On Becoming and Not Becoming a Poet:  A Conversation with Phyllis Koestenbaum

by Cate Gable

The Party Train, A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, Edited by Robert Alexander, Mark Vinz and C. W. Truesdale, New Rivers Press, 1995.

Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies, Phyllis Koestenbaum, La Questa Press, 2001.

Criminal Sonnets, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Jacaranda Press/Writer's Center Editions, 1998.

oh I can't she says, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Christopher's Books, 1980.

Associated Writing Programs, Annual Conference, Psychological Aspects of Prose Poems:  Impulse and Practice, 2003.

Stealing the Language:  The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, Alicia Ostriker, Beacon Press, 1986.

Phyllis Koestenbaum is a poet deeply committed to the authentic. She has taken as her medium the prose poem, and, in her hands, this form is an exquisitely crafted environment for the exploration of the human psyche and condition. She uses herself and her life as material for constructing musical, dreamlike interludes.
       In Part One of our ranging conversation, we talk about her struggle to become a poet and to find or re-find her natural voice. We discuss editing, titling and the construction of a 'poetic environment.' In Part Two of our conversation, we continue our exploration of identity, talk about the process of writing and revising, about who's in the 'poetry club,' and what the role of the poet is in current culture.
       Phyllis is funny, frank about herself and others, and generous. She is also a fine poet who deserves a broader readership, beginning with the three poems reprinted here from Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies (La Questa Press, 2001).

­­Cate Gable

CG: "Cassandra and Irene" is the title poem for Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies. Is this the first place Mrs. Vanderpool is introduced?

PK : She's in a number of poems. She was a very important person in my life. She was my seventh-, eighth-grade teacher. She was the one who supported my writing, the first one. She was tough as anything and she had us recite poems. And she knew I wanted to be a poet, and she knew I was a mess. She was just very, very tough. But she was basically telling me I could be anything that I wanted to be. She took me under her wing and kept me there, right near her desk. She made me work very, very hard. And she appears again and again and again—actually, a couple of times.

CG: In "Cassandra and Irene," you say:  'I was in love with her.'

PK: I was in love; she was so important. Talking about taking on identities, I'm wondering if that isn't why I had to have these people—not as titles, but as poems really. These are all, of course, hypotheses. But I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case. In "Cassandra and Irene," I talk about hearing those names and always liking them. I was drawn to those names. I still am. Whenever I hear an Irene, I go crazy. And "Cassandra" by Louis Untermeyer, was a poem that I had read in Mrs. Vanderpool's class.

You know, people think that writing poetry is a sort of mysterious art, but that poets really know what they're doing. I don't really know what I'm doing. I wish I knew more. I would have accomplished a good deal more in the years that I've been writing. I've published eight books in twenty-five years, since 1980—well, that's twenty-three years—which isn't bad. But I have the work of, certainly, three to five more manuscripts sitting in my house.

CG: Isn't that true for most writers?

PK: Probably. Well, I don't know. I want more than is probably appropriate to have.

CG: How does this subconscious world, this dream world, interact with the world of the mind, which is more about technique, about crafting, about wanting to know, needing to know? Maybe that dream-self is the poet-self. Maybe it doesn't need to "know."

PK: The first book I published in 1980 was a book of my dreams called, oh i can't she says to which Robert Hass very nicely wrote a strange introduction. I recorded my dreams and I didn't change them. But I did things with them. I took words out and, where they repeated, I'd make lists. I drew and I crossed out. It was a very experimental book and I don't think there's much in there that's memorable. The process of the book might be. And one of the poem fragments has been republished. Alicia Ostriker, interestingly, took a verse and used it as a quote in the beginning of her chapter on women's anger, which I was very pleased about.

CG: What do you think the relationship is between process and product?

PK: I don't even know how to answer that. The process is far more important than the poem—I do know that—because that's your life and the poem is just the evidence of the life, and imperfect really, although I like the poems in Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies; I'm very attached to them. Some of them I think are indeed really imperfect, but there are others where I think that I have done something.

CG: Which are your favorites?

