CDR interviews Kelle Groom
Danielle Sellers: One
of the many things I admire about your most recent book, Five Kingdoms, and your work in general, is that when you write
about deep loss, like the loss of a child, you convey intensity of feeling
without sentimentality. Do you feel that’s something imperative for a poet to
do, and how do you walk that line of intense feeling without stepping over into
the mawkish?
Kelle
Groom: In my work, I’m writing about the things that matter to me. I’m
interested in what I don’t understand. Tenderness is important to me, writing
from feeling is too of course. To me, sentimentality means a failure in the
poem – superficial emotion. Intense feeling is the opposite of
sentimentality. I have sharp, honest
friends who are poets, and I trust them to tell me if something seems weak or
empty in a poem. I think that especially in elegiac poems, it’s important for
me to have strong readers because it’s possible that the intensity of feeling
that I have in the writing might blind me to the weakness of particular lines.
DS: In an earlier
interview with 32 Poems, you mentioned your interest in prehistory. In Five Kingdoms, this interest is evident, particularly in poems like
“Bone Built for Eternity,” “Oldest Map of the World,” and “Newgrange,” to name
a few. Obviously, quite a bit of research went into this book, but it reads
very organically, it doesn’t read like an encyclopedia. When writing, how do
you work in interesting facts so seamlessly?
KG:
It’s common that the fact is the spark for the poem. Rather than integrating
research into a poem, the research sets it going – and it becomes part of the
road of the poem. Often, until it appears –some glimpse of the world – there’s
no way into the poem.
DS: When researching,
is there one particular book you go back to again and again for
information/inspiration? Do you often have an idea for a poem and then do
research, or are certain poem ideas spawned by research?
KG:
My beat-up dictionary. No, I never have an idea for a poem and then do
research. Sometimes I’m aware of an image or some other thing – some spark. But
often, I’m not. But I still want to write. When I was a student, a Finnish poet
came to my school. She said that she read everything – science, history, etc.
It made so much sense to me. I like to have a lot of resources available on
things that are interesting to me – visual arts, history, maps, weird reference
books/dictionaries, movies… It’s not an
organized process – I just like to get lost in things. But usually, somewhere
along the line, something will spark and connect with an image or feeling that
had been below the surface, waiting for me to notice. When I write a poem, I
like to have more than one thing going on. In part, it’s for the distraction. I
need a consuming task to keep me busy, so my subconscious can do its work to
help me see something new.
DS: You’ve mentioned a
bit about the books which are friends to your poetry, what about other things,
like foods or moods, temperatures, which might spur your writing on?
KG:
Silence and music. In general, the quieter my environment the better. But I also
need music to lift me into and sustain a writing space. Weirdly, I need the
house to be quiet, phone off, and the music on headphones only. I try to make it so that I can feel safe from
interruptions. I’ve always written late at night when almost everyone is asleep
and even the distraction of email ceases. Once I’m writing, I hate stopping for
food too, so I keep a lot of protein powder, soy milk, and coffee in the house.
I think any mood is good for writing – whatever it is just becomes another
element in the writing.
DS: And if we have one
thing we have to have its opposite. What are the nemeses of your writing? What
things make you not write?
KG:
Exhaustion from other work. I try to protect my writing time and the physical
wherewithal to do it. I’ve learned to think of being selfish about my writing
time as a good thing – a compliment.
DS: Even if one has
never been to New York, one can imagine what the literary scene is like there.
The literary scene in Florida is more elusive, even to a native Floridian like
myself. What is the poetry scene like in Florida?
