Kristy Bowen : coda

How does a poem begin?

In the best circumstances, the first line that springs up like a bone I build the rest of the project on, whether that's piecing collected fragments together or just seeing where one line to another takes me.  Since I do tend to write in series, once I am a couple pieces in, I can usually find my way out or follow it to it's natural conclusion. Where that bone or first line comes can be anywhere. Something I read. Something I see. A phrase that just comes to me as I'm in the shower or drifting off to sleep and not poeting at all.  A memory that seems unusually vivid somehow. Many of my projects wind up being heavy with research or "inspirational reading." Of the last few series I worked on, the inspo came from different places. I was watching The Shining with my boyfriend and  was sort of high and noticed things I hadn't quite seen before (Overlook). I was scrolling though social media and spotted a funny Weekly World News with a great headline ("Babies Living On Board the Titanic"). I was listless during lockdown and mourning the spring flowers along my route to work (bloom) I think once I'm mid-project, it sort of continues on its own momentum.

Kristy Bowen : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I think the longer I do it and the more I make myself write even when I don't think I can. It gets easier to get a poem or a project rolling.  For the past three years, after a long time of doing it irregularly, I've been writing almost daily, and the results are usually good.  So like running everyday, it gets less painful as time goes on.  You just have to show up at your desk with your running shoes on and you're off. The difficulty may have nothing to do with the writing itself for me, but with connecting those poems with readers.  Or maybe even knowing there are readers out there at all.  You drop a penny down a well and sometimes you hear a little splash but more often, only silence.  So you throw another coin in and hope for the best.  It isn't entirely about publication and acceptances/rejections, but also about the smaller ways you feel someone is actually reading what you're writing. That silence is terrible, and the more excited you are about what you've created, the worse it is. I don't feel this as much with visual art, which I think is an easier sell with a wider audience.  Everyone, even non-creatives, can look at a collage or painting and fall in love with it.  The audience for poetry is so small, mostly poets themselves and there are so many of us writing it. It's sometimes amazing anyone sees it at all. 

Kristy Bowen : part four

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

I think its spareness allows an entire world to be contained in a line---sometimes even a single image. Something like fiction takes more words to get to the same place. You also have to follow certain paths in narrative and suspense-building that an audience expects. You can break the rules, but only a few writers can do that well without losing your reader. With poems, your reader kind of expects to get lost.  For things to never be what they seem. Obviously poems rely more on rhythm and sound, what in the old days, obviously made memorization easier, even in free verse. We have any poem at our fingertips now via technology and don't need to commit them to memory, but musicality is still very much a part of the experience. Also, poetry has that power to take abstract ideas or moods and make them solid flesh I realized lately that I communicate so much just everyday conversation in metaphors and sometimes people find it annoying--how I explain everyday things, but I also how those metaphors are how I think things out. See this is like this, and it makes sense to me, but sometimes is confusing for the person I'm talking to..lol..

Kristy Bowen : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I think the way I compose poems has changed from when I first began, and there are probably different stages in my writing life in terms of  process--the sort of moves I make to get something going.  In my 20's, poetry was this difficult thing, which needed to happen when the winds were right. I would sit down with my ideas and hammer something out as an attempt at getting to something already fixed in my head. I either succeeded or failed miserably and had to start over. At the time, there was a lot of poems that were persona-driven.  My first chapbook is filled with pieces about historic, literary and mythological figures. I myself, didn't have all that much to draw from, or if I did, I didn't know how to harness it. In my 30's, I was simultaneously starting to work visually in collage and book arts, so much of my writing took on sort of cobbling together of things. I didn't have a defined idea to begin, more that the pieces would form the whole, and the idea would be formed and finessed from the raw materials--sometimes found texts and random threads, I didn't know, starting out and assembling a poem from random bits,  what it would end up about and I really liked that--writing as a way to discover. Also, I began writing more and more narratives into my poetry and wordbuilding, which isn't something poets talk about as much as fiction writers and visual artists., but it's there. Also, working in tandem visually and with words, so many of my projects began to incorporate visual elements--collages and paintings. In recent years, I still do this, but I also have been letting sound--rhyme and rhythm--form what I'm building when I'm stuck. I realized at some point I had eschewed lined verse entirely for prose poems, but have been circling back a little. Whatever the form, sounds plays a greater role in my composition than it did a decade ago.  I still don't know where a poem will go necessarily, but this is part of the fun.
 

Kristy Bowen : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

If you go way, way back, I was fascinated with Mother Goose, which I guess is is a type of poetry.  Before I could even read a word about it, I carried around this very battered (and stained with applesauce) black and white checkered book of it and "read" it via the pictures. Otherwise, poetry wasn't something that lived in my world as a kid outside of nursery rhymes and the sort of chants you did while jump roping in elementary school. I was really into to horror and spooky things, so when Poe came around in junior high, I was smitten. While I easily would have told you I was writing a horror novel as a pre-teen, poetry was something firmly in the past and not something people--real people--actually did anymore. Poe. Shakespeare. Longfellow. Chaucer. All the fodder of high school textbooks. I wouldn't have been able to pick a contemporary poet out of a lineup, and probably would have argued, like a unicorn, they didn't exist. Our freshman year English teacher had us write poems, though, and I remember wowing her with one about flamingos. Somewhere there's a high school diary, bedecked in a rainbow and with a tiny lock, filled with poems about unrequited love and kittens. So I just kept going, but it still felt like something I had no idea what to do with or if there was even an audience for it. If you fast forward post-adolescent poems that at first were very spare and about societal issues, then later, Dickinson rip-offs about what my 20 year old self thought were VERY BIG IDEAS. I actually got to a space where things were improving. At the time, I was moving past the idea that poetry was this old, dusty, archaic thing and actually starting to read contemporary poets--at first Louise Gluck, Anne Sexton, Carolyn Forche, Sharon Olds. I had long been a Plath fan, but more for her prose and journals,  and less for the poems, which I don't think I was skilled enough yet to appreciate in those years. For all my strong feminist woman poet models, I always laugh that it was the deadest of the dead white men that broke things open for me and gave me a kind of permission to write the poems I wanted to write. I was in a graduate lit program and we were reading The Wasteland and it broke something open. In the months after, after years of writing on the side and making other plans for my life, I decided that poetry was what I needed to be doing.

Kristy Bowen : part one

A writer and book artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of many artist books, chapbooks, and zines, as well as several prose/poetry/hybrid collections, including the recent sex & violence (Black Lawrence Press, 2020.) Her poems have appeared recently in Pretty Owl Poetry, The Account, and Pedestal Magazine.  She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio.

What are you working on?

Right around the holidays, I stumbled into my brother-in-law's comment string on a Facebook post from someone he'd been talking about a few day's prior--a guy who was pathologically into conspiracy theory and had some crazy thoughts about current events (at that moment it was the Nashville bombing). What caught my attention was not so much what he was saying, but HOW..this strange sequence of cause/effect and pattern-forming that had no basis in fact or reality and yet was captivating nonetheless. It occurred to me that in our own histories, we often make meaning and substance out of  our own lives and experience in a similar way. And if I could capture that diction and flowing way of talking about things--my own things--it might be an interesting experiment. I have a handful of pieces that I'm liking and hope to write some more. At my day job at the library, we are planning programming and exhibits around the subject of urban legends this semester, something I've written about quite a bit before,  and those ideas are also turning some similar wheels and creeping into the poems.