Kristin Garth : coda

How did you first engage with poetry?

I remember the first poet who I ever saw performing their work.  I was in early elementary school, and we all came to the cafeteria to hear a poet.  Even then I guess I had pre-conceived notions of what a poet was.  I expected someone professorial.  Instead it was a man who looked like he came down off a mountain.  He was in fact from the Ozarks.  I looked for his book which I still have somewhere in my library, and I was unable to locate it to tell you his name.  I was just smitten with him.  I loved watching him own his identity which was so unique and tied to his place, his unique experience.  He was a performer and an individual.  It taught me that you didn’t have to be from a big city or slick or pretentious to be a poet.  I am from a small town, Gulf Breeze, Florida, and he was from a smaller place than me, but he was a traveling, performing poet.  You just have to do the easiest and hardest thing in the world: be yourself.  A person who can do that, I think, can own any room or microphone or page.  You have to tell your story like it’s the most important story in the world.  If you do it right, it is.

Kristin Garth : part six

Why is poetry important?

Poetry is my whole life.  I didn’t do it for a long time.  Gave it up for many, many years.  I was living life and reading like crazy.  I feel that my experiences and what I read and observed, it gets experienced again in a contemplative, analytical way in poetry.  Poems are important because I think they help us both relive experience in its most meaningful way, devoid of the extraneous.  I love revisiting life in this way, even the dark aspects of life and learning from them, reminding myself of how far I have come and what victories I have made.  Poetry is a celebration even when it’s sad, I believe.  It marks a journey even when it’s dark and bleak.  Sometimes my saddest poems both break my heart and make me feel a sense of happiness that other people might not reading them because I am past them.  I survived it.  When you write something that is bleak and painful, and it makes you feel it in your bones, remember, but you’re past it – it’s a wonderful thing.  It’s a reminder of the complexity of life and the journey.  That’s why I think poetry is important.

Kristin Garth : part five

How important is music to your poetry? 

Rhythm and rhyme are such a part of songs.  I write sonnets, mostly, which one derivation of that word is song.  It’s like a little song.  They have a great rhythm to them and a rhyme scheme that I enjoy the way I enjoy a good song.  It’s one of the reasons I have come to enjoy performing them so much.  When they work well, they have a lot of musicality.  I think they sound great out loud.

I also love music.  I love to listen to instrumental music, electronica, witch house when I write.  I write a lot of poetry with dark themes, and music can really put me there, bring me into the drama, the mood.

Kristin Garth : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

If I don’t have an idea, it’s getting started.  Coming up with that idea out of what sometimes can feel like a void – or a distraction of the mundane that conspires against the kind of silence it takes, at least me, to be able to write.  I have to be alone.  Not physically alone in a room.  I actually like to write in coffee shops, but I need headphones.  I need music without words because I can’t have other people’s words in my head while I’m writing.  I’m really focused – or maybe I am just easily distracted.  But that’s my method.  I like to be in physical proximity to people but buried in music and my ideas.

If I have the idea, the hardest part is coming up with a good first line.  If I have a good first line and an idea, I am gold.  I have a map to where I’m going.  I know I’m going to get there.  I just have to wait it out and listen to the voice because it’s happening.

Kristin Garth : part three

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

The dense, terse nature of poetry – the details of it, full of pulp and flesh and strained of the filler and water, it is life at its most condensed, shocking level.  There’s no politeness in poetry or development – it’s nitty-gritty all the way through.  It’s all icing, tart, cream, orgasm, nightmare.  To me, it’s always the richest parts of every experience, so reading poetry is like living the best and worst of life in a tiny little box.  I think that’s why knowing a lot of poets, it’s an interesting experience because what we have in common is a very microscopic engagement with the world.  We are not hanging back in the shallow end.  We are in deep, experiencing, swallowing the chlorine water that reminds of us the water fountain in second grade and that boy who watched you drink and you realized you were  physically desired.  We are always in the present and the past, in the details and the imagination.

Kristin Garth : part two

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

I used to be on a critiquing site but I really made a conscious decision to stop submitting to critique.  Some people thrive on criticism.  I am a naturally insecure person, and while I was on the site, I would have work up on the site that was published and really ruthless critiques coming in saying to me:  “Who would read this?  Give it up” coupled with one right behind it that would say something over the top ridiculously flattering like “You will be taught in schools one day.”  And while it’s nice to get the super bump of confidence from the latter, I would at times, because I’m shy and insecure, want to give up entirely from the hate.  It wasn’t helping me. 

I used to cry to an editor friend, Nadia from Moonchild Magazine, who is the most patience maternal, nurturing person.  She gave me the courage to say, “This critique is not useful to me.  I don’t have to do this.”  And so I moved away from that. I’ve been lucky because I write and publish a lot to work with some editors who really take on the editor mantle, guide you, give you feedback whether they are choosing to publish you or not.  I love this.  It reminds me of graduate school which I did not complete and regret.  I feel when I get the privilege of working with a really professional, good editor, I am back in school again.  And I’m a forever schoolgirl, so I like that a lot.  It doesn’t mean I always agree or take the advice, but I like the dialogue, and sometimes when you do, something magical happens.  I had that experience recently with Kolleen Carney at Drunk Monkeys.  She gave me a little push that resulted in an improved poem, and I value those experiences.

Kristin Garth : part one

Kristin Garth is a poet from Pensacola, a kneesock enthusiast and a sonnet stalker.  Her sonnets have stalked the pages of Occulum, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, Moonchild Magazine, Midnight Lane Boutique and many other publications.  Her first chapbook Pink Plastic House is available from Maverick Duck Press.  Her second chapbook Shakespeare for Sociopaths is forthcoming from The Hedgehog Poetry Press January 2019.  Follow her sonnets, socks and secrets on Twitter: @lolaandjolie.

What are you working on?

I just completed a chapbook Shakespeare for Sociopaths.  It’s 37 Shakespearean sonnets on the subject of sociopaths.  This is my second chapbook.  My first was very personal to me because it was very biographical and it was like a pink Barbie dreamhouse of my life.  Shakespeare for Sociopaths is about influences:  William Shakespeare who designed the cage for most of my poetic creations – a cage, I will clarify, that liberates from me from thinking about form a lot and focusing on content.  It is a cage that I feel free to let my wild subjects roam and roar in the safety of 14 lines.  It keeps me terse and bold that cage, and I’m excited to celebrate it and the dark influences from life and literature that I have struggled against or stumbled upon in nightmares or books. 

Shakespeare for Sociopaths is a 40-page chapbook which will be released by The Hedgehog Poetry Press on my birthday, for good luck, January 17th, 2019.  I am so excited to be published by this fine press and to bring this book to everyone and share my love for Shakespeare, true crime, sinister characters, survival and dark influences.

Also, tonight I recorded a poem for my Twitter.  I love to make Soundcloud audios of my poetry and post them.  I call it The Garth House of Poetry & Burlesque (as I was once a stripper); people who read my poetry know this very well.  (It’s a very favorite subject of mine.)