My mother reads every single blog post, article and Facebook update I write and thinks I am “absolutely brilliant.” My mother was so intrigued by a cover letter I wrote addressing the impact John Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies had on my desire to be a Journalist, she took it upon herself to read the text that inspired me so much. After Harvest Gypsies (a collection of articles about migrant farm workers during the Great Despression) she was inspired to read Grapes of Wrath. And then something amazing happened.

My mother found her own significance and inspiration in the book that so inspired me. I feel deeply connected to her, as if there is still an invisible umbilical cord. My mother was taken aback by the stories of the women in the novel, specifically the section in which a woman explains the nature of women.

She was so inspired she wrote her own poem, discussing the nature of women or rather nature and women. I feel especially inspired by her analysis of a specific scene from Harvest Gypsies. These are themes and lessons my mother has showed me:

Flow of women

“Through driven strength, small beginnings are nurtured.” This is explaining the cycle of strong women nurturing the next generation of strong women.

“The nourished branch out on a new path.” This is the strong women who has been taught by a strong women branching out. She finds her own path through life, her own definition of what a strong women is. The word nourished is used strategically because nurturing is something so often attributed to women.

“Forging ahead, bending when needed, breaking through at any opportunity.” The bending means being flexible with the will of others and continuing to move forward but recognizing that their path is molded along the way by other people. Timing is everything; the aim to to never lose sight of her goals, to grasp onto every opportunity as if it were her only opportunity. She takes nothing for granted, but is grateful for the opportunity.

“To rise and flow ever constant, the progression of life.” A woman is constantly moving forward. Like a river a women rises with opportunity and the movement through life is constant. It never stops.

“If possible, nature’s namesake provides a chance to pool, swelling inward, the lifeline divided into small beginnings.” My mother has nourished me. She’s given me the foundation for finding my definition of what a strong woman is.

She is my beginning.

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post Mothers, Daughters, and John Steinbeck appeared first on Newfound.

The band’s authenticity and pride in where they came from makes them relatable and keeps their fans connected. No matter where the band goes they never forget their hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where they got their start.

“Wish we could turn back time, to the good ol’ days,
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out.”

In the lyrics of the hit song “Stressed Out,” Joseph addresses his longing for going back in time to when life was easier, a time we oh-so-often refer to as the “good ol’ days.” The music video for “Stressed Out” takes place on the street where Dun grew up and Joseph is seen singing the chorus in Dun’s old house.

The theme throughout the albums of Twenty One Pilots is their sense of place. Their home is not just in Columbus, but in the music that has molded these two creators to form their own identities. Twenty One Pilots have combined both their homes in music and homes in the literal sense to create authentic art.

Seeing Tyler Joseph sing the lyrics listed above in the home of Josh Dun forces reality into their art and opens up their homes lives to their thousands of fans.

“My name’s Blurry Face and I care what you think”

Blurryface (Fueled By Ramen, 2015), the latest album of Twenty One pilots, personifies the feeling of insecurity. Joseph quite literally makes his insecurities into the character Blurryface and becomes him in his music videos.

In the music video, Joseph paints his neck and hands black to signify his insecurities. His neck symbolizes his insecurities in his voice, and his hands symbolize insecurity in his creations.

This is powerful to me. As a writer I feel insecure about everything I create, which often leads to putting aside projects in fear that no one will like them and that no one will recognize them. Fear and creativity can coexist; they must learn to live together, they cannot be separate but must be equal.

Twenty One Pilots expresses these two emotions and humanizes them with the character Blurryface. The courage of Joseph to display his raw emotions as an artist inspires me to keep creating.

When I listen to Twenty One Pilots’ music I feel emotion, and to feel emotion is to be a human. I love Twenty One Pilots because they make me feel human.

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer, Twenty One Pilots Fangirl

The post Fear and Creativity Make Me a Twenty One Pilots Fangirl appeared first on Newfound.

My curiosity prompted me to abandon all social media for the day and focus on the environment around me. I spent the rest of the day searching for inspiration, observing my surroundings with a purpose.

My day of searching externally for inspiration led me to finding it internally within my own curious thoughts. My curiosity led me to think about what kind of things inspire other people. So, I asked some friends and family to look for something throughout their day that inspires them and take a picture. Here’s what I learned:

One friend found inspiration from a quote written by a stranger.

Others felt it by a bubble blowing optimist on their college campus.

A couple sought inspiration in pictures that made them express gratitude for those who sacrificed for them.

While some saw inspiration in big city architecture that they hope to be a part of one day.

One was inspired by the beauty of movement.

