and any number of states and provinces. It is very very cool. We’d like to go live again someday but for right now, Zoom is it.
Also in 2015 we began CAPS PRESS and have published four anthologies, two ekphrastic catalogs (in collaboration with Roost Studios), and four books from regional poets - Fred Poole, Larry Carr (in collaboration with his lightwoodpress) and my latest haiku collection, Monet’s Bamboo. We have a small but loyal and expanding membership that keeps things afloat as well as an active website (www.callingallpoets.net) and a YouTube page with over 70 videos and counting.
Please check CAPS out any First Friday or Third Thursday at 7pm EST for our readings. I think, beginning in April, we're going to start a third event, Open Mic Salon, every second Tuesday. That is still in the working stages. See the website for more details
Mike Jurkovic: I was hoping the first question would not be the hardest. First let me shout out a gracious Thank You to my friends, peers, and Arts Mid-Hudson for the honor of being named the 2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate.
I will continue my outreach with Calling All Poets, which now, on either of our monthly events, we have folks joining in from two or three different continents and several states across the nation.
Outside of a few live/Zoom hybrid-themed readings, I hope to hold throughout Ulster County (ars poetica, political protest, poetry as humor) I'm hoping to stage at least two JazzOetry events. Stay tuned.
But on a more lasting note, I hope to establish through the county or a permanent Poet Laureate In Memoriam. Many great writers and poets have made the Hudson Valley their home and their muse. The first poet. I would like to memorialize would be Donald Lev. I am willing to wager there is not one writer under the age of seventy who has not, in some way, been affected by Donald's humor, honesty, perseverance, and spirit. I would then hope that successive poet laureates would add other names.
The second thing, and believe me, if I just get the conversation rolling during my tenure, that would be great, is to somehow establish a Hudson Valley Poetry Archive. Either through the county, then the state, or vice versa. However, I believe it is culturally, socially, historically, politically, and artistically a concept that has to happen. We have lived through many unprecedented times, and the poets of the Hudson Valley and beyond have chronicled quite the oral history. Maybe it is something for one of the larger NYS colleges or the library system; I don't know how, but I know it is a necessity. CAPS alone has thirty years of audio, video, digital files, photos, books, etc.
Then there's the Woodstock Poetry Society and Albany Poets and all the voices in NYC...we are an abundant resource.
SoFloPoJo: What was the catalyst that made you a poet? And when did that take place?
M.J.: Dylan. Let's just blame Dylan flat out. Sure I was intrigued by the Beatles, Stones, Smokey, etc . . .but Dylan is the cause of it all. "Mr. Tambourine Man" specifically.
I was what, Ten? Eleven? We had just come back from shopping at a now defunct Hudson Valley department store - Caldors - where I bugged my mom to get me the new Bob Dylan which would have been "Bringing It All Back Home" I heard the Byrds version of course and wanted to hear this one right away. So I put Side Two on first and heard:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
And appropriately enough I threw up! No Lie! I tossed whatever breakfast had been near the portable turntable in my bedroom. The wordplay twisted my little brain into so many knots I couldn't find my balance and hurled. It was then and there that I wanted to try and put words together in rhythmic ways.
But I was always writing before that. Short stories mostly. Believe it or not I was an A+ student in grade school and my report cards were, if I may take a moment of braggadocio, stellar. It was alway either yours truly or a real, Irish, South Bronx grade-school cutey - Mary Alice O'Cullen - at the top of the class. As a reward for the great grades, my folks would buy me the original Aurora superhero or monster models —‚ Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy; Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman --
I'd make 'em, my mom would paint 'em when I messed them up. My room was full of them and I wrote about them. I had a whole collection that would be worth Lord knows how much today but most of them got smashed beyond hope when we moved north from the South Bronx to Garrison, a sleepy little Hudson River town in Putnam County in late 1969 early 1970.
SoFloPoJo: I can relate to that. Did you "study" poetry anywhere, with anyone after that?
M.J.: Well I’m not sure study is the right word. I'd study the lyrics, the rhythms and patterns and broken rhyme schemes of the music.
Once in high school the names started crossing my fields of interest. Vonnegut, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whitman, Ferlinghetti. I had a great creative writing teacher who would excuse me from class to peruse the library for titles... In college I was never in class which is why I never got any degrees... I would just immerse myself in Ursula K. Le Guin, Denise Levertov, Patchen, Snyder, Jane Kenyon... Tom Waits and Randy Newman and Ricky Lee Jones.
While in Mercy College I had a English writing teacher who, when he missed his train from the city, let me teach the class. You can imagine how that went.
Anyway, did I ever study poetry? I guess in an obtuse way. Formally no. But to be honest I learn from hearing and listening to folks like yourself and the many grand voices we're fortunate enough to be exposed to, either by technology or gathering around the fire at readings.
SoFloPoJo: You love jazz, yes? Does it seep into your poetry?
M.J.: O absolutely! music - jazz, rock, hip hop - they all seep in rhythmically.
I've written songs with rock and folk musicians since this whole journey started. (just as an aside, I have over 100 songs copyrighted) I try to perform as often but not often enough with our awesome jazzoetry quartet. If you think of your words as an instrument that gets to solo within the group the buzz is visceral and to an extant, ethereal.
When your words follow your own melody strange things happen... You begin to play with the words more, maybe even abandon perceived meaning or the meaning you thought you were going after.
If becomes a whole other creative process and the poem becomes something more than words on a page... They become words with an immediate edge. Words that own the moment.
SoFloPoJo: So let’s talk about CAPS-Calling All Poets Series. Who started it, when did it begin, how does it work?
M.J.: I wasn’t at the very first CAPS open mic in March of 1999. I was hosting my own traveling poetry carny — Voices of the Valley — in various venues throughout the Hudson Valley. We were featuring many of the same voices though. Jim Eve, the founder of CAPS, would come to my events and I’d go to CAPS and we became good friends. CAPS was housed in the beautiful Howland Cultural Center in Beacon. Built in 1872, there wasn’t any place like it. We continued on, Jim always nagging me to blend Voices into CAPS and me nagging him vice versa.
In January of 2003, after another creative endeavor of mine hit the skids, I relented and said sure, let’s join up. So the two became one and CAPS continued along its merry way gaining supporters, advocates, friends. CAPS became a foundational program for the Howland Center. My trips into NYC and Albany brought folks in from outside the region. It was fun.
In 2014, Jim and I decided to create a non profit organization and thus CAPS, Inc was born. We’re still a non prof but between you n me n probably Musk and his meddling minions, we’re hanging in there. Also around that time we hooked up with some more tech savvy poets and we started videoing and recording and what not.
The snag came in 2015 when the Howland flipped because we went non profit and tried, in reality, to extort more rental money from us. I mean Jim and I and our wives were on the board of directors and they were trying to not double, not triple but quadruple our rent. It was crazy, so we moved across the street for a while but then their rent went up which meant so did ours and we were suddenly homeless.
Emily, (my wife), our cousin Susan, and I were strolling down Main Street New Paltz in 2016 when they decided to go into one of the shops and I decided to check out the new gallery. It was perfect for CAPS and we hit it off and Roost Studios became the home of CAPS until covid. At the Roost we started live-streaming and getting a college audience and really picking up steam.
It sounds crazy to say covid was a good thing for us, but it was! Once we started zooming, the world opened up and we met great folks like yourself and Performance Poets. We hooked up with Patricia Carragon and that whole crew at Brownstone Poets. We hooked up with Sandy Yannone at Cultivating Voices. Now CAPS features voices from three different continents and any number of states and provinces. It is very very cool. We’d like to go live again someday but for right now, Zoom is it.
Also in 2015 we began CAPS PRESS and have published four anthologies, two ekphrastic catalogs (in collaboration with Roost Studios), and four books from regional poets - Fred Poole, Larry Carr (in collaboration with his lightwoodpress) and my latest haiku collection, Monet’s Bamboo. We have a small but loyal and expanding membership that keeps things afloat as well as an active website (www.callingallpoets.net) and a YouTube page with over 70 videos and counting.
Please check CAPS out any First Friday or Third Thursday at 7pm EST for our readings. I think, beginning in April, we're going to start a third event, Open Mic Salon, every second Tuesday. That is still in the working stages. See the website for more details
YouTube links:
Buckshot Reckoning Launch Reading w/JazzOtrey Quartet:
https://youtu.be/CpClfKivBw4?si=_eYeundzM1CGNwhC
The King's Garage: Collaborative Poems w/Will Nixon
https://youtu.be/VomKQ4wdgLI?si=-_2shmh2NokIYKiJ
Psycho Squid: New, Nervous Voice
https://youtu.be/9o0sDyaw0xs?si=4jcOLTZ9--0YIH-i
Nuclear Cooties: Sic Pups
https://youtu.be/Q0qCtz9Ours
A link to Mike’s YouTube channell:
https://www.youtube.com/@mikejurkovic4791/videos
Other links:
bluesky: @mjpj55.bsky.social
instagram: mooncusser55
Find him in Fcebook here: https://www.facebook.com/mikesjazzpoetryjournal
www.callingallpoets.net
Mike’s books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07T9T38CJ/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=13c1e141-4c63-4173-bd9f-5c27a0288647&ref_=ap_rdr
Mike can be contacted directly here: [email protected]
Buckshot Reckoning Launch Reading w/JazzOtrey Quartet:
https://youtu.be/CpClfKivBw4?si=_eYeundzM1CGNwhC
The King's Garage: Collaborative Poems w/Will Nixon
https://youtu.be/VomKQ4wdgLI?si=-_2shmh2NokIYKiJ
Psycho Squid: New, Nervous Voice
https://youtu.be/9o0sDyaw0xs?si=4jcOLTZ9--0YIH-i
Nuclear Cooties: Sic Pups
https://youtu.be/Q0qCtz9Ours
A link to Mike’s YouTube channell:
https://www.youtube.com/@mikejurkovic4791/videos
Other links:
bluesky: @mjpj55.bsky.social
instagram: mooncusser55
Find him in Fcebook here: https://www.facebook.com/mikesjazzpoetryjournal
www.callingallpoets.net
Mike’s books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07T9T38CJ/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=13c1e141-4c63-4173-bd9f-5c27a0288647&ref_=ap_rdr
Mike can be contacted directly here: [email protected]
February 2025
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Denise Duhamel interviewed by Gregg Shapiro |
Perfect in “Pink”: an interview with Denise Duhamel
by Gregg Shapiro
Denise Duhamel and I go way back. All the way to the early 1980s, when we were both undergrads at Emerson College in Boston. I had the honor, and distinction, of being the first person to publish Denise when I was poetry co-editor at the Emerson Review. Since then, we have maintained our friendship no matter where we lived; Tucson, NYC, Lewisburg, Astoria, Hollywood for Denise, and DC, Chicago, Wilton Manors, and Fort Lauderdale for me. Poetry has been one of our constants, and it was Denise who introduced me to the late poet Maureen Seaton when Maureen and I both lived in Chicago. That Denise and I have both wound up living in South Florida at the same time has only strengthened our bond. It was with great pleasure that I had the opportunity to once again interview Denise, this time about her remarkable new book “Pink Lady” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), shortly before its release.
Gregg Shapiro: Denise, I’d like to begin by talking about the cover of your new book, “Pink Lady.” The photo is of your late mother Janet. In what year was it taken?
Denise Duhamel: The photo was taken in 1957, the year my mother graduated from nursing school. I refer to two other photos in “Pink Lady” – one of my mother at 10 years old in a hula skirt and another when she was 80 that I took when she visited me in Florida – but I felt this was the best image for the cover.
