Issue VI, Volume III : February 2012
Written Artists
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Circe by Nicelle Davis
 Stunning New Poetry From Associate Poetry Editor Nicelle Davis |
| Keetje Kuipers - Poetry |
Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She 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, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon's Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published earlier this year by BOA Editions. It contains poems currently published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated four years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje teaches 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.---------
Keetje Kuipers Interview with John Hoppenthaler In 2007, you were the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and you used the residency to complete work on Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and is now published by BOA Editions. Can you tell us about that experience and how living in the wilderness may have informed some of the poems in the book?It really was the wilderness out there: I was in a little cabin two hours down a dirt road from the nearest town. The house was off the grid and way out of range of cell phones. My only way of communicating with the outside world was with one of those trucker-style radios. I shared the radio line with the rest of the wilderness-dwellers scattered up and down the valley that runs the length of the Rogue River, and the phone would always cut out after a few minutes. It really meant that I couldn’t have long conversations with anyone—except my dog, of course. This was probably the most profound way that living in the wilderness informed the poems in the book: I had absolutely no one to talk to about the work that I was doing. The new poems I was writing didn’t have other eyes on them besides my own. The revisions I completed went through draft after draft without outside commentary. The ordering and restructuring of the book changed daily, and my choices to lose or keep poems in the manuscript were no one’s but my own. Of course, before I embarked on this wilderness experience, I’d gathered plenty of feedback on much of the work that appears in the book. And when I returned to civilization, the poems and the manuscript continued to change as I sought feedback from mentors and peers. However, being out there alone with no one to turn to in my moments of artistic questioning and doubt taught me a kind of self-reliance as a poet that I hadn’t had before. I feel much more confident about the poetic choices I make now, and while I have dear friends who I go to often for insight on my work, I trust myself to make the final decisions.
Can you speak a bit about your education and mentors, and how the experience has affected your work? It’s hard to know where to begin with this question because so many people have been good enough to teach me, take me under their wing, push me along. I will say that I my first mentor, the poet Nathalie Anderson, who was one of my professors at Swarthmore College, instilled in me the utmost respect for formal tools in poetry. This was later reinforced by another very important mentor, the poet Garrett Hongo, who was a professor of mine during graduate school at the University of Oregon. Having this really foundational respect for craft and musicality has continued to directly influence the way I write my poems. The poet Dorianne Laux has been present in my life as a mentor ever since I read her first book, Awake, when I was a senior in high school—this was the first book of poetry I’d ever read. The fact that I ended up working under her mentorship while I was studying at the University of Oregon was a great stroke of fortune. I’ve also really benefitted from the support of mentors and colleagues like Kevin Gonzalez, Henrietta Goodman, Marion Wrenn, Stacey Lynn Brown, Major Jackson, and Tracy K. Smith. These are all writers who have shown me that they deeply believe in the work that I’m doing. They all knew me when I didn’t have a single accolade to my name, and they’ve shepherded me faithfully toward what my work can be, should be, wants to be. There is nothing like the experience of finding a mentor and working towards becoming her colleague and peer. That is my greatest aspiration.The landscape of your poems varies, and it seems you are always on the go, traveling here and there. Are you restless? If so, how might this restlessness reveal itself in your work? I recently read a Carl Phillips interview where he said, “I have this longing to live in one place and call it home forever, but some part of me seems to require longing, rather than the satisfaction of that longing.” I couldn’t agree more: I was born in Washington, spent the first few years of my life living there and in Montana and Idaho (my father was a fishing guide during those summers), then moved with my family to Minnesota and finally California. I went to college in Pennsylvania, lived in New York as a failed