Interviewed by Brittany Witters
James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a Master of Arts, from the University of Virginia with a Master of Fine Arts, and from the University of Missouri, Columbia with a Doctor of Philosophy. In 2005, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. My Psychic is his latest book of poetry.
Q: Having read My Psychic, I noticed the form of your poetry takes many different shapes, from the blocky paragraph look of “Don’t Drive to the Beach Alone” to the very spacey “My Psychic.” The last poem in this collection, “Up Late, Reading Whitman,” combines four different visual techniques. What is it that drives you to create these looks on the page?
A: The length of the line, it’s placement in the stanza, and the stanza’s relation to the poem as a single instant, is a way of creating an alternate sense of time via rhythm and musical momentum, much in the same way that a movie or song compresses time, and no two compress time in exactly the same way.
Q: My Psychic is dedicated to your mother, and she appears in one form or another in almost all of the poems in this collection. The middle section, “Love Had a Thousand Shapes,” seems to be one big poem about her death and its effect. It is terribly moving and lovely to read. Some people say it can take many years before one is able to start writing about something deeply emotional or traumatic; how were you able to write about a subject so dear to your heart?
A: I don’t know if I was able. I think sadness gets the best of the poem maybe too often. Building a formal expression is, even if in sadness or anger, a project presupposing futurity, inherently optimistic. How can you feel optimistic with this sort of loss without it feeling false? I was banging my head against the wall. What I wanted was my mother to return, as if she would if I could describe her with the right words, the way any good writing materializes its own reality. I think the poem was something of a process of coming to accept that she could only come back in memory, in dream, in my attempts to write about her, and that such return was a blessing. But she spoiled me as a child, and I wanted her to come back, and I was made aware of how accustomed I had become to getting what I wanted if I worked at it hard enough. You can never work hard enough to bring someone back. Ask Orpheus. You can only fail. And your specific failure, its merits and fumbles, its stairwells and slipping rocks, are what you’re left with.
Q: There are a few mentions of Keats, Whitman, and Shelley in your collection. What do these writers mean to you and how has your reading of them shaped you as a poet? Also, do you believe one must read a lot to be a successful poet?
A: The first question could take a long time to answer. The second question is easy. Yes, you must read a lot, but not because you must, rather because you want to; if you’re not interested enough in it to read it, why commit yourself to writing it? Don’t limit yourself. Read everyone you haven’t already read. Re-read. Don’t worry about crossing a reading finish line after which you’ll be ready to write. The reading and the writing are concurrent. I can’t imagine a universe without Keats, Whitman, Shelley. It would be awful. Like living out in the fucking boondocks again.
Q: Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A: If jealousy is best measured by reading poets of my own age that make me want to go write, then I’d say Terrance Hayes. He just gets better and better with every book. He inspires excitement more than jealousy for me. He blends an eye for precise detail, idiomatic speech, a gift for narrative, a quicksilver tonal spectrum, and has a voice like no other poet I know. What makes it better for me is that we grew up around the same time and in many ways have common ground culturally that I haven’t seen others write about before, least of all myself. I mean, you have to love a poem that has Fred Sanford saying “You Big Dummy!”
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: Like all children, I was beautiful to my mother, and that’s all I knew on earth, and all I needed to know. What else? I liked to rest my tongue with it jutting out past my teeth, which the dentist said years later pushed my top teeth forward. He said my tongue was too big for my mouth. He should see it after a few beers. I suppose I spent a good deal of time staring at the screen door at the school yard across the street before I was able to go to school, then once I went to school, I spent a lot of time staring out the window at my house across the street. I liked to sit in the chicken coop and swing on the bean pole perch. Sat in bass boats held aloft on their back yard trailers. Sang to neighborhood dogs until they’d bite. I decided garbage men should make more money than lawyers because their work was harder. Thought that “city” should be a very big long word as it represented a big place and I was distressed to find it not so. Liked to copy my books word for word and give them to my mother as a gift as if I’d written them myself. Assigned personalities to numbers and colors.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: We’re old buddies, but I’m not crazy about his company. He stinks, drinks my beer and never brings any over when he drops by. Smokes my smoke, the bum. But you have to root for the underdog. And friends like that keep your feet on the ground no matter where your last poem was published.
Q: What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A: See question 2. But aside from subject matter that’s painful, there’s the cycle of writing, thinking it’s great, then thinking it’s awful, then willing to salvage whatever you can, and all the attendant mood swings.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: A line snuck up behind me and said BOO! before I could erase it.
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: Thinking that if I wrote well that day I could go and do whatever else I wanted for the rest of the day, no matter how irresponsible.
Q: Lastly, what did you have for lunch today?
A: Too early to tell. Yesterday it was Chicken on a Stick from the Chevron station on the corner of South Lamar and Jackson Ave in Oxford, Mississippi. Delicious and nutritious.
