Chelsea B. DesAutels

Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books, Oct. 2021). Her work appears in the Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A Tin House Scholar and winner of the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review, Chelsea earned her MFA from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. Chelsea lives with her family in Minneapolis.

What brought you to writing in the first place?

Language itself brought me to writing. I remember being young—first grade, I think—and so pleased with the sound of a poem I’d written with rhyme and alliteration (though I wouldn’t have known the terminology). I wrote in college but didn’t return to writing seriously until, in the middle of another career and the first months of motherhood, I faced a significant health scare. At that point, writing my story was the only way I could wrap my arms around all that was happening. I was trying to face this tremendous upheaval, full of dread and gratitude, head on. I didn’t know how else to do that except poetry.

What is your writing life like? Do you write everyday or whenever inspiration strikes?

I write in spurts. There are months when writing just isn’t feasible. Then it becomes feasible again and I’ll try to write or revise a poem each day. This schedule works for me. It takes the pressure off the times I’m not writing.

Please share with me a poem you wish you had written. What in particular do you admire about it?

There are hundreds of poems I wish I’d written! This morning—one of the first cool, damp mornings of almost fall—I wish I’d written Sharon Olds’s “Station,” from her first book, Satan Says:

Coming in off the dock after writing,

I approached the house,

and saw your long grandee face

in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade

the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered

eyes found me on the lawn. You looked

as the lord looks down from a narrow window

and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no

hint of shyness you examined me,

the wife who runs out on the dock to write

as soon as one child is in bed,

leaving the other to you.

Your long

mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,

did not curve. We spent a long moment

in the truth of our situation, the poems

heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

I love how the poem exists in a single, quiet moment and simultaneously manages such emotional complexity. I study this poem to learn about image, expanding time, music, and syntax that holds small surprises.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Pema Chödrön and Simone Weil (both books by Weil and a book called Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson about Weil and other women writers and artists). As for poetry, I recently reread John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry and Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, and I’ve been reading a few poems from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton most days this summer.

 

Paula Cisewski

Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, ​Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.

Cisewski's work has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, 78: A Tarot Anthology, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and New Poetry from the Midwest. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and House of Helsinglight.

While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor with Minneapolis teens, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables. Now she teaches writing privately and academically, makes things, and collaborates with fellow artists and activists.

What brought you to writing in the first place? A need to imagine possibilities I didn’t see around me. As a young child I read voraciously and wrote fantasy stories as imaginative, usually haunted spaces in which to escape. For example, in a pile of my childhood ephemera, I recently unearthed a story from third or fourth grade titled “Noah and the Ghosts.” Can you imagine that haunted ark? Then in my later childhood, I moved away from fantasy to writing poem-like things that attempted to articulate and lay claim to my own experience of reality, for myself if no one else. Generational family traumas were still causing lightning quick tectonic shifts and much pain all around in the home where I grew up; that’s just how it was. A notebook and a pen provided a personal universe.

Music was my poetry gateway. Even into my early twenties I was writing lyrics for a band that never materialized (I was too introverted) inspired by all the lyrics I loved by Bowie, Bauhaus, Crass, Patti Smith, Bad Brains, Killing Joke, Elvis Costello, etc, etc. And by then I was also in love with e.e. cummings and Wanda Coleman and Kahlil Gibran and Elizabeth Bishop and was writing poems while my baby napped.

A couple years later, as a nontraditional, first generation college student, I didn’t know anything about sustaining a writing life, or publishing, or even academia, really. In an effort to find my people, I asked the owner (Kenny Horst) of the jazz club where I worked nights (The Artists Quarter) if I could start an open mic, and he said yes. In the early months I served as bartender, cocktail server, and MC just to keep the night viable for the first handfuls of dedicated weekly poets! But before long it became a vibrant event, often standing room only. That’s when my eyes opened to what was already here in the Twin Cities and I fell in love with this interfusion of literary communities. And it’s from there I began to broaden my gaze.

What is your writing life like? Do you write every day or whenever inspiration strikes? I don’t think of inspiration as a thing that strikes; rather, I have to make space for a relationship with it by being attentive and open. That said, I am an adjunct professor and freelancer, so my writing life changes more or less seasonally, with each semester’s workload. Sometimes I write every day; often I don’t. What seems to matter most to my quality of life is that I’m awake in the world and that I have some reasonable amount of protected writing time peppered throughout my week. Every week. I get it on the calendar, and it becomes inviolate. I know by now to expect times when the words go dormant, and I know by now that even in those times fruitful things are happening. But it still makes me twitchy! I am a distraction-prone accident magnet when I’m not writing. Making other things--collages or assemblages or small book arts projects--when language goes underground does help. Still holding space does help.

