Q: When did your interest in writing begin?

MK: Something important and definitive happened to me very early, somthing that became the generative spark. I spent much 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, and in the evening. At two, at three, at four, I listened, rapt, to the sound of their voices. I had no understanding of what the verses meant, but I fell under the spell of their music. Listening to those rich, full Biblical utterances rolling from my grandfather's and grandmother's tongues was like hearing the first couple, Adam and Eve, speak their story. There is grandeur and glory in that language. There is suffering and ritual. I learned there the power of language to exhort, to sooth, to sing, to moan, to cry out.

My grandmother had been a teacher. She read to me. I remember loving the rhythm of Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," the rhymic feel of unrhymed triple meter. I memorized quite a bit of it, by listening. Later she read me passages from Shakespeare. I wrote little verses of my own and made small books, sewing the binding with her needle and thread.

When I learned to read, I read voraciously, mostly novels. I read War and Peace when I was nine, and in fifth grade Moby Dick. I was also reading things like The Secret Garden and Nancy Drew mysteries. I learned piano and clarinet. I sang and danced. Then, at ten, after a bout of the mumps, I lost the hearing in one ear. I felt deeply wounded. I imagined 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 felt myself no longer a whole person but a cripple. I didn't know how to tell my parents how I felt, and they didn't know how to help me. My father took me to a specialist to see if my hearing could be repaired. The physician informed us that the auditory nerve was dead. There was nothing that could be done. We left his office and got into the elevator. I wept quietly. My father seemed not to notice. I felt abandoned.

Soon after that we moved to the west coast, taking my grandparents with us. My grandparents were greiving this uprooting from their land. I felt their pain, and my own: the two things conflated. Part of me had been ripped away, and I felt that in order to be able to give up that place that seemed my home, I had to kill in myself my love for land, for landscape. I turned away from nature as a way to try to blot out pain.

I was an adolescent. Trying to grow up, I chose a bad way: the way of negation. I begin to push my grandmother, whom I dearly loved, away from me. As I thought I had to reject nature in order not to feel the hurt of leaving, so I thought I had to reject my grandmother, not to feel the pain of growing.

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.

Previously I'd had many friends, but now some exuberance I'd had was diminished. I sealed my grief inside. I had to make a life in the new place, so I made a few friends, but not many. I continued to read: literature was consolation. I read all of Faulkner's novels to get through high school. And I wrote. 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 decided to send it to a religious magazine. They published my story and paid me $50.00. My parents were impressed. 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?"

I also had a wonderful high school teacher named Jane who encouraged me. One day I used the word "ligneous" in a composition, a word I'd learned from Faulkner, and Jane didn't know this word and had to look it up. I could feel her delight. I felt truly loved by this teacher. Her love made a very great difference to me.

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 scholarships in writing, music, sculpture and painting, and I won the writing scholarship that first year. There was one writing class, graduate level, in which students wrote both poetry and fiction. The Professor, Ralph Salisbury, let me in because I'd won the scholarship. He was a very kind man, gentle, and a very good teacher. I understand now how lucky I was to meet him at a time when I was young and impressionable. I'm very grateful for the teachings and encouragement he gave me.

That year for the first time I heard a poet, William Stafford, read in public. He talked about having been a conscientious objector. His gentleness 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. I entered various contests as an undergraduate and won them. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines. Epoch, Poetry Northwest, the Northwest Review, Confrontation.

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 not only to address important human issues but also specifically women's issues.

MK: Saying Things, my first book, 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 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 ethical imagination 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 creators, both makers and 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 agape--struggling to persevere in a destructive culture of industrialism, technology and war.

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) that the fraught nature of the mother/daughter relationship is 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 daughters 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 bodies and so are we, and we're aware of how complicated life as a female is going to be.

Q: Both books contain 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's poetry movement took this up bigtime. The romantic/sexual union is one of the places where we experience intimacy, and it is also a place where power relationships may play out, and in that sense it's a woman's issue. It's also a human issue. Intimacy's an obsession and preoccupation of just about every human being, a universal, primal obsession, but women probably think about it more, and differently, because they're raising children and making families cohere.

