Kenneth Hart

Interviewed by Nick Young

Kenneth Hart is a man of diverse interests. He received his M.F.A from Warren Wilson College in 1998, teaches at New York University, and also works in the family roofing business. In 2007, he was the co-winner of the Allen Ginsberg Award, and the New Ohio Review awarded him the 2008 Editor’s Prize. Though primarily located in Long Valley, New Jersey, he summers in Alaska. His first book of poetry, Uh Oh Time, won the 2007 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. 

A: The title for the poem was totally spontaneous. I remember thinking the phrase “It’s ‘Uh Oh’ time”; usually my ear catches a phrase that I hear outside in the world, or in my head; I kind of roll it around and grab it. When I was sending the book around, I kept looking for a different title, something that was edgy or eye grabbing, and “Uh Oh Time” was the only thing I could think of. I was sending out a few different titles with the same manuscript; this one got taken, so I thought, “All right, I’ll stick with it.”

Q: What authors currently inspire you, and/or what authors are you jealous of?

A: There’s so many. Currently, I’ve been reading Walt Whitman, again, and he always inspires me. I am inspired by C.K. Williams, Tony Hoagland, and recently I’ve been reading Sharon Olds again. I used to read her—haven’t read her in awhile—and I’m now rediscovering things in her that I hadn’t seen in a long time, or I didn’t see before.

And, you know, I’m jealous of all of them. Especially Tony—Tony’s a friend, and he’ll write a poem and I think, “I wanted to write that poem.” But he did it, and he did it ten times better.

Q: Your poem “The Dead” starts off with the line, “Two boys diverged in a stubble field,” which feels like an obvious riff off of Robert Frost—“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” Any reason you picked Frost?

A: That poem came almost entirely out of a dream—not the words but the scene. And it was very, very strange and I probably had that rhythm of Frost—that line—in my head. I wrote down whatever happened after the dream, and over the course of months, I kept tinkering with the poem. I put it in a blank verse and then kind of edged back from some of it. It just seemed right for the poem, but it wasn’t anything that came from “the real world”—it was totally out of this dream, although I didn’t feel it was necessary to say it was a dream. I wanted to put the situation out there.

It seems like one of the more different poems in the book, because I don’t have “dreamy” poems. And “The Dead” is kind of dark, too.

Q: So what, then, is it that inspires you in terms of subject matter? It seems that your poems have an observational, meditative style on instances. How do you find these moments, or do you simply keep your eyes open and wait for them to find you?

A: Yeah, I think they find me. And maybe I’m attracted to a certain type of thing. The poem “The Hinge” was based on the idea of seeing the fluency of a young, Chinese-Canadian girl between two worlds (Asian and North American): it was so admirable to me that I started writing about it. I mean, I could sit in a diner and overhear a little line of conversation, but you never know where the poem is going. Nine times out of ten it’s a crappy poem and doesn’t become all that much. The tenth time you get it, and you’ve found your subject as you write it.

But you also find your deeper subject. What I tend to do when I introduce the poems before I read is speak a bit more abstractly about the deeper subject, because it’s hard to get a lot from hearing one read [the poem]. Then, the poem kind of illustrates, for example, talking about the tension between freedom and imprisonment. When people read it they can pick it up—you can go back and read it fifty times.

Q: Do you find tensions, then, to be the most integral part of a poem? That it has to be the tensions in life or “moments,” as life is never as static or as simple as it seems?

A: Yeah, I think it’s where those two things crash. It’s like seeing a car wreck; I’m attracted to that—where two things are pulling at each other. I think Neil Simon once said, “All drama begins when a character says ‘No.’” In other words, as soon as there’s conflict or tension.

