The Lightning Room with Kallie Falandays

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with Kallie Falandays. Back in our February issue, Kallie pulled us apart as she put us together. Now, she speaks:

1. “I Want To Tell You Yes” and “If Morning Never Comes” are both profoundly physical poems, of pulling things out and stuffing things in. Are these based on specific people?

Yes and no. Yes they are based on real people, but no because it’s not the real person but the imagined person that these poems explore. That world (of imagination) is sometimes infinitely more interesting to me.

2. What is the most uncomfortable (not physical) experience you’ve ever had.

That experience is probably buried somewhere too deep to find at this moment.

3. “I Want To Tell You Yes” reads like a demand, mixing a kind of visceral carnality with images of nature, as if subverting one of those boring nature poems. Is this poem really about innocence lost?

No, it is more about going to what is lost and wanting to undo it – not necessarily so that it becomes whole, but so it becomes again and again.

4. Tell me one soul you’d like to completely tear apart.

That’s one secret I will not reveal.

5. In both of these poems, there’s an exchanging of histories. “If Morning Never Comes” manages to balance a kind of seething longing (?) with moments of tenderness – in your writing, how do you create this dynamic?

I think longing and tenderness are strands of the same string, and so anytime one of those ideas is expressed, the other follows.

6. Please share exactly how you would drink up the darkness.

As if I were bathing in it.

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.