SHANNAN

Reading and re-reading your poems, I felt like they took on some mythic proportions, held me by the collar and made me look at them in the eyes without dropping my gaze. They scare me, thrill me, and ultimately pull me in, make me feel comfortable to be in this space of disruption. One thing I notice consistently is your rhythm. There’s a way in which the poems take on a lullaby-like lilt with the subtle recurring “I” and “ee” internal rhymes. This effect is jarring when juxtaposed with the narrative of the poem. Lines like “…they can sense when they’re about the die, and begin / to flower desperately” and “having no choice / but to leave the bathroom and fuck him and then / someone else and so on…” work to break the reader out of whatever stupor that might have been created thanks to the rhythm, but surrounding them is a seering personal narrative that, well, sounds, in terms of language, fucking gorgeous. Is this perhaps the unique challenge and gift of poetry? That in a relatively small space we are experiencing a whole life, a whole world, and thus the poet works overtime so to speak to conjure that with all its anachronistics and dichotomies and sometimes that means you’ll read about destruction and find it beautiful? 

KAYLEE

Thank you so much. I think you're right, although I think the beauty might come by accident. I am always wary of writing about destruction in a way that smothers that destruction in palatable language. But I do think destruction has its own kind of music, and I try to listen to that music as closely as possible, steering away from dramatizing or diminishing it. I think when something is wholly and unapologetically itself on the page, the relief and clarity of that can feel like beauty.

I love your point about experiencing a whole life within the small space of a poem. I've had a tendency towards narrative braiding in my poetry recently, and I think it also reminds me that destruction doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that the potential for all things to be touched by destruction is what makes those same things miracles in their fragile existence. 

KARAN

Thank you for this answer, Kaylee. This steering away from dramatization came through for me immediately in your poems, and appealed to me a great deal. I thought, here’s a poet writing destruction without romanticizing it. I see how unflowered your poems are and love them for being that way. I mentioned this before to Todd Dillard that we recently learned (in Sophia Terazawa’s workshop) there are four categories in which poetry can be categorized: poetry of the soul, mind, body, and heart, and that the best poems often have it all. I think your poems are coming as much from the mind and soul as they are coming from the heart and body. 

Consider “Translation Theory” for instance — here, you’re exploring the complex relationship between language, experience, and emotion. You’re starting right at the core idea of the poem: “We can only access what is real through the mediation of language, / but that doesn't mean if you stick a knife through your chest / you're not going to get hurt.” You’re suggesting language acts as a mediator for accessing reality but acknowledging the limitations of words when it comes to conveying the full depth of human experience. The poem (like all others here) is vulnerable, philosophical, tangible, and spiritual all at once. Do you think you’re writing more from either one or two of those modes than others? And more generally, where do you think poetry comes from, and where does it go?

KAYLEE

I love these categories—I've never consciously thought of poetry like this, and it's giving me a lot to consider. I started seriously writing poetry about two years ago, and for much of that time, my poetry was situated in the body and the heart, as I spent those years in the midst of some physiological and psychological difficulty. I used to think that the almost violent urgency of such poems was the only way I could or should write, because it was all I knew. But I'm realizing now that the poems I actually liked from those years were ones that moved beyond the immediacy of physical experience, veering into mind/soul territory, asking the heart and body questions of why and how it had gotten to this place, and where it was going, and where it wanted to go. Such questions are what make a poem last, I think, because we can't ever definitively answer them. So I try to remain as balanced between the modes as I can.

I think poetry comes from these questions of why and how, and I think where it goes is the way it makes a reader ask those questions of their own life. I remember the first time I read Larry Levis' poem “Family Romance”: in it, the speaker's driving to his first wedding and it ends, “I thought: why me, why her, & knew it wouldn't last.” Why do we do things that we know will end, and end poorly? When I read that poem a few years ago, he gave me one of the questions I'll spend the rest of my life writing poetry trying and failing to answer.

