~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Interview and Book Review -

 Julie Kane Interview by Dixon Hearne

Thank you so much, Julie, for taking time to share inspiring facets of your creative life as a poet. We know that our readers will appreciate your thoughtful words and comments.

DPR: What might your life have been like had you not made the choice to devote yourself to writing poetry?

Julie: I would probably be married to a surgeon, with kids. My college boyfriend went off to med school two years ahead of me and wanted me to get married, leave Cornell, and transfer to a college in the New York City area—but I didn’t want to leave the big, supportive poetry community I had at Cornell, and I wanted to go on for a master’s in creative writing after graduation. If I had taken that other path, I probably would have gone into publishing in New York City like my two sisters, who became book and magazine editors.

DPR: What was it about poetry that so clearly identified itself as the organizing center of your life?

Julie: I love the idea of an “organizing center.” It makes me think of loose iron filings on a surface that suddenly shape themselves into a rose when a magnet is placed near. But I truly do not know the answer. Some people fall in love with horses at an early age, some people hear a violin for the first time at age five and know instantly that that is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. That’s how it was for me and poetry, from a very early age.

DPR: What challenges spur you onward? Inward?

Julie: My latest self-challenge was completing the Certificate in Genealogical Research course from Boston University in December 2020. I enjoy genealogy as a hobby, and I wanted to see if I could master the skills to advance to the professional level. But yikes, it was the most demanding course I ever took in my life. If not for the pandemic, I don’t think I could have done it, because it took forty to fifty hours every week, for sixteen weeks. Going back to grad school at the age of 39 to study toward a Ph.D. was another self-challenge. And there have been other very personal challenges, like quitting drinking. The spur that drives me is always the realization that the person I want to be in the future is not the person I am now, and there is work to be done between then and now to get there.

DPR: How have your writing and teaching choices affected you emotionally? Intellectually? Professionally? Physically? How have you struck a comfortable balance? A sensible degree of proportion?

Julie: My poetry is often based on intense personal experiences that can be painful emotionally to relive, in order to write about them. But when you are able to transform pain or suffering into art, into something true or beautiful, it takes away a lot of the initial rawness of emotion. And then others can read the work and have it resonate with their own experiences, and sometimes it is helpful to others in that situation, to know that you have found meaning in suffering, order out of chaos.

“Teaching choices” can mean so many things: where to teach, what to teach. The teaching and service workloads at a regional state university like Northwestern are much higher than at private colleges or flagship state universities like LSU, so it could be difficult to strike a balance between those professional responsibilities and my own writing and personal life, at times. But right after I got my master’s degree from Boston University, in my early twenties, I spent a year as the George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. I had no responsibilities whatsoever other than visiting English classes when invited, but with all that free time on my hands, I don’t think I was any more productive then than I was later on in life, with a heavy load of job responsibilities.

I have a big yard here in Natchitoches, with pecan trees, a fig tree, azaleas, a sweet olive tree, a crepe myrtle, a mimosa tree, roses, ginger lilies, cannas, hydrangeas, and more. It is very calming and centering just to look out the windows at the flowers and the bird feeders, or to take a walk through the beautiful Natchitoches Historic District. I could never go back to big city life after living here. The natural surroundings help me to find balance when things are stressful.

DPR: Which poets and poetry have influenced your own poetic expression? Why?

Julie: That’s a good question. The biggest influences on my own style or “expression,” as you put it, are ones I encountered fairly early in life, when I was still malleable, like wet clay. Robert Frost, for his friendly, conversational tone of voice. John Donne, for his sudden flashes of humor in the midst of serious poems. Yeats, for the sheer hypnotic beauty of his language, meant to be heard with the ears. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, for showing me that women’s experiences were valid subjects for poems, even though there were hardly any women poets in my textbooks then.

DPR: What changes/shifts in contemporary poetry writing do you foresee?