Lyric poetry, because it's lyric, is a place to celebrate and describe intimate relationship, 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--love, death and the changing seasons, as Marilyn Hacker titled her book of sonnets--and to tell it like it is from a female point of view. Writing about the nature of intimacy--including birth and raising children--became a crucial theme in that movement. Birth is after all one of life's quintessential moments, and male poets had pretty much left it alone. For the first time there came to be many, many poems about this sacred animal moment. Ostriker's "The Mother/Child Papers" is still one of the best books about birth and about trying to raise human beings in a world torn apart by war and greed.

Q: "To The Banker: Sestina Against Money" is a raucous and ribald defense of sensuality from a female point of view.

MK: Yes. It addresses the struggle of sensuousness to prevail in a violent 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. It was the Seventies, and I'd 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 more than I could be proud of, unconsciously. 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 relevant imagery and facts from history. The poem, much of which is in second person, is addressed to the woman. As I talk to her about herself and her situation, we examine illusion after illusion, shredding each one and stripping it away. 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: Poetry is spoken song. It's the opera of speech, the jazz and blues of speech. It's a rhymic ritual, a rite. Think of it as a great, underground room filled with drums and flutes. Donald Hall has said that poems are "pleasures first: bodily pleasure, a deliciousness of the senses." Frederick Turner says that when a poet uses and an audience hears meter, "we are taking a first step into an organic recognition of our unity with the physical universe." And it's through the senses that we experience emotion. Lyric poetry is the medium of feeling. In fiction we're concerned with developing characters and moving them through action. In a poem a single psyche sings NOW, uttering the words of this moment and no other. The tradition of the personal lyric begins with Sappho. Homer spoke in epic proportions, and it was Sappho, a woman living a woman's life (a privileged one, so far as we can tell), who, in the West,first rendered the quintessential human moments: anger, loss, grief, mourning, abandon, the connection of sexual passion, the many kinds of joy. Now I'm wildly happy, a poem fragment says. Now I'm unutterably bereft.

And lyric poetry--because it's a voice that sings rather than tells its grief or joy--is ritual. We use it to purge ourselves of grief and loss, to lament suffering, to exorcise anguish, and to praise, honor and celebrate life. It engages us at an elemental level, and it's oral. 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 with which to engage. They build in certain musical givens that the poet then engages these 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 that formal diction, not to give it up but to expand it so that I could use more informal diction more often and not have it seem out of place. As a way to do this, I began to set myself exercises in 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 my first consciousness of repetition and variation--repetition and variation are the basic, bottom line fundamentals that constitute the music in lyric poetry--was 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 a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to lament and 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 a time when 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 then: that formal poetics at that time were in ill repute because they'd been linked with 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 "poetry for ladies." As though women who wrote couldn't possibly handle the great subjects. Or as though metrics couldn't possibly encompass the issues of the age.

Dickinson of course had stayed within certain formal limits, especially in contrast to Whitman, and had expanded these limits, adapting them to her purposes. Interestingly, June Jordan, who wanted to distance herself from a tradition carried on largely by white women, rejected Dickinson and declared Whitman her model.

I was aware at university that formalism was out of vogue, but even in high school I'd been aware that form can be playful, challenging, expanding. And there was Auden who was male and who wrote both free verse and formal verse. I became obsessed with his work. I liked how he combined free verse and formal verse in a single work. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is a case in point. Section I is in a loose, free verse form, section II in blank verse, and Section III in tetrameter really gets down into the ritual feel stressed verse can have. I was fascinated by the way the poem progressed from a looseness of rhythm (and a sophisticated diction) to a more regular rhythm to heavily stressed tetrameter (and simple diction, one or two syllable words), with ever-deepening focus on the grief Auden felt and on his honoring of Yeats. Displaying this range in a single poem became an ideal: it was how I wanted to write. I read Auden over and over. I wanted to be him.

At the same time I didn't pay alot of attention to what was in vogue in verse and what wasn't. I couldn't afford to. 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, for stress. I was thinking in terms of the aesthetics of a line, that a line was a unit which linked rhymically and naturally with other units, and a line had to have linguistic beauty. Rhythm is a form of beauty.

