Kathleen Hellen Q & A with Eastern Iowa Review
Chila: "Signs" is a piece of flash prose, certainly lyrical. Take for example, these lines:
"Amber lots like grasslands dispossessed, where narratives in trails include the lost Manokin, where once the Nanticoke had traded words (about 300)—not used since frail Miss Lydia last spoke—like beaver skins for match coats; where fugitive Acadians once wintered, before their lands were confiscated; where Negro galleries still host a ghostly choir, the old brick founder’s church a dutiful memorial."
How do you piece together these types of works?
Kathleen: Each work is different, and different strategies—take parallelism, parataxis and hypotaxis, as examples—present options for structuring the text. This excerpt from “Signs” comprises a series of parallel subordinate clauses, each headed by the word “where” that functions as a place marker, each clause moving the narrative forward, one succeeding the next, much in the same way the principals—the Manokin, the Acadians, the slaves—succeeded each other in the historical landscape. Through syntax, the grammar, I wanted to create a sense of linear temporality, a record of human transience.
Chila: Your poetry has been widely published. This is something I've said over and over in these interviews: poetry and the lyric essay or the flash lyric prose, go hand in hand. How important is having a good grasp of poetry to a writer who wishes to infuse their work with lyricism? I realize the question may seem like a no-brainer, but flesh the answer out a little bit for us. I'm amazed at the pieces that some call "lyric" which are anything but.
Kathleen: The lyric essay, like lyric poetry, is analogous to song, and the writer tunes her ear to tonal qualities, the musical effects of line, sequence, rhyme and rhythm—that harmony of parts that Coleridge demanded of the poem. In the lyric essay, language accompanies the emotional intensity of the work. The writer’s voice is the instrument. I only know it is an essay not a poem because its theme is what I might call more “public” than personal.
Chila: Does your journalistic background - "just the facts" - conflict with your creative desires? How do you mesh them, or do you even need to - the prosaic with the poetic?
Kathleen: I often write as “witness” to events, the work becoming an expression of memory, both individual and collective. As in “Signs,” I write to record what happened, because without words, as the philosopher Berel Lang has said, nobody would know how what happened happened, or even that it happened—as if the writing alone would survive.
Part of my creative process, the literary histrio, is researching the facts. I trawl through histories, etymologies, for example—not necessarily with purpose but alert to what engages my attention. I let intuition guide what facts I might select, what language. Here, I defer to Poe, who said most writers would shudder at letting their readers glimpse “behind the scenes” of writing and rewriting, selections and rejections that yield purpose “only at the last moment.”
Chila: Your responses are enlightening, Kathleen. Now, tell us about the writing project you're most passionate about at the moment.
Kathleen: At present I’m working obsessively on a collection of poems at the intersection of popular culture, particularly film. I am a great fan of noir.
Chila: Best of wishes on that. I hope it all comes together for you well and soon. And finally, what do you wish I would have asked but didn't?
Q: Why the lyric essay, and why now?
A: The essay as a genre reaches back to the zuihitsu of early Heian Japan. It has evolved from those loosely connected fragments to the commonplacing of Montaigne, the polemics of Addison and Steele, and to the argument in brief that presents today with great versatility: the photographic essay, the musical essay, the film essay, and also, in what some have called the golden age of first-person writing online, the narratives that are native to the Internet, the digital confessions that have currency in website magazines like Salon and BuzzFeed.
Few essays, however, are more fully realized and self-aware than Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, winner of numerous awards including finalist for the National Book Award. Brevity here would be soulless. At once private and public, at once argument and elegy, this lyric essay extends the possibilities of the form. Rankine’s observations, recollections and reflections accumulate to challenge the assumption of a “post-racial” America. Citizen annotates Adorno’s argument that the world wants to be deceived, and here, the lyric essay is a hybrid that can tell the ugly truth—so beautifully.
Chila: "Signs" is a piece of flash prose, certainly lyrical. Take for example, these lines:
"Amber lots like grasslands dispossessed, where narratives in trails include the lost Manokin, where once the Nanticoke had traded words (about 300)—not used since frail Miss Lydia last spoke—like beaver skins for match coats; where fugitive Acadians once wintered, before their lands were confiscated; where Negro galleries still host a ghostly choir, the old brick founder’s church a dutiful memorial."
