Four Questions for C. Kubasta

C. Kubasta experiments with hybrid forms, excerpted text, and shifting voices – her work has been called claustrophobic and unflinching. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. A 6-year-old once mistook her for Velma, from Scooby Doo, and was unduly excited. She feels a strong affinity for Skipper, Barbie’s flat-footed cousin. For each major publication, she celebrates with a new tattoo; someday she hopes to be completely sleeved – her skin a labyrinth of signifiers, utterly opaque. She is the author of two chapbooks: A Lovely Box, which won the 2014 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize, and &s (both from Finishing Line); and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX). She teaches English and Gender Studies at Marian University, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She lives with her beloved John, cat Cliff, and dog Ursula. Find her at ckubasta.com.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

CK: When I was in 6^th grade, my Language Arts teacher challenged us each to write a poem – I think it was for Read magazine. That was probably the first time I really thought about poetry, but somehow it stuck. I turn to poetry often when I want to express the fragmentary and evocative: much about our lives seems fragmentary; bits and pieces of language that evoke something about our human experience, without attempting to fully explain or narrativize that experience is what draws me to poetry. Although lately I’ve been writing fiction, and fully planning to immerse myself in that, setting aside poetry for a while, I’ve been unable to do so. Poems call to me to be written. Sharp fragments (the roadkill clustered with crows; the half-toppled Martin house; the formula for a chemical reaction; how denim is riveted) become embedded in my consciousness and want to become poems, and nothing else. Since the election I’ve been thinking of bees and colony collapse. What could that be but a poem?

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

CK: I want poems that occasion a physical reaction. I’m drawn to poems with sharp lines, with intricate & surprising forms. Poems and poets that move me cause excited utterances, usually an expletive, the sort of thing that could be admissible in court even after I’m gone. Recently I was trying to explain to a student what I liked about a poem and I wanted to draw a picture of a screw with a t-handle for extra torque. The good poem affects me like the screw is in my belly, and there are various “turns” throughout the poem, a good quarter turn, that sinks it deeper in. I want poems that are visceral, that cannot be ignored, that demand our emotional, psychological, and mental energy. We are forced to engage with them – poetry, like humor, porn, & horror, should also be a body genre.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

CK: &s, a new chapbook, is just out; the poems in it use the ampersand to construct and deconstruct the poems. My second book of poetry will be out next year from Whitepoint Press. Of Covenants explores linguistic, religious, and legal covenants – these tacit agreements define & articulate our experience. Lately I’ve been thinking about the last idea a bit more, especially in terms of language. There are a number of poems in the book that explore pronouns and their supposed antecedents. Certain pronouns seem to have lost their moorings, a happenstance both troubling and liberating. Additionally, the sentence diagrams that map these relationships seem to need an additional dimension that accounts for who interprets meaning, for who overhears the transactional nature of the naming. Perhaps what I’ve been reconsidering since the election, when we’re arguing whether words mean what they purport to mean, or whether they mean anything at all, is whether the notion of language as a covenant has begun to fray in a very visible way. The poems I’m writing just now are a longer series; I seem to be thinking in moving parts of longer pieces, rather than in individual poems. One series, Percolations, engages (obliquely) with the questions/concerns/issues raised this last summer through the public responses around shootings & protests. Another series, Corpus, utilizes the body and its products as a sort of autobiography: the stapes, the eye, ambergris. I also recently wrote a poem I love about a dear friend who died – it’s a poem about his dying, the days of it, the waiting for it. Each section of the poem is titled “The Present.” His dying was always in the present. 

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

CK: I want more poetry that challenges us, as readers and human beings. I want less “nice” poetry, fewer “pretty” things. I want poetry that is difficult – and I don’t mean less accessible – I mean poetry that deals with difficult topics, that forces us to picture things we’ve never imagined, that asks us to empathize in ways we haven’t, that asks us to inhabit uncomfortable spaces, that asks us to sit with discomfort and doesn’t let us off the hook. And I want people to not only be willing to read this kind of work, but to seek this out, to seek ways to stretch our humanity. Our humanity is a muscle like any other.

Four Questions for Ruth Awad

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Sixth Finch, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Drunken Boat, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been anthologized in The Hundred Years' War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015). She won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and she lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her partner, Pomeranians, and bunnies.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

RA: I wonder about that a lot. When I was writing my first book, I had such a clear sense of mission. In the US, we often get a flag-waving and human-erasing narrative of far-off wars waged against and between brown bodies in the Middle East. I wanted to understand and portray that destruction’s civilian price, so I wrote about my father growing up in Lebanon during its civil war. And this answer might speak more to where I am right now (between projects / floating in space), but some days, I just don’t know why I write other than I can’t stop. Strip away the altruistic desire to say something honest, reach people, and change minds, and there’s just me and my nagging want to create. Maybe it gives me some semblance of control in a world ruled by chaos.   

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

RA: I’m always looking for that one line that will sink its teeth in me. That will upend my expectations and make me reassess where I was before I read the poem. That will make me wish I’d thought of it first.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

RA: Right now I’m working on a second collection I affectionately call my “feminist love poems.” I don’t feel very in control of these poems, which is a departure from my last project Set to Music a Wildfire, where I interviewed my father, his friends, and my family, and researched, planned, and obsessively plotted the collection’s narrative arc, etc. So with this new project, I’m forcing myself to be more open to emotional logic, which is a fine enough guide when you’re writing about your fucked up romantic past and what it means to be a woman heavily instructed by patriarchal norms but who’s trying to unlearn it.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

RA: I hope it keeps evolving. I want inclusion to be business as usual and not exceptional or a selling point. I want more POC editors running big-name journals and presses. I want ableist, sexist, racist poetry to never see the light of day. (I’m surprised this point can even make a wish list in 2016, but here we are.)

Ruth’s Web Site