Q: When did your interest in writing begin?
Q: When did your interest in writing begin?
MK: Something important and definitive happened to me very early, something
that became the generative spark in my life which made it possible for me
to become a writer. I spent quite a lot of time with my maternal
grandparents on their wheat farm in the midwest. They were Presbyterians,
and they read the Bible aloud every morning before breakfast. At two, at
three, at four, I remember listening, rapt, to the sound of their voices. I
had little understanding of what the verses meant, but I fell under the
spell of the music in that language.
I climbed onto that wave of utterance and let it
carry me. Listening to
those rich, full Biblical utterances rolling from my grandfather's and
grandmother's tongues was like listening to the first couple, Adam and Eve,
speak their story with their own mouths. There is both grandeur and glory
in that language. I learned from that listening the power of language to
render story, and to exhort, to sooth, to sing, to moan, to cry out.
My grandmother who had been a teacher would
read to me,
sometimes from the
Bible. I also remember loving the rhythm of Longfellow's "Song of
Hiawatha." From the shores of Gitchyguumy (?) to the shining big sea
waters. I memorized quite a few verses of the opening by listening to my
grandmother read it. Later she read me passages from Shakespeare. I made
small books, sewing the binding with needle and thread. I was already
escaping into the imagination, "thinking up" stories and writing them down.
I learned to read and read voraciously, mostly
novels. I read War and
Peace when I was nine. In fifth grade I read Moby Dick. Then I read The
Brothers Karamazov. I was also reading things like The Secret Garden and
Nancy Drew mysteries. I don't remember reading poetry, except in school.
I also loved music, learned piano and clarinet, and
loved to sing and
dance. Then, at ten, I lost the hearing in one ear from a case of mumps. I
felt deeply wounded, and I felt this loss prevented me from continuing in
music. Whether this was true or not, it was how I felt. The wound threw me
off. I was devastated, not only by the loss--I was not a whole person now,
but a cripple--but by the fact that my parents didn't know how to help me
adjust. Though they were probably doing all they could, I felt abandoned by
them.
Soon afterward we moved to the west coast, taking
my
grandparents with us.
I was sad, bereft to leave that landscape, and sad because I did not feel
like a healthy person anymore. The two things conflated. Something precious
and vital to me had been taken away.
I didn't fully understand it and I didn't know what
to do about it. It
shut music off as an avenue. Even my grandmother didn't know how to help
me. They say when the gods take something away they leave a gift. Perhaps
the gift was that loss made me more sensitive to, more aware of, loss, my
own and the losses of others. Perhaps it engendered an ability to feel
compassion for others.
Q: What did you do?
MK: What I had to. I had to make a life in the new place. I made a few
friends--previously I'd had many friends, but now some exuberance I'd had
was diminished. I sealed my grief inside. I continued to read: literature
was consolation.
I'd given up on religion, but in high school, on my
own, I
wrote a story
about a man who carries Christ's cross for him for a while to give Christ a
rest. I don't know how I decided to sent it to a magazine, but I did. I've
now forgotten what the name of this little religious magazine was, or how I
knew about it. They published my story and paid me $50.00. My parents were
terribly impressed by this. To this day, when I see my father, he says "Why
don't you write some more stories like that one you wrote in high school?"
In high school I also had a wonderful teacher
named Jane who
encouraged me
to write. I was reading Faulkner then. I was very lonely, and I read all of
Faulkner's novels in order to get through high school. One day I used the
word "ligneous" in a composition, a word I'd learned reading Faulkner, and
Jane didn't know this word and had to look it up. She was delighted with
me, I could feel her delight. I felt truly loved by this teacher, and I've
never forgotten it. The right teacher at the right time can make a very
great difference.
When I was a senior I wrote some poems which
won me a
scholarship to the
University of Oregon. They had just begun to give these scholarships in
writing, music, sculpture and painting, and I won the writing scholarship
that first year. There was one writing class at the University then, a 400
level class in which students wrote both poetry and fiction. The Professor,
Ralph Salisbury, let me into the class because I'd won the scholarship. He
was a very kind man, and gentle, and a good teacher. Looking back, I see
how lucky I was to have him teach me at a time when I was young and rather
impressionable. I'm very grateful for the teachings and the encouragement
he gave me.