Another felt it in something so simple as a Professor opening blinds on a window to let in light rather than flip on a light switch.

While a few were inspired by the complexity of nature.

Another felt inspired by the bravery of someone else.

While others felt it from their friends who cannot speak but always understand.

 Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post Inspiration is Everywhere: A Photo Essay appeared first on Newfound.

Anna King is a PhD student at Georgia State University, a mother of two, and a small-business owner (she runs a soy candle business with her husband Chad). Her other passions include fitness, preferably Cross-fit at her local gym in McDonough, Georgia. King’s works have been published in literary magazines as well as academically in the “Ellen Glasgow Journal of Southern Women Writers.” King was offered a fellowship by the Summer Literary Seminars and she has been nominated for a Pushcart. 

Taeler Kallmerten: What thing did you see today that most stayed with you?

Anna King: I work as a teacher with struggling students, many of whom have learning differences, many of whom do not fit in socially. Today is the ribbon cutting ceremony of our newly renovated Estes Learning Lab—a badly needed update to a program that has been underfunded for years. Seeing my community rally together to set up an environment to help non-traditional learners has been both humbling and inspiring.

Kallmerten: When did you realize your passion for poetry?

King: Like many writers, I was a young child when I realized how much I loved to write about things I saw that moved me. Someone once said that only two things pierce the human heart: beauty and affliction. My clearest early memories about writing are of admiring natural scenery and feeling a near obsessive burning to communicate on paper what I experienced.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process and any advice you have been given?

King: Writing has become increasingly challenging since I had my second child, and I already work a full time job as a teacher and attend graduate school. I often don’t get much writing done until I am on significant breaks like summer vacation or spring break. When I do, I put on music—Third Eye Blind is my favorite—and often start with an image or a combination of words. From there, I weave that concept into a poem. I often can write a poem fairly quickly, but then I may continue to revise for even years afterwards. The best advice I received was to write first and then worry about where to put the poem in your manuscript later!

Kallmerten: What are you trying to communicate throughout your chapbook?

King: I started the chapbook a couple of years ago believing that I was going to tell the stories of people around me who had experienced pain. Some of my family members and friends had seen personal tragedy such as the death of children and the brutal shooting of a family pet by a police officer.

But then the chapbook became a chronicle of my own growth when I met the man who is now my husband and fell in love with him. Later on, a friend of mine was horrifically murdered in a hit and run—and her fiancé was driving. She was five months pregnant. The chapbook evolved again as an outlet for dealing with that grief. I worked through that grief and eventually was able to find peace. The work concludes that I finally understand how to be willing and able to love the people who already love me, regardless of how terrifying it is to be that open again.

What we do with pain becomes a second skin. I make tourniquets and remedies for an emptiness that runs universe deep. My ten years of my dishonesty is Meghann–who used nakedness to answer all of us. And all of this we never wanted. Last week I filled the car with shrieking–thick and succulent–while I was on the interstate. Her birthday is on a Wednesday and I am undone.

– Anna King

Kallmerten: In Part IV you mention something called a “second skin.” Can you explain what a second skin is and why you believe it coincides with pain?

King: I believe the “second skin” is a mask we wear to cope with pain, any pain. No one gets an instruction manual to deal with grief until after they realize they’ve done it all wrong and they attend counseling or read self-help books. So many of us wear a variety of these “second skins”– drug addiction, infidelity, abuse, anxiety, depression, or obsession with achievement. Unfortunately, the mechanisms we use to try to deal with our pain often result in destruction. I saw that about myself as I wrote the chapbook. 

Kallmerten: In the second to last poem of Part III  you write “The heresy of silence fills me again when Chad begs say what you feel.” Can you explain this line, specifically the “heresy of silence”?

King: My husband, Chad, and I are very different, and during my grieving process for my friend Meghann I would often shut him out and would not say how I was feeling. Sometimes that was because I felt so many conflicted things I had no idea how to name what I was feeling exactly. Sometimes I just didn’t realize how long I had been bottling it up. I started to see that when I stopped talking that I was reverting back to bad habits. It became increasingly important in that grieving process to voice to him things like, “Today in the car I thought I saw her,” or “I had a dream about her,” or “I came across an old picture and I felt so angry.”

Deconstructing water is for the birds. The heresy of silence fills me again when Chad begs say what you feel. Soundlessness thickens my gums as I think of what is next–creating friezes monuments obelisks with gerunds and such. But I see the ocean as a gazillion salt shakers instead of the largest cemetery. The days balloon. The nights breathe. I have become a project of cartographers.

