~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Interview and Book Review -

 Kendall Dunkelberg Interview by Dixon Hearne

Kendall, thank you for your time and valuable insights. I know you’re a busy person. We are so pleased to talk to you about your inspiring poetics, and we know our readers will enjoy what you have to share with us.

DPR: It is clearly important to you, as editor of Poetry South and Ponder Review, to provide a platform for other writers' voices. Please talk a little bit about how you’ve been able to fit in your own creative work along the way.
 
KD: I would say that editing Poetry South and Ponder Review helps with my own creative work more than they get in the way. For instance, this week, I’ve been doing faculty evaluations, program assessment, new student admissions, paperwork to pay summer faculty, etc. Those aspects of my academic job, which usually need to be done yesterday if not sooner, tend to get in the way of writing much more than working on the magazines. Reading submissions is a relief from checking email, filling out reports, and all the other day-to-day business that is also essential. Reading submissions reminds me of why we do all the other things, and it recharges my batteries.
 
DPR: Do you think that working as an editor of literary journals has influenced the way you view your own creative work, particularly when you are submitting it for publication? If so, how?
 
KD: Editing has definitely affected how I view submissions to magazines. Nothing helps your confidence quite like reviewing hundreds of submissions. You quickly realize there are many uncontrollable factors in the submission process and a “rejection” really isn’t a judgment as much as a statement that your submission didn’t work for one person at one moment in time. Finding the right place at the right time and being fortunate enough to reach the right reader takes a lot of luck, as well as craft and skill. You learn to expect submissions to be returned and to be ready to send them out again as soon as they come back.
          More than developing a thick skin, though, editing constantly tests you. I learn as much from the submissions I return as from the ones I accept, sometimes more. As I review submissions, I am constantly thinking about why I value certain kinds of narrative poems over others or what constitutes a distinctive voice. I’m not looking for poets who sound just like me, but I am always thinking about my choices, and I’m most excited when I find someone whose poems surprise me and make me rethink my assumptions. All those thoughts that run through your head while reading submissions return when you sit down to write, and you think about how another editor might see your work. There are times when you need to banish that internal censor, and there are other times when those voices challenge you to try something new or to push the work you’re doing further, even if it runs contrary to the latest styles or trends.
 
DPR: I'm always very interested in this idea of "place" in writing. Eudora Welty once said that one place understood helps us to understand all places better. I know you were born in Iowa and have lived in many places, including Belgium. How has this experience informed and influenced your writing and teaching?
 
KD: Place has always been very important to my writing, as is true for many writers. I may write from memory and bring in places from my childhood or other places I’ve lived like Belgium, Chicago, or Texas. Often, I’m inspired by something in my daily surroundings. Many poems begin on a morning walk, so elements of those places and of the seasons enter into the poems, even if they are also about a myth or something further afield. Eudora Welty complained of writers (mostly male) who weren’t aware of what flowers would be blooming at different times of the year, and I share that concern. It’s not just a question of accuracy, but of attention to the world around you and the rhythms and cycles of that world.
          Growing up in small-town Iowa had its parallels to living in the South. Behind the houses across the street there was a corn field where we would often play. We walked and rode our bikes out to a creek or a little further to the Cedar River. Living abroad in Belgium as an exchange student after high school, learning Dutch and experiencing another culture, helped me see the place I grew up with new eyes, as has living in other parts of the country or traveling. Learning another language both helps you see your own language in a new light and makes you more confident and aware of how you use it. The same can be true of living in another place. You become more attuned to your surroundings after being away or when you move to a new place.
 
DPR: Do you feel a sense of indebtedness to the region in which you live? In other words, do you feel as though you have to write about the place in which you live or have lived?
 
KD: I have now lived longer in Mississippi than anywhere else. I don’t know that you have to write about anything, but I am certainly informed by the places I’ve lived, and the South is a major influence, though how I approach it and how I live here is also influenced by all the other places I’ve been. You are probably most influenced by where you spent your formative years, so Iowa and the upper-Midwest will always inform my temperament and my sense of place and history, and it is a place I’ve been fortunate to be able to return to frequently over the years. I cut my teeth in poetry after college in Chicago, so that world informs me, as does Belgium and the hill country of Texas, especially Austin, where I studied comparative literature and translation. In the South, I'm always aware that I wasn’t born here, that I retain an outsider’s perspective to a certain extent. And yet, through directing the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium and editing Poetry South, I’m also very interested in challenging definitions of what constitutes Southern writing. My own work is Southern in that it is written in and of the South. I respond to the world around me whether that is writing a poem in reaction to what the governor or a city council person said or writing about a bird or fox or flower I’ve seen. In any case, the local is usually the starting point, but the poem also needs to connect to something that transcends the local, the personal, the immediate, so I’m also always looking for connections beyond the local. In the same way, a poem is often grounded in the present moment, yet seeks to resonate far beyond that moment to have an impact. It will hopefully be read by readers in a very different time and place, and you hope it retains meaning.
 