That year for the first time I heard a poet read in
public.
It was William
Stafford. I remember being awed when he told about having been a
conscientious objector. I liked his gentleness, which was palpable. Later
that same year Diane Wakowski came to read. When I heard her, a woman, I
thought for the first time, I can do this. I can become a writer. That year
I published my first two poems in the Massachusetts Review, a literary
magazine that has survived and still exists.
Q: You went on to get an MFA?
MK: I entered various contests as an undergraduate and won them. I began to publish poems regularly in small literary magazines. Epoch, Poetry Northwest, the Northwest Review, Confrontation. I also changed my major to political science, since I had other interests beyond literature. I married in my senior year and my husband and I went off to Mexico for a while. A year later I wanted to go back to school. We came back to Oregon, and I got an MFA in 1968. We had a baby when I was twenty-eight, and we decided to leave Eugene and come to Boulder. I had the habit then, which I still have, of writing every day, preferably in the morning. I had established this as a routine. When my baby was small, I would put her down for a nap after lunch and then sit down and write while she slept. I knew those two hours were all I had. I was still published regularly in small magazines. After we'd been in Boulder a year, I got a part time job teaching at the University, which turned into a full time job. Those were the days when you could get a job without having published a book. I began to publish in more important magazines, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation.
Q: When did you start writing fiction?
MK: My MFA thesis was both. I've always written both, all the way back to those little books I stitched by hand.
Q: Your early work seems to me not only poems which address the important human issue but poems much concerned with women's issues.
MK: Saying Things, my first book, was publishsed idn 1978. It fits this description only in the sense that those human moments are addressed by a female persona. In More Palomino, Please, More Fuchsia, which was a finalist for the San Francisco State Poetry Prize, there ARE poems written out of an awareness of womens' issues as such.
Q: "Get Out of Here" lays out a portrait of patriarchy, though not in a didactic way.
MK: There are lots of images of male misuse of power (big game hunting, missile imagery and Big Government Political Machine imagery) and of female subservience. But it's also a poem about imagination in the service of ethics. The lushness and sensuousness of imagination and the persistence of an ethical imagination are played off against imagery of the efficiency and violence of the military-industrial complex.
Q: "Sestina for Bright Cloud, Singing (But Not the Blues)" is compelling in its whimsy and tongue in cheek irony. It seems to speak of "women's work"--child rearing, cooking and housekeeping--as essential, as the foundation of culture.
MK: Yes. It's about women being the creators, the makers, the laborers in the fields, and about patriarchal institutions that get in the way of that labor that sustains life in its richness, its lushness. Its theme is the sensuousness of life--in which babies are born and food prepared and eaten and nature honored for its wildness and its life sustaining agape--persevering or struggling to persevere in what is basically a destructive culture, a culture of industrialism, technology and war. There are also poems in that book which simply celebrate female power, such as "Proscription" which describes female power in it raw and mythic form, through images of animals and animal sacrifice before a god.
Q: The poems about the mother/daughter relationship in that book and in What We Have To Live With (1989) are especially interesting in that, taken together, they convey great complexity in that relationship.
MK: Alicia Ostriker writes, in Stealing The Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, (which, by the way, is THE important work to date on the Women's Poetry Movement--if you're teaching writing at a University, you should include this book on your required reading list) that the fraught nature of the mother/daughter relationship as due to the fact that it's a primal erotic relationship, an "emotion-laden intimacy antedating all others, on which perhaps all others are modeled." There is bound to be ambivalence, because the intimacy is a two-way dependency, and there has to be separation and loss and then, hopefully, reunion. There is honoring of the mother in these poems you mention, and anger, inevitably, as well as fierce celebration of the whole complex enterprise.
Q: In "Matriphobia" you write from the point of view of being a daughter and a mother at the same time.
MK: That poem is about the anger we necessarily feel against our mothers when we try to define ourselves as separate beings and try to separate from them, about how difficult this is because they've also been our models. It's like trying to separate from yourself. Then you watch you daughter try to do it too. And it's about women' bodies, how much our bodies are perceived to define us, and how we often want to reject our mothers because they are female and so are we, and we're aware of how complicated life as a female is going to be.
Q: Both books contain many love poems. Is it because sexuality and love are major themes of women's lives and thus of women writers?