Q: You said that you’re “particularly interested in narrated meditations, where an event meets a psyche that wishes to make sense of it, revel in it, and/or argue with it.” What is it about the idea of the “event” that seems to compel you? Because it seems your work takes a singular, minute detail and then proceeds to blow it up…

A: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think it’s because I don’t feel one of my strong muscles is imagination. Some poets, like Wallace Stevens, are wildly imaginative. Their stuff comes out of this enormous, dark place; you’ve got, really, no idea where this stuff is coming from. And I don’t have that gift. I might be able to seek it more, but when I’ve tried to write poems out of that place they came across as too ethereal; I wanted to be grounded more. So I think my poems are more representational—seeing something in the world, responding to it, and then there’s kind of a dialogue between me and the thing, or the thing and something else.

Q: It’s interesting you mention the relationship between the grounded and the abstract. Your poem, “Against Abstraction,” seems to speak directly to this idea: you offer very concrete, specific images first, and then shift into abstraction towards the end. Would you say offering the concrete details first allows you to make the jump to abstraction because the poem has already been rooted?

A: Yes. [A poem I like], D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake,” balances narration and abstraction and concrete really well. And I think something similar is happening in “Against Abstraction”: it’s trying to make the argument that we’re in physical bodies, and it goes just about as far as it can. To me, if the poem had ended [with the concrete], it wouldn’t have been enough; it had to find that second thing.

And the title came late: I had to discover along the way what was happening [in the poem].

Q: You’ve written that you’re “attracted to the essayistic more than the lyric—argument, analysis, interpretation—more than pure song, though rhythm, cadence sound, and the lyric’s way of accessing emotion are very important.” Are you a “content over style” person? And, what is your impression of what a poem should do, or should be?

A: I would never say a poem should or should not do something. Just like there are so many different types of music that I love, I want them all to exist. I love poetry that I don’t “get” with the top of my brain, and that I only hear my way into understanding…or perhaps dream my way into understanding. Or, even, there are some poems that totally baffle me, yet I’m drawn to their mystery or their music.

But I’m not that kind of poet. The kind of essayistic style of telling a story and then thinking out loud about it—meditating on it—seems to be what I’ve grown into. I didn’t start out as one type of poet: I tried a lot of different flavors, a lot of different styles.

And style and content support each other. If it’s all content and the writing is poor, it’s not going to hold up. If it’s all style, and it’s empty, then it’s not going to hold up either. They’re two legs upon which the poem has to stand.

Q: So would you say there’s common ground between what you do, then, and a style such as narrative non-fiction?

A: With regards to narrative non-fiction, I’ve heard this phrase used—the lyric essay. This seems to be more musical, denser, less flat—not your typical style of journalism. Yet, it’s still conveying information using rhetorical [means] to get a point across or argue with a point, yet it’s doing it a bit more musically. And I think if you were to transfer this over to poetry, my work is closer to that.

Q: I want to ask you about the use of the “I” voice. Your poems “The Blues,” “In a Place Such as This,” and “The Big House” seem, at first glance, to be written in a persona. These poems: are they autobiographical, persona, or are they deliberately fictive? How do you choose to use the “I” voice, and how do you choose the direction that the voice will take…or do you even choose it at all?

A: I think that’s a good question. It happens over the long process of revision. There are poems that I’ve written that were stories I’d heard somewhere, or part of a story that got combined with another story. Then, as I’m writing about it, because I’m drawn to it, maybe it’s in third [person]. But over the life of the revision where I’m changing, inventing and making things up, maybe I decide it seems better to put the final version in first person because it seems more urgent and more direct and more immediate, for both the reader and for what the poem seems to be asking for. But, [while written as an “I”] that poem never actually “happened” to me.

Other times something does happen to me. And, whether it be because I want to move away from the material (for a number of reasons) or I just think the poem, the way it’s written, would work better with a little distance, I’ll put it into the third person voice or the second person voice. It seems like they’re always cross-pollinating each other so that the end result, to me, is not autobiography or confession as much as a product of the poem that I hope relates to the reader.

I know that “me” or any author or poet is coming across in the book, but I don’t want my shrink to read my poems and come up with a judgment.

Q: In talking, then, about having some sort of relatable element to the reader, what does poetry—in a very general sense—owe the reader? It seems, right now, that poetry exists in academia and that, as opposed to fiction, there’s little “popular” poetry. What is the sense of the reader that the poet has when he sits down to write? Or, does he just want to talk about the poem itself and then hope the reader comes back to it? Is there a sense of readership or being read during the writing process?