– Anna King

Kallmerten: Have Old English elegies had any influence on the style of your Chapbook?

King: I do love elegies, and I have studied them considerably over the years. Some of the most beautiful poetry is written in elegiac form. I feel like my work is an elegy for more than one person, but that the losses happen at different times. Some of the “loss” in my writing is about death, other times it is about something else. Since experiencing several losses was an ongoing grieving process interspersed with happiness like finding love, it doesn’t quite fit the traditional model. Life felt too big to make it all about what I did not have. However, it was important to me end it on what I do have, which is the consolation.

Kallmerten: Lastly, is there a question you would like to be asked or if given the opportunity would ask another poet?

King: I would love to know how other poets genuinely make the time to write. I often need days to relax before I can decompress enough to write. With the demands of a family and home, what is a woman to do when she needs to write but also has to eat, sleep, and work?

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘Simbelmynë’ – An Interview with Anna King appeared first on Newfound.

Lorsung’s chapbook “West Illegitimately“  exemplifies the ways in which the present is created from many pasts. Within the chapbook repetition is manipulated as a constraint that allows Lorsung to create an acrostic style poetry. “West Illegitimately“  is a part of a larger piece of upcoming work and was a finalist for the 2015 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize.

Our neighbors are students, maybe 20 years old. Today I slept until ten and lay on the couch looking at the snow falling in immense slow flakes and their red curtains stayed closed and I put a record on our record player which we have not to be ironic but because it slows down our listening and makes us go in order, which we have so little of these days

– Éireann Lorsung

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you realize your passion for poetry?

Éireann Lorsung: I don’t think I have ever conceived of my relationship to poetry—or to language, writing, texts, books—as passion. Passion seems like something that is relatively short-lived, and also extreme. I see its definition includes the words “a compelling enthusiasm,” and certainly I feel both enthusiastic about poetry (in particular when I am in a classroom where poetry is central) and compelled by it. But I also feel compelled to eat and breathe and move and I don’t think of these as passions. Writing things down or making marks on paper—some of these eventually take on the title of “poem,” often by habit (that’s the category easily supplied for this kind of thing)—has been part of my way of being in and relating to the world for as long as I can remember.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process?

Lorsung: Mostly writing means reading things, making notes about things, drawing things, watching out windows, knowing and learning the names of things, studying things, listening to things and animals and humans, paying attention to things including internal things, sewing and making things with my hands, memorizing things, taking pictures of things, singing things, and sometimes using a pen, pencil, computer, or phone to record things at length.

Kallmerten: What compelled you to start Dickinson House? How has Emily Dickinson inspired you as a poet?

Lorsung: Dickinson “inspires” me insofar as I feel her as an ancestor—I am grateful for her departure from older ways of writing and for the ways in which her private and often minuscule practice provides, over time, a chasm that begins to represent writing from the US. And I admire her like I admire very religious people who are drawn to live out their faith in private, who have mysterious experiences of what they believe is there and whose lives demand solitude and priority for those experiences. That is what links Dickinson the poet to the space I made and named for her: a desire to consecrate a space and to consecrate it in particular to unseen women doing their internally demanded work.

As far as how the space came to be, I suppose it stems from my education, which mostly took place at the kitchen table, surrounded by my brothers studying and my parents helping or cooking: I like to be in rooms with others who are learning and making.

Kallmerten: How do you manage your many endeavors and also find time to focus on your writing?

Lorsung: I have always been this way. Something that helps me come to terms with how I work (when I hear the mighty should that arise from observing many other people’s different lives) is to remember that even in stretches of time where all I “have” to do is write, I can only ever manage a few hours before I need to do something else—walk, read, cook, move… When I keep this in focus I remember that a few minutes or an hour regularly will keep the ideas moving and will suffice to make the work. I am selfish when I can be about my time. I have a very supportive partner, who makes it his business to encourage me to write. And I accept that the work I’ve taken on requires a tiny sacrifice of my own time/energy in order to put the values it represents into motion. I’m okay with that.

Kallmerten: You recently gave a lecture about failure where you talked about the concept of productivity. Can you talk about that a little?

Lorsung: Productivity is a concept I had never encountered before my second year in university. It was alien to me to count the worth of a day based on tangible output. When I count my work through this lens it rarely measures up: I am often “unproductive,” meaning I spend a lot of time doing invisible writing and even more time doing work that is “not writing”—cleaning, cooking, teaching.