Please share with me a poem you wish you had written. What in particular do you admire about it? I began responding to your request, Erin, by compiling a list of formative and meaningful work which soon grew beyond reason. The longer the list grew, the more I feared I would forget the most important poem and kick myself later! It’s such good luck to be permanently overwhelmed by the powerful work of others. In an effort to stop overthinking, and because I am rereading Bright Scythe, I’m going to share a Tomas Tranströmer poem (translated from Swedish by Patty Crane), knowing it’s one of infinite choices I could have made:

The Half-Finished Heaven

Depression breaks off its course. Anxiety breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off in flight.

The fervent light pours out, even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings are revealed, our Ice Age studio’s red beasts.

Each person is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. The endless ground under us. Water shines between the trees. The lake is a window into earth. I admire the fullness within and around the fragmentation. The tension between sorrow and illumination. There are both surprise and clarity. There’s enough breathing room in this poem so that as a reader I feel trusted/welcome to participate in its connections. And that fourth stanza makes me fall a little in love with everybody.

What are you reading right now?

In addition to the Tranströmer, I have kept the collaboratively written Counter-Desecrations: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed, close for the last couple years. Also, I’m reading Matthew Salesses’ novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear and Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. 

 

Athena Kildegaard

Athena Kildegaard's sixth book of poetry, Prairie Midden, is due out from Tinderbox Editions this fall. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, december, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, North American Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been set to music by Linda Kachelmeier, Libby Larsen, Mina Esary, Jake Endres, Michael Betz, and others. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.

What brought you to writing in the first place?

I'm the oldest child of three, and as we know, oldest children are keen to receive kudos. That's one thing that brought me to writing, I'm sure (I was six when I wrote my first poem): an awareness that writing a poem would make my poem-loving parents proud. That's the Freudian version of the story. The other story, hinted at already, is that my parents loved poetry and I was surrounded by it. Both of them grew up in houses where the Bible was read at the table. They continued that practice and replaced the text. It wasn't a ritual, but pretty often my dad, a professor of English, would hand someone at the table an open book and say, “Read this!” And whoever was the recipient of the book would read. That's the spiritual version of what brought me to writing poems. Another story is that I needed a way to escape and poetry gave me that place. I have always loved words and word play and I supposed I could have translated that into making crossword puzzles, but I didn't. Instead I wrote poems. For much of my childhood I'd escape to places on the Minnesota River with my notebook and pen and mostly I wrote about what I saw.

What is your writing life like? Do you write every day or whenever inspiration strikes?

I don't write every day, but I do read poetry every day, even if only poems that show up in my email thanks to the various organizations that send poems. I tend to have hot times and cool times; that is, times when I'm writing stuff I sense is worth writing and times when I'm basically chucking mudballs. And there are generally poems in process floating around on my desk. Also I keep a notebook where I whine and make lists and quote stuff others have written that I admire and argue with the world and record surprising stuff I've learned and in between all of that poems get their start.

Please share with me a poem you wish you had written. What in particular do you admire about it?

I'm a Libra, which means I can't make up my mind! I thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins for the music, and then Olav Hauge for the dark Scandinavian wryness, and then Elizabeth Bishop for the attention to detail and her often hidden rhythms, and then Inger Christensen whose booklength poem Alphabet is such a tour-de-force, ditto Caroline Bergvall's Drift, and then Thomas Lux's poem “An Horation Notion,” because of its Calvinist doctrine, and . . . So I chose a prose poem, a form I've hardly tackled, by Adrian C. Louis, a fellow Minnesotan poet, from his book Evil Corn. 

                    Plains Indian Riddle: June 25th

                    I get off the interstate at Mitchell, SD. The station wagon ahead of me in 

                    the drive-thru at McDonald's has DOC plates from the Boy's Reform

                    School in Plankinton. There's a flabby, white middle-aged driver, and two 

                    Skins in the back, maybe fourteen. They appear to be twins. They're

                    laughing, sweet smiling boys, swimming through the screaming fog with 

                    bright, blighted fish eyes. On the ridge above McDonald's, the west wind 

                    is keening, or maybe it's the ghost of Custer, still screaming for Benteen to 

                    come and perfume the wild shit smell of death's wet kiss.