Your mother was a nurse. In what ways do you think her vocation had an impact on you and your family?
My mom was in a caring profession and often exhausted by it, so I was always aware that her job was very difficult. I was lucky that she had medical experience since I grew up with severe asthma. Looking back, it must’ve felt like she was still at work when she was taking care of me, too. One of my craziest memories of my mother as a nurse was during the infamous New England Blizzard of 1976. Snow covered our windows, but my father dug a path out so that my mother could go to work on a snowmobile! Someone from the hospital came to pick her up.
Your mother regularly appears in your poetry. Do you know how she felt about you writing about her?
Early on in my career, my mother didn’t like me writing about her or our family. But then in 2009, I published a book called “Ka-Ching!” which contains a section of poems about a terrible accident my parents had been in. My mother loved that I dealt so tenderly about her and my father’s ordeal. That was her favorite book of mine.
Did you begin writing the poems in “Pink Lady,” which deals with the end of her life, before she passed, or did they come to be after that?
I began writing the poems as my mother’s illnesses began to progress. I wrote and wrote while she was in the nursing home. And then I wrote more poems while she was in the hospital and hospice. I wasn’t sure there would be a book entirely about my mother until after she passed.
At what point did you realize that you had a book manuscript?
When I started to string together the middle section of the book, which is a chronological timeline of my mother’s stay in the ICU and hospice, I first saw the arc of what the book could be. I wanted it to be more about just my mother’s death. I gathered other poems I wrote about her to introduce her in the first section and included poems that dealt with the aftermath of her passing in the third section.
How do you think she would feel about the poems in “Pink Lady?”
I hope she would feel honored! After she died, I sometimes asked her permission in a little prayer or prayer-equivalent as I wrote.
Because much of “Pink Lady” is set during the early days of the pandemic, do you consider it to be your COVID book? Or do you think you might have more to say on the subject for another book?
Funny you should ask! Julie Marie Wade and I have a forthcoming chapbook from Harbor editions in 2025; “The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020” in which we used that specific form to document our lives during early Covid. I wrote so much during Covid. I guess panic is a catalyst for my writing.
“Pink Lady” is your seventh book, beginning with 2001’s “Queen for a Day,” in the Pitt Poetry Series from University of Pittsburgh Press. What does having this kind of long-term relationship with this press mean to you?
I feel quite fortunate. While it’s true that the Pitt Poetry Series could say no to me at any time for any book, I know I will get a thorough and fair reading there. They are new editors now, and they seem completely in sync with Ed Ochester’s vision.
I’m glad you mentioned Ed Ochester, who had been the general editor of the Pitt Poetry Series since 1979. He passed away in 2023. Do you have a fond memory of Ed that you’d care to share with the readers?
In 1997, I met Ed at Bennington College. (I was teaching in a high school program and he was on the faculty of the low residency MFA.) I got to hear him read his poem “Pocahontas.” I had just published my book “Kinky” – a book of Barbie poems – and I was hooked by his subversive and wonderful rendering of colonist John Smith's Native American “girlfriend” who he claims saved his life and who he also claims fell in love with him. We had a great talk about feminism and colonialism. He was so amazingly smart and funny! Ed was a fabulous editor and an equally wonderful poet.
“Pink Lady” is being published in January 2025, followed by “The Latest.” Are there other books by you that readers can look forward to in 2025 and beyond?
“In Which” just came out as a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. And I also have another collaborative volume forthcoming. “Tilt,” the last manuscript I wrote with our friend Maureen Seaton before she passed in 2023, is forthcoming from Bridwell Press. The book will actually be part of a two-books-in-one volume paired with “Beautiful People” by Aaron Smith and Maureen. This has been a very fortuitous year for me.
by Gregg Shapiro
Denise Duhamel and I go way back. All the way to the early 1980s, when we were both undergrads at Emerson College in Boston. I had the honor, and distinction, of being the first person to publish Denise when I was poetry co-editor at the Emerson Review. Since then, we have maintained our friendship no matter where we lived; Tucson, NYC, Lewisburg, Astoria, Hollywood for Denise, and DC, Chicago, Wilton Manors, and Fort Lauderdale for me. Poetry has been one of our constants, and it was Denise who introduced me to the late poet Maureen Seaton when Maureen and I both lived in Chicago. That Denise and I have both wound up living in South Florida at the same time has only strengthened our bond. It was with great pleasure that I had the opportunity to once again interview Denise, this time about her remarkable new book “Pink Lady” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), shortly before its release.
Gregg Shapiro: Denise, I’d like to begin by talking about the cover of your new book, “Pink Lady.” The photo is of your late mother Janet. In what year was it taken?
Denise Duhamel: The photo was taken in 1957, the year my mother graduated from nursing school. I refer to two other photos in “Pink Lady” – one of my mother at 10 years old in a hula skirt and another when she was 80 that I took when she visited me in Florida – but I felt this was the best image for the cover.
Your mother was a nurse. In what ways do you think her vocation had an impact on you and your family?
My mom was in a caring profession and often exhausted by it, so I was always aware that her job was very difficult. I was lucky that she had medical experience since I grew up with severe asthma. Looking back, it must’ve felt like she was still at work when she was taking care of me, too. One of my craziest memories of my mother as a nurse was during the infamous New England Blizzard of 1976. Snow covered our windows, but my father dug a path out so that my mother could go to work on a snowmobile! Someone from the hospital came to pick her up.
Your mother regularly appears in your poetry. Do you know how she felt about you writing about her?
Early on in my career, my mother didn’t like me writing about her or our family. But then in 2009, I published a book called “Ka-Ching!” which contains a section of poems about a terrible accident my parents had been in. My mother loved that I dealt so tenderly about her and my father’s ordeal. That was her favorite book of mine.
Did you begin writing the poems in “Pink Lady,” which deals with the end of her life, before she passed, or did they come to be after that?
I began writing the poems as my mother’s illnesses began to progress. I wrote and wrote while she was in the nursing home. And then I wrote more poems while she was in the hospital and hospice. I wasn’t sure there would be a book entirely about my mother until after she passed.
At what point did you realize that you had a book manuscript?
When I started to string together the middle section of the book, which is a chronological timeline of my mother’s stay in the ICU and hospice, I first saw the arc of what the book could be. I wanted it to be more about just my mother’s death. I gathered other poems I wrote about her to introduce her in the first section and included poems that dealt with the aftermath of her passing in the third section.
How do you think she would feel about the poems in “Pink Lady?”
I hope she would feel honored! After she died, I sometimes asked her permission in a little prayer or prayer-equivalent as I wrote.
Because much of “Pink Lady” is set during the early days of the pandemic, do you consider it to be your COVID book? Or do you think you might have more to say on the subject for another book?
Funny you should ask! Julie Marie Wade and I have a forthcoming chapbook from Harbor editions in 2025; “The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020” in which we used that specific form to document our lives during early Covid. I wrote so much during Covid. I guess panic is a catalyst for my writing.
“Pink Lady” is your seventh book, beginning with 2001’s “Queen for a Day,” in the Pitt Poetry Series from University of Pittsburgh Press. What does having this kind of long-term relationship with this press mean to you?
I feel quite fortunate. While it’s true that the Pitt Poetry Series could say no to me at any time for any book, I know I will get a thorough and fair reading there. They are new editors now, and they seem completely in sync with Ed Ochester’s vision.
I’m glad you mentioned Ed Ochester, who had been the general editor of the Pitt Poetry Series since 1979. He passed away in 2023. Do you have a fond memory of Ed that you’d care to share with the readers?
In 1997, I met Ed at Bennington College. (I was teaching in a high school program and he was on the faculty of the low residency MFA.) I got to hear him read his poem “Pocahontas.” I had just published my book “Kinky” – a book of Barbie poems – and I was hooked by his subversive and wonderful rendering of colonist John Smith's Native American “girlfriend” who he claims saved his life and who he also claims fell in love with him. We had a great talk about feminism and colonialism. He was so amazingly smart and funny! Ed was a fabulous editor and an equally wonderful poet.
“Pink Lady” is being published in January 2025, followed by “The Latest.” Are there other books by you that readers can look forward to in 2025 and beyond?
“In Which” just came out as a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. And I also have another collaborative volume forthcoming. “Tilt,” the last manuscript I wrote with our friend Maureen Seaton before she passed in 2023, is forthcoming from Bridwell Press. The book will actually be part of a two-books-in-one volume paired with “Beautiful People” by Aaron Smith and Maureen. This has been a very fortuitous year for me.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Hollywood.
Gregg Shapiro is the author of nine books including Refrain in Light (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include BarBar, Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal, The Penn Review, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, and confetti, as well as the anthology Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville, 2023). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick, and their dog Coco.
Gregg Shapiro is the author of nine books including Refrain in Light (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include BarBar, Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal, The Penn Review, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Impossible Archetype, and confetti, as well as the anthology Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville, 2023). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick, and their dog Coco.
Mary Lyn Ray interviewed by Amanda Russell
Eagle Pond Farm, home of Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall Photograph by Daphne Bruemmer
The Interview with Mary Lyn Ray:
Amanda Russell: You are a founder of a nonprofit preserving Eagle Pond Farm.
Where and what is Eagle Pond Farm. Why is it important?
Mary Lyn Ray: This New Hampshire farm, right where the edges of three small towns--Danbury, Wilmot, and Andover--come together, is where the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon shared a writing life. Maybe dating to around 1800, the farm had been in Don’s family since the time of the Civil War. The hundred and sixty acres are centered by an early cape typical of New England and an adjacent weathered barn. The steep, wooded flank of Ragged Mountain, which was once pasture for cows, presses into the back of the farmhouse and barn. Beyond the barn and across the road, hayed fields descend to Eagle Pond. Five miles to the south is Kearsarge, the blue mountain so present in the work of Don and Jane.
Neither of them would be the poets they became without the farm.
Don loved it all his life. When growing up in Connecticut, he came every summer to stay with his grandparents and help on the farm. It was there, too, that he first began writing poetry. After he and Jane married in 1972, they came in 1975 to try a year of living and writing at the farm. And they stayed. Jane died there at forty-seven in 1995, when leukemia took her. And Don, months short of ninety, died there in 2018.
Jane said that it was coming to the farm that made her a poet, because it gave her a place to write and a subject to write from and about. There are few of her poems and prose pieces that don’t speak of it or attach to it. As for Don, anyone who has read his work knows that he defined himself by the farm. Both cherished, as well, being part of the surrounding community where, despite their eminence, they were always “Don and Jane” (and always much loved).
Because their lives and their work were so informed by the house and farm and the wrap of place around them--so much that both farm and place have become part of the American literary landscape--there is unusual importance in preserving this, not only as source and context for reading Jane’s and Don’s work but also as reminder of how poetry can inhabit the near and familiar we each know and live with.
AR: How did the nonprofit come about?
MLR: In 2019, the year after Don’s death, the farm was about to be sold at the start of May, and two auctions and an estate sale would be happening that same week. I and other neighbors, friends, and colleagues in historic preservation came together hastily to “do something,” without quite knowing what that “something” would be. Two among us bought the farm to buy some time to put together a plan. Others of us bought what we could at the auctions and estate sale, so not everything would be dispersed. And, very quickly, we realized that we would have to create a nonprofit to acquire and be custodian of the farm and what it’s about. A summary of that story, and the beginnings of At Eagle Pond, Inc., is at our website, https://ateaglepond.org. Newsletters also archived there help fill in what’s been happening since then and what’s ahead.
