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DS: When and why did you decide to write poetry?
MC: One of my poems opens, “Thanks but I prefer to perpetuate a difficult and lonely lifestyle.” That pretty much sums up the why. When? Well, I’ve been writing poetry rather constantly since middle school, but it wasn’t until about my junior year of college that I became very serious about it. I was 21, driving around with my then boyfriend (now husband), whining about how I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, and he was like, “Are you kidding me? You’re already doing it!”
DS: What percentage of time are you “in your head,” and what percentage are you “in the real world”?
MC: Um, I think I would say I am “in my head” 95% of the time, and I am in the world 50% of the time.
DS: Please tell me about your revision process. How do you know when a poem is done?
MC: My revision process varies. Sometimes I just keep writing
new poems. I don’t try to salvage anything; I just throw it all away until I
get to wherever it was I didn’t know I was trying to get. Other times I
painstakingly whittle poems. I say whittle because I rarely add—I nearly always
subtract as I revise. And I trust that I’ve subtracted the right things when I
can’t remember what the poem used to be (I figure if I can’t remember the line
I cut, then no one else was going to remember it either). However, if an old
version of the poem keeps popping into my head as I revise, I often return to
that version. How do I know when a poem is done? I don’t, really. But I’m a fan
of brevity. It’s like a game of Jenga minus the last turn. I stop when, if I
remove one more piece, the whole thing will fall apart.
DS: You have been a teacher, reader/editor, and writer. How does your approach to poetry change as you take on different roles? How does it stay the same?
DS: You have been a teacher, reader/editor, and writer. How does your approach to poetry change as you take on different roles? How does it stay the same?
MC: While they are quite disparate, for me, the roles of writer,
editor, and teacher are unified by a single tool box. For example, if one of
those tools were a hammer, as a writer, I am constantly trying to develop my
relationship to that hammer—how does it feel in my hand? How many swings does
it take me to sink a nail? How can I use the hammer more efficiently, more
forcefully… When I am reading or editing, I am analyzing and evaluating other
people’s hammer use—what techniques do they have that impress or interest me?
Are they particularly strong, agile, etc… And, when I am teaching, it’s more
like—This is a hammer. This is why a hammer is useful. This is how fun a hammer
can be. How dangerous. Okay, class, now,
swing away.
swing away.
DS: Please describe your forthcoming chapbook The World, which is a series of responses to poems by Czeslaw Milosz. What did you recognize in Milosz’s work that prompted such a project?
MC: I had, for a long time, a preoccupation with childhood—or, at least, the kind
of strange and unbridled imagination that accompanies childhood. Adults are so
logical, so weathered, so boring. Milosz’s series “The World” was written in
Warsaw in 1943—so you might imagine it would take on the devastation of its
time directly, but it doesn’t. Instead, the poems are written from a child’s
perspective. The pressures of fear, death, war are felt only indirectly through
images like white pickets “sharp, like tiny flames” and “the moons of
mountains…visible in spots, / something like goose feathers scattered on the
ground.” Anyhow, in December of 2010 two things were happening for me: I was
trying to quit smoking, and I was obsessing about these poems. It was the first
time, as a reader of poetry, I felt an overwhelming urge to write back—to
respond directly to something I’d read. And I needed a distraction from the
smoking. So, I locked myself in my tiny office and started rearranging the
words in Milosz’s poems, adding some of my own personal experience… and, after
a concentrated, but exhaustive, revision process, emerged as a non-smoker with
her own version of “The World.”
DS: When I finished
your first chapbook, What to Tell the Sleeping Babies, I came up with this two-sentence description (and if you
want to blurb me, please include my middle initial): “Chelko reveals tiny
mysteries to us without fanfare or cuteness. Her poems continue to see what
we’ve been missing and thoughtfully let us know.” Do you find these “tiny
mysteries,” or do they find you?
MC: I am and was, especially while writing the poems in What to Tell the Sleeping Babies, preoccupied by ways of seeing. For example, the poem “The Orchard Picked Over”
imagines the last apple with a man inside it, but inside the man is a cloud, and
inside the cloud, a girl. It’s that kind of imaginative sight that interests me—the
relentlessly playful kind that reveals “tiny mysteries” in the banal. DS: What roles do the people around you play in your poetry? How important is it for your non-poet friends and family to “get”
your poems?
MC: The friends and family of any writer are bound to be, at one
time or another, literary victims. They never know when, how, or where they
might show up as characters in a piece of writing. I write, more lately than
ever, from my life. So, the people around me get plugged into poems like it or
not. I do have a handful of friends who play an active role in my writing life
(most of them are also poets), and they are the people I harass with drafts and
ideas and theoretical rants. Other than that, I really don’t show my work to
friends and family unless they ask. It is very important to me that readers of
poetry find my work accessible—but I am not a fan of poetic evangelism, so I
don’t try to convert my non-literary friends and family into an audience.
DS: A poet friend of
mine told me, “You’re sane, unlike most poets.” (I wasn’t sure if this was a
compliment or condemnation.) How do you feel about the notion that people write
poetry to search for the solution to a problem or problems? If you aren’t able
to find a solution that satisfies you, how would you assess your work? (Say you
write brilliant poems about failed relationships but never figure out how to
have a successful relationship…)
MC: Grace Paley said, “A writing problem is a life problem.” I
believe that our writing lives and our personal lives are hopelessly linked—at
least, one always seems to cruelly imitate the other. But I don’t think
solutions are found in poetry—at least not more than Frost’s idea that a poem
is “a momentary stay against confusion.” Solace is, however, found in poetry—no
matter how disturbing the verse, there is comfort in truth telling. And that is
what poetry attempts, right? But there is something dangerous about paying
attention—allowing your inner life to absorb and weigh and analyze the
happenings around you. It can make you cynical. Corroded. Difficult. It can
cause you to become an emotional addict, bouncing from one great love to the
next. It can drive you to drink. To kill yourself. To hide out on a ranch in
the Southwest. It’s risky business. Thinking. But so is living. And I haven’t
lived long enough to know if my writing and relationships will ultimately fail…
but I am pretty damn hopeful.
DS: A high school English teacher (e.g., I) asks you to help his students
write poems. What are the three most important pieces of advice to give them?
MC:
- Learn to write a really good sentence.
- If you aren’t enjoying yourself when you are writing—no one is going to enjoy reading your work.
- “But that’s how it really happened!” is no excuse for a bad poem.
DS: What do you
consider your place in the “Poetry World”? Describe how your current project
(or future ones) may affect
that place.
that place.
MC: Let’s define the “Poetry World” as a parade. The parade consists
of millions of ghosts, thousands of elaborate floats (most depicting love or
sex or death or war or all of the above), some balloons, several hundred people
on stilts, several hundred overweight pageant winners creeping by in antique
convertibles, and then there are countless exuberant young people running every
which way tossing candy into the streets. I am one of the people tossing candy.
But all that matters, really, is that the parade exists, and that it keeps
moving forward. In all of my current and future work, my only real hope is to
be a part of that great bright poetic streak through time.
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Read these poems by MRB Chelko:
"The Hairs on My Coat Belong to the Animal I Sleep With" and "Memoir"
"Definition:"
"Outside We're All"
Two poems from The World
"Six Recurring Dreams"
from Manhattations
from Manhattations
from December Songs
from December Songs
from December Songs
from December Songs
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Read these poems by MRB Chelko:
"The Hairs on My Coat Belong to the Animal I Sleep With" and "Memoir"
"Definition:"
"Outside We're All"
Two poems from The World
"Six Recurring Dreams"
from Manhattations
from Manhattations
from December Songs
from December Songs
from December Songs
from December Songs