Around that same time I noticed that now 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. Then came Marilyn Hacker. I was thrilled, in the way I'd been with Auden. She took his place in my iconography. Suddenly there was no reason to apologize for loving form.

Of course the fact remains, as both Annie Finch and Molly Peacock have pointed out, that for women to write formal verse is a radical act because the tradition is male. As Molly says, it's like entering the "gilded" cage and inhabiting it rather than being locked up in it. Even when the formal verse written by women is very scrupulous and elegant, its subject matter maay not be. You sense that it's being written by an outsider.

As I worked on the poems in More Palomino I got hooked on the sestina. I like how long it is, and obsessive. I like to climb inside one and lose myself there. I became so fascinated by how sestinas work, how many and varied repetitious possibilities they offer, that I began almost to think in sestinas. Interestingly, The Formalist still declines to publish them. I wonder if this is an aesthetic decision, or is it because in the canon the sestina doesn't have a particularly representataiv history, a cannon of illustrious practicioners?

Now, with Finch's anthology, we see that the long tradition of women's formal poetry (Teasdale, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Millay, Louise Bogan) is alive and vibrant again.

Finch says of the collection, "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." Interesting how ritual is implied by "conspicuously repeated pattterns." Many who now write formal verse didn't learn it from the tradition. They learned it from hymns, or blues songs, or they learned it from The Handbook of Poetic Forms in workshops. People teaching workshops often use forms as one way of teaching, and more and more young poets are having a whale of a good time discovering that forms enhance linguistic playfulness.

The mistake is to assume that form's a container. It's, as Molly Peacock says, a skeleton, the INSIDE of a poem, which the poet then feelingly elaborates.

A lot of poets sometimes write formal verse. We're weary of people who simple mindedly dismiss form as old fashioned or fascist. Sidney Lea, at a conference said, "Don't tell me I"m a reactionary because I sometimes write in form."

Q: Could you expand on the idea that traditional forms are not constraints?

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." 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, by gravity, by wind patterns.

In free verse one is concerned with form as well. Free verse is not free. A work of art has shapliness. Its rhythm, if it's truly a work of art, is beautifully appropriate to its content, rises out of its content. This is an aesthetic fact, and beginning students often have little sense of aesthetics. Many have half baked notions of poetry as a medium of rebellion, and that rebellion depends on desecrating anything in the poem that might give it a shapely shape. They don't understand that they're trying to use poetry to react mindlessly to some vague threat from authority. Form has nothing to do with authority. It has to do with aesthetics.

Q: What is your mode of composition when you're writing free verse?

MK: The same as when I'm playing with form. I stay in the present moment and watch the cliches go buy and wait for original language to surface. William Stafford said that the "stance to take, reading or writing, is neutral, ready, susceptible to now." And that our role "is one of following, not imposing."

Q: Following what?

MK: I don't believe creation is an atonomous act. I believe we do it along with the universe. The physicist David Bohm speaks for a number of other physicists when he says that the character of the universe is "unbroken wholeness" which he calls That-Which-Is. Poets used to talk about "the muse." They felt a sacral voice near them, whispering, urging them to utterance. That "voice" is the invisible but palpable interconnectedness of the universe, That-Which-Is, offering itself to creation.

What psychologists call the unconscious may be the part of That-Which-Is from which this voice emmanates. It's where dreams flower, nebulous longings float. Where we bury our corpses, store our seeds. I think of it as resembling a cave deep in the earth. Heidigger said poetry is the only language which can express the unconcealedness of beings. For me the poem is hidden in the sacred, and I must go down inside myself into that ritual cave, that unknown and find it. Writing resembles the mythic journey of the hero as Joseph Campbell describes it. One must go down in order to find the authentic words, the magic utterance: then and only then you rise.

Li-Young Lee says the line of poetry is an ecstatic act. Rilke said "I am circling around God."

Q: There seems to be a fundamental change in theme 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. 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. The idea of compassion as a way of life was held up to the light. Turned in that light, it became visible, 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.