DPR: As author of the textbook: A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing, you provide an approach and understanding as regards the writing process. What shaped these views? What additions/changes, if any, would you make in a second edition?
 
KD: A Writer’s Craft was shaped primarily by the students I taught for nearly twenty years before I started writing the book, by what worked and didn’t work and by what I learned from them. Probably the earliest influences would be the teachers I had at Knox College and conversations about teaching with close writer friends, Anna Leahy, Mary Cantrell, and Stephanie Vanderslice. Also textbooks I had used, loved, and argued with until I decided to go without a book and write my own notes, many of which had been created to fill in the gaps where I thought a book didn’t do something justice. Often poetry got short shrift in comparison to fiction, and many writing textbooks had a way of talking to students that seemed overly prescriptive, even harsh. So once I decided to strike out on my own to write notes that truly mixed the genres at the outset of the semester and then treated four genres as even-handedly as possible, I started to think about whether other teachers might benefit if I published them as a book. Once again, I asked writing friends and received encouragement, and I was fortunate enough to land a very good publisher who also pushed me to develop the notes in certain ways, especially to make the book more appropriate for an international market.
          If I were to undertake a second edition, I would try to incorporate even more international writers in examples, and especially more writers of color, whether American or international. I would also look to different forms from other cultures. I’m very interested in Matthew Salesses’ writing about non-Western narrative forms and would love to follow some of the leads he gives about Asian narrative in Craft in the Real World. A similar exploration could enrich the chapters on poetry and drama. Since my days performing poems in Chicago, I’ve been interested in multi-vocal, choral poems with call and response or dramatized poetry that breaks the monolithic speaker of the poem or performance that breaks the fourth wall and allows the audience to respond. African narrative poetry often incorporates the performance of the griot with the responses of the crowd, and other cultures have other ways of conceiving the lyric voice in more communal terms. I’ve also gotten more involved with digital writing and how narrative, and potentially lyric, can change when the words are taken off the page and the reader/user can be given a more active role in the creation of the text, so I would probably want to add to the final chapter on other genres.
 
DPR: I recently read an article on Lit Hub in which Paul Harding reflects on working with an independent publisher on his debut novel Tinkers, which of course went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Can you talk about your experience working with university presses? Would you recommend that writers submit their work to smaller presses? What might be the advantages/disadvantages of doing so?
 
KD: For poets, small, independent publishers and university presses are the primary market for a book-length collection or chapbook. A very few poets will get picked up by the major publishers, but that seems increasingly rare. More and more fiction and creative nonfiction writers are moving to independent presses, too. Small presses are better situated to market a book with a modest print run. They know their readers and develop unique lists that will speak to their readership. There are many great university presses with poetry series (LSU, Arkansas, and Georgia, to name a few), and there are some exciting independent publishers who focus on poetry (Bull City Press and Unsolicited Press come to mind). Read the contributors notes of your favorite magazines to find more.
          But not all small presses or university presses are the same. An advantage of going with a university press is that you can be pretty certain they will follow a standard publishing model, pay author royalties, and promote your book, though the author will also be expected to be part of promotion and may be responsible for editing and other aspects of production. Many independent presses do this as well, though some work on a hybrid publishing model, and some offer self-publishing services that seem more like a vanity press, so a writer needs to keep up to date with the different publishing models. Jane Friedman maintains a valuable list of these, The Key Book Publishing Paths, updated annually.
 
DPR: Also, if you don't mind, please tell us a little bit about your new collection which is out for review. Where did the organizing/thematic center come from?
 
