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.