Interviews

I think the why of what I’m proposing could not be more opposite to the life hack mentality. I’ve warned people before about my book that not only is it not a self-help book but you might be more confused when you finish it.

The part that sounds weird to non-writers is that—What is this about observing people who only exist in your mind? But that’s how civilians think. To people who do what we do, that doesn’t sound weird at all. That’s the whole job: observing people who aren’t real.

Ideology for me is a loaded word that comes out of a New Critical language of received ideas that are not often interrogated. So I would hope that the essays work in pushing against ideology in the sense that an essay is irreducible from personal experience. In some ways, the more you are able to focus on one’s personal experience of a thing the more resistant you will be to ideology or reductive thinking of a thing.

And so, I’m a daughter of Toni Morrison, though not bloodline; but kinship-wise, and culturally, we are akin. I have a responsibility—to not necessarily say what she has said about being a daughter but to recognize my place in that continuum and welcome other daughters of all cultures into that—because who celebrates that except your family?

Don’t ever do anything that doesn’t have integrity . . . Authenticity as close as you can get it, as close as you can get it and never fudge it. Never blur it. Don’t try and make it pretty. Integrity: that’s the word.

I think that we have to go forward and say, “I’m not going to wait for patriarchal structures to catch up to women poets.” We just have to go forward, and if they are not going to read us in the way that we deserve to be read, then it’s not worth our time in arguing.

Human life is invested in epistemological difficulties—just finding your ass with both hands these days is a challenge. But I think that nature, if we involve ourselves in it, if we just spend time [deeply inhales] looking at trees, smelling rocks… I like to crawl, I like to lie down in the woods a lot, I do that a lot, which has made me famous to the animals and my neighbors too.

So when I opened that back up, all the fear and pain and terror I should have been feeling then, but didn’t, came back on me. I was catatonic. My editor called me and said, “Kim, the book’s past due, honey. Where is it?” I said, “The manuscript, the hard copy, well… it’s in my trunk, and it’s bound in twine.” I couldn’t believe it. I was carrying it around hostage. Psychology 101.