Kate Gaskin : part five

How does a poem begin?

With a feeling of lightness, a thread of rhythm, an image. Or with great difficulty after ages of struggling against the misery of a blank Word document. Good poems come from both types of beginnings. Bad poems too.

Kate Gaskin : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

I don’t usually listen to music when I write, but music must be integral to my writing process because the way my poems sound—their rhythms and cadence—is the element of craft I most prioritize.

Kate Gaskin : part three

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

I return again and again to “The Abduction” by Stanley Kunitz, which reminds me to prioritize strangeness and beauty and to not be afraid to go for broke with the ending.

Kate Gaskin : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve recently read Graham Barnhart’s The War Makes Everyone Lonely and Abby E. Murray’s Hail and Farwell. Both deal with the tensions of critically engaging with the U.S.’s recent (and ongoing) wars. I love how technically beautiful Barnhart’s work is, and Murray’s is delightfully clever, even funny. I’ve also recently read Jenny Molberg’s new collection Refusal which is an absolutely scorching powerhouse of a book. Hayan Charara’s Something Sinister is singularly the most absorbing and memorable book I’ve read in the recent past.

Kate Gaskin : part one

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, which won YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, Passages North, Blackbird, and The Southern Review, among others, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, and in 2017 she won The Pinch’s Literary Award in Poetry. Currently, she is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal.

Photo credit is Dominic Gaskin

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I struggle with self-doubt. It can be difficult to get out of my own way. I also struggle with needing to process my own emotions and experiences for long periods of time. It took three full years of incubation to write the flagship poem of my book Forever War, but once I was able to write it, a whole flood of other related poems came spilling out, and those poems ending up being over half my book. Right now, I’m in processing/incubation mode instead of flood-of-poems mode, and I’m trying to practice patience and faith.