MK: Intimacy is a major theme of women poets, and the women' poetry movement took it up bigtime. The romantic/sexual union is one of the places where we experience power relationships, and in that sense it's a woman's issue. But then it's also a human issue. Until the Sixties though, sex and romantic love had been pronounced upon almost exclusively by male poets. Intimacy's an obsession and preoccupation of just about every human being, a universal, primal obsession. And lyric poetry, because it's lyric, is a place to celebrate and describe this relationship. The lyric is also a very fitting place to sing of sensuousness and sensuality. A powerful impetus for the women's poetry movement was the desire to address the traditional topics of poetry--death, life, and love--and to tell it like it is from a female point of view. Writing about sex and sensuousness and the nature of intimacy became a primary theme of women's poetry.
Q: "To The Banker: Sestina Against Money" is a raucous and ribald defense of sensuality from a female point of view.
MK: Yes. Like "Get Out of Here" it addresses the struggle of sensuousness to prevail in a violent, destructive, industrial, techonological culture. But the poem that actually deals with power relationships between men and women and with the history of patriarchy is the book length poem Diana Lucifera published by Shameless Hussy Press.
Q: How did you come to write it?
MK: It was the Seventies, and I was thinking about these issues. They were always on the back burner. I had been thinking about the ways in which and degree to which women buy into their own oppression. I saw myself as acquiescing quite a lot, unconsciously, and I was trying to get conscious about it. So the frame of the poem is a narrative in which a woman is about to be killed in her own home by a man with a gun. Within and around this narrative I then wove imagery and facts from history and from other cultures where bear on patriarchal matters. The poem is addressed to the woman, and as I talk to her about herself and her situation, it examines illusion after illusion, shredding each one and stripping it away, seeing the reality that's behind it. I wanted clarification as to how much women's situation is due to men's dominance and how much it's due to women's acquiesence to that dominance. A male friend of mine in South Asia, on an occasion when I was bemoaning patriarchal institutions, said, "Women are powerful, but they don't use their power." He is a reformer, and he was expressing his frustration at the fact that women in his culture seemed not to be doing their part to bring about change. It's certainly a question that individual women, no matter how privileged or how exploited, have to face.
Q: What We Have To Live With is powerfully lyrical. Also your focus on traditional forms has become more predominant.
MK: Lyric poetry is the medium of feeling, of the emotions. Poetry is
spoken song. It's the opera of speech, the jazz and blues of speech. The
tradition begins with Sappho who was the West's first lyric poet. It was
she who first rendered the quintessential human moments: anger, loss,
grief, mourning, and then the connection of sexual passion, abandon, and
the many kinds of joy. Lyric poetry is a musical form, and because it is
primarily music--a voice that sings rather than tells its grief or its
joy--it is also a form of ritual. We use lyric poetry rituaistically to
purge ourselves of grief and loss, and to praise, honor and celebrate.
The lyric is oral. It is intended to be spoken so that
it can be heard.
The page is merely notation for HOW the poem is to be spoken, a notation of
how the poet heard it. Traditional forms interest me because they are
repositories of lyric ritual. They build in certain musical givens that the
poet then works with in a creative way. When I was at work on the poems in
More Palomino I wanted to expand the range of language I'd used in my first
book. I consciously tried to widen the possible vocabulary in that book and
to widen and deepen and lengthen the poems musically and linguistically. As
a way to do this, I began to set myself exercises in forms, especially the
villanelle and sestina.
When as a senior in high school I won that
scholarship, one
of the poems
in my entry was a villanelle. But the first consciousness of repetition and
variation--repetition and variation are the basic, bottom line fundamentals
that constitute the music in lyric poetry--was, as I've said, the Bible.
The narratives are all connected by formulaic repetitions. And Jesus
said....And Paul said....And Jesus said. And the exhortations are
repetitions: Thou shalt and Thou shalt not. And the Psalms, There is time
to sow and a time to reap, a time to lament an d time to leave off
lamentation. And the Song of Solomon. "As the lily among thorns, so is my
love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the wood, so is my
beloved among the sons."