How do you piece together these types of works?
Kathleen: Each work is different, and different strategies—take parallelism, parataxis and hypotaxis, as examples—present options for structuring the text. This excerpt from “Signs” comprises a series of parallel subordinate clauses, each headed by the word “where” that functions as a place marker, each clause moving the narrative forward, one succeeding the next, much in the same way the principals—the Manokin, the Acadians, the slaves—succeeded each other in the historical landscape. Through syntax, the grammar, I wanted to create a sense of linear temporality, a record of human transience.
Chila: Your poetry has been widely published. This is something I've said over and over in these interviews: poetry and the lyric essay or the flash lyric prose, go hand in hand. How important is having a good grasp of poetry to a writer who wishes to infuse their work with lyricism? I realize the question may seem like a no-brainer, but flesh the answer out a little bit for us. I'm amazed at the pieces that some call "lyric" which are anything but.
Kathleen: The lyric essay, like lyric poetry, is analogous to song, and the writer tunes her ear to tonal qualities, the musical effects of line, sequence, rhyme and rhythm—that harmony of parts that Coleridge demanded of the poem. In the lyric essay, language accompanies the emotional intensity of the work. The writer’s voice is the instrument. I only know it is an essay not a poem because its theme is what I might call more “public” than personal.
Chila: Does your journalistic background - "just the facts" - conflict with your creative desires? How do you mesh them, or do you even need to - the prosaic with the poetic?
Kathleen: I often write as “witness” to events, the work becoming an expression of memory, both individual and collective. As in “Signs,” I write to record what happened, because without words, as the philosopher Berel Lang has said, nobody would know how what happened happened, or even that it happened—as if the writing alone would survive.
Part of my creative process, the literary histrio, is researching the facts. I trawl through histories, etymologies, for example—not necessarily with purpose but alert to what engages my attention. I let intuition guide what facts I might select, what language. Here, I defer to Poe, who said most writers would shudder at letting their readers glimpse “behind the scenes” of writing and rewriting, selections and rejections that yield purpose “only at the last moment.”
Chila: Your responses are enlightening, Kathleen. Now, tell us about the writing project you're most passionate about at the moment.
Kathleen: At present I’m working obsessively on a collection of poems at the intersection of popular culture, particularly film. I am a great fan of noir.
Chila: Best of wishes on that. I hope it all comes together for you well and soon. And finally, what do you wish I would have asked but didn't?
Q: Why the lyric essay, and why now?
A: The essay as a genre reaches back to the zuihitsu of early Heian Japan. It has evolved from those loosely connected fragments to the commonplacing of Montaigne, the polemics of Addison and Steele, and to the argument in brief that presents today with great versatility: the photographic essay, the musical essay, the film essay, and also, in what some have called the golden age of first-person writing online, the narratives that are native to the Internet, the digital confessions that have currency in website magazines like Salon and BuzzFeed.
Few essays, however, are more fully realized and self-aware than Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, winner of numerous awards including finalist for the National Book Award. Brevity here would be soulless. At once private and public, at once argument and elegy, this lyric essay extends the possibilities of the form. Rankine’s observations, recollections and reflections accumulate to challenge the assumption of a “post-racial” America. Citizen annotates Adorno’s argument that the world wants to be deceived, and here, the lyric essay is a hybrid that can tell the ugly truth—so beautifully.
I truly appreciate this informed interview and will watch Kathleen's career with anticipation in the days ahead. ~Chila
Kathleen Hellen's poems are widely published and have appeared or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, The Nation, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and now sits on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Her book reviews have been published in several journals, including the Baltimore Review and Oyster Boy Review. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she teaches creative writing in Baltimore.
Kathleen Hellen's poems are widely published and have appeared or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, The Nation, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and now sits on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Her book reviews have been published in several journals, including the Baltimore Review and Oyster Boy Review. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she teaches creative writing in Baltimore.