Spotlight On…

The wonderful and full-throated Keetje Kuipers talks with us today about the particular horrors that shame exacts on the body, our culture of self-blame, and the similarities between fiction, longing, and fear.

Tell us about the first poem you remember writing?

I was a senior in high school. Poetry had never been part of the curriculum until that point, and I’d really read very little of it previously in my life. However, my English teacher that final semester of high school asked us to go to the library or the bookstore and find a book of poems we loved. I very fortuitously stumbled upon Dorianne Laux’s first book, Awake, and completely fell in love with her poems, and poetry in general. This same English teacher then asked us to write a report on one of the poems in the book we’d found, and finally, to write a poem of our own. Mine was called “The Headboard” — it described the end of a quite passionate love affair that my young self had not at that point yet had the privilege of experiencing. So from the beginning my work has been peppered with what some would call fiction, and what I would call longing and fear.

How often do you struggle with your writing? Or does it come easily?

I write two kinds of poems: The first kind of poems are the sort that arrive on the page wholly formed, completely finished, fully realized in terms of movement, language, voice, image, and intention. These are my most magical poems, not only because they seem to come so easily, but because they always remain the strongest and best poems I’ve written. However, they’re rare. The second kind of poem, which I write much more often, is one that arrives on the page as an awkward first draft, or even a simple fragment, and it might go through twenty or more revisions before I feel as though it’s on solid footing. These poems go through major transformations — dramatically changing form, tone, length, theme — sometimes resembling the first version in so few ways that after a while I forget the two were ever the same poem. I feel that these poems are never as strong as those rare others that arrive in the world already so sure of themselves, but it does feel good to do the work of rough-handed revision. I like to think of my poems as equations that I’m working out, trying to get the fragments on both sides of the equals sign to really equal each other. Or maybe it’s more like a rubik’s cube, or sudoku — it’s a puzzle that in some alternate reality already has a solution, I just need to work it out. If that’s struggling, then I welcome it, the same way I welcome a hike up a very steep hillside — what a feeling of accomplishment (not to mention a rewarding view) waits at the top.

Describe your typical writing environment.

I don’t think I have one. I’m not a writer who sits down at her desk each day and puts in the requisite number of hours. I write poems in my head while I’m running or hiking. They often begin to arrive as a small phrase or fragment while I’m washing the dishes or taking a shower. I’ve done a tremendous amount of driving around Montana and Oregon in the last few years, and they certainly show up when I’m in the car speeding down an empty highway. I’ve also always enjoyed writing poetry while listening to other people read their own, so I’m that person digging for a pen in her bag while Bob Hass intones his verses up at the podium. I guess all this means that my typical writing environment involves a borrowed pen, a scrap of paper pulled from a trashcan, and a sense of urgency about getting it down before I forget what I was composing on my hike, in the shower, or as I was looking for a rest stop where I could pull over. I do revise religiously, and that happens at my desk with all the drafts spread around me — a much more careful and meticulous process than the original act of composition. I like to revise in the morning, when I’m feeling fresh and clear-headed, and since my poems often come to me in first draft form at night, the morning seems like the best time to face them with fresh and dutiful eyes. It’s also when the poems first show up on my computer, since I always compose freehand or on my typewriter.

What’s your favorite poem you’ve written? Why?

There’s always that poem you think is the best poem you’ve ever written, and luckily, that poem keeps getting replaced with new poems as you continue writing. However, for me, that “best” poem — the one that sings most musically, speaks in the most authoritative voice, possesses the clearest intention, and communicates most viscerally to my readers — has been the same poem for a long time now. I wrote “Fourth of July” in the summer of 2007, which is when I was finishing Beautiful in the Mouth. It’s probably one of the last poems that made the cut before I started sending the manuscript out to contests and presses, and in some ways I think it has more in common with the poems I’m writing now than it does with the other work that appears in that first book. “Fourth of July” is written in the voice of a liar, an unreliable narrator who makes her unreliability clear to her reader from the very beginning of the poem. Her cavalier attitude is a cover — she’s not fooling herself, and she’s certainly not fooling anyone else. That speaker is also judging herself for this false toughness, for this anti-romantic posturing that she’s so clearly failing at following through on. I think this is my favorite of my poems because it’s the first that was written in this voice, a voice that I’m currently obsessed with, a voice that completely occupies the collection I’m working on now, The Keys to the Jail.

What’s the last book that you loved?

I feel very lucky to have so many friends who are avid readers of poetry — I get new recommendations for books every day, and they always run the gamut in terms of styles and sympathies, obsessions and craft choices. One of the reasons I value these recommendations so much is that the study of poetry at the graduate level can create a very small personal library. This is not the fault of the MFA programs, but is simply a byproduct of studying anything from within the confines of such a small group of mentors and peers. For instance, when I was attending the University of Oregon, my professors introduced me to numerous poets whose work I had never read before. However, it was the reading habits of my fellow students that more dramatically influenced the books that ended up on my shelves. I graduated from my MFA program believing that Jack Gilbert and Larry Levis were universally believed to be the two most indispensable poets who ever lived (a reflection less of the program itself, and more so of the leanings of my particular cohort that year)—I didn’t realize that at other graduate programs across the country completely different poets, ones I’d never heard of, had been similarly anointed. So it’s a great pleasure for me to become more familiar with those poets that my friends see as touchstones and whose work I’ve perhaps somehow managed to miss out on. However, some of my favorite books from the last couple of years have been Gabby Calvocoressi’s Apocalyptic Swing and Doug Powell’s Chronic. My two slightly older favorites at the moment are James White’s The Salt Ecstasies and Donald Justice’s collected poems. Each of these was recommended to me by a friend, and each has been a wonderful discovery and addition to my growing library of influences.

