Rachel Reeher Interviews Kathleen Winter

Kathleen Winter’s poetry collection I will not kick my friends won the Elixir Poetry Prize, and her first book, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award and the Antivenom Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, and Tin House. She received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House, James Merrill House Foundation, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas’s Dobie Paisano Ranch.

Transformer is her newest collection of poetry (The Word Works), and she spoke with Poetry Editor Rachel Reeher about its release.

From Poetry Editor Rachel Reeher: I'm interested in the way that place manifests in the poems of Transformer. We're moved from apartment complexes to cafeterias, from the flats of Colorado to the ocean, from the city center to Middle Earth. There's so much specificity of place in this collection, and I wonder what your relationship is to place in terms of your poetry. Is this something you consciously consider when writing a poem?

Kathleen Winter: I often write away from home and love to travel, and if I can't get away and indeed am trapped in my very small and dusty cabin with far too much dog hair on all its surfaces, at least there's the possibility of transportation through memory—or imagination—of other places. In the poems in the first section, about domestic violence and other types of violence against women, place necessarily assumes an oversized importance. Women who experience domestic violence are likely to be isolated in their homes by their abusers, to be separated from other family and friends, to be discouraged from finding support so that the abuser is able to exert more control. "Holes in Drywall Made by a Fist" is set in a home on a military base because the level of domestic violence is even higher among military populations than in general US society. The barroom setting of "Finally, the girls" is based on a photograph that inspired the poem:  two musicians of the 1930s, wearing a tuxedo and a cocktail dress. I have no idea what the actual relationship of those two people was, but the poem imagines a relationship of struggle, an imbalance of power enforced by violence.

In the second section of the book, place matters because those are poems about childhood, about family, and thus most of them are set in Texas, where I haven't lived in ages. I've been in California most of my adult life, except for my MFA years in Tempe. But there's also "City Eye Elegy," an elegy for my father, which is set in San Francisco. My father was a sublime person and getting over his death took me a long time. The poem was written after a visit to the city, several years after I'd moved away from it, and after he'd died. 

The third section of the book is ekphrastic. The poems jump around geographically because the art I wrote about was made in Germany, Spain, Siberia, England, Mexico, Polynesia, Greece or France. Some of the poems are personae poems set in the distant past in remote places. Writing that sort of poem can be a lift when you're stuck for nine months at a makeshift desk made of two file cabinets and a piece of plywood covered in wallpaper. My secret holiday gift for my husband this year is going to be new wallpaper for the desk.

RR: You mention the relationship between place and violence against women, and the collection doesn’t shy away from these brutalities. We even open with a moment of violence in “South Huntington Apartments,” the first poem in the book. I’m interested in how you see the relationship between poetry and violence, or what the possibilities of that relationship might be. Does poetry offer a form of healing? A space to expose or bring awareness? Something else?

KW: The potential that it could be healing seems exceedingly optimistic. Poems as a space in which to expose violence and some of its consequences, yes. To bring awareness? I sure hope so, but maybe preaching to the choir is more likely. It might depend on the readership of the publication or the audience at a reading. These days most poetry readers apparently are poets, with students perhaps in distant second place. And maybe it's naive and/or self-serving to think so, but most poets I know are of the pacifist, do-no-harm ilk and wouldn't really have their awareness altered drastically by poems about violence, except to be further horrified and motivated to counter it as best they can.

On the other hand, Brigit Pegeen Kelly's mind-blowing poem "Song" is one of the best I've ever read about violence and its aftermath and it absolutely did deepen my thinking about the impact of violence, not on the victims but on the perpetrators. Some of Roger Reeves' poems have affected my thinking about the reverberating impacts of violence on victims and communities. In addition to communicating about the world and examining human interactions, in my experience poems centered on violence can be quite cathartic to write. Creating these poems can provide a welcome release of anger, a species of revenge, and even a sense of triumph and intense satisfaction born of making work that's artful out of a hateful experience.  

RR: I love this spectrum of functions you name, especially poetry as a "species of revenge." You touch on the poem as an act of examination, which seems especially important to this collection, and even integral to these notions of violence/revenge/catharsis/triumph. I'm thinking of the poem "February," where a dog's hair is used as a lens through which to examine mortality, or "Holes in Drywall Made by a Fist," where the holes offer an examination of violence and vulnerability. This use of the concrete as an access point for the abstract/emotional feels intrinsic to many of the poems here, and I'm interested in how you understand the role of this kind of examination in your work.

KW: I've long wished I pushed more on image in my poetry, along with on sonics, humor, tone, and argument, all of which I rely on so faithfully. But as a matter of fact, I just don't usually begin writing a poem by having an image in mind. Sometimes my poems feel to me to be a bit short on image:  such a powerful, memorable element. And yet, image does pop in when I need it, once I get engaged with writing a poem, coming into the lines spontaneously to illustrate or explain or dramatize. The unconscious, or "flow" mechanism, or inspiration, or whatever magic's at hand that day, will throw an image or two my way, as needed.