But in fact I think that when I work hard to be very alive to and awakened by the ordinary work that takes up most of my time, I am able to be more alert and discerning on the page, too. For me the pressure to “produce” is untenable and tied to a logic that I try to reduce as much as I can in my own life—the logic that what is valuable is what is visible, or that writing-as-process is subsumed in value to writing-as-product.

And I know in my own life that focusing on ‘being productive’ requires a willing amnesia about the fact that making meaning takes time. So I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I say that, because I would prefer to reject the idea of productivity all together and encourage writers to spend their time attending closely to whatever the work of living puts at hand, from dirty dishes to the blank page, and to see what comes of that (rather than being self-critical for “failing” to live up to an imagined standard of factory-quick production).

Kallmerten: In “Americium” you write “…I put a record on our record player which we have not to be ironic but because it slows down our listening and makes us go in order, which we have so little of these days.” Can you explain why you believe our lives today lack order?

Lorsung: That’s actually in the poem with the very long title that begins “When I say fathers…” And the “we” in that section and several others is a very particular “we”: the we of my partner and me, stuck in the difficult and disorienting disorder of immigration/migration. It’s also a sort of wry comment on the fact that most of the music I listen to (and probably many people listen this way) ends up being a jumble of all kinds of things, more like radio than like a record. The record goes in an order I can’t change (without getting up to physically move the needle). When I listen to music on my computer or phone it’s rarely in the order in which it was made (i.e. the order of an album); it’s a different and more diffuse order.

Kallmerten: In section entitled “An archaeology” it is clear you are talking about people migrating. Can you tell me more about this section?

Lorsung: Moving freely is a human right that transcends national boundaries. The “Archaeology” poems are my imagining of the migrational movements of people in the southwestern parts of Flanders in the 1940s, during the occupation here—the second occupation in thirty years, in a landscape that was still recovering from the absolute desolation of the First World War.

So, in these poems I am trying to experience the landscape here (which is, as many are, pretty banal now that I’ve lived here a while) as the site of an older and other dailiness—the dailiness under occupation, the movement of people (including members of my partner’s family) across borders, through checkpoints, in military prisons, or hiding in byres.

I’m also thinking in these poems about a long history of people here belonging to the land their descendants still live on, and what it means to e.g. be peasants (as much of my partner’s family was even until the middle of the 20th century), what it means to be land-tenants, what it means to do physical labor on and to care for land that isn’t yours by law. I took inspiration from Michel Foucault’s idea of archaeological method as a mode of inquiry into ideas, and relied on actual ‘archaeological’ findings, both textual and material (shards of blue tile found in a field, for example), to generate images for the poems.

Kallmerten: Is there a question you would want to ask other writers?

Lorsung: I would like to ask them what thing they saw today that most stayed with them and what they love.

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘West Illegitimately’ – An Interview with Éireann Lorsung appeared first on Newfound.

Readers encounter the medical terminology Huynh once studied in poems like ‘The Translation. Further reading of Huynh’s work reveals another layer: poems like ‘Tết’ ruminate on the loss of loved ones, extending to loss of language or cultural ties.

The interplay between these themes–the medical world, the author’s cultural background–make Huynh’s chapbook ‘The First Language’ feel alive and fresh.

Fake hearts if mechanically activated
ba-dum on a machine-measured beat
Beating to stay alive Beating to stay alive
Surgery requires an incision
below the collarbone
A small metal tentacle fed into a superior vena cava
A flat egg shaped pacemaker to push against
skin like a subtle speed bump in the road
The one that catches you off guard during a night drive
The one that catches your first lover off guard
when he rubs his hand across your chest
pulls away finds the light
and avoids your childhood scar
– Amanda Huynh

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Amanda Huynh: I did not start off pursuing poetry. Writing was something I did on the side, and I was pushed to go into science. My first bachelor’s degree was in biology, and I minored in creative writing. The writing impulse was present the entire time. I still remember someone telling me, “You’ve majored in rationality, and minored in your passion.” After graduation, I got a full-time job in the medical field, and I could have stopped at an eight-to-five job. However, that lifestyle did not fit me well. It was not long before I went back to school to get my second degree in English. This time, I was serious about pursuing a writing life.

The time I spent completing my English degree was one of the most pivotal points for me. I had two wonderful professors, Laura Kopchick and Tim Richardson, who really opened everything up for me. This was also the time when I had committed to a genre. It all happened during an advanced poetry workshop. I had just finished writing a poem, “My Nervous System,” about a narrator seeing a crush and how her nervous system is reacting. My poem was being critiqued, and I realized all the possibilities in poetry. I knew that this was what I was going to pursue. This was also the first time I was actually really proud of something I created. It is such a nerdy poem, but I still find it one of my favorites to read.