Does reading online influence your writing style? How would your work change if you lost access to the Internet for a year?

Well, I did lose access to the Internet for seven months when I lived in a wilderness area, and that was a wonderful experience. When I returned to civilization, I tried to replicate it by refusing to set up an internet connection in my house. In some ways this was a great choice — because I couldn’t be online checking my email and watching music videos on YouTube, I did a lot more actual reading of books, and I was able to maintain the sense of peaceful contemplation that I’d experienced during those seven months in a cabin in the woods. Not only did I do more reading, but I also did a lot more staring at the wall and out the windows, which translated into more poems. Essentially, because I wasn’t online, I was doing a lot more thinking. Unfortunately, my colleagues and students at the University of Montana were not as pleased with the arrangement, as there now exists on expectation that you will have checked your email before the work day actually begins. So I set up an internet connection at home and have been shackled to it ever since. However, the actual reading that I’ve done online has been a wonderful influence on my work, and I have found that it’s an excellent way to keep up with all the new, exciting poetry that is happening out there. The poems I see in online literary magazines are some of the most inspiring in terms of turning me on to new forms and styles — they urge me to reach beyond my own tired syntax into realms of language that I hadn’t realized existed. And online magazines have been the most supportive in responding to the publication of my book and in starting conversations about my work — so I’m endlessly grateful for the opportunity to share poems and ideas about poetry in such an open and easily accessible forum. What poetry and poetry-related texts that I read online seem most important to me in terms of the conversations that they enable. Still, I think I’d continue to be inspired by new work without the presence of the internet; I’d simply reach backwards more often than forwards when looking for that inspiration, finding “new” syntax and “new” styles in older work. I think it’s important to look in both directions when searching for inspiration.

There’s an extremely visceral element to your poetry that I adore and I think that bodily, earthy element grounds your work in a way that makes the more esoteric components accessible. Is there a difference between writing poetry with a sense of physicality as opposed to a more cerebral approach?

I was recently in Iowa City to give a reading at Prairie Lights, and I had the chance to talk with two of the local writers there—a graduate student in the MFA program and the wonderful poet, Rob Schlegel, who helps run the reading series. We took a very memorable walk through the quiet back alleys of Iowa City, Rob’s two dogs leading the way past hedges and darkened picket fences, as we discussed our current poetic projects. I was the first to give the rundown on my new work, and I explained that my current manuscript-in-progress, The Keys to the Jail, is built around questions I have about blame and guilt, particularly the self-blame that comes from failing in some very visceral way — failing to stay young, failing to produce a child — failures that show up on the body. I talked about these ideas for awhile, letting the black Iowa night soak up all my smart words about this new project. When it came time for the other two poets to discuss what they were working on, their explanations came out in a very different way: there was no discussion of personal experience or emotion or how either of those might be enacted on the body. Their work was based on what seemed to me to be an extremely cerebral approach to their art, and distinctly disconnected from the physical. I want to make it clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking this approach, or pushing at poetry from a decidedly cerebral direction. Rob’s first book, The Lesser Fields, is actually endlessly physical, not to mention expertly crafted, and surprising and stirring in its choices — thrilling poetry can come from a very cerebral place. However, the conversation did make me realize that despite the fact that my poems are often the result of serious contemplation about such cerebral topics as our contemporary culture of self-blame, they are also deeply rooted in my own experience, particularly the visceral and physical sensations of being bereft and ashamed, and how those experiences work their very particular horrors on the body. The fact that I write this way doesn’t seem to me to be a choice — in fact, I’ve often tried to get away from the body in my writing. It doesn’t usually work, but the pushing away from it is sometimes what makes for the best tension in the resulting poem.

And lastly, what’s it like to be named a bestselling poet?

I don’t think I have much of an understanding of what that term really means outside of how the idea of it makes me feel. We all have personal markers in our lives, goals that we’re going for with our work — for me, being a bestselling poet isn’t one of them. However, I believe that any writer — even the most private, reclusive one working in total isolation — wants a readership. We write because we have something to communicate, because we’re sick of talking to the wall. So if being a “bestselling poet” means that more people are in conversation with my work, that my poems are more often out there arguing and making claims and singing songs and shouting from rooftops, then I’m very glad for it — I’m glad for the life they’re being given in someone else’s hands. I know I go to the work of other poets in order to recognize something in myself that I didn’t know was there before, to receive solace for a wound I couldn’t heal on my own, to hear someone else say the words that were unspoken in my own heart. I would hope that being a bestselling poet means that my poems are doing just that for more people.

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Keetje Kuipers earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone. Keetje has taught writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula, Montana, where she lives with her dog, Bishop, and does her best to catch a few fish.