PK: Well, I do like the last one a lot, "Birthday Girl." I like the first and the last. "Cassandra and Irene" is a very embarrassing poem. I've often read it at readings—made myself read it—and its confessionalism embarrasses me quite a lot. At the same time, it's a real breakthrough poem. I had to let myself say whatever I wanted to say, very freely. It was written fast and not much revising went on. "Harriet Feigenbaum" has almost no revisions. I sent that one to a journal very fast, without revising, and then Louise Gluck said she wanted it for Best American Poetry—which was shocking because I think it's one of the least successful poems in the book—and then Joyce Carol Oates took it for an anthology.

CG: Is "Harriet Feigenbaum" more accessible?

PK: Well, when you write about the holocaust, it does something to people. I like Joyce Carol Oates a lot. She is a genius writer. Anyone who writes that much has got to be a genius. I haven't read a lot of her recent books, but I read a lot of her early on.

There was a lot I would want to change and thought about changing in "Harriet Feigenbaum" and then decided that maybe what made it work for these people was that it was so unsmooth. So I left it. I did not re-edit that poem for this collection. It's sort of like "Cassandra and Irene," in the sense that not much has been done to it at all; actually much less than any of the other poems in the book.

CG: What is the purpose of a poem? In your AWP [Associated Writing Programs] presentation, you use these phrases:  "eliminate the writer's isolation"; "a desire to be understood by an audience"; "trying to connect with an audience."

PK: That's really important, and I don't feel that's happened! (laughs) Truly, I have a very small audience and when it turns out that someone has read me, that is just thrilling because I don't have a very wide audience. Some of it is just logistical. All my presses have been small presses in California. I tried to get bigger presses; I just haven't succeeded. And then I didn't try with Doris Day. I was a finalist in some very big competitions. It was almost taken by a university press; it was a runner-up.

CG: Would that have given it a better distribution?

PK: Oh, would it! It would have made all the difference. But I had a very generous editor and publisher at Woodside, Kate Abbe. She liked the book so much that she wanted it to have a better chance. So she waited, and when it wasn't taken elsewhere, Woodside published it.

CG: It's a beautiful book. It feels wonderful. The cover is great.

PK: It's a beautiful book! And Kate was so honorable about every bit of it. There's only so much distribution you can do and you don't get reviews if you go with a small press. You just don't. But that may not be the only reason. Publisher's Weekly has reviewed Criminal Sonnets and Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies very favorably, and that's unusual for a very small press book. But that hasn't helped. I've just had limited reviews.

CG: What would it mean to you to have a broader audience?

PK: I'd be in the club! Finally! That would mean a lot. I'm very naked in my need. And I also know it won't matter when it comes.

CG: Who's in the club, do you think?

PK: Louise Glück, who has always been very generous towards me. I read everything Louise writes, but mostly that's because I established a relationship with her early on when I was writing [Criminal Sonnets]. I'm out of touch now. She was the first person who read the sonnets and who helped me revise in a small workshop I took with Hass and Pinsky. Louise was very enthusiastic about the work because it reminded her of John Berryman. And I really do like John Berryman. I wouldn't mind being in his club. Alas, though, he killed himself. I don't want to be in that club!

CG: What about those connected to the West Coast, Richard Hugo or Carolyn Kizer maybe?

PK: I'm not connected with the West Coast. Carolyn Kizer has read my work and written me some recommendations. I don't think she's a real fan, but I don't know.

CG: Do you know Marilyn Hacker and her writing? Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons is one of my favorites.

PK: I used to just love Marilyn Hacker. I still read everything that she writes. She's a wonderful writer and I certainly think that my sonnets were influenced by reading Hacker. She's done such brilliant work in form. I think that if you're writing in form, she's influenced you. As I think Berryman has also. I love Robert Hass as a person and as a writer, but we're really far apart. I think he's brilliant. He has a lot of demons. My favorite poem of Hass's is something called "My Mother's Nipples." I loved it—and I think he felt sort of like I do about my "Cassandra and Irene" poem. He used prose and poetry, some very prosaic passages of autobiography and then lyrics, lyrics and haiku. He talked about song. It's a very interesting work. Hass is so good and he's so well-trained—I don't have the kind of training that Hass got.

CG: What do you mean by "training"?

PK: Well, he was in the Stanford Stegner program working with Ivor Winters. He's got a Ph.D. in literature, which I certainly don't have.

CG: That brings us back to your essay on technique and avoiding a certain kind of "culmination" in a poem, not taking that easy out in the last line. We're pre-programmed to expect a last line that takes us somewhere.