Kallmerten: You said you were born in Texas. How has Texas inspired and shaped your writing?

Huynh: Yes, I am a native Texan—the old born and raised. I never lived outside of Texas until I moved to Virginia in 2014. I mention this because it changed my perspective about home. When you live somewhere, you don’t really notice the distinct characteristics around you.

When I moved, I was able to see Texas through a new lens. There’s a large Latino population in Texas alone, and an even greater diversity. It’s not as common in Virginia. The absence of this has found its way into my work. Before I moved, I rarely wrote about family: our Latino perspective, work struggles, identity, working as migrants, what it means to be Latina, what it means to be Latino, and more. It is more prominent in my work than it’s ever been, and I believe it has a lot to do with being fourteen hundred miles away from home.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process, and share any advice you’ve been given by other poets?

Huynh: The writing process varies from one poet to the next. For a while I thought my writing process was terrible until I heard a craft talk on revision by Cornelius Eady. He described how there is no one correct way to write, and that for many people it can be vastly different. The biggest point I took away was that revision will always be a part of the writing process, and as he put it, “You better make your peace with it.”

In my writing, I tend to sit with an idea and meditate on it. It might take a few minutes or a few months, and it all depends on what the topic is. If the topic has something to do with current events, I will do some research. I do not start writing until I have a firm grip on the first couple of lines. When I do, I write it out by hand, edit, rewrite, and repeat. It doesn’t become a draft until I type it into a Word Document. At that phase, it becomes a revision game and I begin to save all the versions.

“to pray in a language
I don’t understand,
a language my throat
cannot wrap around
– Amanda Huynh

Kallmerten: Your poetry illuminates a struggle to preserve your culture. You write “It occurs to you/ that only in America will you lose/ abuelo.” Can you describe why you think this happens? And how it has impacted you?

Huynh: The dilution of language, yes. The loss of a family member, yes. When someone passes away, you are not just losing a loved one—you are losing a connection to your culture, a mind, an experience of the world during a specific time, and a speaker of your own language.

My mother lost her mother at the age of sixteen. Since then, she didn’t feel compelled to speak Spanish. I’ve never asked my mother why, but I’ve concluded that it’s because it brings painful memories of a time that’s now gone. The only time Spanish is spoken tends to be around family, and we live far from family.

My parents moved away because of work—the working culture in America pushes people to be workaholics. When we moved from Abilene to Houston, I was five. In those first five years I remember my aunts and uncles coming over all the time, there were always cousins to play with, trips to Floydada (where my grandparents lived) were frequent, Spanish was thrown around more, the meals were homemade, and for some reason we were always having a party for something. When we left, all of that went away.

Kallmerten: Houston was recently named the Most Diverse City in the United States. Does the diversity of Houston contradict the seemingly inevitable phenomenon of American assimilation? Do you believe multiple cultures can coexist without any one being completely erased? Why or why not?

Huynh: I believe assimilation creates a type of cultural evolution. When I say this, I mean that certain aspects of a culture, when brought to America, will be lost while other aspects will be carried forward. My in-laws came over from Vietnam in the 1970s—my husband’s parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents still have a firm grasp on their culture. As for my husband, he’s split between two cultures: Vietnamese and American.

There are parts of his culture that he hangs onto, but he is also losing some of it too. When my husband was ready to propose to me, what came to his mind was not the traditional Vietnamese proposal, a Dam Hoi. Instead, he proposed the American way—on one knee. Of course, after the proposal it was a “Why didn’t you do this?” and a Dam Hoi was eventually done. I share this because there are things parents will forget to tell their children about their culture or something will not be brought up in conversation.

Will my husband be able to pass on everything to his children? No. The culture our children will inherit will be a mixture of Vietnamese and Hispanic. That’s not including the American culture they’ll be raised in. We will still try to pass on our individual cultures, but it is not a guarantee that they will pass it along.

Do I believe multiple cultures can coexist without some being completely erased? In my case, I hope so. I will find out within the next decade with my own kids, but from a larger vantage point I do believe multiple cultures can coexist. Will they coexist equally? I’m not sure. Again, I hope they can, but it might not be possibility. It all depends on people.

Kallmerten: You sometimes write about the struggle women face in society. My favorite poem in your chapbook is “Returning to the Moment I Learned to Count,” about expectations of women: expectations of society on women, expectations of nature on women, and expectations we have of ourselves. I’d love to hear more about what went into this piece.

Huynh: Cross-culturally, I believe all women are impacted by society’s unrealistic standards. I know I am impacted. If you were to ask me about what I thought was great about myself, I would probably answer with all the things that are not so great. All my life, I have been conditioned to think this way.