KD: The poems in Tree Fall with Birdsong came together over more than a decade. The collection has gone through a few working titles and submissions to over forty publishers and contests in that time, and the focus has shifted some and been refined over time. Many of the poems deal with death, since I lost my father, my sister and my father-in-law during this time, though not all at once. I remember one reviewer for a press who turned it down suggested that I might write a whole collection about trees, since one poem cycle centered around the loss of two trees at my mother’s home. I didn’t think much of the suggestion at the time, but eventually, I did start to look for ways trees informed the other poems. That, along with googling the working titles I had at the time and finding other poetry collections with the same or similar titles, led me to the title of Tree Fall. Then a storm took down a large maple tree that stood over our home when I was growing up, which led to another cycle of poems thinking about the tree and my mother’s mortality, as well as my own.
          Death can be a morbid subject, though a frequent one in poetry. My poems tend to be more about coming to terms with mortality than with grief. A central moment in the collection is a series of haiku, composed on morning walks along the Tombigbee river, looking at the paradox of fullness and absence, transience and presence, and the cycles of the seasons, such as the reminder of the fullness of summer in a locust shell seen in autumn. I realized that Tree Fall focused more on the loss side of that equation, whereas many of the poems focused on renewal and life. Birdsong seemed a fitting addition to the title, both because there is a poem of that title in the collection and because birds often inhabit these poems. More poems followed that revelation, and older poems were set aside. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Though I didn’t want to write too much about it directly, there is one reference in “Ash Wednesday” and a poem titled “Quarantine” that could be about any quarantine but was written with the COVID lock-down in mind. This led to a series of poems about myths of the underworld, trying to imagine a way out of our collective grief. “Gilgamesh” and “Inanna” are two of these.
 
DPR: Who are some of your favorite poets, and what books of poetry are currently on your bookshelf?
 
KD: One collection I’ve been reading is David Young’s translation of Du Fu, a poet from China’s Warring States period. I wanted to return to him in our current political moment. Before that, I was reading W. S. Merwin’s selected poems. Some of my early favorite poets were Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, and Muriel Rukeyser, even John Berryman, who for all his inner struggles, understood the twisted American dreamscape perhaps better than anyone. I’ve also been interested in C. D. Wright’s poetry for a long time, and of course I spent many years working on Paul Snoek and other Belgian poets, as well as reading in French and German for my Comp Lit degree. In contemporary poetry, I’m a big fan of Ashley M. Jones, the Alabama poet laureate, as well as Mississippi’s laureate Catherine Pierce. Derreck Harriell, Sean Hill, Adam Vines, Jack Bedell, and Claude Wilkinson are also doing great work. I could keep going; there are so many. Of course, I’m thinking of poets I know through the Welty Symposium or Poetry South. It’s one of the best things about directing the symposium or editing a magazine: I’m constantly on the lookout for new and talented writers. And I won’t even get started on the young poets (and some not-so-young poets) from our low-residency MFA program who have promising careers ahead of them, not to mention my colleagues or our undergrads. I’m sure I’d overlook someone if I started down that path, but suffice it to say, I get to read fabulous poets nearly every day.
 
DPR: What projects, if any, are currently in the works?
 
KD: My most recent poetry project has been a series of poems from the perspective of an “intergalactic traveler.” This started as an exercise to get myself away from writing poems like the ones in Tree Fall with Birdsong, though it has started to take off and may be approaching chapbook or at least mini-chapbook length. The idea was to look at current issues from the ultimate outsider perspective and to give myself license to talk about things I might otherwise never bring up in a poem, while also giving myself distance to question my own perspective on those issues. They’re meant to treat serious subjects with a dose of humor as well. Thank you for publishing three of these in Delta Poetry Review last year.
 
DPR: What is the most important advice you think you could give to aspiring writers?

KD: My best advice is to explore your voice and follow where it leads you. In saying this, I don’t mean you should ignore the good advice of mentors or be too quickly satisfied with everything you write. Instead, I would encourage you to follow your passions, listen to the way you and your community talk, find the mentor voices and forebear poets who speak to you in some way, even if their voices are very different from your own (I don't write at all like most of my greatest influences), ignore those who would tell you to be someone other than you are, while constantly challenging yourself to get better and truer to yourself. If you do that, and if you constantly test yourself against the writers you most admire and challenge them with your own innovations, and if you never give up, then you will find your community and you will have something valuable to offer it.

Book Review by Susan Swartwout

Dunkelberg, Kendall. Barrier Island Suite: Poems Inspired by the Life and Art of Walter Inglis Anderson. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2016. Pp. 72. $8.95 paper.