A: I don’t know anyone who writes—at least the first draft—with an idea of an audience or what people will think. That may come later. I do think poetry owes something to readers. On one level it owes some kind of awakening, whether it be emotional or intellectual, or a linguistic awakening, so that readers who don’t write poetry—or even if they do write poetry—feel things in a new way or think in a new way or they hear language in a new way after reading the poem. The only reason I know the answer to that, so to speak, is because that’s what I go to poetry for.

As far as the state of poetry is concerned, in the 1950s poetry was very academic. Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell (to a different extent), and even Sylvia Plath were really breaking out of the academy. Even though poetry is in the academy now, it’s not what it was then, because it’s not academic poetry. You don’t read the poem and have to look up ten footnotes to understand it. It’s very conversational. Our most popular poet right now is Billy Collins, and even though I would imagine the majority of the readings he gives are to college audiences, I wouldn’t say his poems are academic.

Now there’s something else to be said about the creative writing culture and the fact that more and more poets are being brought along and created, and most of the time are reading to audiences of other poets. I don’t know if there’s another way around that; it’s okay for me, to an extent, but I would hope that, in every audience, there are a few people who don’t write and are there just to listen to poetry or to read poetry.

And, yet, name one person who’s never written a poem. I mean, my father wrote poetry in high school and he became a roofer. It seems like everyone wrote something they would call a poem. In other cultures everyone does this. There are not assigned poets. In oral cultures or tribal cultures there are no assigned poets; everyone partakes in maQ of the arts.

Q: What is your process of writing? Do you lock yourself in a room and starve yourself for three hours? Do you wake up and start writing immediately?

A: It depends. When I’m writing—meaning, every day when I’m working those muscles—I’m more fluent, so I’m doing it everywhere. Yes, I’m waking up early in the morning and writing in my notebook; then, I’m bringing that notebook on the subway and maybe putting it next to my bed at night and writing whenever something’s happening.

I’ve also gone to residencies for writers, where I’m there specifically to write and have a little bit more of a regimen: I wake up, write, take a break in the afternoon, go back in the evening and revise, and so forth. But I don’t have any one way. As much as I like writing at home, there are a lot of distractions at home; and I love writing, as some of my poems show, in a diner or a subway car or a restaurant or a Laundromat. You see things that you don’t see within the four walls of your home.

Q: Do you think the idea of experiencing life or experiencing things is vital to a poet or a writer’s process…that one can’t necessarily write in a vacuum? Do writer’s have to experience life and then almost talk life back at the reader?

A: I don’t think so. There are enough examples in the history of writers who haven’t done that. The novelist Kent Haruf, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Eventide, wore a blindfold and typed that entire novel. So what’s that process like? I feel like I lack the imagination gene so I [have] to go out into the world, be stimulated by something, and then begin to engage with it on the page. Of course there are things that come out of my subconscious that make it onto the page, but that’s a small percentage of what I write. But I think it’s different for everyone.

Q: I’ll finish this up with a few fun questions. What kind of a child were you?

A: I got into a lot of trouble. I was always getting detention, called at home by my teachers, run-ins with the cops. I’m kind of the black sheep of the family.

Q: What’s the greatest surprise in your writing, to this point?

A: The fact that someone actually decided to publish a book of mine. It totally threw me off guard when I got the phone call; I never believed it would happen to me.

Q: What’s a typical lunch for you?

A: Well, I almost never eat breakfast—coffee is my breakfast. Lunch is usually something healthy like oatmeal and fruit or some kind of stir-fry. I live alone so I don’t like to spend a lot of time cooking. I either make something quickly or open up a can of soup. I guess it’s always different.

Q: What’s your relationship with rejection?

A: It depends whether we’re talking about being rejected by a journal or being rejected by a woman. I’m used to being rejected by journals because it’s hard to get published in journals. But even though I should be getting used to being rejected by women, it still hurts every time.