The Lightning Room With Karen Eileen Sisk

Won’t you join Karen Eileen Sisk (five poems in nov. issue) as she tells us why preserving a room full of a bunch of dead people and Judy Blume while unleashing the concentrated blabbermouth of anger at the lush from a living room couch is the only way to live.

1) If you could create a room with any 3 people who’ve ever existed in there. Would you make a room you’d want to visit or destroy? and why?

I would create a room I would visit. I think because my instinct is always to preserve rather than destroy. I love museums, antiques, collections that have been carefully collected and preserved. So it seems natural to build collections of good and/or important people. My room would sort of be a museum preserving say Jim Henson, Mr. Rogers, and Judy Blume. Or I’d have one with Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and H.D. It would be a museum to people that I’d want to visit regularly. Poor Judy Blume, I lumped her in with a bunch of dead people.

2) Name a poet no one reads but should?

Even though I’ve spent the last 7 years in graduate school, I never feel like I have a good sense of who people read and who they don’t. I guess I would recommend Lynn Emanuel because I get the sense that not enough people read her books. She really crafts a book.

3) What do you try to avoid in your poems?

Sappiness. I feel like I have a predisposition to the sappy in life that I try to avoid at all costs in my poetry. I then probably err on the angry, but I’m more comfortable with my predisposition to the angry.

4) How is your poetic voice different from your inner voice or is it the same?

My poetic voice is a concentration of my inner voice. My inner voice is a blabbermouth that sort of just goes on and on and on, and my poetic voice edits and censors her. My poetic voice is harder, angrier, and sadder because that’s what my current project needs her to be.

5) Where did you write these poems?

I wrote these poems on my living room couch while watching television which is where I do the majority of my writing. These particular poems were also revised over iced tea at Aspen- a local coffee shop here in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

6) When I read your poems, I feel like I’m floating in space and there are so many beautiful colors around me but I’m wearing a protective suit and I have to chose between seeing and dying. Why do I feel that way?

I’m intrigued by this response. I think what you’re reacting to is my love of the image married with the subject matter I’m working with. From H.D. to Mark Doty, I’m interested in other poets that craft intense images and metaphors, and it is what drew me to contemporary poetry when I started college. My poems then became very image-oriented. I think image and metaphor drive my work still. In my current work, I’m juxtaposing those lush images and metaphors I love with the experiences of growing up as a girl in rape culture. These poems deal with being sexualized at a young age, being sexually abused and raped, and then trying to come to terms with heterosexuality post abuse and rape, and approaching this from many angles like my hymen or a PTSD induced nightmare. I think my work can be sort of suffocating, so maybe the suit is wise. I also am surprised I survived to write these poems. Poems helped me survive and now those things they helped me survive feed my poems. Maybe I too had to see, and then tell, or die. I feel like I have made that choice myself more than once. I had to tell to live. I still have to tell to live.