The stated purpose of the nonprofit, held with deep conviction, is to preserve the farm, honor Jane’s and Don’s work, open the house to the public, invite reflection on poetry and place, and provide residencies during parts of a year where poets and others can take up their own work.
We are careful to say that the farm is not a writing center or an artists’/poets’/writers’ retreat because we intend a broader public program--not only residencies. “Retreat” can also suggest something closed and withdrawn, as well as something only for “artists” or “poets” or “writers,” the opposite of open-to-anyone. But poetry underlies everything.
AR: How did you know Jane and Don?
MLR: When I came here in 1984, they were close neighbors who became close friends of my heart--Don for some thirty-five years, Jane for a too-short ten. Their poetry and their affections for (and celebration of) this place and its occasions showed me how to claim home here. We felt the same profound attachment to what abides here. Because of them, I got to be part of conversations and dinners with poets and writers and others in the arts who came to visit them at Eagle Pond Farm. With Jane and Don I also had companions in the gravest of moments and goofy ones, too. I housesat (or, more accurately, Gus-sat) for them when they were away. And because I’m also a writer and we kept very different hours, we liked to say that, among us, we provided twenty-four- hour literary coverage of South Danbury (where I live) and their end of Wilmot. Now the team is smaller.
AR: What role do you see Eagle Pond Farm playing in the preservation of Don’s and Jane’s legacies?
MLR: There are different ways of looking at legacy. Don’s and Jane’s papers at the University of New Hampshire library archives are one. Another is their poetry and prose out in the world. Also their illumination of the art, craft, and mysteries of writing. And, yes, the story in the house and farm at Eagle Pond (including the legacy of severely-scratched wallpaper left by Don’s last cat, Thelma).
The role of the house and farm is, I believe, to recognize Don and Jane as poets making poetry (and exemplary prose), to sustain what inspired their days and their work and their life together, and to enable visitors to experience that.
We are wanting the story we present to be as true as it can be to the lives Jane and Don lived at the farm and to evoke what they were living with there. We are lucky that long friendships and acquaintance let some of us witness their story close-up, so we’re not starting with only what’s published and feeling left to guess or invent.
AR: When I visited the farm, you talked about general and specific needs and efforts to return or replace items that were lost in the estate sale.
Could you tell us more about that?
MLR: When Don and Jane arrived in 1975, discarding almost nothing from previous generations, they filled the Eagle Pond farmhouse still further with bookshelves, books, art, and their lives.
After the auctions and estate sale, the house felt stripped of what had filled it. And was. Consequently, it read very differently from the house Don and Jane had known. But since you were here, many things--both major and not so major--that got away have been returned by people who bought them. Or we’ve found things in the house not included in the auctions or sale. We’ve also been able to make some substitutions that are very, very like what was there.
Most recently, we are thrilled by the gift of two Paris Review posters (one a Frankenthaler, one a Christo) that had such presence in the house during Jane’s and Don’s years and now help, with that mid-century energy, restore it to itself. They also reference Don’s association with The Paris Review, where he was the first poetry editor, from 1953, when the magazine was founded, to 1961. As noted in our October newsletter, “From outside, the farmhouse looked like just another old New Hampshire cape with extensions and sheds. Coming inside, however, was a Dorothy-knew-she-wasn’t-in-Kansas-anymore moment. Everywhere there were modern graphics and color you might expect in museums but not across from Eagle Pond. . . . This was art that Jane and Don lived with, as much a part of their days as the farm.”
We are well aware that we can’t reconstruct exactly what used to be. I’ve also come to realize that if everything had remained intact, we would have felt an obligation to establish a historic house museum, keeping things (and layers of things!) untouched. That would have had its validity, but it wouldn’t have left room for the life of the farm to continue as a place for the making of poetry. Visitors--and residents especially--wouldn’t have had room to bring their own work there. So maybe some of that loss--or call it paring and editing--was necessary to allow the invigorating new life that’s finding bloom.
AR: What are the challenges facing preservation of the farm?
How can people support the work the nonprofit has taken on?
MLR: The greatest challenge, to answer plainly, is money. Especially money to cover the recurring expenses of owning and maintaining the farm. We begin each year knowing that we have to raise $40,000 to $45,000 just for that, annually. We must also build up match for grants we’ll be applying for, to start work on the house and barn. We need to plan for eventual paid staff: for now, all administration, expertise, and time are donated, so there is no expense for staff. But that can’t be forever. And we should, as well, begin creating endowment to sustain what we’ve taken on and to relieve some of the anxiety of annual fundraising.
Deferred maintenance of the house during Don’s later years has caught up with us, and certain aspects of property have a shelf life, anyway. The house needs considerable exterior repair and paint. Inside, wiring must be updated and some plumbing and heating replaced. Rooms need to be refreshed and repainted but not changed. The farm land, itself, waits for attention to field edges and treework. A view of the pond waits to be restored.
Any gift, of any amount, makes a difference and we truly appreciate each one. Because the nonprofit is a recognized 501(c)(3), all contributions are tax-deductible. A donation can be sent by mail to: At Eagle Pond, Inc. / P.O. Box 452 / Wilmot, NH 03287. Or an online donation, using PayPal, can be made at our website: https://ateaglepond.org/donate.
AR: I know it is the intention of the nonprofit to have poets at the farm again.
Could you talk about that?
MLR: We “have” poets already!--even if not yet resident poets. When we incorporated the nonprofit, we were thinking that, along with preserving the house and farm, our most important “activity” (as IRS calls what a nonprofit does) would be providing residencies to poets. And we still plan toward that, once the house is more ready. But while that’s on pause, we’ve realized the importance of an expanded program of events, workshops, collaborations (we’ve come to love collaborations), and simply opening the house to visitors. Don and Jane would be appalled by those words--“opening the house”--but there are no idling tour buses. Rooms in the house are small and can’t accommodate large groups. So a visitor’s experience is intimate and very real. Though there are no regular days or hours for visiting, we are glad to plan visits in advance.
So . . . among the many visitors coming to pay homage and to learn from the house and farm what Jane’s and Don’s lives and work grew around, are a host of poets. Some are nearby, some from faraway. Some have known Don’s and Jane’s poetry (and other writing) for years, some have only recently found it. Some are long-established, some setting forth.
Before we had learned what worked and what didn’t (yet), our very first residents were a composer/pianist from California (who had set some fifty of Jane’s poems as songs and has now added a selection of Don’s) and a New York singer, musician, actress, and poet who performs and records with him and is involved with him in making “Songs from Eagle Pond” a work for musical theater. They understood they would be camping more than “residing,” but they were game. And they brought us an incredibly rich week, concluding with an impromptu concert. Afterward, we received a long letter about what that week meant to them: having “a chance to work there, to discover new meanings in poems and, honestly, just to sit in the space where the poems were born and crafted.”
Since then, we’ve been substituting day-visits for poets, so they can write at the house if they choose, but they don’t stay there.
We’ve also been experimenting with workshops, including a glorious (if rainy) day back in June for poets and plein air painters together, in collaboration with an art gallery. The comradery and sharing between poets and painters was palpable, as they engaged deeply with what the house and farm opened to them. And their work demonstrated, in many ways, a guiding poet’s counsel that imagery, so important in Jane’s writing, “draws a poem [or painting] away from abstraction and allows entry to what might otherwise remain unapproachable.”
AR: How can people learn about what’s happening at Eagle Pond Farm?
MLR: We welcome anyone to join our e-list to receive our occasional newsletters, typically four a year. The simplest way is to fill out the contact form at our website: https://ateaglepond.org. We are also glad to receive email inquiries: [email protected].
AR: Because you’re also a writer, can you tell us about your work?
MLR: For twenty years I thought I’d found my work in museums, where--besides teaching and composing exhibits and doing the things museums do--I was writing about cultural history and American art. Then, more and more, I was drawn to historic preservation and, most of all, to pondering place and a sense of place. And then--those two words that make every story--I fell into writing picture books for children and knew I was home.
In the introduction to her translations of Anna Akmatova’s poems, Jane cites the Russian scholar who was advising her asking with consternation, “how does one render rodnoi?”--a Russian word about place meaning “all that is dear to me, familiar, my own.” Story is a way I try to. Almost every one begins or develops, some way, in something that has happened in ordinary days here (though none, of course, are really ordinary). Other story may attach to that, and what if may enlarge it; but the beginnings are usually in what I’ve met living on, and with, another old New Hampshire farm.
I love the necessary spareness of a picture book, the challenge of trying to tell something that matters in the smallest way it can be said. I love picture book form and the drama that happens in turning a page. I’m kept alert knowing that it’s children I’m writing for. I love, too, their openness to language and to this world they’ve fallen into and the natural poetry they live with. And even though it’s sometimes hard to surrender to an illustrator the story I see in my head, I love the unexpected ways that stories bloom when told in words and pictures together.
I also want to think that we never have to outgrow picture books and what they invite us into.
Some twenty-five books have been published so far. You can see them at my website, marylynray.com. Many others are waiting for illustration and publication. And there are always others I’m writing. The newest, just out this fall, is When You Find the Right Rock, wonderfully illustrated by Felicita Sala.
Amanda Russell: You are a founder of a nonprofit preserving Eagle Pond Farm.
Where and what is Eagle Pond Farm. Why is it important?
Mary Lyn Ray: This New Hampshire farm, right where the edges of three small towns--Danbury, Wilmot, and Andover--come together, is where the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon shared a writing life. Maybe dating to around 1800, the farm had been in Don’s family since the time of the Civil War. The hundred and sixty acres are centered by an early cape typical of New England and an adjacent weathered barn. The steep, wooded flank of Ragged Mountain, which was once pasture for cows, presses into the back of the farmhouse and barn. Beyond the barn and across the road, hayed fields descend to Eagle Pond. Five miles to the south is Kearsarge, the blue mountain so present in the work of Don and Jane.
Neither of them would be the poets they became without the farm.
Don loved it all his life. When growing up in Connecticut, he came every summer to stay with his grandparents and help on the farm. It was there, too, that he first began writing poetry. After he and Jane married in 1972, they came in 1975 to try a year of living and writing at the farm. And they stayed. Jane died there at forty-seven in 1995, when leukemia took her. And Don, months short of ninety, died there in 2018.
Jane said that it was coming to the farm that made her a poet, because it gave her a place to write and a subject to write from and about. There are few of her poems and prose pieces that don’t speak of it or attach to it. As for Don, anyone who has read his work knows that he defined himself by the farm. Both cherished, as well, being part of the surrounding community where, despite their eminence, they were always “Don and Jane” (and always much loved).
Because their lives and their work were so informed by the house and farm and the wrap of place around them--so much that both farm and place have become part of the American literary landscape--there is unusual importance in preserving this, not only as source and context for reading Jane’s and Don’s work but also as reminder of how poetry can inhabit the near and familiar we each know and live with.
AR: How did the nonprofit come about?
MLR: In 2019, the year after Don’s death, the farm was about to be sold at the start of May, and two auctions and an estate sale would be happening that same week. I and other neighbors, friends, and colleagues in historic preservation came together hastily to “do something,” without quite knowing what that “something” would be. Two among us bought the farm to buy some time to put together a plan. Others of us bought what we could at the auctions and estate sale, so not everything would be dispersed. And, very quickly, we realized that we would have to create a nonprofit to acquire and be custodian of the farm and what it’s about. A summary of that story, and the beginnings of At Eagle Pond, Inc., is at our website, https://ateaglepond.org. Newsletters also archived there help fill in what’s been happening since then and what’s ahead.