actress, traveled through Spain in search of material, went to graduate school in Oregon, took a wilderness fellowship in a cabin there, moved to Missoula to teach at the University of Montana, and am now living in San Francisco as a Stegner Fellow. Am I restless? Have I had a choice? I think in my youth I never felt tied to any of the places that I lived. Since then, I’ve let my work dictate my geography, partly because geography didn’t seem to matter. I fell in love with New York when I lived there, but that’s not an uncommon story. It wasn’t until I moved to Montana as an adult that I felt I’d found the home I’d never had. It was the strangest experience to recognize a place—recognize it truly in my heart—though I’d never really known it before. Now, geography has become of primary importance to me, and the battle for belonging—and the butting together of disparate and conflicting geographies that express different parts of myself—are clearly hashed out in my poetry. In our current world, where so many of us have lived and traveled all over, where we’ve defined ourselves differently and transformed to become new people as we’ve moved through the geographies of our lives, we all have many landscapes to reconcile within us. It seems to me that reaching a resting place doesn’t guarantee rest.In your poem “At the Museum of Modern Art,” you write, “They say the modern condition is one / of isolation, and if I’m anything, // I’m modern.” Many of the poems in Beautiful in the Mouth, as well as some of the poems featured here, seem to speak to this situation. Many of your poems are infused with a feeling of great loneliness. I am lonely. I don’t think you can carry your house on your back for ten years and not feel that way. My grandmother dropped out of high school and married my grandfather, a taxi driver, when she was sixteen. She had my mom two years later, and three more children followed. She’s lived in the same town—Holland, Michigan—almost her entire life, and nearly all of my extended family still live there, as well. I have a dog and a car with a hatchback. It’s modern, and it’s lonely, and it’s what I have to work with as a writer.Often, in Beautiful in the Mouth, tension seems generated by the collision of inadequate language and the ineffable. For example, in “Blackfoot River” you write, “And what are we moving / towards in speech except more words that waste their motion? / The unspeakable spoken and spoken until it becomes / lost in the bright keening of the stars, those unknown / latitudes we measure every message against.” Poetry has been a huge source of comfort and solace in my life. It has allowed me to connect with people I’ve never met, to feel less alone in the void of movement that has been my life, to find a way of understanding myself and those around me. However, it can’t do all the work I’d like it to. While it’s my passion—and my profession—language has failed me just as it fails us all. Words, and poems especially, are merely an attempt at understanding, expressing, and encapsulating our strongest feelings of desperation and yearning, desire and fulfillment, fear and repulsion. They are beautiful, necessary attempts, the same way that standing on top of a mountain and shouting your name into the uninhabited air is an attempt—we must declare ourselves over and over again, and still never really find a way to understand how we exist.How has your experience as a theater major and an actor affected your poetry? I believe that poetry is best when recited. Therefore, I believe it should be written to be read aloud. It needs drama, music, and character—all performative elements. It also needs a story. Poems are tiny plays: they have individual personas, voices, monologues. And poetry is, like the theatre, originally an oral tradition, and I think it will best survive that way. As we move away from print media and find poems as art pieces (http://www.bornmagazine.org/) or streaming fleetingly through our iPods (http://www.poemflow.com/), we’ll best be able to carry them with us as text heard, inhaled, remembered, and recited.We’re Facebook friends. Recently I read a posting you made in response to Cate Marvin’s essay on the VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) site that discusses her experience as the Writer-in-Residency at the James Merrill House (http://vidaweb.org/dealwithit.shtml). Cate’s essay speaks to the discomfort and fear the committee seems to have felt at the thought of Cate, a single mother by choice, arriving with her new baby, Lucia, in tow. You wrote to Cate that the piece “spoke to me very clearly about the struggles of my friends, as well as my own fears about becoming a writer/mother.” Might you speak to that a bit more specifically? I’d like to be able to say that—at least when it comes to the literary community—such stories are shocking, but of course that’s not true. Honestly, it feels a bit dangerous for me to speak to it more directly. I’m in the process of applying for academic jobs, and while I understand that any potential plans