Interview & Poem with Kary Wayson

We knew we had to investigate when we heard about a “live wire” poet named Kary Wayson making the rounds in Seattle. What’s so “live wire” about her, you ask? Well, for starters, she’s won a Pushcart Prize and last year published a full collection of poetry. But that’s sooo last year. This year, her name is generating a whole new buzz. On a Thursday night in January, we put on our Frye boots and headed to Open Books, where Kary was scheduled to read. The tiny bookshop swelled with eager Seattlites. Soon, Olena Kalytiak Davis, another poet of the moment and also slated to read that night, entered the store wearing a pair of room-commanding thigh-high boots. Then Kary, decked out in her own brown-booted poetic swagger, crossed the threshold. The event was a poetic and stylistic burst — a paroxysm by two women who — as Davis put it– “are really, truly trying to make it as writers” and succeeding with an electric, “live wire” panache.

Dark Sky Magazine: Where were you born? How did it influence your decision to write poetry?

Kary Wayson: I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, but both my parents and their families are from Portland, Oregon. With one parent or the other, I grew up all over US map: Winnebago, Nebraska, Sioux City, Iowa, Milwaukee, OR, Yonkers, NY, and later,  in Minneapolis, though Portland has always been my home.

I came to writing poetry like we all do, as an intense adolescent, barricaded in my bedroom, listening to top-40 music and scribbling in my journal. I was a shy kid, an only child who moved regularly back and forth between my divorced parents — strange to think that they were younger then than I am now! Anyway, I was always moving to a different school in a different city in another state, always the new girl, always dragging around a book. I grew up reading a lot. I can see now that growing up, I used books not so much for escape, but as way to settle into myself, to inhabit a home I made inside my own head, where I cultivated a privacy that was grounding but also lonely. My work comes out of that place.

DSM: Describe some inspirational teachers that have helped you along the way.

KW: Miss Allegretto! My English teacher at St. Mary’s Academy, where I happily spent all four years of high school. I still remember standing at her desk in tears, clutching The Great Gatsby as if my life depended on it. She took me under her wing — looked at my scribblings and encouraged me to keep at it — she even went so far as to type up and mail off a few of my poems for publication in a teachers’ magazine — pretty heady stuff for a 17 year old! I do believe that it was her encouragement that helped me to consider applying for a writing scholarship to the first of my many colleges, the University of Redlands, where I worked with Ralph Angel. His encouragement, among many other things, taught me that the writing of poems could become a legitimate pursuit — that I could — and should! — make a life out of making poems. Later, it was Maxine Scates at Lewis & Clark, who to this day continues to encourage my efforts; and, even later, at the University of Washington’s MFA program, Rick Kenney and Heather McHugh — two of the most brilliant poets and professors I’ve ever met. Those two, each in his and her own way, taught me to pay close attention to the sonic values of language — by which I mean the syllables of words and phrases — as units of meaning, yes, but even more as little motors made of sound.

DSM: The notes in American Husband demonstrate how you draw from other poets. How important is influence? How many of your poems spur from that energy?

KW: It’s essential for a poet to read poems, for any artist to apprentice herself to the masters of form. As for my own personal experience, I find that I must read in order to write. I read constantly — poems, of course, but also lots of fiction, philosophy, art history and and theory. I look at a painting and, if it moves me at all, I am moved to make a poem — or at least a part of one. Same goes for music and film. Other people’s imaginations activate my own. The experience of encountering good art is, for me, as if somebody throws a ball. If it’s coming towards me, my instinct is to catch it and throw it back. Somebody cool said something like that — maybe Jonathan Lethem? in his Harper’s essay called “The Ecstasy of Influence”? Anyway, much of what I feel is my best work comes from interactions with other artists’ best work. I am always so grateful to be moved to write.

DSM: Would you agree that your poems observe more than they announce?

KW: I have to disagree! I think the work does announce. As Allen Grossman says, “poetry is the speech of last resort,” and my poems tend to all live on (and off!) their little emergencies. The impulse behind many of them is the urge to just goddammit say something (anything!) for once and for all.

DSM: Lines like I say blue/but what I mean is/ blonde braids/bleaching on the beach show the distance between what we say and intend. What’s that distance like for you and how does poetry help or not help close that gap?

KW: Jack Gilbert says, “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,/ and frightening that it does not quite.” The poetry in which I’m most interested explores (rather than solves) the gap between language and experience, between what I said and what I meant. That distance, that gap — I picture it as a great wide gully — catches everything that gets lost in the effort to translate experience into thought, and then again in the effort to set thought into words. I am most moved by art that wants to go down into that scary gully to see what can happen out of what it finds there. I am thinking here of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso” and Laura Jensen’s “Baskets,” two of my favorite poems of all time precisely because they speak from down deep in that gully without trying to fill it or bridge it or explain it away.

DSM: At your reading, you discussed the construction of the poems you were about to read. It sounds like you are deeply involved in the stages of a poem — and that you’re willing to talk about them. What do you wrestle with most when constructing a poem and how do you overcome it?

KW: Every day I have to wrestle myself to the table to write. Every day I do not know how to make a poem. Every day I am confused and scared — scared that I might write like crap, that I might have nothing to say, scared that I’m repeating myself, and why? again? am I doing this anyway? Not for the money! And then I do it anyway: I set the kitchen timer for one hour and ten minutes, then putz around for the first ten (cleaning or pacing –), and then I sit down for the one hour and write, which often starts out as a kind of exploratory journalling and then turns into a fascination with phrasing, which then will result in complete lines and by then the hour has passed and I either keep on or stop with a clean conscience. The more I do it, the easier it is. When I take any more than a few days away from it, I have to begin all over again. So yes, it is a struggle — it’s hard to make a poem! Just like it’s hard to be a person. Every day I am always beginning and beginning again some more.

Poppies In December

by Kary Wayson

These aren’t more than three. They grow
and sleep to the side of the street. In winter
they mind the cold.

They lose all memory. So I think I am only.
Thinking of them in their dark,
during the day in the dark, thinking,

I am an asshole
and a thief.
I think they do not.

They don’t have what I wouldn’t want.
They don’t have anything or visitors.
I visit their day

or say so gravely.
A circuitous route surrounds them.
They live in the curve

of a capital J. They could care less

but not likely. What else won’t they
do, or don’t they say? They are not extra.
They have no feet. This whole hillside

amounts to their two weeks. And then
don’t they leave me alone.

_______________________________________

Kary Wayson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Journal, FIELD, Filter, The Best American Poetry 2007, and the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kary was a 2003 Discovery/The Nation award winner, and her chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her poem “Lives of Artists” won the 2009 Crazyhorse/ Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, and her first full collection, American Husband, won the 2009 Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in poetry. Kary lives and works in Seattle.