Compassion also is an issue in relation to 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. "Goteborg, The Terrace" is about self healing in nature. "Blessing" describes a spiritual transformation, the kind that happens when we are compassionately present for another.

The wholeness and interconnectedness of the biosphere is a fact. I cannot harm another part of it without 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, including kindness to ourselves. 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, to avoid what will harm and to pursue what will heal. I don't succeed, or course.

Q: In your new book Warscape, With Lovers, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Prize for 1996, you address themes of creation/destruction as a witness.

MK: Rabindranath Tagore called it "the eternal cycle." Like him, 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, and has been especially important in the West since the Sixties when Americans became aware of our country's manipulations abroad and of government's destavation of landscape. 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. We who are Americans live in a prosperous country with minimal interest in the world beyond its borders unless that world presents economic "opportunity." There are people who are addicted to violence in the entertainment industry, but they don't want to hear about the massacres, rapes and disappearances which go on where economic resources are scarce. Ours is a country that exported violence to the Third World and to other species, and 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 any optimism?

MK: Creation and destruction are continually in play. They are energies which wax and wane, Sasaki Roshi's expansion and contraction. What is different now from previous periods in history is that never before have landscape and species been so threatened with extinction. 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 separate illusion from reality is Buddhism. Though Buddhism is not, strictly speaking, a religion. It does not promote a god or gods. Rather the practice of meditation is 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.

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 the illusion of who and what we think we are.

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 might lead. And not to be aware has tragic consequences. Stafford writes about the importance of awareness. "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 writers honor that responsibility.

I want to write what will encourage awareness, help readers to look at the world with a deconstructive eye, to see the illusion in what culture presents as desireable, to see the flaws in our institutionalized assumptions. I've tried to address this in fiction too. My 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 describe the 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 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."

I'm interested in the cycle, how it swings back again from violence to creation. Transformation fascinates me. One of my stories, "Distant Lights on Water" (How To Accommodate Men), is an example. Clayton, the protagonist, 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: In Mozart, Westmoreland And Me you write both traditional stories and stories which are rather more experimental.

MK: Each story demands its form. Certain material asks to be cast traditionally--"Iron Shard" and "The Thing Around Them" would be examples. I truly learned to write an omniscient narrator 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 Vasuhi in "The Thing Around Them" needed that treatment, that perspective that can be distant and then zoom in at will. 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 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 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 which still kept the same repetitious touchstone somewhere in them.

Q: Would you say it's a feminist work?

MK: Yes. But my notion of feminism includes scrutinizing women as of men. The story "Mozart..." is satire, and female figures (The Queen of the Night, and her daughter, Pamina) come in for some hits too. 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," a story narrated 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, interested only in women. This a myth promoted by the media. Of course there are disagreements among feminists, and there is a range from radical to conservative. We're about as alike as all Democrats or all Republicans. Feminists generally would agree that they want to live in a way that recognizes the connections between us and the wholeness of life. That means that we care how everyone fares--women, men, children, our elders, other species. My work critiques cultural practices which violate this ethic and mask and obscure recognition of this wholeness.

Q: What practices?

MK: 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. 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.

And 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 out children to ask those questions every time they buy something or ask us to buy something for them. Why don't we have controls on advertising? When we let profit take priority over moral values, we promote mindlessness. And without awareness, we don't live the good life here in the U.S., not anywhere near it. We live the life of people at the mercy of their own greed and ignorance, a life which is destructive of ourselves and of other species.

"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: 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, you'll 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, becauses 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. The poem is 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, sacredness. 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: Perhaps it wouldn't. 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.

I showed this poem to Dana Gioia at a New Formalist conference, with a certain trepidation. 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 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: Isn't fiction, and to some extent poetry too, a form of entertainment as well?

MK: Literature is "entertaining" only in the sense that those who read it find it fascinating. But the word "entertainment" carries a negative connotation for most writers. It suggests harmless fluff, something superficial and merely decorative that will challenge neither the status quo nor individual ethics. William Burroughs said, "I am not an entertainer." I don't consider myself an entertainer. I'm in pursuit of the distinction between illusion and what's really there. If I don't honor That-Which-Is, every god will leave us.