The messages we take in subconsciously do damage to ourselves, but it also perpetuates how we treat each other. This poem wrestles with that idea. It is very easy for a woman to blame her mother for instilling an inner critic, making her self-conscious, and insecure—to see the situation from this one point of view. However, to see it from the mother’s point of view, from the mother’s mother’s (grandmother’s) point of view, and so on is the real challenge.

Someone must have made similar comments to the preceding woman to justify her passing them on. The criticism falls from one mother to the next daughter who becomes the next mother, and the cycle continues. The question that then arises is “When will it stop?”

I believe the only way for the cycle to change is by the people who become aware of the behavior, and choose to act differently. It’s a daily battle, not only when interacting with other people, but within ourselves.

Kallmerten: What did writing this chapbook teach you?

Huynh: I have a long way to go. I feel like I am still starting out, and I still have a lot of things I need to work on. It’s a continuous growth, and an ongoing process.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘The First Language’ – An Interview with Amanda Huynh appeared first on Newfound.

“What Cement is Made of” chronicles the inner city racial violence and poverty-stricken neighborhoods Donaghy grew up around. Donaghy has received awards such as the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence for his most recent book “Start with the Trouble.” He was also awarded the Board of Regents Teaching Award from Eastern Connecticut State University where he currently teaches poetry and creative writing.

Donaghy was encouraged by his poetry professor at Kuztown University to share his work and believe in his voice, and now he encourages his students to do the same.

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Daniel Donaghy: I didn’t start to write poetry seriously until I took Harry Humes’s poetry writing course at Kutztown.

The first poem I wrote for that class was about the tension in my father’s life, which often manifested itself as violence toward my mom. I was a struggling physics major at the time, not sure what was going to happen to me. I honestly cannot tell you why I signed up for the class. It didn’t fill any requirements or electives. I just wanted to take it, I guess.

The class after I’d turned the poem in, Harry asked me to stay after class. I thought, “Oh great. I can’t do physics. Now I can’t do poetry. Where am I headed?” After class, though, he said that he liked what was at the heart of the poem and named four or five poets (including Len Roberts, whom I think should be far more widely known) to check out if I wanted to learn how to write poems about family. I hogged Harry’s office hours for the rest of my time at Kutztown. I cannot overstate his influence on my professional and writing life.

“Why poetry?” is a good question. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I’m addicted to the compression of a poem. I love the potency of poetry, the energy that the best poems capture and transfer in such a short space.

The poems I like most come alive when you read them aloud. You can feel the force of life behind the poet’s words. They believe what they’re saying is important and they’ve organized their words in such a way so that I feel that way, too. And when I connect with their ideas, emotions, and energy on that level, I feel less alone in the world. I feel more alive. Just like when I hear a great song. The artist taps into a vein he/she shares with me and gives me something I didn’t know I needed. I always go back to Rainer Maria Rilke, who says in his “Letters to a Young Poet” that if you don’t have to write, don’t.

I am rarely if ever compelled to remember poems that feel as though they were composed entirely in the poet’s head, that have no emotional urgency driving them. I’ve always been someone who has a lot of energy, so writing, for me, is a physical exercise. So is reading. And that physical engagement is often most intense for me when I’m reading and writing poetry.

Kallmerten: You are a professor and your past students describe you as being knowledgeable, patient, engaging, and even “awesome” in one of your reviews on Rate My Professor. One review left on the site claims to be someone who never wrote poetry before your class but now they describes themselves as a true poet. You inspire your students to create. Can you say the same for your students?

Donaghy: I can certainly say the same for my students, many of whom are far more articulate, poised, and mature than I was at their age.

Teaching poetry writing at a state school is a job that I always wanted to have. There is not one day, not half of one day, when I am not fully aware of how fortunate I am to have a position that allows me to help students, many of whom have overcome great odds to become the first person in their family to go to college, to believe in the value of their own stories and their own voices.

When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to be, what was going to happen to me. I was this kid with a lot of energy, looking for someplace to put it. I tell my students on the first day that they may have signed up for a poetry writing or a creative writing class, but they really signed up for a voice class. We spend a lot of time talking about what that means, about understanding the difference between the language that the world imposes on us and that language each of us owns, which only we own, which no other person who ever lives will have access to. I don’t want my students to sound like me or any other writer when they write. I try to help them to sound like themselves.