I like Millay. She was one of the poets I read
extensively at
University,
where her work was considered declasse because Modernism was in vogue and
she wasn't modernist. In A Formal Feeling Comes, the 1994 anthology
compiled by Annie Finch, Annie reminds us of what I myself experienced at
University: that formal poetics at that time meant reactionary politics and
elitest aesthetics. It became a serious issue for women writers, because
Williams had put down formal verse, and Joyce had said of The Waste Land
that it "ends (the) idea of poetry for ladies." Dickinson of course stayed
within certain formal limits, especially in contrast to Whitman. More
recently June Jordan, who wanted to distance herself from a tradition
carried on by white women, declared Whitman her model.
I was aware of the stigma attached to formalism,
but even in
high school
I'd been aware that form can be playful, challenging and expanding, and NOT
confining. At University I didn't pay much attention to what was in vogue
and what wasn't. I was absorbed in finding the form each poem of mine
seemed to want to take. Often, when I'd found that form, it was a poem that
fell into the category of free verse. Sometimes, though, a poem seemed to
cry out for meter as I was writing it, or for accentual stress. At the time
I thought in terms of the aesthetics of a line, that a line had be a unit,
had to have some beauty and rhymic coherence. Later I read Marilyn Hacker,
and around that same time I noticed that form was becoming almost a
democratic institution. It was used, for instance, in Kenneth Koch's book
for teaching writing to children. The alternative poetry scene, though they
billed themselves as descendants of Williams, were also using form in new
and experimental ways. Suddenly there was no reason to apologize for loving
form. (Though there was still grumbling about the very existence of
sestinas. Interestingly, The Formalist still declines to publish them.)
Then, as I've said, I was trying to expand my
repetoire and
range, and as
I worked on the poems in More Palomino I got hooked on the sestina. I like
how long it is and how obsessive. I like to climb inside one and lose
myself there. Each poem is the creation of a world, and a sestina is the
creation of a very large and detailed and lush world. I became so
fascinated by how sestinas work, how many and varied repetitious
possibilities they offer, that I began almost to think in sestinas.
Now, with Finch's anthology, we see that the long
tradition of women's
formal poetry (Teasdale, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Millay, Louise Bogan) is
evolving once again. There is a kind of grassroots uprising going on. Finch
says, "Defining "formal" poetry broadly as poetry that foregrounds the
artificial and rhetorical nature of poetic language by means of
conspicuously repeated patterns, I have chosen a continuum of formal poems,
from regular rhyme and meter through accentual verse through non-metrical
rhyming poems to repetitive chants."
Q: Could you expand on the idea that traditional forms are not consraints?
MK: Of course they're constraints. Now guess who said this--My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action....The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
Q: Who?
MK: Igor Stravinsky. Who is, if anything, a modernist. Constraint is a
given in form. Without constraint, what you have is formlessness. Even the
ocean, that symbol of formlessness, is constrained by terrain. People get
very simple minded when they consider form in poetry. They seem to forget
that we are creatures that long for the rhythms that only repetition and
variation can provide. Those rhythms and repetitions constitute form.
In free verse one is concerned with form as well.
Free verse
is not free.
Your poem will have a shape, that shape determined by the rhythm of its
sound patterns. This is often a difficult idea to convey to beginning
writing students: the idea that a work of art has shapliness. Its rhythm,
if it's truly a work of art, is beautiful. Beginning students often have no
sense of aesthetics, of what constitutes beauty. Some have half baked
notions of rebellion which depend on desecrating anything in the poem that
might give it a shapely shape. They don't know why they're doing this. They
don't understand that they're reacting mindlessly to some vague threat from
authority. Form has nothing to do with authority. It has to do with
aesthetics.
Q: There seems to be a fundamental change in your work after What We Have To Live With. Though some of your previous themes appear--women's issues, for example--both Midwife and Soulskin focus on compassionate connections between people and on psychological transformation.
MK: Midwife was commissioned by the Center for Human Caring at the Nursing School in Denver. I was paid $6,000.00 to research and write poems about nurses. This opportunity was a gift. It allowed me access to a world I couldn't have easily entered on my own. For instance, I was invited to be present at four or five births, something I couldn't have engineered by myself. The sphere of birth and dying, of illness and recovery, is rich subject matter for a poet, for these events are intensely emotional events. And in focusing on the meeting of a nurse with the person she cared for, I was focusing time after time on the moment of compassion. Watching this moment over and over again was bound to effect me. The idea of compassion as a way of life was held up to the light, and turned and turned in that light, so that I might see it from many perspectives. Compassion as a way of life became visible, present, urgent.