PK: Yes, writing a very beautiful poem that perhaps ought not to be is an impulse that I can fight because it's not that entrenched in me. In "Young Armless Man in the Barbeque Restaurant," I found a way out. I did escape. But it was a very flat, unpoetic escape. It is still one of my favorites because I set up a scene there and I like the way I concluded it. I like wanting to be like that man. I'll never forget that scene, so that's why I like it.

And I was also very touched that Charles Simic—I would like to be in his club and I would like him in my club!—chose "The Young Armless Man" for Best American Poetry. I met him at a reading in Berkeley and told him how much I liked his work and he said, "And I very much like your poem." And I'm happy about that. I think he's been very courageous and I like who he worships:  Joseph Cornell. I'm very drawn to writers who have had bad lives, tough lives.

CG: Richard Hugo was a very troubled man, an alcoholic. He grew up with his grandparents who were working-class. Their home was about scarcity and poverty and rough behavior. And here was a fallen angel, basically, who was trying to find a voice. Well, there's more than one club maybe.

PK: Yes, I would like just to be accorded a place in contemporary poetry. That's really it. It doesn't have to be a big place! I could sit at the same table. I don't mind where I'm put.

CG: In the New Rivers Press anthology, The Party Train, A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, there's quite a discussion of the prose poem. There seems to be a lot of interest in prose poetry right now.

PK: There is, of course, and that always makes me very nervous.

CG: Really. Why?

PK: Because when it becomes a fad, then it's going to die out and then it won't be given much credit. People do it because they think it's easy. It's natural in terms of the development of modern poetry for there to be this movement.

CG: One of the editors of The Party Train makes the point that the same kind of controversy and discussion ushered in free verse.

PK: Isn't that interesting? And there's also a lot of interest now in something called the "lyric essay," which is something I've been writing for a long time.

CG: How would you distinguish the lyric essay from creative non-fiction?

PK: It's closer to creative non-fiction than to the prose poem, but it's less consciously formal in terms of its thinking of itself as a whole that has a structure like a poem. It's really much more connected to the essay, which is a lot looser, can be longer. I don't think prose poems often are very long. And I think that it doesn't pay attention to the devices of poetry as the prose poem does, very much so.

CG: If you were going to compare your work to a piece of visual art or music, which would be closer? I shared some of your prose poems with a friend and she said, "These feel like paintings."

PK: I was thinking of a collage, but the movement is certainly musical. I suppose I would say collage, although I think that there is a musical necessity that I form in my writing.

CG: You have a wonderful phrase for the process of writing that allows you to find the central essence of a poem:  "laid-back coherence." Can you talk about that? It sounds like you find the center of a poem first and then obscure it later.

PK: Yes, I do. I don't want linear, ever. Even if it's linear, I try to do something to destroy that. I don't want that because linear would be easy and I do always want to reach beyond what is easy. I do first drafts fast—I pause much more often than I used to, which I'm interested in—but I generally write a first draft very fast. Frequently I time myself because then I just say, 'OK, that's it.'

CG: So it's a kind of a timed free writing?

PK: Yes, and often or most of the time I don't know where I'm starting. I will sometimes have a specific exercise—write about this, or write it all in one sentence—I use prompts or tricks of the trade. Then when it's finished, I usually don't read it. Or I may read it and put it away. When I come back the second day, I'll go through it pretty fast and start chopping away things that don't seem to be as interesting. It's always pretty miraculous how it hangs together. Everything there will be in some way related, although it will not be a linear progression, and that's where a lot of the difficulty arises.

CG: Do you write in longhand?

PK: Yes. And I usually work for—it's changed now because my schedule's changed—but I used to work for three or four hours. And on succeeding days I would come back and do more; usually not just chopping out, but adding. A lot of additions, lots of additions! And the additions in some way often make it more difficult. If I would just leave it alone, it would cohere better.

CG: So, as you're revising are you also writing a new piece or do you just stay with that one piece?

PK: No, I stay with that piece, always. Always. That's it. It's given.

CG: How do you know what to add? In free writing you're following a trail.