Throughout the course, I keep reinforcing the mantra that that I may be their professor, but books (the books we talk about, the books they find on their own) are their teachers. We read writers with widely varying styles, and we talk all the time about reading like mechanics, like thieves, so that we can learn from great writers how to move people with our own work, how to use language and images and memories they’ve mined from their own minds and hearts.

Next, hear silence falling flat
as awning shadows

over Osage, where in every
boarded window a nail gun

still rings rifle-loud
-Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: Your poems reference life in Philadelphia while you were growing up, the racial conflicts, the bombing of Osage Avenue, and the eleven people who lost their lives that day. Do you feel like you are a voice for those whose city turned their backs on them?

Donaghy: I wouldn’t ever claim to be a voice for anyone but myself. I think we can get into trouble pretty quickly if we ever try to speak for anyone else.

That said, I think that I have a responsibility in my writing to bear witness to what I’ve seen and to argue in whatever way I can for social justice. Without, I hope, going on too much of a tangent (or a rant), what the city of Philadelphia did on Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, and what it has done to the residents of that block and the surrounding neighborhood over the subsequent decades is unconscionable.

I recap the story in the poem about the day the city tried to “mobilize,” if not kill, members of an African American liberation group named MOVE (it’s not an acronym; the name is in all caps to emphasize the organization’s sense of urgency), with whom police had had many conflicts over the years, by dropping explosives on a row home that was linked to blocks of other row homes owned by residents who were completely uninvolved with MOVE. All of the houses burned down. The city, as the evidence has revealed, rebuilt those houses cheaply and shabbily then denied for years that it did so.

I was living on the other side of the city when that happened, in a mostly white, Irish-Catholic neighborhood. The fathers in my neighborhood were pretty unsympathetic to the plight of the mostly African American neighborhood that had been bombed. There was no outrage that I recall. In fact, I don’t remember much talk about it. It was around that time that I began to realize that I was being taught to be a racist by men I otherwise admired in many other respects. For a lot of reasons, I turned from their examples.

As an adult, now, I feel a strong sense of purpose to write about those experiences, to bear witness to that racism, that anger, the scary smallness of that life view, and to speak my truth about some very complicated and frightening times I have lived through.

“T-shirts, ball caps. They wait for each other
to pull on clean socks, lace their boots, then rise
together, laughing, toward their evenings.

– Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: What inspired you to write “What Cement is made of”?

Donaghy: I wrote that poem shortly after visiting the workplace of brother-in-law, Shawn. At the time, he was a truck dispatcher for a cement company. While I was visiting one time, he’d forgotten something at work and asked me if I wanted to come along. We had to walk through the locker room and shower area to get to where he worked. All of the details in the poem come directly from that experience.

The heart of the poem comes from what I saw growing up as men in my neighborhood, including my father, worked long, hard hours of physical labor. With Shawn’s workplace in my head, I finally had a place to situate these men collectively and individually. They came home from work five, six days a week exhausted, smelly, spent. They’d fall into the couch or out onto the front stoop or onto a stool at a corner bar for a while before did it all again the next day.

It’s an incredibly hard way to make a living. It’s no way to make a life, really, but it’s the life I was headed toward, like most of the people I grew up around. I remember my father sitting me down at the kitchen when I was 8 or 9, telling me about what it was like to be an electrician at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, how he’d wire boats for ten, twelve hours a day in any weather.

I remember that he told me, “Work with your mind. Your hands will fail you someday.” It’s like he had seen his own future; that’s what happened to him ten years later. I think about that talk with my dad a lot. It’s another moment, maybe the first moment, that put me on a path to be a teacher.

Kallmerten: Readers of ‘What Cement is Made of’ encounter racial injustices in Philadelphia, the poverty you grew up around, and about life in the Kensington neighborhood. What about these places inspired you to write about them?

Donaghy: It’s the story I have to tell. Simple as that. Each of us carries inside the story of where we come from and how we got where we are.

As we get to know new friends, we spend so much time talking what it was like where we grew up. And we’re always reminded in our present lives of someone or something from that earlier place. You grew up around some colorful people, I bet, Taeler––people who gave you, through their actions and their words, great examples of the kind of person you should grow up to be and the kind of person you should work your whole life trying not to become.

You could drive a friend up and down the streets of your hometown, I bet, and talk about what’s happened there over the years, how things have changed, what the local secrets are that no one likes to talk about. The longer we think about the houses we grew up in, about our hometowns, questions about “what was it like?” gets more and more complicated. At least they have for me. I love to be in the middle of writing a new piece in which I’m speaking to something that I thought I’d forgotten, that raises some part of my past from the dead so that I can wrestle with it again, maybe make some sense of it, some art out of it, maybe bring people back to life and let them have their say.