Q: In Soulskin you include poems from your experience at Mother Teresa's hospice and poems about healers.
MK: The hospice poems are about that compassionate moment. HOW do we
enact
this moment? It is a moment that can take infinite shapes, and it will
differ with each encounter. The curandera knows, instinctively, what the
macho man needs. The nurse in "Innanna" demonstrates a very sensitive
compassion for both the dying mother and her daughter. By articulating some
of these moments I hope to make my audience more aware of their own
opportunities. And of course I want to make myself more aware of mine.
The wholeness and interconnectedness of the
biosphere is a
fact. I cannot
harm another part of it without ultimately harming myself. I have to strive
to live a life in which my living brings about the least amount of harm.
This is humbling, especially in a culture which prizes individual rights. I
don't view individual rights as sacrosanct. Where individual rights
interfere with the balance of the biosphere, they should give way to
responsibility.
Recognition of the world as one world naturally
leads to an ethic of
non-violence, of mercy and of kindness. Every day, every moment, is for me
the site of my struggle to remain aware that I'm not separate from the rest
of creation, and my struggle to avoid what will harm and to pursue what
will heal. I don't always succeed, or course.
Also these "opportunities" include compassion for
oneself. Some of the
shorter poems focus on this. "Chiariscuro: The Lily Tanks" focuses on
transformation from dormancy and passivity into wakefulness and sensual
fullness. "Blessing" describes a spiritual transformation, the kind that
happens when we are compassionately present for another being.
Q: In Warscape, With Lovers, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Prize for 1966, you address themes of creation/destruction as a witness.
MK: Rabindranath Tagore called it "the eternal cycle" of destruction and creation. He believed and I believe that poetry works "against forgetting" by bringing news from the larger world beyond our personal "borders." The poetry of witness has been going on for a long time, but it has become more prominent on the scene in the last few decades because the West has acted very destructively toward other cultures and nations, within the borders of western nations, and toward nature, and because as human beings we have become more and more aware of the abuse of human rights. Warscape With Lovers includes poems based on my involvement as a volunteer human rights worker for Peace Brigade International with the suffering caused by the civil war in Sri Lanka where I worked in 1992. Ours is a country that can be incredibly generous with its resources when other nations are in need (famine relief, for example), but it is a country which also exports violence to the Third World and to other species. Now this violence is coming back to us. As the Irish poet Eavan Boland wrote, we live "in a time of violence." For the last decade I have been feeling much like Seamus Heaney, when he remarked the influence of the war in Northern Ireland on his work. "From that moment," he wrote, "the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament...."
Q: Warscape With Lovers seems a dark book, shot through with streaks of light. As a witness, how does one manage to feel optimism in the face of the deliberate, calculated cruelties of war and the thoughtless destruction of millions of species?
MK: Stafford, in his amazing poem "A Ritual To Read To Each Other," writes:
"I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty/ to know what occurs but
not recognize the fact." Every human being has two jobs. One is to see
what's really there, to see through the illusions. Quantum physicists have
come to the view that we cannot know objectively beyond a certain point
because when we make an observation we are part of that observation and
influence the outcome. The religion that promotes this idea that our job is
to become aware of our illusions is Buddhism. Though Buddhism is not,
strictly speaking, a religion. It does not promote a god or gods. Rather
Buddhism urges the practice of meditation as a way, a means, of
experiencing what's really there. Physicists finally have come round to
saying that truth is necessarily subjective and experiential. Buddhists
have been saying this for centuries.
Artists understand this. The artist's work is to see
what's
really there,
and to report on it subjectively. When an artist does this, we have the
"truth" she or he observes, and we have it in her or his words,
subjectively, and knowing this, we can then hold it up beside other
subjective truths, and, hopefully, taken together, we will begin to get a
fairly detailed view of what's really there.