SHANNAN

Your poems deal with the female body with scorching intimacy. When I say “intimacy”, I’m not really referring here to sexuality even though your poetry does not shy away from this. Rather, I’m thinking about lines like this:

from “The Last Spring”:

“looking at my body how I might have looked

at my own hunger, if it could have stood

outside of me, ashamed, and begged me

to let it back in…”

from “Love Story of Beginning and End”:

“And though

my mother told it like a cautionary tale,

how could it have been, unless the moral of

the story was what Rilke said about how the end

grows inside of you like a fruit.”

from “After the Flood”:

“And when I lived there, by which I mean in the flood

I lay belly up, waiting for whoever it was

to be finished fucking me, I would feel humiliated

not by however my body was being used

but if, at the end, he would pay for my cab home”

Especially here in this last section, you write about humiliation as it connects with what the female body experiences. Likewise, in the earlier section, what happens to the body is “told…like a cautionary tale” which again points to a sense of shame. Hunger is an unforgiving need of the body. And the speakers you present in these individual poems appear to test the limits of that body. These are heavy things. And it can be hard for poets to attempt to write like this and also consider craft alongside that. Would you speak more about how you manage both in tandem?

KAYLEE

I think what's more interesting about intense and vulnerable experiences like shame and hunger is not as much the way they feel when we're experiencing them, as the way that feeling casts our world in a totally unfamiliar light and makes us question everything. I'm thinking of a part of Anne Carson's “The Glass Essay”—that epic breakup poem, one that I'd definitely say deeply examines hunger and shame—where she says:

Where does unbelief begin?

When I was young

there were degrees of certainty. 

I could say Yes, I know that I have two hands.

Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally disappear—

Where does unbelief begin? I love that question so much, and I love how full of unanswered questions “The Glass Essay” is generally. It calls the reader to think, to participate, to move around a world illuminated by shame and wonder at everything in its new light, rather than collapse inward into solipsism. 

I want my poems to work similarly, speaking with the reader personally rather than proclaiming how my speaker's feeling from behind a podium. So to be honest, I'm not sure I think about craft very deliberately when I'm writing beyond trying to make sure the poem feels somewhat like something I could say to a trusted friend over a meal or coffee. It's a lot of reading and re-reading out loud, to notice when I'm rambling, or not spending enough time on a certain image. Something I've been doing recently is writing letters I won't send. It's a highly inefficient but also highly rewarding way of creating a kind of framework for my poems: when I imagine I'm speaking directly to someone I love, I feel like what needs to be said kind of falls out in the way it wants to.

KARAN

I love that way of writing. It brings such a vulnerable story-teller mode to the poem. I find it a thousand times easier to write letters than to write poems. I think I’m going to start conflating the two as well. Thank you.

I see that under the surface of your poems is a longing for understanding, the struggle to connect and express oneself without any barriers. Are you preoccupied with the complexities of human communication and the inherent gaps that exist between individuals, despite their attempts to bridge them? Is poetry a way for you to understand better, or make someone see you, understand you?

KAYLEE

Absolutely—I'm a little terrified at how much you read my mind just now. A few months ago, I took a translation theory class (hence, obviously, “Translation Theory”) that really delightfully disturbed me and made me hyper-conscious of how much language means beyond plain dictionary definitions. For example, when I was a kid, I remember seeing a safety warning on TV one Halloween about kids choking to death on hard candies. I hated hard candies, but pretended to like them and traded my little brother for all of his, giving him all the candies I actually liked, because I was terrified he'd die.  For some reason, it would have killed me to just tell him to be careful because I cared about him and loved him, so I had to go this weird, roundabout route. I feel like that's what language is like, if that makes sense. And I love poetry because it feels like a way to go beyond the limits of language, to begin to see the shape of what we really mean. A poem, for me, would be whatever I was trying so hard to tell my brother at that moment and didn't know how to.

SHANNAN

A relationship that crops up throughout the narratives here is that between mother and daughter. I myself write a lot about this weird behemoth of a topic. One thing I really appreciate is the paced way in which you deliver powerful zingers, unexpected turns of phrases, which in turn further embolden just what a beast this dynamic can be to capture. In “After the Flood” for example you write this:

“Like when my mother once,

sometime between that boy 

and my year of no birthdays, 

when I knew something would soon go wrong 

inside me and still wanted then to try 

to fix it—suggested, outside the psychiatrist's office,

not looking at me, that we die, 

right then, together.”