The stated purpose of the nonprofit, held with deep conviction, is to preserve the farm, honor Jane’s and Don’s work, open the house to the public, invite reflection on poetry and place, and provide residencies during parts of a year where poets and others can take up their own work.
We are careful to say that the farm is not a writing center or an artists’/poets’/writers’ retreat because we intend a broader public program--not only residencies. “Retreat” can also suggest something closed and withdrawn, as well as something only for “artists” or “poets” or “writers,” the opposite of open-to-anyone. But poetry underlies everything.
AR: How did you know Jane and Don?
MLR: When I came here in 1984, they were close neighbors who became close friends of my heart--Don for some thirty-five years, Jane for a too-short ten. Their poetry and their affections for (and celebration of) this place and its occasions showed me how to claim home here. We felt the same profound attachment to what abides here. Because of them, I got to be part of conversations and dinners with poets and writers and others in the arts who came to visit them at Eagle Pond Farm. With Jane and Don I also had companions in the gravest of moments and goofy ones, too. I housesat (or, more accurately, Gus-sat) for them when they were away. And because I’m also a writer and we kept very different hours, we liked to say that, among us, we provided twenty-four- hour literary coverage of South Danbury (where I live) and their end of Wilmot. Now the team is smaller.
AR: What role do you see Eagle Pond Farm playing in the preservation of Don’s and Jane’s legacies?
MLR: There are different ways of looking at legacy. Don’s and Jane’s papers at the University of New Hampshire library archives are one. Another is their poetry and prose out in the world. Also their illumination of the art, craft, and mysteries of writing. And, yes, the story in the house and farm at Eagle Pond (including the legacy of severely-scratched wallpaper left by Don’s last cat, Thelma).
The role of the house and farm is, I believe, to recognize Don and Jane as poets making poetry (and exemplary prose), to sustain what inspired their days and their work and their life together, and to enable visitors to experience that.
We are wanting the story we present to be as true as it can be to the lives Jane and Don lived at the farm and to evoke what they were living with there. We are lucky that long friendships and acquaintance let some of us witness their story close-up, so we’re not starting with only what’s published and feeling left to guess or invent.
AR: When I visited the farm, you talked about general and specific needs and efforts to return or replace items that were lost in the estate sale.
Could you tell us more about that?
MLR: When Don and Jane arrived in 1975, discarding almost nothing from previous generations, they filled the Eagle Pond farmhouse still further with bookshelves, books, art, and their lives.
After the auctions and estate sale, the house felt stripped of what had filled it. And was. Consequently, it read very differently from the house Don and Jane had known. But since you were here, many things--both major and not so major--that got away have been returned by people who bought them. Or we’ve found things in the house not included in the auctions or sale. We’ve also been able to make some substitutions that are very, very like what was there.
Most recently, we are thrilled by the gift of two Paris Review posters (one a Frankenthaler, one a Christo) that had such presence in the house during Jane’s and Don’s years and now help, with that mid-century energy, restore it to itself. They also reference Don’s association with The Paris Review, where he was the first poetry editor, from 1953, when the magazine was founded, to 1961. As noted in our October newsletter, “From outside, the farmhouse looked like just another old New Hampshire cape with extensions and sheds. Coming inside, however, was a Dorothy-knew-she-wasn’t-in-Kansas-anymore moment. Everywhere there were modern graphics and color you might expect in museums but not across from Eagle Pond. . . . This was art that Jane and Don lived with, as much a part of their days as the farm.”
We are well aware that we can’t reconstruct exactly what used to be. I’ve also come to realize that if everything had remained intact, we would have felt an obligation to establish a historic house museum, keeping things (and layers of things!) untouched. That would have had its validity, but it wouldn’t have left room for the life of the farm to continue as a place for the making of poetry. Visitors--and residents especially--wouldn’t have had room to bring their own work there. So maybe some of that loss--or call it paring and editing--was necessary to allow the invigorating new life that’s finding bloom.
AR: What are the challenges facing preservation of the farm?
How can people support the work the nonprofit has taken on?
MLR: The greatest challenge, to answer plainly, is money. Especially money to cover the recurring expenses of owning and maintaining the farm. We begin each year knowing that we have to raise $40,000 to $45,000 just for that, annually. We must also build up match for grants we’ll be applying for, to start work on the house and barn. We need to plan for eventual paid staff: for now, all administration, expertise, and time are donated, so there is no expense for staff. But that can’t be forever. And we should, as well, begin creating endowment to sustain what we’ve taken on and to relieve some of the anxiety of annual fundraising.
Deferred maintenance of the house during Don’s later years has caught up with us, and certain aspects of property have a shelf life, anyway. The house needs considerable exterior repair and paint. Inside, wiring must be updated and some plumbing and heating replaced. Rooms need to be refreshed and repainted but not changed. The farm land, itself, waits for attention to field edges and treework. A view of the pond waits to be restored.
Any gift, of any amount, makes a difference and we truly appreciate each one. Because the nonprofit is a recognized 501(c)(3), all contributions are tax-deductible. A donation can be sent by mail to: At Eagle Pond, Inc. / P.O. Box 452 / Wilmot, NH 03287. Or an online donation, using PayPal, can be made at our website: https://ateaglepond.org/donate.
AR: I know it is the intention of the nonprofit to have poets at the farm again.
Could you talk about that?
MLR: We “have” poets already!--even if not yet resident poets. When we incorporated the nonprofit, we were thinking that, along with preserving the house and farm, our most important “activity” (as IRS calls what a nonprofit does) would be providing residencies to poets. And we still plan toward that, once the house is more ready. But while that’s on pause, we’ve realized the importance of an expanded program of events, workshops, collaborations (we’ve come to love collaborations), and simply opening the house to visitors. Don and Jane would be appalled by those words--“opening the house”--but there are no idling tour buses. Rooms in the house are small and can’t accommodate large groups. So a visitor’s experience is intimate and very real. Though there are no regular days or hours for visiting, we are glad to plan visits in advance.
So . . . among the many visitors coming to pay homage and to learn from the house and farm what Jane’s and Don’s lives and work grew around, are a host of poets. Some are nearby, some from faraway. Some have known Don’s and Jane’s poetry (and other writing) for years, some have only recently found it. Some are long-established, some setting forth.
Before we had learned what worked and what didn’t (yet), our very first residents were a composer/pianist from California (who had set some fifty of Jane’s poems as songs and has now added a selection of Don’s) and a New York singer, musician, actress, and poet who performs and records with him and is involved with him in making “Songs from Eagle Pond” a work for musical theater. They understood they would be camping more than “residing,” but they were game. And they brought us an incredibly rich week, concluding with an impromptu concert. Afterward, we received a long letter about what that week meant to them: having “a chance to work there, to discover new meanings in poems and, honestly, just to sit in the space where the poems were born and crafted.”
Since then, we’ve been substituting day-visits for poets, so they can write at the house if they choose, but they don’t stay there.
We’ve also been experimenting with workshops, including a glorious (if rainy) day back in June for poets and plein air painters together, in collaboration with an art gallery. The comradery and sharing between poets and painters was palpable, as they engaged deeply with what the house and farm opened to them. And their work demonstrated, in many ways, a guiding poet’s counsel that imagery, so important in Jane’s writing, “draws a poem [or painting] away from abstraction and allows entry to what might otherwise remain unapproachable.”
AR: How can people learn about what’s happening at Eagle Pond Farm?
MLR: We welcome anyone to join our e-list to receive our occasional newsletters, typically four a year. The simplest way is to fill out the contact form at our website: https://ateaglepond.org. We are also glad to receive email inquiries: [email protected].
AR: Because you’re also a writer, can you tell us about your work?
MLR: For twenty years I thought I’d found my work in museums, where--besides teaching and composing exhibits and doing the things museums do--I was writing about cultural history and American art. Then, more and more, I was drawn to historic preservation and, most of all, to pondering place and a sense of place. And then--those two words that make every story--I fell into writing picture books for children and knew I was home.
In the introduction to her translations of Anna Akmatova’s poems, Jane cites the Russian scholar who was advising her asking with consternation, “how does one render rodnoi?”--a Russian word about place meaning “all that is dear to me, familiar, my own.” Story is a way I try to. Almost every one begins or develops, some way, in something that has happened in ordinary days here (though none, of course, are really ordinary). Other story may attach to that, and what if may enlarge it; but the beginnings are usually in what I’ve met living on, and with, another old New Hampshire farm.
I love the necessary spareness of a picture book, the challenge of trying to tell something that matters in the smallest way it can be said. I love picture book form and the drama that happens in turning a page. I’m kept alert knowing that it’s children I’m writing for. I love, too, their openness to language and to this world they’ve fallen into and the natural poetry they live with. And even though it’s sometimes hard to surrender to an illustrator the story I see in my head, I love the unexpected ways that stories bloom when told in words and pictures together.
I also want to think that we never have to outgrow picture books and what they invite us into.
Some twenty-five books have been published so far. You can see them at my website, marylynray.com. Many others are waiting for illustration and publication. And there are always others I’m writing. The newest, just out this fall, is When You Find the Right Rock, wonderfully illustrated by Felicita Sala.
Top row from left to right: Don’s briefcase; Jane’s scarf and purse; Don’s old upstairs study.
Bottom row from left to right: Eagle Pond; Jane’s books; Jane’s irises.
(photos by Amanda Russell)
Bottom row from left to right: Eagle Pond; Jane’s books; Jane’s irises.
(photos by Amanda Russell)
On Eagle Pond Farm: a personal statement by Amanda Russell
Finding a Long Gray Hair
by Jane Kenyon
I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.
(Jane Kenyon Collected Poems Greywolf Press 2007)
Amanda Russell: I lived in New Hampshire for only 364 days. But every time we move, I get to know my new region by reading its poets. I started with Robert Frost’s book New Hampshire which my husband gifted me for my birthday. At the recommendation of a friend, I read Jane Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours and folded the corner of over half its pages. I even wrote poetic responses to “Apple Dropping into Deep Early Snow,” “Song” and other poems of hers. Then I began reading her Collected Poems. From Room to Room and onward, I found examples of ordinary moments opened into something deeper, more immediate and engaging than mere observation, as in her poems “Finding a Long Gray Hair,” “Year Day,” and “What Came to Me.” I was happy to discover a poet who wrote from home, often from within her home, and about what she saw around her home. Searching for recordings of Jane reading her work, I found the documentary by Bill Moyers titled A Life Together, Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall and watched it twice.
How far away was Eagle Pond Farm from my duplex in Enfield, New Hampshire? Only 26.4 miles. I made a promise to visit though I did not act on that promise right away in the slick darkness of winter. In spring, my husband got an offer for a tenure track job for which we’d move across the country in early June. I emailed Mary Lyn requesting a tour of Eagle Pond Farm.
We met at the Farm during the weekend of Mother’s Day 2023. Before walking “room to room,” I was greeted by Jane’s irises in bloom. I saw firsthand the aprons she wore, her purse and scarf left hanging on a nail by the kitchen stairs, the coffee mug and posters she got from Graywolf Press. I stood in her office, looking through the window she would have looked up mid-poem to look through. There’s a “Sorry We’re CLOSED” sign hanging from her desk lamp.
