Ask The Author: Kit Frick

Kit Frick has Five Poems in the September Issue. Here she answers our questions about the moon, an apocalypse, and Reader’s Digest.

1. Why are all poets so fascinated by the moon?

This is actually an idea I’ve been obsessing over lately—I’ll try to address it in a historical sense and in a more personal way. So there’s this vast, time-honored canon of poetical lunar musings, devotions, and preoccupations. It’s burned into our brains in Poetry School: Shakespeare, Yeats, Donne, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath—these are just a few lunar obsessives. Everybody who’s anybody has called on the moon. The moon is at once ever-present and ever-changing, and until very recently, it was out of human reach. Even now, it’s out of reach for most of us in a tangible sense, unless we’re Buzz Aldrin. So our fascination with it has something, I think, to do with the contradiction contained in its constancy and inconstancy, and in our (poetical and human) tendency to want what we can’t have.

That being said, there’s a fearfulness now about calling on the moon. It’s been done and done and done. How do you do it without succumbing to cliché? For me, it’s a challenge, and I love a challenge. And I’m not alone in this—Christopher Kennedy does it exceptionally well, as do Denis Johnson, Dorianne Laux, and many others. Each has made the moon new again in his/her own way, and it’s exciting to see that happening—poets facing cliché head-on instead of running from it. I want on that train. I’m interested in stretching and collapsing diction and syntax, in disrupting linguistic expectation, in surprise. I want to confront, question, poke fun at, engage with, and honor humankind’s devotion to the moon. I want to incite in the reader the imaginative urge that the moon evoked in humankind for centuries, before it became the stuff of shibboleth.

2. How would you survive the whole grain apocalypse?

By taking lots of fiber supplements? Seriously, though, I’m compelled by the idea of an apocalypse and humans reacting to desperate, life-or-death situations, but I’m also terrified of this kind of thinking. (Like I cannot watch horror movies without having nightmares for weeks.) My partner is obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, zombie graphic novels and video games, and survival strategies for the surely-approaching zombie apocalypse. Zombie games on the Xbox are a kind of background chatter in our house, so they seep into my thinking and into my poems in torqued ways.

3. How would you be bound to a hospital bed?

You mean how would I want / like to be bound to a hospital bed? I’m pretty sure I’d want to avoid this scenario at all costs! The artist in my poem “A Cautionary Tale” is bound with those safety straps they use in psych wards, which is pretty terrifying. I guess I’m fascinated by my own fears. I suppose if I could choose, I’d want to be bound by candy necklaces so I could chew my way out!

4. Isn’t the Reader’s Digest now even too long for the latest generation?

Well, I’m pretty certain Reader’s Digest has never appealed to anyone in the under-60 crowd, but I understand you’re asking in terms of length. Personally, I was always offended by those Reader’s Digest condensed books growing up in the 80’s. If I wanted to read a book, I wanted to read the whole darn thing! When my grandma was living, she loved to enter those Reader’s Digest contests, and while I’m not sure she ever won any money, she did end up with a lifetime supply of condensed books, which my mom and I always graciously took home and eventually donated to the library or Salvation Army.

My students, who are in the ballpark of 18-20, balk more at being assigned a poetry collection or a work of experimental fiction than they do at a long, but straightforwardly narrative, text. What I’m noticing most is a resistance to complexity and difficulty—texts that make us read passages twice or go back to search for meaning—more so than a resistance to longer works, as long as they read easily. To cull some well-worn examples, think of the Twilight books and Harry Potter—two rampantly successful series for YA readers in the last decade—and those books are long! But easy. Vapidly easy, in the case of Twilight. So readers who grew up on them, those same readers that I now have in lit. class, aren’t put off by the length of a text, necessarily, but they want the ease of a narrative plot and the readily digestible characters offered by commercial fiction. And don’t get me wrong, I loved reading Harry Potter, but it’s alarming when a change in point of view or a challenge to convention is enough to get my students up in arms.

5. How does the shapelessness of the poems affect their tone?

Oh boy, get ready for my wordy answer to this one. The prose poem: that anomalous hybrid creation. Charles Simic perhaps put it best when he described the prose poem as “the sole instance we [poets] have of squaring the circle.” In Simic’s estimation, prose poetry “is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does.” And how. As a form, the prose poem shares a great deal with its sister, the poem written in free verse. Both can employ the usual suspects to affect the reader’s sense of tone, or mood: image, point of view, repetition and variation, leaps in time and subject, and so on. At the same time, crafting tone in the prose poem is an act somewhat veiled by its form because, at the most basic level, the prose poem’s units of information are constructed in sentences and paragraphs to free verse’s lines and strophes. This seems quite obvious, but there’s a magic in the paragraph. As Jayne Anne Phillips reminds us, “The poem broken into lines announces itself as a poem, but the paragraph seems innocent, workaday, invisible.” When handed a prose poem, we let down our guard. James Tate has aptly characterized the form as “a means of seduction…People generally do not run for cover when they are confronted with a paragraph or two. The paragraph says to them: I won’t take much of your time, and if you don’t mind me saying so, I am not known to be arcane, obtuse, precious, or high-falutin’. Come on in.” And so we do, perhaps lulled by the prose poet’s use of sentences and paragraphs, and we walk right in. Once inside, those elements of image, repetition, leaps, and so on do their work same as in lineated poems, but they’re less conspicuous, perhaps, less capital “P” Poetic, and thus tone is born, unexpectedly, capable of taking us hostage.

6. Who is your favorite human of the year?

If you’re taking the time to read this, you are.