Koss : part five

What are you working on?

I’m always working on lots of things at once. I’m tweaking poems for a hybrid book coming out this year from Negative Capability Press, for which I’m also creating images. I’m refining another manuscript and sending it out, while writing some poems about my ancestors (probably a chapbook up the road). There are also some comics rattling around. I’m moving towards visual expression, although I see words being part of it.

Koss : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry can free you from the constraints of linear time while condensing a lot into a very small space. While flash fiction also compresses information, poetry can unravel from a line, a word, an image, or an experience.

One thing I love about poetry is the process—the journey—hopping in the car with no particular destination. While poetry, like other writing, can be narrative, it’s a much more open medium than essay or fiction writing, which tend to be more preconceived. Of course one can push the limits of any medium, but poetry gives permission right up front.

Koss : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

It never feels finished and, at any stage, it can always fragment and explode into something else, which is why I believe that, while it’s good to go through multiple revisions, it’s important to keep going and produce lots of work—unless of course you want to be Elizabeth Bishop. Cut that thing loose or it might become your albatross.

Koss : part two

How does a poem begin?

No single way. Sometimes a poem’s a thing that rattles, a nagging, maybe for months, that suddenly shakes loose. Sometimes it’s an obsession, a repetitive thought or feeling that I have to interrupt and unleash through writing. Sometimes I hear a rhythm late at night while in bed, then a word or two or some lines, and I have to get up and let it unwind.  I’m an inspired writer, not a disciplined one. And yes—it’s a crazy thing. I should do more planning, more jotting, and notetaking as future fodder.  Fortunately, there is this persistent rattling . . .

Koss : part one

Koss is a queer writer, fine artist and designer with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been, or will be published in Entropy, Diode Poetry, Cincinnati Review Online Micro Feature, Hobart, and Spillway #27. They have a hybrid book due out in 2020 by Negative Capability Press. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular

Why is poetry important?

This has always been a difficult question for me—with poetry or art. There’s importance to creator and significance to audience, so I’ll try to answer both. Obviously one often writes poems out of personal need and urgency, whether it’s a way of understanding ourselves or the world around us. There’s also an element of attachment to making art—a secondary attachment that is not a mother or a lover—the oneness/connection felt while writing or painting and, later, the connectedness of reading out, sharing, and publishing.

Sometimes it’s an important message we send in a bottle—an artifact to the future, or a small comfort provided to a stranger who might pick a book of poems from a used bookstore shelf in 2050. Along with reaching strangers with my ghost words, I wouldn’t mind being immortalized in that musty book and have my art work hanging in the dead museum—proof I was here and I mattered. So yes, it’s about connecting with others AND mattering, here, there, now, or some time. Poetry defies time even while marking it.

As for importance to society, poetry, as traditionally defined by academia, is a fairly elitist activity, written and appreciated by few. One can say society needs poetry to remind us we are human, or we need it to converse with, comfort, instruct, and connect with each other. That has often meant three poets reading to 40 other poets. While this, in itself, isn’t a bad thing, the exclusivity hasn’t always enabled poetry to reach its full potential as an expressive medium or way to build communities.

I see that changing right now as poetry finds its way into mainstream culture via certain phenomena like Slam Poetry and social media. We are, in America, now seeing poetry as social action and protest. It’s exciting to see, in my lifetime, art as a vehicle for social change and political action, something vital in these dark times. It’s the stuff I’ve mostly only read about in history books, occurring, usually in some faraway country. I hope this phenomenon proves to be enduring.