I saw the effects of the estate sales: bookshelves emptied and walls missing much of Don and Jane’s contemporary art collection. Two Glenwood stoves, the painted bed and Donald’s desk had to be bought back from auction to bring home. Every room of the house lends depth to Jane and Don’s story: the light switch cover of Michelangelo’s David, the scorch marks on the living room floor, and the sign above the Caldecott Room. Even the empty room upstairs speaks through a circle scuffed paintless on the wood floor. Like an open mouth, it tells where Donald’s desk— where he— had once been. In the living room, his soft brown leather briefcase patched with silver duct tape sits on a bookshelf by his blue chair.
On my route home, at the recommendation of Mary Lyn, I stopped by the nearby summer camp that many of Jane’s poems, such as “Campers Leaving: Summer 1981,” reference. I stood by Eagle Pond watching my shadow stand firm in the shift of choppy waves and was renewed. A month later, I moved from New Hampshire and took with me the love for Jane and Don and Eagle Pond Farm.
November 2024
Interview With A Poet:
Becka McKay
Interview With A Poet:
Becka McKay
Becka Mara McKay is a poet and translator. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book of poems is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press). You can find her recent work in Witness, Salt Hill Journal, Bennington Review, and Notre Dame Review.
SoFloPoJo: You said at a panel discussion not too long ago that you were reading one poetry collection per day. Are you still doing that? Is it the Sealey Challenge?
Becka: Ha! This is a funny question because I started reading a book a day in the fall of 2017 when I was on sabbatical and wanted to do something to mark that achievement. So I read a book of poetry a day for four months, and I liked it so much I did it again the following summer, and then I did it again at the beginning of the pandemic for almost a year. I don’t know when Nicole Sealey started the Sealey challenge, but no, this was not part of that. I fully encourage people to do the Sealey challenge, though! I am not reading a book a day currently. I imagine that when the books start to pile up again I will.
SoFloPoJo: Are you currently working on a collection? Do you generally have a project going?
Becka: I am currently working on a series of poems in which I retranslate every verse of the Song of Songs and write a golden shovel for each. I am only about halfway through chapter 3 (out of 8), so I don’t really know what the final collection will be like (or if it even will be a collection), but there are 117 verses in this particular book of the Hebrew Bible, so this is a years-long project. I often make challenges for myself like this to see what happens next, which is the only answer I can give to the question “do you generally have a project going”.
Here are two of the golden shovels that were recently published: https://bombaylitmag.com/issue58-becka-mara-mckay/. A third one is coming out soon in Shō.
SoFloPoJo: You've translated fiction from Hebrew. Tell us something about that and will you translate poetry at some point?
Becka: I have translated a great deal of both fiction and poetry from Modern Hebrew—my doctoral dissertation, in fact, is a collection of more than one hundred poems translated from Hebrew accompanied by a critical introduction. (Here is my most recent published translation:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2023/03/03/shimon-adaf-translation-becka-mara-mckay/chronicles/poetry/
While I find translating fiction much, much easier than translating poetry, I find translating poetry is more rewarding. Never am I more aware that translation is the closest possible form of reading than when I am translating a poem: I’m examining etymologies in both languages, considering each word sometimes on a letter-by-letter basis. One of the reasons I’m so absorbed by my new Song of Songs project is that it allows me to both translate and write poems, rather than my usual practice of alternating between poetry and translation projects.
SoFloPoJo: How does translating fiction and poetry affect your own writing? Do you write fiction as well as poetry?
Becka: I do not write fiction (which might be one of the reasons that translating it seems easier for me), although I feel like I am often threatening to start.
I have thought (and written) a lot about the relationship between my translation work and my own poetry. The short answer is that for decades now they have been in a productive struggle for my time and attention. It is impossible for the voices I translate not to leak into my own work—I’m a writer, so words are my medium, and translation provides me with a lot of words! And the research I do while translating is often the spark for my poems. The idea of translation works its way into my poems quite often—my most recent book has a series of poems about various animals as “mistranslations.” Conversely, when I translate I find that I have to be rigorous about creating a voice in English that isn’t just a version of my own voice.
SoFloPoJo: What is your most recent book? Can you tell us more about this idea of animals as "mistranslation?" That's really interesting.
Becka: My most recent book, The Little Book of No Consolation, came out in 2021. Much of the framework for the book developed from the year I spent writing daily responses to a calendar, “Forgotten English,” that I was given by a former student. I wrote a series of poems that were each from a nonexistent book called The Dictionary of Misremembered English, and those poems introduce the sections, which themselves contain bits of other series of poems, including a series of poems about the “secretary of the Apocrypha,” a series called “Happiness Is the New Bedtime,” and the mistranslation poems, which are all titled “X as Mistranslation” where X is the Latin name of the animal (or, in one case, tree). So there is “Sayornis phoebe as Mistranslation,” in which I consider the song the of the Eastern Phoebe, and “Aeshna umbrosa as Mistranslation,” in which I observe a cardinal eating a dragonfly, and “Larus argentatus as Mistranslation,” which takes as its inspiration my work as a volunteer at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota. I think there are eight of these poems in total. I write about animals a lot, particularly birds. I have two poems in the newest issue of Bennington Review—one is about mockingbirds and one is about lizards. I appreciate the challenge in trying to write about animals in a way that feels authentic and not sentimental or cliched.
SoFloPoJo: To wrap up, can you tell us the line-up of poets who might be coming to Florida Atlantic University (FAU) ?
Becka: We have a great event coming up on Wednesday, October 16—one of our two new creative writing faculty members, Romeo Oriogun, is reading. He is the author of, most recently, The Gathering of Bastards, which was a finalist for last year’s National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He is a remarkable poet and I hope all of your readers will come to Boca for the event!
SoFloPoJo: You said at a panel discussion not too long ago that you were reading one poetry collection per day. Are you still doing that? Is it the Sealey Challenge?
Becka: Ha! This is a funny question because I started reading a book a day in the fall of 2017 when I was on sabbatical and wanted to do something to mark that achievement. So I read a book of poetry a day for four months, and I liked it so much I did it again the following summer, and then I did it again at the beginning of the pandemic for almost a year. I don’t know when Nicole Sealey started the Sealey challenge, but no, this was not part of that. I fully encourage people to do the Sealey challenge, though! I am not reading a book a day currently. I imagine that when the books start to pile up again I will.
SoFloPoJo: Are you currently working on a collection? Do you generally have a project going?
Becka: I am currently working on a series of poems in which I retranslate every verse of the Song of Songs and write a golden shovel for each. I am only about halfway through chapter 3 (out of 8), so I don’t really know what the final collection will be like (or if it even will be a collection), but there are 117 verses in this particular book of the Hebrew Bible, so this is a years-long project. I often make challenges for myself like this to see what happens next, which is the only answer I can give to the question “do you generally have a project going”.
Here are two of the golden shovels that were recently published: https://bombaylitmag.com/issue58-becka-mara-mckay/. A third one is coming out soon in Shō.
SoFloPoJo: You've translated fiction from Hebrew. Tell us something about that and will you translate poetry at some point?
Becka: I have translated a great deal of both fiction and poetry from Modern Hebrew—my doctoral dissertation, in fact, is a collection of more than one hundred poems translated from Hebrew accompanied by a critical introduction. (Here is my most recent published translation:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2023/03/03/shimon-adaf-translation-becka-mara-mckay/chronicles/poetry/
While I find translating fiction much, much easier than translating poetry, I find translating poetry is more rewarding. Never am I more aware that translation is the closest possible form of reading than when I am translating a poem: I’m examining etymologies in both languages, considering each word sometimes on a letter-by-letter basis. One of the reasons I’m so absorbed by my new Song of Songs project is that it allows me to both translate and write poems, rather than my usual practice of alternating between poetry and translation projects.
SoFloPoJo: How does translating fiction and poetry affect your own writing? Do you write fiction as well as poetry?
Becka: I do not write fiction (which might be one of the reasons that translating it seems easier for me), although I feel like I am often threatening to start.
I have thought (and written) a lot about the relationship between my translation work and my own poetry. The short answer is that for decades now they have been in a productive struggle for my time and attention. It is impossible for the voices I translate not to leak into my own work—I’m a writer, so words are my medium, and translation provides me with a lot of words! And the research I do while translating is often the spark for my poems. The idea of translation works its way into my poems quite often—my most recent book has a series of poems about various animals as “mistranslations.” Conversely, when I translate I find that I have to be rigorous about creating a voice in English that isn’t just a version of my own voice.
SoFloPoJo: What is your most recent book? Can you tell us more about this idea of animals as "mistranslation?" That's really interesting.
Becka: My most recent book, The Little Book of No Consolation, came out in 2021. Much of the framework for the book developed from the year I spent writing daily responses to a calendar, “Forgotten English,” that I was given by a former student. I wrote a series of poems that were each from a nonexistent book called The Dictionary of Misremembered English, and those poems introduce the sections, which themselves contain bits of other series of poems, including a series of poems about the “secretary of the Apocrypha,” a series called “Happiness Is the New Bedtime,” and the mistranslation poems, which are all titled “X as Mistranslation” where X is the Latin name of the animal (or, in one case, tree). So there is “Sayornis phoebe as Mistranslation,” in which I consider the song the of the Eastern Phoebe, and “Aeshna umbrosa as Mistranslation,” in which I observe a cardinal eating a dragonfly, and “Larus argentatus as Mistranslation,” which takes as its inspiration my work as a volunteer at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota. I think there are eight of these poems in total. I write about animals a lot, particularly birds. I have two poems in the newest issue of Bennington Review—one is about mockingbirds and one is about lizards. I appreciate the challenge in trying to write about animals in a way that feels authentic and not sentimental or cliched.
SoFloPoJo: To wrap up, can you tell us the line-up of poets who might be coming to Florida Atlantic University (FAU) ?
Becka: We have a great event coming up on Wednesday, October 16—one of our two new creative writing faculty members, Romeo Oriogun, is reading. He is the author of, most recently, The Gathering of Bastards, which was a finalist for last year’s National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He is a remarkable poet and I hope all of your readers will come to Boca for the event!