Julie: I don’t have a crystal ball (though I did read palms for extra money in grad school!), but one interesting direction I am noting is a trend toward more hybrid writing, books that combine poems with passages of prose or visual images or both. I’m thinking of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Anne Carson’s Nox, and Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, for example. The boundaries between poetry and other creative genres are getting more blurred.

DPR: You have received many awards and wide recognition for your excellent writing. How do you approach writing poetry? Is it generally mood-driven, image-driven, emotion-driven, place-driven, or event-driven?

Julie: When I feel compelled to sit down and write a poem, something is trying to surface from my unconscious mind. I don’t quite know what it is yet, although I might know the mood of it or an image or a line of it. It’s like glimpsing a moving shadow under thick ice. Somehow I have to bore through that ice and haul the poem up to the surface. If I think I know everything that’s going to be in it and how it’s going to end, in advance of writing it, it is never going to be any good. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

DPR: What guiding principles inform and guide your poetry writing? What themes and topics (psychological, philosophical, emotional) appear most often in your writing? What literary devices and/or approaches do you favor, if any?

Julie: Reviewers and critics are so much better than I am at identifying unifying themes and topics. I am inside my poems, but they are on the outside, where they have a better perspective on the big picture. Ann Brewster Dobie has a chapter on my work in her book Voices from Louisiana: Profiles of Contemporary Writers (LSU Press, 2018). She sums me up by saying, “Julie Kane has been described as a formalist, a confessional poet, a playful stylist.” There’s another chapter on my work in Catharine Savage Brosman and Olivia McNeely’s Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). They say, “Many of Kane’s poems are built on disorder, unhappiness, and suffering.” They also mention humor, surprise, quick sketches of scenes, and frequent Louisiana or New Orleans motifs, along with the confessionalism and formalism. I do know that I write better when I have the challenge of a form to restrict my choices and send me off in surprising directions than I do when I am free to put down anything I want on the page. I don’t ever let the so-called “rules” of a form like the villanelle keep me from breaking them for the sake of a better poem, though.

DPR: You continue to receive awards and recognition for your poetry. How has being Louisiana Poet Laureate allowed you to influence and encourage writers of all ages and/or stages of development?

Julie: I hope that I was able to encourage young or beginning writers during my term as Louisiana Poet Laureate. I think just seeing that a poet can be a real live person in your classroom or local library and not just a long-dead figure in your textbook can be helpful for young writers. The other Louisiana Poet Laureates and I have tried to communicate that poetry is a living art and to promote the work of our fellow Louisiana poets and writers whenever we can. One of the most enjoyable experiences I had was a day spent at the New Orleans Museum of Art with local schoolchildren. They had each written a poem about one of the artworks in the museum, and they took turns standing in front of “their” artwork and reading their poem about it, and then I got to give quick feedback about the poem. It was so much fun, and they were so creative. I got to visit public schools, charter schools, libraries, and community centers, as well as the more typical spaces for poetry readings, like universities and book stores. But it was in those schools, libraries, and community centers that I got a chance to reach audiences who would not normally attend a poetry reading in a university setting, and that is what is so different about the work of the state laureate—the opportunity to bring poetry to wider audiences and to spark an interest in those who might otherwise ignore it.

Book Reviews by Susan Swartwout

Jazz Funeral: Poems, second edition. Pasadena, CA, Story Line Press, 2021. Pp 72. $20.00 paper.	Mothers of Ireland: Poems, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 56. $17.95 paper.