Between the  mother suggesting this absurd, frightening thing and where the speaker actually opens this sentence there are several breaks, meanderings, and many years are collapsed into those distractions until the place of the present (“psychiatrist’s office”) action is established and then finally the “fact” revealed, the small memory concluded. This mimics, perhaps, the natural way in which we might revisit memories, especially difficult ones. It also leaves the reader in suspense, something that, whether we are writing genre-based or not, also naturally creates excitement. I’d love to hear more from you about how these decisions refract and present memory in the way you do. 

KAYLEE

When I sit down to write, I'm usually prompted by a specific memory I have, and then I sit and focus on what comes to mind after that, writing down images or other memories that then surface, whether they logically follow or not (they almost never do). There's something so wonderful to me about how surprising and inexplicable these natural leaps between memories are. We don't have to manufacture this mystery, it's already built into the way our mind moves, beyond our own capacity to understand. I think the decisions I try to make are ones that present the strange dance of the mind as faithfully and attentively as possible.

KARAN

This is so true, and somehow inspiring — your method of allowing memories to guide your writing, regardless of logical progression. These poems do read as if they are navigating the labyrinth of your mind. This reminds me also of how Bob Hicok writes: trying to capture the mind in a specific moment in time. I wonder this though: how do you ensure that these meandering paths maintain the emotional intensity and thematic coherence? What is your process of revision like? Do you revise a lot? Do you trust your gut at all times? When does self-doubt appear for you?

KAYLEE

I definitely revise a lot, usually over the course of many months, and the revision is usually necessary because I often don't trust my gut and grasp instead at some kind of logical coherence I imagine will be more satisfying to a reader. Self-doubt is always present, because like we talked about earlier, I'm desperate to be understood! But I think I tend to overshoot the mark in first drafts and start simplifying and/or overexplaining my own thought process because I want so badly to make sense to other people. Revision is then taking many deep breaths and cutting those explanations, trying to trust that my memories will stand on their own, that there is a reason why the memories came to me in the grouping and ordering that they did, even if I don't know it myself. My poems in ONLY POEMS, except for “Translation Theory”, were all written by this weirdly formulaic method: I think of a few moments in my life that feel huge, luminous and perplexing to me, and then write the poem as an exercise in drawing out their hidden connections. Maybe the emotional intensity comes from the fact that these memories are just ones I can't get off my mind. That is, the intensity's inherently a part of them, and it's just a matter of being willing to spend time silently observing them in the poem without shaking them by the shoulders demanding answers, or turning away.

KARAN

It is also so interesting you mentioned Anne Carson whom Shannan and I both love deeply. “The Glass Essay” is such a complex and multi-layered exploration of loss, identity, and the fragmented nature of self. Your poems are far from the form of the fragment, and yet you’re doing similar things content-wise: weaving together personal narrative, literary allusions, philosophical musings, shifting between past and present, loss and longing, thought and emotion. Is your struggle the existential struggle to reconcile the past with the present? 

KAYLEE

I love Anne Carson so much as well! And I think yes, the struggle is the one of reconciling the past with the present, but under the condition that I never allow myself to feel any kind of success or fulfillment in this reconciliation. I don't think it's possible, or if it is possible, it is possible in an infinite number of flawed ways, and it's less the goal of reconciliation than the continual striving towards it that matters to me. I'm remembering a line from Nox, Carson's work about the disappearance and death of her older brother: “A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.” I think this prowling of the past is what I'm always trying to do. Of course, I don't mean for my work to become trapped in retrospection and remove me from the present. I think it's more like how when I look at my friends, for example, I want to ask them: Where did you come from? How did you get to be here, the way you are, in my life? How did we find each other in this huge world and how did I come to love you so much? “Prowling” them, hearing stories about their childhoods, learning about them and their endless selves, is where the joy of loving them in the present comes from, knowing the work of understanding them will never be done.

KARAN

I love the care and honesty with which you’ve answered these, Kaylee. Thank you! Finally, would you please tell us your strongest influences, your most favorite poets? 

KAYLEE

I have so many people I adore but the one I'll always say first is Larry Levis. I read his poem “Winter Stars” for the first time when I was sixteen, and there have been so many points over the last six years when he's been the only person that makes any sense to me. I'm also obsessed with Anne Carson, of course. Frank Bidart, Li-Young Lee, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky—I could go on forever.