To get back to this urge to examine through poetry, whether aided by the mechanism of image or some of the many other tools we have available—on a personal level I think it's just part of being an analytical, logically-inclined woman, and someone who's been lucky enough to feel thrilled by learning. A desire to understand, to learn, to greedily want to know more, can lead to the act of examination. Also, from a less self-congratulatory angle, the act of examination, whether in poems or other circumstances, is an effort to increase our control over ourselves and our lives—a defense against chaos and vulnerability.

It's conventional wisdom among contemporary US poets that we shouldn't know where a poem's going, that we should learn something from ourselves as we write it and end with an insight or revelation or understanding we didn't have when we started to write the poem. This is an idealized situation, but I agree it's amazing when a poem works out along these lines and you get that eerie feeling that someone else wrote it. (Someone with more understanding, and better use of images.) 

RR: There’s a recurring theme of religion and belief in this collection, especially in the early poems. I’m thinking of “Killarny,” “My Fear Is a Green-Eyed Monster,” and “I Stabbed Someone Before I found the Lord.” But often religious images or language are used in the context of violence, threat, or transgression. I wonder if you could speak to your interest in motifs like this, and how they make their way into your poetry.

KW: I think your question's actually spot on for all three of my books. That's a bit ironic since I'm an atheist. But yes, this theme of belief. What do we believe in, what do we want to believe in. (And disbelieve in.) Your observation that some of these poems are "more religious in language than in literal meaning" gets at my appreciation for the poetry I grew up hearing in church: the 16th Century Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible. Raised as a weekly churchgoer, I heard this melodic and image-laden language recited, read, and sung on a regular basis. But as soon I took philosophy courses in college, all bets were off. I'm too enamored with rationality to believe in God (especially a humanoid god). And the patriarchal essence of religion—at least as I knew it—is enough to thoroughly discredit religion for me. But that language...rhythmic, sonically gorgeous.   

Looking at the Transformer poems through the lens of your question makes me think about politics, religious fundamentalism, and President Biden's recent executive order reversing one of Trump's orders, which had cut funding for abortion counseling and funding. Why do I in some poems link religious language with violence, threat, transgression? I guess I'm with Margaret Atwood on this point: so much of contemporary and historical religious practice and theory is repressive and sexist. "Don't require someone else to believe what you believe" aligns with the Golden Rule, Categorical Imperative, good manners and common sense. Yet repression and coercion are part of the DNA of so many religions.

I'm pleased that you included "Killarney" in your query about religion. The poem centers on this idea and image of the ancient elk rising from its extinction, being resurrected, to parallel how the speaker of the poem wants to be redeemed from dishonesty, or from the artistic sin of in-authenticity. In this poem and others I find the religious motifs to be useful as metaphors (but inconvenient—to say the least—as "reality").

RR: Lastly, I wonder if you’d speak to the title poem of Transformer. I love the sort of texture and warmth in the image of the dog and its hair, a sort of allyship in that exchange that feels intimate in a way that human connection/relationship isn’t, or isn’t here. What’s your relationship with this poem? How did it become the title for the collection?

KW: It's a tail-wagging-the-dog situation, since I wrote the poem after I'd titled and assembled the collection.

That book title came to me in 2011, the last year of my MFA, when I was renting a room in a house in Tempe and taped a copy of a black and white photograph to my bedroom door. I closed my door a lot, as you do in a house shared by several grad students, so I often looked at that photo and it gave me a jolt of pleasure. The inventor Tesla sits in a chair in front of a giant piece of electrical equipment that's sending out huge wings of fiery light. He's got his back to the machine as he calmly reads a book--so cheeky, like an album cover. I wanted that image to be the cover of a book I'd someday write. Researching the photograph I found that the machine was a transformer, and scrawled that word on my copy of the photo. I felt like it described me a bit after I quit practicing law, moved from California to Arizona, went to graduate school for the third time, and was about to embark on a new life as a poet and teacher.

Turns out the title Transformer fits the poems in my current collection better than it did the first two books, and finally I got to use that book title in 2020, although the rights to the photograph of Tesla were too expensive for my press to afford. Instead we went with a painting by acclaimed painter Fred Tomaselli--and he so generously donated the use of his vibrant image.

Very shortly before Maggie Smith chose my manuscript for the Hilary Tham contest at The Word Works, I thought it would be handy to have a "Transformer" poem in the book. I think it's the last poem I wrote for the collection. It comes near the end, and references the book itself (probably because the book felt to me like a finished project, at that point). It's kind of a love poem to my dog Otis and his plentiful hair. When you live with an eighty-five pound Lab/Dane, there's a certainty his hair will sift into everything--especially the lox and bagels. By quick count, seven poems in the book have a canine presence, but only three feature Otis particularly. Besides honoring him, with "Transformer" I wanted to make change become the subject matter as well as the syntax and structure of the poem.

Rachel Reeher is a writer from the Carolinas and an MFA Candidate at Arizona State University. She is Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.