Of course this depends on the artist being truly,
openly
aware. Not to be
aware has tragic consequences. Stafford writes that it's "important that
awake people be awake," because only an awake person can see what's really
there. Henry Miller said, "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to
be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." Those adjectives
begin to suggest how rich a life we can lead, if we stay aware. And
Stafford's poem tells us how dangerous unawareness can be. "If you don't
know the kind of person I am/and I don't know the kind of person you are/a
pattern that others made may prevail in the world..." The poem goes on to
say that "the signals we give each other.../should be clear: the darkness
around us is deep." Artists are in a very visible position. They give
signals whether they would have it so or not. So it's of upmost importance
that we who are writers honor that responsibility.
I want to write what will encourage awareness,
help readers
to look at the
world with a deconstructive eye, help us to see the illusion in what
culture presents as desireable, to see the flaws in our institutionalized
assumptions. Only then, when we see what's really there, will we as a
culture connect again with nature and truly honor nature and ourselves as
animals. The story "Looking for Mother" is a critique of the myth of the
perfect family and is also about illusion and reality in a society where
illusions of community are promoted for personal gain, while what most
prevails in the culture is loneliness.
In Warscape With Lovers, I try to see and describe
the
complimentarity of
creation and the destruction. "Ghazals For The Turn Of The Century" is, in
its first half, a portrayal of the pain destructive cultures embody and
which people in those cultures suffer. The poem also describes a
transformation out of that pain and brokenness into wholeness and serenity.
It deals with this on both personal and private levels, and at the level of
culture. It's about moving from war culture to a peace culture, both
privately and publicly, at the level of individuals and humanity as a
whole. My task seemed to be to get humaneness into the poem and still grant
the violence its sublimity. Violence is, after all, authentic. And complex.
Tagore writes, in "A Flight of Swans," of those times when immense violence
holds sway, "Welcome Him now with all that you have/...and touch His feet
with your forehead,/ Now the All--Destroying is come." He's talking about
the sublime.
But of course energy is impermanent. I'm
interested in the
cycle, how it
swings back again from violence to creation. Transformation fascinates me,
and I've addresssed it in fiction too. One of my stories, "Distant Lights
on Water," is an example, as is "Mine" (How To Accommodate Men). Clayton,
the protagonist in "Distant Lights on Water," experiences the
transformation that results when we give, and he wants both to experience
this transformation as often as possible and to act in the world in such a
way that he does less rather than more harm. He tries to make changes in
his company's way of doing business, and tries to live his private life as
much as possible in the circle of light transformation casts. In "Mine" the
young American journalist hopes her reporting will ultimately help heal the
world away from war. In the meantime erotic phone calls from a young
soldier in the country where she's posted intrigue and distract her. Their
different backgrounds make it difficult to say who is exploiting whom.
Certain turns in event make clear to her exactly what it is that
constitutes love.
Q: Let's talk for a while about fiction. In Mozart, Westmoreland And Me you write both traditional stories and stories which are rather more experimental.
MK: I like to write in both of the ways you've described. In fact each
story demands its form. Certain material just asks to be cast
traditionally--in How To Accommodate Men "Iron Shard" and "The Thing Around
Them" would be examples. Those novels I read as a child surely planted
seeds. But I truly learned to write an omniscient narrator much later, from
Nadine Gordimer. Reading her novels, I began to see how it was done by a
master. Her early books, and then A Sport of Nature and now None To
Accompany Me have all been vitally important to me in learning to render
that point of view.
The suffering of Radika in "Iron Shard" and of
Vasuki in "The
Thing Around
Them" needed that treatment, that perspective that can be distant and
encompassing, and then zoom in at will. Other material needs more latitude
for experiment. When I wrote the story "Mozart, Westmoreland and Me" I was
also writing sestinas, and several writers and friends have remarked that
that story resembles one. They're right. My experimenting with a new form
in poetry helped me devise fiction in a new way as well. But the story also
had to do with what I was reading, a biography of Mozart. He lived to write
music, and it was music that fed him. In the meantime his life was
extremely spartan, and he was deprived of much emotional comfort. It was
also the era of Vietnam, and Westmoreland had come under scrutiny. I
enjoyed playing off these two characters against each other by creating a
female protagonist both of them might relate to, but differently. She is
the narrator and so gets to comment on the two males, one an artist, one a
general. I had the idea to energize the language by writing mostly short
sentences which contained repetition of a phrase or repeated a sentence
construction, and then to compliment these with longer sentences, not
Nineteenth century sentences, but sentences more filled out, though they
kept the same repetitious touchstone somewhere in them.