August 2024 Interviews
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Jennifer Franklin & Jim Daniels
hosted by Judy Ireland Discussing the Q & A gauntlet: Jim Daniels: " During the Q & A―maybe this is part of my fear of Q & A― a guy got up and said 'Well, what you're writing is not poetry, and ah, you're just flaunting your working class genitals.' ―which I though would make a good title for a book..." |
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May 2024 Interviews
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Dorianne Laux & AE 'Earl' Hines
with Lenny DellaRocca hosted by Judy Ireland Discussing poetry written in her Monday Workshop: Dorianne Laux: “The last one we wrote, Earl, this last Monday was one that I pulled a phrase from one of the poems in your book – I think it was the last one you read: “I did die that summer”... (from AE Hines poem: “Sacramento 1994) AE “Earl” Hines: “Well you know what’s ironic about that, I wrote that poem after reading “Bakersfield 1969” (by Dorianne Laux) Dorianne Laux: “Are you kidding?!” We invite you to view the video for more. |
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Dorianne Laux in conversation with AE "Earl" Hines & Lenny DellaRocca
hosted by Judy Ireland, SoFloPoJo Reading Series Producer
see more of Dorianne Laux and AE Hines here:
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/sfpj-video-2024-25.html
hosted by Judy Ireland, SoFloPoJo Reading Series Producer
see more of Dorianne Laux and AE Hines here:
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/sfpj-video-2024-25.html
February 2024 Interviews
The Wanderer’s Embrace: A Conversation With Charles Kell
You can read W.J. Herbert's review of Charles Kell's Ishmael Mask at
https://www.valpo.edu/valparaiso-poetry-review/2023/12/18/charles-kell-review-by-w-j-herbert/
Neither Charles Kell nor I knew each other when I first reached out to him, but Autumn House Press had just published his award-winning debut collection, Cage of Lit Glass, and I was hoping to speak to him privately about the process. Because he was so unfailingly generous with his time, I hoped that when his new collection came out, we could discuss that one, too. Miguel Murphy describes Ishmael Mask as “tender, gothic, and wonderfully catastrophic,” and I heartily agree. In the conversation that follows, Kell and I talk about his creation of the collection: his artistic wanderings through its obsessions, absurdities, and passions. - W.J. Herbert
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W.J. Herbert: Charles, Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me and congratulations on this second collection! In your first, the award-winning Cage of Lit Glass, the book itself functions as a cage whose lit glass we peer through as we read, the poems “Words describing eyes written in a book/of glass.” In your newest collection, Ishmael Mask, the speaker has almost lost the ability to see. “I saw my face reflected from a metal/cup—black circles where my eyes/should be—open, dark. Is this a fundamental difference between the two collections? If so what, if any, explorations in Cage of Lit Glass and/or your prize-winning chapbook Pierre Mask [SurVision Books, 2021] led to this shift?
Charles Kell: First, thank you, truly, Wendy, for these insightful and deep questions. In Cage I was really trying to write the poems that were anathema to me, that made me uncomfortable, really, sick to my stomach, and were the opposite of what I was previously doing, how I started to write poems. I thought it might be the only book I do, so I wanted to put everything in them. The book works as a cage in some ways—many of the speakers are trapped in various physical, emotional, psychological enclosures, but there are many openings, chances for escape as well. In some ways the book is a cenotaph. I wanted to think about experiences, situations, friends, time, periods that are over. The book is filled with intertextual engagements and allusions—there are a handful of poems that take titles from and reference Kafka. However, the fundamental themes are incarceration, substance abuse, and a wreck my friends were in in 1999. Ishmael Mask, on the other hand, is not as concerned with the past, with “friends” as deeply, with thinking through certain “narrative” experiences. I was playing around much more, having fun through the lenses of Melville, Tomaž Šalamun; again, there are multiple intertextual relations but I was not concerned with constructing more straight-forward narrative poems. Though, there are many in there. I am constantly at odds. That is, I do like narrative poetry but I get bored quickly. An entire book (my own) of narrative poetry loses me. The poems lose the “punch” after so many in a row. Sometimes I think “just write a short story already.” Similarly, I love experimental, nonnarrative, surreal poetry where there are not clear footholds, but in the same way after so many in a row, I get lost, bored. I like a mix of both. Timothy Liu recently said he prefers my poems where I “lift my mask” and reveal more of myself. I took this to mean more narrative poems, or poems that have an intense, personal element, perhaps. I’m not sure or doubt that, for me at least, the more straightforward narrative poems lift any mask at all. It’s simply another mask; it’s just another persona relating this narrative moment. Maybe most nonnarrative poems feel closer to me, while the so-called “confessional” poems feel like another person. However, this was / is the advice I desperately needed to hear—it was so insightful. I took it to heart. At times, I can get lost with disparate voices, references, making poems “too cute.” I have a pantoum, “Titorelli,” referencing the court painter in Kafka’s The Trial; I like the poem but I don’t know if it’s a good poem; I don’t know, or I don’t think it’s really saying anything. I think what Tim Liu was telling me, reiterating, was to continue to write the hard stuff, the extremely difficult stuff that I, I admit, run from often. I love dark places but I don’t want to live in them. But I need to continue to go there…this was such helpful feedback, it actually helps me rethink and refocus on what I want to do.
WJH: In both collections, the act of writing and drawing figures prominently. In “The Carcasser” from Cage of Lit Glass, the speaker has “picked at the bodies of both living & dead,” as if his writing constructed by taking a body, “Ripping it open & then sticking/a pencil in the ribs to dig around.” As the speaker remarks in “Oblivion Letter,” the process is inward-looking: “Words you write when your shadow arrives.”
But in Ishmael Mask, the focus of the writing shifts outward, as in “Frames,” in which the speaker concludes, “…that one can draw/ loss, draw frost without anyone knowing//what it is, draw the color of night, draw—/for the final time—the light reaching the trees into nowhere.” Is a different ontological definition reflected in this shift?
CK: Writing and drawing, painting, novels and poetry—these are my life. Everything is a Künstlerroman for me. In Cage I was coming to terms and thinking through poems with subject matter that was not wholly mine. I was driving back to Marc’s house from the bar, back in 2016, and I showed him my story, “An Emptying”; he read it in the car and was silent then started joking—“here’s my carcass, my body, pick me clean”—and we laughed, howling out the windows. Most often, writing, books are all a person has, say, in jail / prison, in a small apartment, off somewhere alone; writing and books in Cage serve a specific purpose of thinking through these people and experiences. That if I could write it, get it down…I don’t know, it would simply “be all down.” It doesn’t change anything. Poetry, art, doesn’t do anything, change things about life. But I go back and forth with this. It changed my life in many ways. It means everything to me. I honestly don’t think I’d be here if not for these things. I worried in Cage about writing: am I using people? Am I simply turning horrific experiences into neat poems, couplets and quatrains? And, the answer, I guess, is yes. I was hoping not to do this as much in Ishmael, not for any reason other than “I already did that,” but there are many narrative poems in the new book. It’s subjective, in that I don’t want another poem going over the same material, subject matter. I just get bored with it in my own work. So, the philosophical shift, difference in definition, is one dealing with time and practice of poems. The drawing, the writing in Cage was much more focused on interiority, taking thoughts, feelings I’ve had for twenty years and seeing if I could construct these poems I wanted to make. I wanted Ishmael to be different, even though there are similarities. I wanted the writing, the drawing to focus on the present, the acts of writing in and for the moment. Now, I want to go further, in different directions.
WJH: Some of the writing in Ishmael Mask comes directly from the 19th century. The collection’s third poem, “Monsieur Melville” begins with contemporary lexicon, but it’s second quatrain quotes from Moby-Dick, “All right, sir, are your papers in order?/Is it a nag or a whaler?” How were you able to so successfully integrate 19th century ontological concerns and specific language with your 21st century perspective and approach to language?
CK: I am obsessed with the filmmaker, Nina Menkes. Dissolution (2010), her adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite films. An earlier film, The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983) opens with a stirring quote from The Book of Job, and this film had such an impact on me. Biblical language influences me a great deal, though I’m not a believer. I love dearly nineteenth-century American literature, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson. Initially, there was so much more language, other poems with that type of diction—I became overzealous. Miguel Murphy said I needed to take some out, that it wasn’t working. I trust him completely. All of those novels, that writing is still so relevant, so concerned with life. The poet, the artist is a wanderer, always looking for something, always trying out new things, knowing the whole time, that he/she/they will probably never find it. One becomes the act, the practice. I love the language of those books, the twisting, labyrinthine sentences, and how thoughts and philosophy accrues. Those books are worlds unto themselves. I wanted to integrate, interweave, and experience the language in my poems. Back to drawing, writing: many if not all the poems are love letters to my artistic obsessions. In my new work, I’m hoping to focus and think through some of the films of Nina Menkes, the films of Chantal Akerman.
WJH: Is there a parallel between the Pequod’s futile search for Moby-Dick and the speaker’s journey in Ishmael Mask? Are the unknowable “whale cathedrals” in your poem “Ambergris,” indicative of this?
CK: Ha! I love this question so much! Art is paradox, endless contradiction. Poems, novels, paintings—they are obviously journeys…but toward what, I have no idea. I think art is futile in some sense, but, again, for me, it is the most important thing. How do I reconcile with feeling that poetry and art make nothing happen, while dedicating my life to it, with thinking I wouldn’t be here if not for these things? I’m with Ishmael all the way on the Pequod. There is a “damp, drizzly November” within me, that it’s “high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I honestly don’t think I write / read to stave off ennui, malaise, but maybe there is something there. Maybe it works that way on a much more unconscious level than Ishmael’s. I love his feelings, his sentiment. I have a confession: maybe I am, in my heart, a Romantic? I want the same things Ishmael wants. The search for the whale is different for Ishmael than it is for Ahab. I have no whale. As for the speaker’s journey(s) in Ishmael Mask—he’s simply a wanderer as well; he’s looking with no clear purpose, no ultimate direction in mind. Maybe running and leaving and hiding a bit.
WJH: Ishmael Mask contains a number of poems that seem to mock their speaker. In “Queequeg Mask,” the speaker carves a coffin and then lies inside, as did Moby-Dick’s Queequeg. The poem’s concluding lines quote Melville directly: “if a man made up his mind to live,/ mere sickness could not kill him.” A speaker’s hubris appears again in “Memnon Stone, Terror Stone.” Here, the character Pierre has challenged a stone to fall on and kill him and, when it doesn’t, he stands “haughtily on his feet,/as he owed thanks to none, and went/on his moody way.” In a final example, the speaker seems to mock himself as he dreams of a “wine-dark” sea; he, the heroic Odysseus, his prison cell, a ship. Can you explain whether these poems are meant to be read ironically? And, if so, how do they function in the collection?
CK: Initially I thought Ishmael Mask to be much more insouciant, playful, funnier than Cage. Some folks have said this is not really so. I thought the speakers in these poems, though serious at times, were also winking and giggling. There is a self-mockery when I find I’m taking myself too seriously. It’s serious but it’s also a joke. I love gallows’ humor, the most inappropriate joking, etc. The darkest places are the funniest, the silliest, where the most absurd things happen. I mean, for me, the very act of writing a poem is absurd. It’s complete hubris—“I have something to say, etc.” There are so many poems, so much art in the world, to think that I dare add to that—ha. There must be this acknowledgment of hubris, too, in a way. That one must think on the complete flip side, that one does have something new to say, that yes…I can add to this history. Even though it will all be forgotten in the near future. It’s the absurdity of creation that I find so lovely and intriguing. The complete dedication, the belief in oneself, the complete commitment to something that will soon be washed out to sea. I love it! So, there’s irony, there’s absurdity; dark humor, laughter; however, my absurdity is also my seriousness, that is, this is generally how I feel, think, believe.
WJH: Cage of Lit Glass, Pierre Mask, and Ishmael Mask are all image-rich, and no image in them is more intriguing to me than that of floating. In Cage’s “Bodybuilder,” the speaker says: “I can become something else./Take my eyes outside, let them float/overhead.” The opening lines of the third section’s “The Lost Boy,” begin: “Headless statues float in a broken/open Cornell box…”
In Ishmael Mask, the floating seems to have taken on an entirely different quality. In “Ohio”, it seems whimsical: “Later, we huddle in// the flooded basement, watching//the washing machine float by./We call it a chapel.” And though the poem “Frames,” will reach a darker conclusion, its initial buoyancy seems almost magical: “For the moment we are floating/out on one of the black/islands you describe so clearly, serene,/comfort, you say…” Do you think this change describes a shift in the speaker’s orientation?