Poet Julie Kane—past Louisiana Poet Laureate, Fulbright Scholar, and winner of a National Poetry Series Award—has had two remarkable collections of poetry published in the past two years, Jazz Funeral and Mothers of Ireland, a unique doubleheader accomplishment in itself. The poems in both books are a tour de force of forms in a voice that is so adroitly contemporary that it belies the notion of poetic patterns as “formal” poems. Kane’s sonnets reveal her own versions of “bare ruin’d choirs,” Irish and Louisiana styled, but without the stilted language or tortured syntax of the sonnets that introduced most of us to the form in grade school. Kane’s books are tough, fearless textbooks of poetic form.
          Jazz Funeral won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2009 and was re-released this year by Story Line Press (an imprint of Red Hen) in their prestigious Legacy Title series. Mothers of Ireland (2020) is published by Louisiana State University Press, in the series Southern Messenger Poets.
          Jazz Funeral’s structure follows the shape of a New Orleans public burial that begins with a solemn musical score on the way to the cemetery and boisterous, celebratory New Orleans-style jazz to dance the mourners home. In Jazz Funeral’s first section, “The March to the Graveyard,” the poet captures elements near their endings: a broken-winged cardinal that feeds only at twilight, a beloved cat, the linguistic innocence just prior to learning the local language in Lithuania, when you haven’t yet learned the words “to ask why or how.”
          “Eulogy,” the second section, is dedicated to the life of New Orleans’ enigmatic Robert Borsodi, a free-spirited bohemian who provided various coffeehouse locations for poetry readings around the city, open to all people. The poems are a crown of 14 sonnets with intertwining lines—the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next, with the last line of the series appearing as the first poem’s first line, liked linked arms—prefaced by a brief biography of the exceptional but widely unknown Borsodi. It’s a magnificent tribute.
          The section “Cutting the Body Loose,” or laying the body to rest, focuses on a post-Katrina observation of the purple martins coming in at night to nest under the Causeway Bridge at Metairie. “Purple Martin Suite” is a flight of four sonnets that celebrate the inevitability of hope and celebration—in the magic swarm and flow of birds that cannot build their own nests, a community of people that nests among “floods & yellow fever,” and a city that rises in place from storm after storm.
          Recently I was talking with my neighbor, who was raised in Mexico City, about the power of the mothers and grandmothers who carry forth their cultures and endow or inflict those cultures on their progeny, depending upon how the cultural lesson is rendered. For both Luis and me, our memories are overly nostalgic, whether good—such as grandmothers who made sure that their (in Luis’s case: hundreds of) family members got together regularly—or bad—such as having to awaken for work when the grandmothers did, earlier than God, to deal with the feeding and plucking of chickens. Kane’s book, Mothers of Ireland, calls forth the Irish matriarchy, and her view is more searingly honest and unrelenting. The introductory poem in Mothers of Ireland, “The Good Women,” summarizes characteristics of Irish women’s power and place in carrying forward their traditions:

          Death makes them bake
          turkeys, casseroles,
          applesauce cakes.
          They breathe the thick
          incense of flowers
          for strength, dispense
          prayers like milk
          from each massive breast.

The speaker of the poem, however, is established as a black sheep, an outlier from this tribe of Irish Marys. The theme of disassociation continues in poems about traumas and cankered relationships: a mother who is cold and disparaging, a genetic tie to suffering that may psychologically indenture an entire ethnic group, an uncoupled couple.
          But the beating heart of the book is the characterization, in which we meet the ancestors. Many of the poems are dedicated by name to the women within them. The four “Acts” in “Family Dramas,” a multi-part poem, showcase entire clans. The epiphoric “Her Heart,” with the epigraph “Julia Margaret Lynch Curtin (1896–1939),” is an exceptional piece in that you hardly notice the soft pulse of the repeated word “heart” at the end of every line, so well incorporated is it into the description. One of my favorites is the poem “That One Over” (Mary McCarthy Lynch [1867–1949]) about a woman so untrusting and self-righteous that she referred to her longtime partner not by name but as “that one over” and wore the china cabinet key to keep him from selling her cheap treasures for whiskey money. The killer last line is her unforgettable mantra: “He hadn’t deceived her yet, but you never knew.”
          Julie Kane is a virtuoso poetry patternist (her doctoral dissertation was on the villanelle) with enviable skill at wordplay. But beyond structure and device, she’s a poet with laserlike observation, walking on a tightrope between two traumatized communities—one that sees death coming every day, sure as the name “Mary” on Dublin church records, and another that parties right up to mortal finality, then dances away with death in a flurry of jazz.