Q: Would you say it's a feminist work?
MK: Yes. But the story is satire, and female figures (The Queen of the
Night, and her daughter, Pamina) come in for some satiric hits. Because I
want to strip away illusion, much of my fiction is satire or employs
parody. "Sons" is a satirical critique of mothering and a call to mothers
to use the power they have over children in a non-sexist way, to act
against the pressure our culture exerts on them to give in to sexist norms.
"Don't Touch Me," and "Keeping Busy" and "Mozart...", portray women trying
to survive ethically and to live responsibly in a violent and materialistic
society. "Mercy" and "Bondage" and "Desires" and "And Judith...." all
address the difficulty of surviving spiritually in a culture of violence.
Certainly those stories could be called feminist. The story "How To
Accommodate Men" critiques sexism and power politics and satirizes
co-dependency.
In "Eating God," told by a mideaval nun, there is
much parody
of the nun's
advisor, a man who makes it his business to guard the nun's virginity and
to counsel her on the proper behavior of virgins. "Laissez Faire" employs
parody, and "Extinct Species" parodies the contributions of both males and
females to the destruction of the planet. All of these stories might be
called feminist.
Q: What's your definition of feminism?
MK: Feminists are often portrayed as being out for themselves. But this a myth promoted by the media. Of course in feminism there is a range from radical to conservative, but I think feminists generally would agree that they want to live in a way that recognizes and honors the connections between us and the wholeness of life. That means that we have to care not just about our own skins but how everyone fares--women, men, children, our elders, other species. My work often critiques culture which violates this ethic and in which institutionalized cultural practices keep us from recognition of this wholeness.
Q: What practices?
MK: The valorizing of one group at the expense of another, say humans at
the expense of animals, men at the expense of women, or women at the
expense of men. You might at first think my story "How To Accommodate Men"
valorizes the woman at the expense of the men in the story. But it doesn't,
because the woman is in deep trouble, it's just a different kind of trouble
than the trouble the men are having.
The valorization of violence in books, films, on
T.V. and in life. Our
political leaders still valorize war as a way of settling disputes.
A valorization of materialism and profit. If I buy a
blouse, I have to
think about where it's made, who made it, how much they got paid to make it
and under what conditions. I may decide to buy the blouse, but I don't want
to do so mindlessly. I wish we could teach our children to ask those
questions every time they buy something or ask us to buy something for
them. Why don't we have some controls on advertising? We don't live the
good life here in the U.S., though we like to imagine we do. We live the
life of people at the mercy of their own greed and ignorance, a life which
is very destructive of other species, of other human beings and of our own
personal well being.
"Laissez Faire" is a story that touches om the issue
of who
gets valorized
at whose expense. It's about an older woman noticing that she's getting the
short end of the stick because she's an older woman in a culture that
valorizes youth and sees older women as refuse. Also, because she's an
older woman in a culture in which men are valorized at the expense of
women, she encounters situations in which women get pitted against each
other for the prize, which is a man. And in which women also get judged by
men in terms of their "prize" value. She lives in a culture which operates
on dollar values and therefore casts her as marked down goods. In theses
circumstances young girls will fail to get the love and attention they need
to become not just whole persons but persons who blossom to their fullest.
Thus girls are susceptible to and buy the illusion that only older men can
give them what mommy failed to provide. In this paradigm Mommy becomes
someone to be despised because she couldn't make up for what Daddy didn't
do, because she's no longer valuable now that her days as a flaming sex
object are over, and because she has failed to change the world for her
daughters to a world in which women are valued as much as men.
Q: You said earlier that a human being has two jobs, and one was to strip away illusion and see things as they are. What's the other?
MK: The other is to be a decent person, to live an ethical life. It's
interesting that Buddhism, which is not a religion, advocates compassion.
Buddha said, in effect, "stop thinking your own mind is reality--you're not
that important. And when you get that clear, remember to honor other people
and creatures."
I like Emerson in his "hitch your wagon to a star"
speech. He
said let us
not indulge "in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not
lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the
other way: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which
the divinities honor and promote." Among these he mentions justice, and love.