PK: That's right. It will have been leading me somewhere usually, in and out, and the additions may have nothing to do with what's there, but I have to make the whole work. So the revision can really present problems, big problems. I don't usually do too many drafts at that point. Then I will go to the typewriter—because the page is so full of revisions and scratches—and I'll produce it on the typewriter. Then I'll read that through and I'll usually make more changes. Later, I'll put it on the computer and it will be done until I go back to it some more. Sometimes that's it. But I usually do come back to pieces. The one I've been working on now has probably got a ream, at least a ream of two thick folders. It's very close to what its first draft was, but it's now in prose. It started out in lines.

CG: When does a piece get a title?

PK: Very soon. Usually by the second day of working on it. If it doesn't have one by then, I'm in bad shape! The title tells me what the poem is about, what I'm really trying to do. It will help with the further shaping of the poem. But sometimes I will throw out the title—I threw out most of the titles here.

CG: You grew up in a very urban setting. Where did you go to restore yourself?

PK: Probably nowhere. I probably didn't get restored except in reading, movies, and theatre; friendships later on. It certainly wasn't nature, although…there's a poem in the very first book about a tree. There was a tree outside this apartment house I grew up in Brooklyn. I was very attached to this tree. I still do love trees. So I guess trees. And I'm thinking of the forest in back of our little house in upstate New York and the smell of the air. That was important, but it was dominated, it was overwhelmed, by the family situation and relationships.

CG: You talk about being raised Jewish. Did you have some spiritual place where you found a sanctuary or did that too feel like more of a burden?

PK: Although my parents were not really terribly observant, my brother had a religious education. I went to Sunday school one year when Mrs. Vanderpool made every kid go. That was very interesting. It would never happen now. Later, I went through a year of doing a lot of praying, my own little prayers. That's a very undeveloped part of me. I'm in a way sorry about that because that could have been helpful.

I've always been "anti-." It's always so amazing to me that I've been at this institute [Stanford Institute for Research on Women and Gender] for twenty years. I don't like academia—that rigidity, that bureaucracy, I don't like it. And religion has that. Judaism has been very exclusionary in terms of women, and certainly I felt that way growing up. So I could never really find a home there. I know it's not the same now. But, no, I don't have a well-developed spiritual self.

CG: What is the role of the poet—and of poetry—in current society?

PK: Oh, it could have, of course, a much better and bigger role than it does. I don't think it has much of a role. I know that there is the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley, but Berkeley is a special place, of course. It really is. There's been a lot of hullabaloo with [First Lady] Laura Bush canceling that tea at the White House. [Details: poetsagainstthewar.org] Though the poets really raised a fuss and she did cancel that, poets are very minor entities in this world. I mean, all of us are. Government seems to really have taken over.

CG: Government and large corporations. Many corporations are actually bigger than most countries.

PK: And where do poets fit in? We have a new head of the National Endowment for the Arts who is a poet [Dana Gioia], but he also was a big-wig at General Foods! I hope he does some good things. And we have the Poets Laureate. And our current one, Billy Collins, yes. I went to one of his readings, and he has readings a lot of people come to. But what are poets to do?

At the same time, I certainly know the power of the word. I believe in it. And yet, I'm forced to say that all I can see happening to poets or writers is that they're imprisoned. I don't see that we've exerted much influence. Of course, we're feared and that's why some writers are in prisons, but I'm afraid I'm a little cynical about what they might be able to do. Because also writers are people and we're easily subverted by the powers that be. So that when writers are public in some way, they may be puppets. The ones who probably could exert influence would never occupy a public position, they never would. That's what I think. At the same time, I'm glad that we still do have a National Endowment for the Arts, although there have been strict limitations. They just don't give as many grants as they used to.

CG: Do you still believe that "Art makes life bearable; / since it wasn't, isn't art immoral" ("Sonnet XIX")?

PK: Yes. I've often thought that. I'm thinking of the film, The Pianist, which I went to and it moved me. And then I came out feeling a little disgusted. And it might not even have been true to Roman Polanski's experiences, but it makes you think that people do survive. But do we have to make it look so pretty? In some ways, ugly as the scenes were, they were bearable and maybe they shouldn't have been. Yes, I do believe that. Yes, yes.

(Cate Gable is a poet, writer and environmental consultant. Her first book, Strategic Action Planning NOW!, was published by St. Lucie Press. Her manuscript, Chère Alice:  Two Lives, a sequence of letter poems to Alice B.Toklas, is a finalist in the 2003 Four Way Books Levis Prize publication contest. She lives in Berkeley, California, the Pacific Northwest, and in Paris.)