Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and
publishing in the small press ecosystem
MS: Your work strikes me as both very very interested in and completely uncommitted to genre. I confess that I haven't read everything you've written but what I HAVE read seems to touch on the Confessional, Sci Fi, Fairy Tale, Myth, Mystery, Noir, Nature Writing and more. What do terms like hybrid, genre, and the like mean to you?
Also a followup, if the above hits, how important is reading to your writing process. How important have libraries been to you?
KK: I like that... very very interested and completely uncommitted to. I think you might describe that as my fundamental orientation to many things. I am an intensely curious person--and since I was a child I've been particularly fascinated by charts, models, and systems of category. I'm talking Linnaeus' taxonomy, the hierarchies of the angelic orders, maps of the globe, and the Dewey Decimal system (I'm straying already to the library portion of your question). Early on I figured out that these tools were just that—tools, that each was an imperfect/incomplete method for giving shape to (but also constricting) human understanding. At the edges and in the gaps of all these provisional structures, I understood that there be monstrosity (and other cities). So I guess I write into those spaces/I imagine those creatures. I am aware that this makes it hard for my work hard to find its readers. Directions: go to the library on the Island of Misfit Toys and head to the resisting-adulthood section.
I've been in academia (as a student) most of my life. I've read broadly and sometimes deeply, though I have never been a completist. I read for wonder, to learn new things and for permission—reading as exploration but without the conquest. There is nothing like going into the stacks for one book and coming out with twelve—one of which then becomes accidentally foundational to my next few years of thinking and writing. I am truly sad for those who have not these experiences. Vital lostness is a joy.
MS: I have vivid memories of reading comics (newspaper and my brother's collections) way before I could read even simple words. I remember realizing that the pictures told stories all on their own. Sometimes adults would read the speech balloons and I'd be confused about how they could get it so wrong.
I also really like what you say about exploration and permission. I remember people like Kenneth Patchen, Richard Brautigan, Lynda Barry, and Ruth Krauss really breaking open what was possible for me. Who do you consider permission-giving writers and artists?
KK: So many! Books that blew the top of my head off early were Bill Knott's The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Heat Bird, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Since then—so many and often in translation. Woolf, Calvino, Borges, Hesse, and then Morrison and Yourcenar and Murakami and Butler.
I love reading philosophy too and lay science (my partner is a scientist). While I teach, I cannot read all I want, but what I do read I let into my core. It's a beautiful feeling, getting all I-Thou with a book. I will honestly say that I wish I'd read comics earlier, because their visual language does not come naturally at all to me. I have to work at it. It's like being in a country where I'm not fluent. It's not a bad feeling—I'm just a little flat-footed, and I was raised as a dancer... so maybe my visual language is more attuned to movement than those frames? Yeah, maybe that. I'll stick with that. My current working theory.
MS: Our librarying processes sound pretty similar, and that made me wonder about your writing process. I tend to do automatic writing until I find a hook and then write write write (still as automatically as possible) into that idea. I end up throwing away a lot of pages. I end up realizing that one old piece actually goes with this new one and together they change everything. Can you talk about your process? Is it different, book to book, poem to poem? Some of your longer form stuff is my fav, and I wonder if those projects happened fairly quickly or if you met the poem/series every day for a while and went exploring.
KK: Every piece insists on its own process. I’ve written only a few short stories— and nearly all of them came out in a single long burst… usually keeping me up into the wee hours. And then the revision of course. Long poems come in sections usually but over a few weeks. And then revision. I recently finished an epistolary novel about a chemist who breeds a crow the size of a horse. The first 20k words took several years to find, and then it fledged itself over a few more months. I am a constant tweaker, and I’m usually working 2-3 projects at a time in one phase of becoming or another. My shorter poems tend to feel like puzzles to me, like hothouse orchids taunting me with their pouting faces and above-ground roots. Overwrought little flowers. How I hate how I love them.
MS: How I would dearly love to read this epistolary novel! Any hints at it finding a home? Can you point us towards other work of yours hiding out online, maybe some links to books and things too?
