Stefanie Kirby

The Interview

Your poetry is a unique blend of biology and concept. What about the human body captivates you as a poet and demands to be addressed in poetry?

On one hand, I’m interested in how a body is able to grow and produce another body capable of producing more bodies. On the other hand, I’m interested in the ways in which these same bodies fail to produce as expected, and how this anticipated production ruptures. As my writing group would be able to attest, this amounts to a significant number of poems about wombs.

Several significant keywords connect this work: mother, daughter, womb, eyes, blood, etc. Did you build this project with a particular vocabulary in mind or did the poems emerge one from another?

These poems grew from one another, as much of my work does. I don’t shy from repetition anymore – I like to fixate on motifs, to reuse lines, to return to specific images. I think often of Marosa diGiorgio’s work, which uses a focused vocabulary, yet manages to imbue each repetition with something new. That’s how my poems emerge: a concept that resonates in one poem becomes a fixation, a seed from which to grow another piece and usually another, and perhaps even another after that. I like to see how an image or line from one poem will echo differently when set into a new piece. I think of it as moving around rather than moving through or on: what will I learn if I stay here, in orbit of this word, a bit longer? Eyes and daughters and mothers will teach me something new with each iteration I build for them.

Refreshingly, the universe of these poems seems to include women only. In a world so drastically endangered by toxic masculinity, how do you see the message and the role of this work?

Perhaps the most important aspect is simply the creation of a space carved out specifically for the existence of women. The privileged relationships here are between mothers and daughters, which are provided their own sort of vacuum by the poems. There’s already so much to investigate in this limited universe that I’ve felt no need to expand its scope, at least for now.

These poems feature many open and shut windows but no doors. What does this architecture signify?

The window poems first emerged while taking a course on odes, and the sonics of “window” and “ode” felt just right! I’m sure there’s something significant about windows versus doors – perhaps the fragility of glass panes rather than a solid wood slab, the ability to observe from safety (or confinement?), the tendency to look out without the impetus to move through – that my subconscious wants to explore, but in terms of initially crafting these pieces, the choice really just came down to the sound of the word.

This series of poems has a kind of fable-like quality, with characters simply being labeled as “a woman” or “the daughter,” as if you’re both telling a specific, personal story as well as a universal, fictional one. How do you hope this unique approach will impact readers?

I think these labels primarily impact the speaker’s distance within the poem and, perhaps, readers’ distance to the landscape of the poem as well. These labels allow me to write pieces as more of an observer, and I’d imagine reading them provides a similar observational effect. The language doesn’t demand that anyone insert themselves into the poem, and we’re able to maintain our distance from “a woman” or “the daughter.” I do try to consider how much distance the poem requires or, conversely, how much intimacy it might need. Some of my later pieces, while still fable-like, started with “a woman” but worked better once that character/metaphor/etc. was supplanted by “you.” This decision is also impacted by the way the piece is built – a poem that’s structured more narratively, based perhaps on one action leading to another, often lends itself better to the universality and distance of “a woman,” while a poem that functions more like a meditation, where images retain their primacy over any narrative underpinnings, often seems to benefit from drawing closer with the use of “you”.

These things contradict themselves

“I’ve seen it both ways,” the daughter says,
“yolk as a river and yolk as wreckage.”

Eggs bloom best in the morning. “I know,”
the mother says, “what it means to be
bloodied and solemn. It helps to be both at
once, or neither.”

As seen in these fragments, your poems often reflect on and explore the idea of contradiction, especially self-contradiction, as well as balance. Nothing is black and white. And nothing, in and of itself, is only one thing. Can you speak to why this theme emerges so often in your work and how it affects your work in general?

For me, contradiction heightens the surreal quality of a piece – the impossible is possible here. I often inject this kind of contradiction early on to help build the surreal landscape on which many of my pieces depend. To use such juxtaposition, though, my poems had to develop a kind of authority to maintain control within the writing, like the role of a director. I think that this control is essential to surrealist writing, this kind of authority, because when a surrealist poem says something like, “Eggs bloom best in the morning,” you want to be sure the reader knows that this is not primarily a metaphor, but indeed a world in which eggs do bloom, and their best blooming in this world occurs in the morning. This authority is necessary for the believability of the poem and the environment it sets out to create. The impossible is possible here because the poem said so, giving further indication that this is unlike any sort of actual reality.

As each of these poems is obviously a larger series, can you tell us more about where this series goes beyond the pieces we’ve read? Is there a larger narrative? How many pieces currently make up this series? Are you working on a narratively and thematically linked chapbook or full-length collection, from which these form part of the backbone?

I never know exactly what I’m working on, beyond the poem, nay, the line, nay, the image directly in front of me. Only when I step back later am I able to discern what a poem is trying to tell me or whether poems are speaking to one another in a way that’s indicative of a larger body of work. That’s one of the most exciting parts of writing – being lost in the detail of the work only to step back to see that there is a larger cohesive whole that’s been growing the entire time. I write the poems as they demand to be written, and later I decide what they’re trying to tell me. Still, this series definitely builds on the themes and motifs in my recent chapbook, Fruitful, while more recent pieces continue to accumulate in a similar vein. Once I’m brave enough to take stock of all the pieces together, I hope I’ll discover the spine of a full-length collection taking shape. Until then, I suppose I’ll keep following the poems like breadcrumbs to wherever they might lead!