Q: He didn't mean romantic love, but probably something like Christian love.
MK: Yes, agape. Friendly love. But romantic love is also a form of divine love. In poetry the romantic paradigm is used to describe transcendent love between human beings and the divine. From Sappho and San Juan de la Cruz, through Rumi and Lalla, Kabir and Mirabai and on down, the romantic relationship is a figure these poets use to describe divine love. And this is appropriate, because romantic love--and the sexuality which is a part of it--is one of the places where sacredness resides and can be experienced.
Q: Is this perhaps how you conceived the sexuality in your poem "Carpe Diem: Time Piece?"
MK: Yes, as I think the poem makes obvious. It's filled with biblical inferences and imagery, so that the "cop a feel" situation, which in Hollywood and on T.V. would be trivialized, takes on, in the poem, divinity. It's a poem that delineates in great detail the sacredness of sexuality, and suggests that we seize the day every chance we get because it's important to love as much as we can.
Q: Isn't confessionalism anathema to New Formalists? How would your poem fit in there?
MK: I showed this poem to Dana Gioia at a New Formalist conference. I don't think of the poem as "confessional," by the way, because I'm not trying to shock the audience. I'm trying to educate them, to show them that one of their assumptions about human sexual behavior may be questionable. But I thought Dana might think it confessional. "I hesitate," I said, "because you're on record as disapproving the confessional." "Not," he said, "if you've got something interesting to confess."
Q: Is there any way in which Emerson's quote bears on the writing of fiction?
MK: Writing fiction encourages us in a very direct way to practice
compassion. To write good fiction you have to imagine the life of the
other. And that's exactly what you must do to feel compassion. When we
imagine the other's context, we see how context makes her or his actions
not necessarily justifiable but understandable. We say, "I don't like what
she did, but I understand how she could have come to do it." And we have
sympathy and empathy then for that person. We understand the person's
failings are failings we ourselves might have displayed under similar
circumstances.
When we write fiction, we creat characters,
histories and
contexts which
will enable our readers to identify with these characters and to
understand, if not approve, their failures.
Q: You speak as though ethics and morality are primary values for you. But isn't fiction, and to some extent poetry too, a form of entertainment as well?
MK: I suppose a novel by Danielle Steel is entertainment to many of her readers. But we're talking about serious literature here. Literature is entertaining only in the sense that those who read it find it fascinating and can become deeply engrossed in it. The word "entertainment" carries a negative connotation for serious writers. It suggests harmless fluff, something superficial that will challenge neither the status quo nor readers' minds. William Burroughs said, "I am not an entertainer." I don't consider myself an entertainer either. I'm after justice, and love. I'm convinced that if I don't, every god will leave us.
POETRY
Saying Things, U. Of Nebraska Press, 1978
More Palomino, Please, More Fuchsia, Cleveland State Poetry Center, 1980
Diana Lucifera, Shameless Hussy Press, 1983
What We Have To Live With, Teal Press, 1989
Midwife, National League for Nursing, 1989
Soulskin, National League for Nursing, 1996
Warscape With Lovers, Cleveland State Poetry Center Prize, 1997
Honey, You've Been Dealt A Winning Hand, Capra Press, 1980
Mozart, Westmoreland and Me, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985
How To Accommodate Men, Coffee House Press, 1998
Krysl has published work in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and many other journals, as well as in O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Anthology, Sudden Fiction, Best Little Magazine Fiction and Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights. She is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-editor of the literary journal Many Mountains Moving. She has taught ESL in the People's Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka and at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity in Calcutta.
"Krysl is funny, fierce, and feminist in the best possible way, and a technician of variety and resourcefulness." --John Updike
"Krysl's poetry is funny, funky, tragic, brave, lyrical, humane, political and full of surprises....She is still writing the liveliest sestinas in America." --Alicia Ostriker
"She has a poet's compression, a novelist's feel for the whole, and she is bitterly funny." --Rosellen Brown
"Confidently shifting between satire and lyricism, Krysl's potent, unflinching stories chart how conflict can become catharsis...." --New York Times Book Review
"Eloquent and edgy....tinged with dark humor....rendered in stunning prose....the conscientiously factual and the creastively charged surreal...." --Bloomsbury Review