In his book Barrier Island Suite, poet Kendall Dunkelberg has created a literary montage of separate worlds—of Mississippi, the islands, the poet himself as discreet but connected composer, of artist Walter Anderson, Anderson’s asylums of incarceration and of sanctuary, of nature and the power of the creative impulse. All of these different worlds share a light focused by Dunkelberg’s diligent research and linguistic skill.
          One world in this collection is that of the writer who has studied both Anderson and the islands to craft these poems. Dunkelberg lives in Columbus, Mississippi, a short Sunday drive from the Gulf Coast that was Walter Anderson’s creative hunting grounds. There he writes, teaches at the University, directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium, edits Poetry South, and posts a wonderful blog on his website http://www.kendalldunkelberg.com/. He’s the author of three collections of poetry and a writers’ craft textbook, and his poems are widely published.
          Another world in the equation is that of the artist, who along with the natural landscape is the main focus of the book. Walter Inglis Anderson lived in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and, in the latter years of his life, on the barrier islands off the coast of Mississippi, mainly Horn Island, to which he would row 12 miles with his art supplies and survive often brutal conditions. His art was driven by process over rote techniques, incorporating diverse materials such as oils, pencil, ink, pottery, glass, linoleum printmaking blocks, wood carvings, furniture, and cloth to make hooked rugs. He slept under his boat, and he lived through hurricanes of nature and of his own mental breakdowns.
          Finally, and crucially, the landscape, flora, and fauna of the barrier islands showcase both Anderson’s heart-land, to which he dedicated his life and craft, and the imagery that Dunkelberg creates to illustrate and shape his vision of Anderson and the islands. The suite is ordered into six sections, taking us from the islands’ origin story to Anderson’s “Little Room,” a padlocked cottage where he secretly painted murals that were discovered after his death.
          In the first section, “Prelude,” the opening poem, “Sand Mountain,” leads a trinity of genesis songs for the islands, in which water wields the brush that paints an island into the landscape: “water is more powerful / than the hardest stone. / The great Tennessee River / carries mountains to the sea” to become “tossed into new formations, / island peaks on the Gulf floor.” The creation of islands continues with “Mississippi Sound” that introduces the lesser and greater gods of sea and air, and “Sea Oats” describes the nurturing perennial grasses that literally hold everything together. Then, destructive as a hurricane, comes the folly of human intervention. One of the most striking images in this section is in “Isle of Caprice,” where a Roaring Twenties party island succumbs to time and water, leaving only a artesian-well pipe sticking up out of the waves, from which Walter Anderson drinks years later.
          Through the poet, the artist and the landscape are joined together in my favorite section, “Water Music.” Here, the artist seems most free, as in “Dog Keys Pass,” where “overhead, the pelican, / he skims over waves,” and in the beautiful “The Magic Hour,” when the artist becomes part of both the dance and the creatures of this land: “the mangrove sways with the crab. / Waves, sand, grass, and clouds join in. // Even the artist / waves his long torso and arms / his feet planted firm / in the mud of the bayou / his hair flying in the wind.” Such joy!
          Following the account of Anderson’s death from cancer in “Great River Road,” the poem “Father of Waters” wrung my heart in its balance of human mortality and infinity. The poem is based on a sculpture Anderson carved from a tree trunk. The haunting refrain “the figure of a man,” a shape partly hidden just as Anderson was, repeats alongside imagery of the artist centered in his beloved river mud, surrounded by its natural elements and animals, until in the final stanza he becomes one with the landscape:

                    The figure of a man, his features dark
                    as the waters, his eyes clear as the stars,
                    his beard swirling in the blood of this river.

          In a final gift, as addendum, Dunkelberg includes brief but highly expansive notes on many of them. As an example, he writes that “Natural Law,” a lovely, philosophical piece, is a found poem, based upon a closely paraphrased entry from Anderson’s Horn Island Logs. The poet braids this piece, echoing the artist’s own words, seamlessly into his suite of poems that relate Anderson’s deep love for the birds, crabs, turtles, and other creatures that he fed, cared for, and drew. Worlds merge.
          Barrier Island Suite moves us with its sensitive portrayal of an artist ignored for many years and with the many worlds of Anderson, the islands, and, here at the doorway of history and vision, the poet. In this writer’s hands, they are beautifully united.