Kimberly Campanello : part five

How does a poem begin?

For me a poem begins in a strange juxtaposition, a kind of tension that is revealed by a seemingly literal or real object or moment in relation to something else (another object or moment), a tension that creates a sense that things are not what they seem.

Kimberly Campanello : part four

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

I return to Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer and Les Illuminations. The strangeness and unpredictability of these poems – not least because I read them in a second language – always gives me something to work with.

Kimberly Campanello : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been reading a lot of ‘innovative’ Irish poetry/poetry coming from Ireland. I’ve particularly enjoyed new work by Pascal O’Loughlin, Natasha Cuddington, and Christodoulos Makris. I’ve also been reading Bernadette Mayer for the first time. One of my favourite things to read is the magazine Poetry Wales, which has been such an incredible force under the editorship of Nia Davies. Continuing the Welsh theme, I have really loved delving into The Edge of Necesssary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018 edited by John Goodby and Lyndon Davies. The poems of Heather Dohollau and Childe Roland are particularly striking.

Kimberly Campanello : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

As a teenager, my reading of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman shaped my sense of what it means to write poetry. Later on, H.D. (Trilogy), M NourbeSe Philip (Zong!), Thomas McGrath (Letter to an Imaginary Friend), Stein (Lifting Belly), and Aimé Césaire (Cahier d’un retour au pays natale) all had a big impact. I’m interested in poets who take on big projects or longer poems – poets who are in some sense visionaries in whatever mode they are working in. My thinking about this large-scale mode is continually renewed by poets with these ambitions, most recently by the work of Geraldine Monk (They Who Saw the Deep), James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar (Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of the Civilised Nations), and Denise Riley (A Part Song). I am really looking forward to the forthcoming book by Joyelle McSweeney, having read some of the poems in journals.

Kimberly Campanello : part one

Kimberly Campanello’s poetry books and pamphlets include Consent, Imagines, Strange Country (on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings), and Hymn to Kālī (her version of the Karpūrādi-stotra). In April 2019, zimZalla released MOTHERBABYHOME, a796-page poetry-object and reader’s edition book comprising conceptual and visual poetry on the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland. Also in April, above / ground press published her chapbook running commentary along the bottom of the tapestry. She is Programme Leader for Creative Writing and a member of the Poetry Centre in the School of English at the University of Leeds. www.kimberlycampanello.com

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

This depends on the poem/project. For my large-scale conceptual/visual poetry project MOTHERBABYHOME, I wrote in isolation but aired the poems regularly among audiences in Ireland and in the UK. These audiences varied quite a bit in terms of their familiarity with the subject matter, with the mode of writing (visual and conceptual), and with poetry readings in general. This variation really helped me ‘test’ the work, or at least know that I should keep going and write all 796 pages of the project. It also made releasing the whole thing and doing a durational performance of all of it feel much more familiar than it might have had I not worked on it for so long and shared work along the way. Currently, I’m sharing work on a regular basis with two poets based in Ireland – Dimitra Xidous and Annemarie Ní Churreáin.