Kallmerten: What are you working on next?

Donaghy: I’m finishing up the third of a trilogy of book-length poetry collections about life in the inner city. Many of the poems from the chapbook manuscript I entered in to the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is from that collection. This project has led me to do more research that I’d done previously. It includes poems triggered by memories as well by current events, which, where I’m from, have been pretty harrowing. This project also has led me to work in a variety of forms that I hadn’t tried before. I also have a short story manuscript that I keep coming back to––sometimes I start writing a poem and it turns into a story. When that happens, I just go with it. And I’d really like to publish a novel.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘What Cement is Made of’- An Interview with Daniel Donaghy appeared first on Newfound.

objects stay grounded easily
but not me – come on
two parts for thunder owe two parts
at once – soon to keep our need

Taeler Kallmerten: The way you organized your chapbook is interesting, can you explain your intentions of breaking your chapbook up into two parts? Can you explain the title to your chapbook “empathy for cars / force of july”?

Davy Knittle: I was interested in ways of riffing on a crown of sonnets, a sequence of sonnets that link the final line of one poem in the sequence to the first line of the next. While these poems don’t link in that way, I liked the idea of having a set of sonnets that connected to one another thematically and structurally. Each of these poems is made up of five stanzas that are 28 syllables each, with twelve poems in each of the two sets. Each set feels a little different from the other, at least to me. I wanted to use the same form to engage a couple of different kinds of moving through the poem, and of the space that each poem might make.

Kallmerten: What are you trying to communicate throughout your chapbook?

Knittle: I’m interested in exploring a kind of attention that’s not by any means singular to me or my work. I’m interested in the way people privately narrate experiences of public space–in what happens to a train station or a school or a public park if while you’re there you can’t stop thinking about something that happened four years ago or what you read in the newspaper or someone you miss or what you’re going to eat for lunch. I want to know more about how a neighborhood or a street or a single spot in a city is a unit of feeling. For me, these poems speak to some of those explorations, which I hope I get to continue for a long time.

Kallmerten: Describe some routines you have adopted during your creative process.

Knittle: I think my main routine is trying to change my routine to adapt to what makes the most sense for me on a given day or week or month. I do try to write every day, and usually I do, but that means a lot of different things, especially for this project, which was composed of fragments of a larger free form document that I wrote with the hope that I’d be able to build poems out of it.

Kallmerten: Can you explain what you learned about yourself after writing this chapbook?

Knittle: I’m not sure. I learned that I like writing poems as part of a larger project, which is something the poet Brandon Brown talks about as necessary to his practice–to start with a project that frames the writing. I hadn’t done that before, and so I learned that having a frame on the scale of the project was generative for me.

Kallmerten: What advice would you give to other creative-minded people who want to write?

Knittle: Try to do it more often than feels absolutely necessary. For me, there are a million reasons not to write, and so finding a way to return to my work out of some of the same general familiar obligation by which teeth are brushed and dogs are walked (I don’t have a dog, but if I did) is helpful for me. I find that if I’ve been writing at least semi-regularly, it’s easier to keep writing. I know that’s true of so many repeated things, of practice in general, but it’s felt different for me to know that than it has for me to build it into my life.

Kallmerten: What are you looking forward to working on next?

Knittle: I’m in the process of expanding this project to include two additional sections: a set of twelve fourteen-line sonnets (again syllabic, but not metrical) and a set of twelve sevenlings, where each line is twenty syllables. I’m looking forward to situating the poems in “empathy for cars / force of july” in a bigger family of poems with some of the same questions and curiosities.

Kallmerten: Finally is there a question you would like to be asked, or one you would ask another poet?

Knittle: There are so many questions I’d like to ask other poets. My academic work has been thinking, recently, about how city planning, poetry and criticism can interact–about what it would look like to read poems as a kind of planning theory. The poet who is the locus of that work for me is Leslie Scalapino, a spectacular poet, publisher and essayist who died in 2010, and who I never met, but have heard so many stories about from people who were close to her.

Scalapino wrote and talked often about the way poetry might participate in the public sphere, where she really believed it could work alongside other kinds of discourse, like criticism and journalism. Where, for instance, a poem might appear in a newspaper as an opinion piece. Today (and many days) if I got to ask a poet one question, I’d ask her what she thought a city that took her poetry as the framework of its plan and systems would look like, and if there were urban spaces that came close to doing some of the things she wanted a city to do.

 Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post “empathy for cars / force of July” – An Interview with Poet Davy Knittle appeared first on Newfound.