Also I noticed that you gave the pieces subjecthood up above, like they were in charge. Is that how it is? Is the poetry alive and constant and you dip a ladle into it? Is it a stream of conscious universe that we just swim in? Are you creating something out of nothing? How would you describe that relationship, between the makers and made?
KK: Of course the writing is in charge. When I take the reins, it's no good. And yes... a bit like a river of beautiful soup. My own mind has a hard time getting at it sometimes... sometimes I seem to be carrying not a ladle but a spatula and I can only pick up the congealed eggy bits. I hate those days.
The relationship between the makers and the made—what a question! I know this: it is changing with tech. Social media asks writers to produce quickly, not look back, not correct, not reflect. It also asks them to answer for their work in ways I'm not comfortable with—because I'm not sure they have the answers. If I believe, and I do, that my best work is not fully available to me on a conscious level, that my best efforts are in some senses a preparation to receive the confluence of exterior and interior filaments as they twist momentarily into a coherent thread—then the anxiety produced by access to a mass of hot-take interpretations can be, to put it mildly, a bad thing.
The maker is not exactly a conduit in my analogic thinking, more like a loom. And the fear of one's work being unraveled is real—it can paralyze the mechanism. It is as real as the fear that nothing you make will ever cover your nakedness adequately, a fear that keeps me weaving.
As to the novel—my horsecrow has not yet fledged. Soon, I hope. If you know a lover of hybridity in all its forms—feel free to hook me up. I will love them back.
Here are some links: My website: www.kirstenkaschock.com
You can find more work here:
WindowBoxing from Bloof Books: https://bloofbooks.com/windowboxing_ebook_print.pdf
Long poem/lyric essay at West Branch https://west-branch-wired.bucknell.edu/past-issues-of-wired/fall-2017/kirsten-kaschock.html
Nonfiction-y thing at Bennington Review: https://www.benningtonreview.org/issue-eight-kirstenkaschock
Most recent poetry book from Lynx House Press: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780899241746/explain-this-corpse/
MS: What is something you think works like poetry but isn't poetry?
For example, I'd say classic cartoon shorts. Sound effects and music pair with the imagery and all the laws of the universe are cast aside. We are given the absurd, the punny, the ham-fisted humorous, as well as the violent and shocking.
What do you think? What is something you think works like poetry but isn't poetry?
KK: Interestingly enough... I just saw a collage of yours online. And I'd definitely say collage/assemblage. What poet hasn't been obsessed with Joseph Cornell for a hot second? (Though lately I've been loving Betye Saar's work). I think choreography and photography can work like poetry (at least poetry I like), in that their organizing principles and limitations push them to consider themselves outside of direct narrative. They are compressed in certain ways, and pressure I think is one way to make a poem.
I know what you mean about the classic shorts. St James Infirmary Blues is a recent obsession. (I recently choreographed to Hugh Laurie's version of the song... yes, that Hugh Laurie). I'd say dreams also work like poems, though maybe I should reverse that.
I cook like I write poems. No recipes, whatever's in the house—like a college student. Lots of failure. I don't think most adults do that, and unfortunately, a failed stew cannot really be revised over a few years into something palatable, although it can be composted for later flowers. I like thinking about this—how anything is like a poem because—everything is already something else... I think you might agree?
MS: Everything IS already something else. I used that exact phrase as a title for a kinda failed series of poems a while back. I was reading about the history of camouflage and riffing on the ideas I found there.
[At this point the poets in conversation chose to collaborate on the following poem, as a way to close the interview. You know how poets are.]
Bradford pears low tide sperm mold
maple rain sad waffle blueberry
hyacinthoid wormtime chocolate savior
diaper wind fresh frog song first charcoal
crow factory edge of fields still-lifeless too much mulch
garage exhaust + ginger sweetness shampoo snore
yellow archangel all angels invasive or refugee
traffic dark and lines swing wings circle the bird
bird circles egg yolk of forsythia snowdrops