I might have to eventually become a mother can’t be held against me during the application process, it’s unlikely that those plans would be looked on favorably by my colleagues if I were to declare them outright. These are hypothetical plans, of course. They don’t really exist. However, I have been witness to just the sorts of situations that Cate described in her essay: I have a friend who was told by the faculty that she never would have been accepted to her MFA program if they’d known she planned to have a baby during the course of her studies (she completed all her course work and thesis with flying colors, and graduated on time). Another friend was repeatedly denied fellowships and grants by her academic institution, though she was the most qualified applicant—the faculty were concerned that, as a mother, she wouldn’t have the time and energy to put those funds to good use. Of course, there are many places within the academy that treat mothers wonderfully. I’ve seen the Stegner Program at Stanford be very supportive of fellows and lecturers with young children—and because of their support, those mothers have continued to be productive writers, doing bold, exciting work. But my feeling of wariness persists. A few years ago I became dear friends with a group of women writers and artists at the Vermont Studio Center, all different ages, some with children, some without. We spent many hours discussing whether motherhood and art are compatible. Now, if we weren’t so afraid of a lack of support—not to mention outright shunning and roadblocking on the part of our colleagues—would we really have been having that discussion? It seems doubtful.You chose to quote a section, from that same essay: “I don’t believe in autobiographical poetry. And if it exists, I don’t want to write it. . . My life is not my poetry.” I’m interested to know if this statement of Cate’s applies to your own poetry, as the speakers of your poems seem to tell tales that are tangibly autobiographical. I can’t deny that almost all of my poems are based in autobiography. However, unlike a memoirist, I feel no pressure to remain faithful to the original story. This rarely bothered me until recently, when my book was published. I’ve been asked in interviews and at readings about the personal experiences that are contained in many of my poems. People want to know more about the back stories of those experiences, especially the saddest, darkest ones. Because the poems appear autobiographical (and, of course, they usually are), readers think they know me, have some insight into who I am, understand my history—and they speak very frankly to me about myself. I understand that this is natural, and when I read someone else’s poem, I make many of the same conclusions about autobiography and the feeling of intimacy that it transmits to me as the reader. I quoted that section from Cate’s essay not so much because my work isn’t autobiographical, but because that’s not all that it is. Regardless of whether or not I’m telling the truth in a poem, I don’t want my character or life to be judged by what I say within one. That’s a tough order, I know, but a girl can dream.What’s next for Keetje Kuipers? I have a year left as a Stegner Fellow—and I plan to get a lot of work done in that time. I’m nearly finished with my next collection of poems, tentatively titled The Keys to the Jail, and this summer I started a non-fiction project about the cabin in the wilderness where I lived for seven months and the woman, Margery Davis Boyden, who that fellowship is named for. I also hope to embark on a poetry translation project this fall. Other than that, my plans are simple: bake more pies, take more hikes, and find a job that allows me to continue doing the work of writing—and teaching—that I love most.---------
Our last vacation
It was the season of dead moles,
Getting over the future
Tonight I want to burn through it, watch desire
Stowaway Future
The end is in the beginning, the ghosts shining through: I understand that I'm going to have to forgive you, You'll have to stop being the greenhouse at night, the soft rabbits And you can't be its answer, quietly bedded down
At the Museum of Modern Art
They say the modern condition is one I'm modern. That must be why missing the pastel glow of a Diebenkorn, Unlike the homeless couple, curled in the doorway of the Chinese bakery But if I can imagine these solitary and pressed together in a kind of awkward naked on a park bench were to reveal resting on her breast just above Come home. Help me find a way.
All the Rivers in the World
You've never seen weather like this: gathering behind the roadside billboards girls are dead. Storms fill the sky, too: winging its way across the air's dirty mouth. but there's so much emptiness to make up for. the little houses made of cinderblock by dead fires. Love the tree line that says Don't be too proud to read what's written thief, thief! You know what's been stolen, back. Oh, tumbleweed queen, all the rivers
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