CK: I was five years old, in my parents’ house, walking back to my room over brown carpet when I suddenly realized, huh, this life is all there is, there is nothing else. I didn’t feel sad, glad, or really anything at all at this moment. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong? But my whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been floating along, that I’m both here and not really here. I then try to stay in the moment, be as present as I possibly can, and that works a little. But when I’m reading, writing I feel as if it’s not really happening. Sitting in a jail / prison cell back in 2006 / 2007, sitting in rehab, or even visiting a loved one in hospital—things that seem “really real” were strange, as though I were floating along the whole time. I’m not making sense, I know. Carrie and I just returned from hiking in Vermont. It was such an amazing time. I’m walking up this mountain, stepping on rocks, but it’s still as though part of me is not there. I am so tickled you pointed those moments out to me. I’m thinking now, damn, I should have edited some of the “floating stuff” but it’s how I’ve always felt and I can’t get outside of it. Ishmael is a floating character; Pierre is a character who floats. Bartleby is a cloud. All of Kafka’s characters are individuals who float. Beckett’s characters are floating voices.
WJH: Both of your collections, toward their conclusions, include a poem set in what might be considered an Elysium. The first, “Tower of Birds” is takes place in a garden with swans circling, beetles sleeping, and a speaker who is “made of earth, cool /moss” covering his feet. The second setting is wilder: a field somewhere in Kansas where water is absent, but hoped for and a missing person is sought. In both poems, the speaker is accompanied, and I wonder if you might talk about the difference between the speaker’s companions in poems which conclude very differently.
CK: I spend a good deal of time alone. I love being alone and crave solitude. Many of my poems feature lone speakers in lonely environments. On the flip side, I love people. People are so beguiling, frustrating, strange, horrible, cruel and also caring, compassionate; people are simultaneously boring yet wildly unpredictable; people are just so damn weird—I’m stating the obvious here. Often, I think, the poet is all Id, all animal and wild, complete monomaniacal (like Ahab!), me me me, the “I,” etc., whereas the novelist is more Ego, more concerned, ultimately, with the lives of people. I don’t really believe this and think it much more diffuse, complicated than my bad dichotomy. I know poets who care much more about the world of people than some novelists. A fiction writer I love, David Markson, often has solitary speakers in his later work. So, I can poke holes in that thought…. “Tower of Birds” is a love poem for Carrie. Timothy Liu challenged me—years ago—to write a love poem and that was it. Carrie is really the only person I spend a lot of time with. We can hang out and talk seriously, be silly, and also not talk at all— we can both do our own things. That poem is set in the Toledo Botanical Garden, a place we used to visit often. Carrie has saved me in too many ways to relate. “Amerika” is a different type of love poem; Kafka, I feel, has been there for me for such a long time, a lot of times when others have not. That’s a wandering, searching, “road” poem. Try to find Kafka, but he’s here all along in the books. I’m thinking of Kafka’s Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared (1927), Karl Rossman, who gets exiled to America and ends up working in a circus in Oklahoma. I’m also thinking of Martin Kippenberger’s glorious installation, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1994). Before I went to college—I didn’t go to college right away—I worked in a factory for a number of years, there were these names that seemed to float in the air—Kafka, Dostoevsky, Chekhov—and I went to the library and grabbed these books and devoured them. Kafka was always there and not there, too. I spend a part of each day thinking about Kafka; I often quote another favorite writer, László Krasznahorkai: “When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.” Kafka is, though, “the man who disappeared,” and that poem is the search. I always thought and argued that all of my “companion” poems are love poems.
WJH: The speaker of Ishmael Mask yearns for connection, and the act of writing seems to be a primary vehicle. In “Perfume,” the initials carved in a tree are “…love letters we scrawling on cedar…”
The speaker in the poem “Carrie” is anchored by sketched images: “For thirteen years/I’ve floated in the atmosphere//ready to burst, the brown strands/of your hair keeping me there.//All this time I’ve been drawing you.” You have said that there is no more optimistic act than writing a poem. Are the references to writing and drawing which are prevalent in this collection evidence of that?
CK: I believe in my bones that there is no more optimistic act than writing a poem, drawing a picture, playing music, practicing and creating any type of art. Writing is everything; every text, to me, is a letter of some sort, an epistle. I’ve written letters all my life, and still do, albeit less frequently. I wonder, often, are prisoners the last letter writers? The very act, the time, the commitment it takes to piece and stitch a manuscript together, it’s such an act of love, of devotion and optimism; also, no book is ever made in a vacuum, books are always acts of collaboration. Now, one might have 5-10 readers (way too many, in my opinion—but whatever works), or one might have a single reader, one person who helps. Cage was written intensely and with Peter Covino and Timothy Liu, with great help from them, and also with Christine Stroud, my wonderful editor at Autumn House Press. With Ishmael, I wanted to do something different; this book is Miguel Murphy’s book; he was really the only person other than Christine, who closely helped out. I was visiting my mother last August (2022), and Miguel would talk to me for hours on the phone, editing, reordering, cutting and revising. I listened to every damn word, mostly. Working on these books with these people are such acts of trust and love. These things are profoundly optimistic. All the poems are love letters, in many ways, each poem can be viewed as an ars poetica; they’re poems about poems, art, literature.
WJH: How, if at all, does your teaching as an assistant professor of English at The Community College of Rhode Island, as well as your work as editor of The Ocean State Review, nourish your life as a poet?
CK: The best part of working on the Ocean State Review is talking with other poets, writers, artists. I’ve made friends through this journal. I love discovering new poets and new work. Talking poetry, writing. When I took over the journal in 2015, the first poets I contacted for work were Michael Palmer and Medbh McGuckian—and they responded, with poems! I opened the 2016 issue with poems by Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop. I also like to place poems, essays by writers who have never published before. I always joke about working on journals and presses: the hours are forever and the pay is nothing. Working on a journal or press is such a labor of love. In a completely different way I feel teaching informs. Not so much discovering new work but being around people. It’s always wonderful when a student gets excited by a poem, a story.
WJH: Thank you so much, Charles, for taking the time to speak with me!
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W.J. Herbert: Charles, Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me and congratulations on this second collection! In your first, the award-winning Cage of Lit Glass, the book itself functions as a cage whose lit glass we peer through as we read, the poems “Words describing eyes written in a book/of glass.” In your newest collection, Ishmael Mask, the speaker has almost lost the ability to see. “I saw my face reflected from a metal/cup—black circles where my eyes/should be—open, dark. Is this a fundamental difference between the two collections? If so what, if any, explorations in Cage of Lit Glass and/or your prize-winning chapbook Pierre Mask [SurVision Books, 2021] led to this shift?
Charles Kell: First, thank you, truly, Wendy, for these insightful and deep questions. In Cage I was really trying to write the poems that were anathema to me, that made me uncomfortable, really, sick to my stomach, and were the opposite of what I was previously doing, how I started to write poems. I thought it might be the only book I do, so I wanted to put everything in them. The book works as a cage in some ways—many of the speakers are trapped in various physical, emotional, psychological enclosures, but there are many openings, chances for escape as well. In some ways the book is a cenotaph. I wanted to think about experiences, situations, friends, time, periods that are over. The book is filled with intertextual engagements and allusions—there are a handful of poems that take titles from and reference Kafka. However, the fundamental themes are incarceration, substance abuse, and a wreck my friends were in in 1999. Ishmael Mask, on the other hand, is not as concerned with the past, with “friends” as deeply, with thinking through certain “narrative” experiences. I was playing around much more, having fun through the lenses of Melville, Tomaž Šalamun; again, there are multiple intertextual relations but I was not concerned with constructing more straight-forward narrative poems. Though, there are many in there. I am constantly at odds. That is, I do like narrative poetry but I get bored quickly. An entire book (my own) of narrative poetry loses me. The poems lose the “punch” after so many in a row. Sometimes I think “just write a short story already.” Similarly, I love experimental, nonnarrative, surreal poetry where there are not clear footholds, but in the same way after so many in a row, I get lost, bored. I like a mix of both. Timothy Liu recently said he prefers my poems where I “lift my mask” and reveal more of myself. I took this to mean more narrative poems, or poems that have an intense, personal element, perhaps. I’m not sure or doubt that, for me at least, the more straightforward narrative poems lift any mask at all. It’s simply another mask; it’s just another persona relating this narrative moment. Maybe most nonnarrative poems feel closer to me, while the so-called “confessional” poems feel like another person. However, this was / is the advice I desperately needed to hear—it was so insightful. I took it to heart. At times, I can get lost with disparate voices, references, making poems “too cute.” I have a pantoum, “Titorelli,” referencing the court painter in Kafka’s The Trial; I like the poem but I don’t know if it’s a good poem; I don’t know, or I don’t think it’s really saying anything. I think what Tim Liu was telling me, reiterating, was to continue to write the hard stuff, the extremely difficult stuff that I, I admit, run from often. I love dark places but I don’t want to live in them. But I need to continue to go there…this was such helpful feedback, it actually helps me rethink and refocus on what I want to do.
WJH: In both collections, the act of writing and drawing figures prominently. In “The Carcasser” from Cage of Lit Glass, the speaker has “picked at the bodies of both living & dead,” as if his writing constructed by taking a body, “Ripping it open & then sticking/a pencil in the ribs to dig around.” As the speaker remarks in “Oblivion Letter,” the process is inward-looking: “Words you write when your shadow arrives.”
But in Ishmael Mask, the focus of the writing shifts outward, as in “Frames,” in which the speaker concludes, “…that one can draw/ loss, draw frost without anyone knowing//what it is, draw the color of night, draw—/for the final time—the light reaching the trees into nowhere.” Is a different ontological definition reflected in this shift?
CK: Writing and drawing, painting, novels and poetry—these are my life. Everything is a Künstlerroman for me. In Cage I was coming to terms and thinking through poems with subject matter that was not wholly mine. I was driving back to Marc’s house from the bar, back in 2016, and I showed him my story, “An Emptying”; he read it in the car and was silent then started joking—“here’s my carcass, my body, pick me clean”—and we laughed, howling out the windows. Most often, writing, books are all a person has, say, in jail / prison, in a small apartment, off somewhere alone; writing and books in Cage serve a specific purpose of thinking through these people and experiences. That if I could write it, get it down…I don’t know, it would simply “be all down.” It doesn’t change anything. Poetry, art, doesn’t do anything, change things about life. But I go back and forth with this. It changed my life in many ways. It means everything to me. I honestly don’t think I’d be here if not for these things. I worried in Cage about writing: am I using people? Am I simply turning horrific experiences into neat poems, couplets and quatrains? And, the answer, I guess, is yes. I was hoping not to do this as much in Ishmael, not for any reason other than “I already did that,” but there are many narrative poems in the new book. It’s subjective, in that I don’t want another poem going over the same material, subject matter. I just get bored with it in my own work. So, the philosophical shift, difference in definition, is one dealing with time and practice of poems. The drawing, the writing in Cage was much more focused on interiority, taking thoughts, feelings I’ve had for twenty years and seeing if I could construct these poems I wanted to make. I wanted Ishmael to be different, even though there are similarities. I wanted the writing, the drawing to focus on the present, the acts of writing in and for the moment. Now, I want to go further, in different directions.
WJH: Some of the writing in Ishmael Mask comes directly from the 19th century. The collection’s third poem, “Monsieur Melville” begins with contemporary lexicon, but it’s second quatrain quotes from Moby-Dick, “All right, sir, are your papers in order?/Is it a nag or a whaler?” How were you able to so successfully integrate 19th century ontological concerns and specific language with your 21st century perspective and approach to language?