I
don’t really know. My experience is limited to Central Florida. I lived in
Orlando for many years, going to school at UCF and then teaching there. I was
always thrilled when UCF hosted readings. And they publish the Florida Review. While I was in school,
one of my professors recommended me for a residency at Atlantic Center for the
Arts, and I lived with other writers for three weeks in a Florida jungle. It
made me realize how much I needed a literary community. When I came back to
Orlando, I really missed being with other writers. So I started a literary arts
organization that offered readings and workshops, dinners, writing awards, and
ran it for almost 5 years. It always seemed strange when writers would thank me
for it because it was one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done. I loved
writers and readings, so I made a place for them. Here in New Smyrna Beach, there
is no permanent literary community. It’s a small beach town with no university
and a high tourist population. But I work at Atlantic Center, and four or five
times a year, writers come here from all over the country for residencies. We
bring those writers into the community for readings too. It’s a transitory
scene, but exciting while it’s happening. Anhinga Press, which published my
last two books, is in Tallahassee.
They’ve been publishing poetry collections since 1976, and Rick Campbell
and Lynne Knight who run the press and make the books are a poetry scene all
their own. These are two people, both writers themselves, who love poets and
poetry and do everything to support them. Rick also runs the Florida Literary
Arts Coalition and Florida Writers’ Circuit, and the Other Words Conference
every November at Flagler College in St. Augustine.
DS: When you come
across the work of poets new to the proverbial stage, what criteria do you feel
they need to fit in order to remain on your radar screen? That is to say, how
do you think poets achieve staying power?
KG:
I want a poem to stop me in my tracks. I want to feel that the poet needed the
poem. I love to be taken out of where I am and what I know. The poets I always
read are the ones who wake me up to what poetry can do.
DS: Are there any new
poets you admire whom you think should receive more attention?
KG:
Cynthia Cruz (Ruin) isn’t a new poet,
but I’ve just discovered her breathtaking work. Teresa Leo (The Halo Rule) who recently published
several devastating elegiac poems from a sequence in the Jan/Feb APR. I also greatly admire John
Murillo’s work (Up Jump the Boogie), and
Terry Ann Thaxton who has a stunning first collection, Getaway Girl, coming out from Salt next year, Aimée Baker, Shane
Seely (The Snowbound House), and Alan
Felsenthal.
DS: Recently, I was
asked whose work inspires me at the moment, which I thought was a good
question. We can see from the notes to Five
Kingdoms that you were inspired by the art of Guillermo Kuitca and Caravaggio,
the poetry of Charles Simic and Mark Strand. What’s inspiring your current
work?
KG:
In the visual arts, a sculpture from China that I came upon in the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston—of Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Compassion; Chagall’s Abraham
and the Three Angels; an autographed letter of Van Gogh’s with a sketch; a
photo of an old snow-covered house in Sandwich, MA which I’d seen in summer
with my mother. On the bulletin board beside my writing desk, I have Spencer
Reece’s poem “ICU,” Sarah O’Brien’s poem “Observatory”; and a remembrance of
Lucille Clifton. Michael Burkard’s Envelope
of Night.
DS: Would you describe
yourself as a voracious reader? What’s on your summer reading list?
KG:
I would describe myself as addicted to books. This summer I’m reading the New Granta Book of the American Short Story,
Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears No
Relation to Happiness, Peter Cole’s Things
on Which I’ve Stumbled, Derek Mahon’s An
Autumn Wind, Tomaz Salamun’s There’s
the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair, Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My
Imagination, Mark Yakich’s Unrelated
Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh, Franz Wright’s Wheeling Motel, the Spring issue of Ploughshares (edited by Elizabeth Strout),
Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point,
Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World,
and two chapbooks: 237 More Reasons to
Have Sex, Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh and ABBA: the poems, Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon.
DS: Since this
interview will publish in summer, what are some of your most cherished summer
memories? What screams summer to you?
KG: I spent almost all of my childhood summers on Cape Cod, and I try to go back every summer, at least for a little while. As a kid, I lived in Dennis and Yarmouth, and when I was older and lived elsewhere, I’d come back to the Cape and stay all summer with my grandparents in Yarmouth. Their house is gone now, but my parents have a place in Wellfleet, on the harbor. I love being on such a narrow strip of land with water on either side. It’s the most beautiful place I know. Here in Florida, in August, it feels like the heat is beating me into the ground. But the ocean is close by, and sometimes when I’m in that see-through greenish-blue water, I think I couldn’t be happier.