Kelly Weber : part five

How does a poem begin?

My poems almost always begin by accident…it’s hard, unless I’m trying to write into a specific gap in a manuscript, for me to try to just sit down and write a poem. But if I give myself a craft exercise or technique to practice, a poem might just show up. Often one poem leads directly into the next, and then I have to go back through a word blob and figure out which parts are one poem, which parts are another, which parts are vestigial and can be released. But that’s what I really enjoy. The pressure is off to face a blank page and Write a Poem. Instead it’s more of an excavation of what’s already there, once I’ve generated big chunks of words. The poem and I discover each other in the process. In a sense, I begin each time, rather than the poem—because each time I’m discovering what poem could be or what I think a poem is.

Kelly Weber : part four

Why is poetry important?

It feels really important in all writing to have language that engages with, resists, challenges, troubles, lives inside the language of all the other discourses of our everyday lives. For me, poetry is a kind of wakefulness, a sensitivity, a tuning in. And it feels important, in the midst of so much functional writing, to have poetry be fire and birdsong in my mouth. It’s an alternative way of being in the world. It’s almost this whole other sense or life experience in addition to, and part of, the dailiness of my life. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the ways I think poetry is important, but those are some the reasons it’s important for me.

Kelly Weber : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Everything! Kidding—but I think it’s difficult to let each poem navigate its way between lyricism and forthright articulation of its concerns, especially in the revision process when the first draft flush of discovery has worn off a bit. How to attend closely to the particular crisis of the poem and listen to it so carefully that we discover—let the poem discover—its deepest formal logic, to use Dan Beachy-Quick’s terms? I find myself often asking if I’m really revising toward that in a poem, or if in fact I’m just using craft to stay away from the most sensitive pressure point at the heart of the piece. There also comes a point I’ve learned to recognize late in the book drafting stage when I sort of hate everything about the manuscript. That’s usually when I know a book is almost done, but it’s hard to look at the massive amount of work and all the pages and think it wasn’t a waste of time. That’s when I know it’s time to probably let the book be done so we can both move on to other things, but then it becomes especially hard to go back and engage with the manuscript both generously and critically to accompany it through its final stages. With a little luck, it becomes a chunk of my heart other people can read.

Kelly Weber : part two

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

When I need renewal, I go back to my favorite books that remind me why I love writing: Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ross Gay’s The Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude. I also try to attend readings or connect with friends in the community to kind of re-connect to my body in writing. When I feel at a low ebb, I think I find myself returning to works of writing and advice from friends and mentors that give me permission to be most honest in the poems. Not just remembering the magic of words, but remembering to link back to my body/heart/gut first and foremost, and feeling that in a community. Anything that helps the discovery feel fresh and wild again.

Kelly Weber : part one

Kelly Weber is the author of the debut poetry collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Dodo Heart Museum (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Her work has received Pushcart nominations and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Brevity, The Missouri Review, The Journal, Palette Poetry, Southeast Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

Photo credit: Mark Weber

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was really hesitant to engage with poetry when I was young. My mom bought me a collection of poetry deemed suitable for children and I think there was some Dickinson, Whitman, etc. in there, but reading poems felt more like a duty than a joy for a long time. It wasn’t until late in high school that I discovered more contemporary poets and began to take an interest in the form. When I first engaged with poetry, I was interested in it as an intellectual exercise in word play, but I didn’t really engage with it as a vehicle for emotion or thinking about the things that mattered to me. Then I finally took some introductory poetry classes in college and met real, living poets who introduced me to the poems of Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, etc. When poems stopped being just perfunctory word games and became a practice of living in the world, I became hooked. It’s surely no coincidence that my interest took off when I was invited into community.