CK: I am obsessed with the filmmaker, Nina Menkes. Dissolution (2010), her adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite films. An earlier film, The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983) opens with a stirring quote from The Book of Job, and this film had such an impact on me. Biblical language influences me a great deal, though I’m not a believer. I love dearly nineteenth-century American literature, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson. Initially, there was so much more language, other poems with that type of diction—I became overzealous. Miguel Murphy said I needed to take some out, that it wasn’t working. I trust him completely. All of those novels, that writing is still so relevant, so concerned with life. The poet, the artist is a wanderer, always looking for something, always trying out new things, knowing the whole time, that he/she/they will probably never find it. One becomes the act, the practice. I love the language of those books, the twisting, labyrinthine sentences, and how thoughts and philosophy accrues. Those books are worlds unto themselves. I wanted to integrate, interweave, and experience the language in my poems. Back to drawing, writing: many if not all the poems are love letters to my artistic obsessions. In my new work, I’m hoping to focus and think through some of the films of Nina Menkes, the films of Chantal Akerman.
WJH: Is there a parallel between the Pequod’s futile search for Moby-Dick and the speaker’s journey in Ishmael Mask? Are the unknowable “whale cathedrals” in your poem “Ambergris,” indicative of this?
CK: Ha! I love this question so much! Art is paradox, endless contradiction. Poems, novels, paintings—they are obviously journeys…but toward what, I have no idea. I think art is futile in some sense, but, again, for me, it is the most important thing. How do I reconcile with feeling that poetry and art make nothing happen, while dedicating my life to it, with thinking I wouldn’t be here if not for these things? I’m with Ishmael all the way on the Pequod. There is a “damp, drizzly November” within me, that it’s “high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I honestly don’t think I write / read to stave off ennui, malaise, but maybe there is something there. Maybe it works that way on a much more unconscious level than Ishmael’s. I love his feelings, his sentiment. I have a confession: maybe I am, in my heart, a Romantic? I want the same things Ishmael wants. The search for the whale is different for Ishmael than it is for Ahab. I have no whale. As for the speaker’s journey(s) in Ishmael Mask—he’s simply a wanderer as well; he’s looking with no clear purpose, no ultimate direction in mind. Maybe running and leaving and hiding a bit.
WJH: Ishmael Mask contains a number of poems that seem to mock their speaker. In “Queequeg Mask,” the speaker carves a coffin and then lies inside, as did Moby-Dick’s Queequeg. The poem’s concluding lines quote Melville directly: “if a man made up his mind to live,/ mere sickness could not kill him.” A speaker’s hubris appears again in “Memnon Stone, Terror Stone.” Here, the character Pierre has challenged a stone to fall on and kill him and, when it doesn’t, he stands “haughtily on his feet,/as he owed thanks to none, and went/on his moody way.” In a final example, the speaker seems to mock himself as he dreams of a “wine-dark” sea; he, the heroic Odysseus, his prison cell, a ship. Can you explain whether these poems are meant to be read ironically? And, if so, how do they function in the collection?
CK: Initially I thought Ishmael Mask to be much more insouciant, playful, funnier than Cage. Some folks have said this is not really so. I thought the speakers in these poems, though serious at times, were also winking and giggling. There is a self-mockery when I find I’m taking myself too seriously. It’s serious but it’s also a joke. I love gallows’ humor, the most inappropriate joking, etc. The darkest places are the funniest, the silliest, where the most absurd things happen. I mean, for me, the very act of writing a poem is absurd. It’s complete hubris—“I have something to say, etc.” There are so many poems, so much art in the world, to think that I dare add to that—ha. There must be this acknowledgment of hubris, too, in a way. That one must think on the complete flip side, that one does have something new to say, that yes…I can add to this history. Even though it will all be forgotten in the near future. It’s the absurdity of creation that I find so lovely and intriguing. The complete dedication, the belief in oneself, the complete commitment to something that will soon be washed out to sea. I love it! So, there’s irony, there’s absurdity; dark humor, laughter; however, my absurdity is also my seriousness, that is, this is generally how I feel, think, believe.
WJH: Cage of Lit Glass, Pierre Mask, and Ishmael Mask are all image-rich, and no image in them is more intriguing to me than that of floating. In Cage’s “Bodybuilder,” the speaker says: “I can become something else./Take my eyes outside, let them float/overhead.” The opening lines of the third section’s “The Lost Boy,” begin: “Headless statues float in a broken/open Cornell box…”
In Ishmael Mask, the floating seems to have taken on an entirely different quality. In “Ohio”, it seems whimsical: “Later, we huddle in// the flooded basement, watching//the washing machine float by./We call it a chapel.” And though the poem “Frames,” will reach a darker conclusion, its initial buoyancy seems almost magical: “For the moment we are floating/out on one of the black/islands you describe so clearly, serene,/comfort, you say…” Do you think this change describes a shift in the speaker’s orientation?
CK: I was five years old, in my parents’ house, walking back to my room over brown carpet when I suddenly realized, huh, this life is all there is, there is nothing else. I didn’t feel sad, glad, or really anything at all at this moment. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong? But my whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been floating along, that I’m both here and not really here. I then try to stay in the moment, be as present as I possibly can, and that works a little. But when I’m reading, writing I feel as if it’s not really happening. Sitting in a jail / prison cell back in 2006 / 2007, sitting in rehab, or even visiting a loved one in hospital—things that seem “really real” were strange, as though I were floating along the whole time. I’m not making sense, I know. Carrie and I just returned from hiking in Vermont. It was such an amazing time. I’m walking up this mountain, stepping on rocks, but it’s still as though part of me is not there. I am so tickled you pointed those moments out to me. I’m thinking now, damn, I should have edited some of the “floating stuff” but it’s how I’ve always felt and I can’t get outside of it. Ishmael is a floating character; Pierre is a character who floats. Bartleby is a cloud. All of Kafka’s characters are individuals who float. Beckett’s characters are floating voices.
WJH: Both of your collections, toward their conclusions, include a poem set in what might be considered an Elysium. The first, “Tower of Birds” is takes place in a garden with swans circling, beetles sleeping, and a speaker who is “made of earth, cool /moss” covering his feet. The second setting is wilder: a field somewhere in Kansas where water is absent, but hoped for and a missing person is sought. In both poems, the speaker is accompanied, and I wonder if you might talk about the difference between the speaker’s companions in poems which conclude very differently.
CK: I spend a good deal of time alone. I love being alone and crave solitude. Many of my poems feature lone speakers in lonely environments. On the flip side, I love people. People are so beguiling, frustrating, strange, horrible, cruel and also caring, compassionate; people are simultaneously boring yet wildly unpredictable; people are just so damn weird—I’m stating the obvious here. Often, I think, the poet is all Id, all animal and wild, complete monomaniacal (like Ahab!), me me me, the “I,” etc., whereas the novelist is more Ego, more concerned, ultimately, with the lives of people. I don’t really believe this and think it much more diffuse, complicated than my bad dichotomy. I know poets who care much more about the world of people than some novelists. A fiction writer I love, David Markson, often has solitary speakers in his later work. So, I can poke holes in that thought…. “Tower of Birds” is a love poem for Carrie. Timothy Liu challenged me—years ago—to write a love poem and that was it. Carrie is really the only person I spend a lot of time with. We can hang out and talk seriously, be silly, and also not talk at all— we can both do our own things. That poem is set in the Toledo Botanical Garden, a place we used to visit often. Carrie has saved me in too many ways to relate. “Amerika” is a different type of love poem; Kafka, I feel, has been there for me for such a long time, a lot of times when others have not. That’s a wandering, searching, “road” poem. Try to find Kafka, but he’s here all along in the books. I’m thinking of Kafka’s Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared (1927), Karl Rossman, who gets exiled to America and ends up working in a circus in Oklahoma. I’m also thinking of Martin Kippenberger’s glorious installation, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1994). Before I went to college—I didn’t go to college right away—I worked in a factory for a number of years, there were these names that seemed to float in the air—Kafka, Dostoevsky, Chekhov—and I went to the library and grabbed these books and devoured them. Kafka was always there and not there, too. I spend a part of each day thinking about Kafka; I often quote another favorite writer, László Krasznahorkai: “When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.” Kafka is, though, “the man who disappeared,” and that poem is the search. I always thought and argued that all of my “companion” poems are love poems.
WJH: The speaker of Ishmael Mask yearns for connection, and the act of writing seems to be a primary vehicle. In “Perfume,” the initials carved in a tree are “…love letters we scrawling on cedar…”
The speaker in the poem “Carrie” is anchored by sketched images: “For thirteen years/I’ve floated in the atmosphere//ready to burst, the brown strands/of your hair keeping me there.//All this time I’ve been drawing you.” You have said that there is no more optimistic act than writing a poem. Are the references to writing and drawing which are prevalent in this collection evidence of that?
CK: I believe in my bones that there is no more optimistic act than writing a poem, drawing a picture, playing music, practicing and creating any type of art. Writing is everything; every text, to me, is a letter of some sort, an epistle. I’ve written letters all my life, and still do, albeit less frequently. I wonder, often, are prisoners the last letter writers? The very act, the time, the commitment it takes to piece and stitch a manuscript together, it’s such an act of love, of devotion and optimism; also, no book is ever made in a vacuum, books are always acts of collaboration. Now, one might have 5-10 readers (way too many, in my opinion—but whatever works), or one might have a single reader, one person who helps. Cage was written intensely and with Peter Covino and Timothy Liu, with great help from them, and also with Christine Stroud, my wonderful editor at Autumn House Press. With Ishmael, I wanted to do something different; this book is Miguel Murphy’s book; he was really the only person other than Christine, who closely helped out. I was visiting my mother last August (2022), and Miguel would talk to me for hours on the phone, editing, reordering, cutting and revising. I listened to every damn word, mostly. Working on these books with these people are such acts of trust and love. These things are profoundly optimistic. All the poems are love letters, in many ways, each poem can be viewed as an ars poetica; they’re poems about poems, art, literature.
WJH: How, if at all, does your teaching as an assistant professor of English at The Community College of Rhode Island, as well as your work as editor of The Ocean State Review, nourish your life as a poet?
CK: The best part of working on the Ocean State Review is talking with other poets, writers, artists. I’ve made friends through this journal. I love discovering new poets and new work. Talking poetry, writing. When I took over the journal in 2015, the first poets I contacted for work were Michael Palmer and Medbh McGuckian—and they responded, with poems! I opened the 2016 issue with poems by Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop. I also like to place poems, essays by writers who have never published before. I always joke about working on journals and presses: the hours are forever and the pay is nothing. Working on a journal or press is such a labor of love. In a completely different way I feel teaching informs. Not so much discovering new work but being around people. It’s always wonderful when a student gets excited by a poem, a story.
WJH: Thank you so much, Charles, for taking the time to speak with me!
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Charles Kell is the author of Ishmael Mask, (Autumn House Press, 2023.) His first collection, Cage of Lit Glass, (Autumn House Press, 2019) was chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He is an assistant professor at the Community College of Rhode Island and editor of the Ocean State Review.
https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/ishmael-mask/
W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen (Beacon Press, 2021,) was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Her work, awarded the 2022 Arts & Letters/Rumi Award for Poetry, also appears, or is forthcoming, in The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
https://wjherbertpoet.com/
https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/ishmael-mask/
W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen (Beacon Press, 2021,) was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Her work, awarded the 2022 Arts & Letters/Rumi Award for Poetry, also appears, or is forthcoming, in The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
https://wjherbertpoet.com/