I could never write this poem, since I'm a white lady, but what I want to learn from this poem is its utter refusal to tolerate bullshit by attending to the details.

What are you reading right now?

I am reading How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker, and Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss, and I've just started The Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant. I've been reading Walker's essays aloud to my husband. They flow deliciously off the tongue and then lead to great conversations about race and the academy and basketball and raising boys. Seuss's sonnets blow the form open in new ways. Oh, yes, I wish I'd written one of them! Also I just read, this weekend, Daniel Kehlmann's novel You Should Have Left, which you can read in a morning and then shiver about for the rest of the day. Kehlmann is a German novelist who has been having a great time playing with the novel as a form.

 

Photo Credit: Ayanna Muata

Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June of this year. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

What brought you to writing in the first place?

I've been writing off and on since fourth grade. Back then, I wrote short stories that were mostly based on things I'd heard or seen elsewhere. After hearing about Land Shark on Saturday Night Live, I wrote a story about a shark that was a door-to-door salesperson. I also wrote a story about a motorcycling mouse. I continued writing short stories. I took one creative writing class in college and loved it. In 1999, after a difficult break up the year before, during a time in my life when I was quite busy and more than a little agonized, I found myself writing poems, not only to process the end of that relationship, but also because, back then, I felt I could manage the time poetry seemed to required (I see it time it takes to write a poem differently now). During my first Christmas in my new relationship, my now wife gave me a gift certificate to take a writing class at The Loft Literary Center. I thought about a short-fiction class, but the best fit for my schedule was a poetry class. 

What is your writing life like? Do you write every day or when inspiration strikes?

I don't write every day, but, if I had to guess, I write something like 300 days a year. Not always poems. I write essays too. Not always long things or finished things. I don't do well when I point myself in a particular direction. I like the idea of researching a fascinating thing and trying to extract as much out of it as I can. My preference is to stay active and attentive and trust that inspiration will come. So many of my poems are ignited by things I see or think about when I'm walking around my part of the world. In poetry, I would describe myself as oriented toward narrative and within the confessional tradition. I have found recently that essays are where I tend to go to process issues of the day, and poems are where I tend to work inward, to think about myself and my experiences. 

Please share with me a poem you wish had written. What in particular do you admire about it?

So many poems came to mind in thinking about my answer to this question. I'll mention a few. John Murillo's "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds," a great poem about God and cities and faith or faithlessness depending on how you look at it, Dan Albergotti's "Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale," which Natalie Diaz taught to me and is a favorite in lessons I share about metaphor, "Faint Music," by Robert Hass which is a narrative gem, Beckian Fritz Goldberg's "Henry's Song," and Galway Kinnell's "The Quick and the Dead." I could have mentioned any number of African-American masters and the poems that mean so much to my heart - "Those Winter Sundays," for example. I'm currently obsessed with Cameron Awkward Rich's "Cento Between the Ending and the End." 

But I choose Jane Kenyon's "The Blue Bowl." This poem means so much to me as a poet. With the exception of the "aquiline nose" that juts out of the poem, "The Blue Bowl" is constructed in plain language. The "meaning" of the poem is simultaneously clear and vast. 'How shall I write about marriage?' she seems to ask and answer. 'How shall I write about loss and mourning, dwelling in them and continuing on?' I prefer to write in plain language too. Although I admire poets who engage the mysterious in ways I do not. By my way of thinking, the topics I write about - race, for example -  do not lend themselves to abstraction. I want to be absolutely clear in what the poem is about and, I hope, complex in the framing, structure, and ideas. I want to write to my friends and family who don't read a lot of poetry in ways I hope poets will admire. Early in my poetry reading, I encountered a lot of poets whose work is lyrical and dense and spectacular. I truly admire the depth and skill so many poets can manage in that mode. As a reader, I'm quite drawn to work that can seem elusive initially. That just isn't my authentic voice.

When I encountered Jane Kenyon, my life as a poet changed. I began to consider all the possibilities available through flour, water, salt, yeast, and heat. The specific and disciplined meter in "The Blue Bowl" inspired me to consider how meter could add energy and sonic depth in my work. That declarative tenth line - "There are sorrows much keener than these." - stopped me in my tracks when I read it. It still affects me in the center of my chest. The poem as a metaphor, and the specific metaphor at the end of the poem were like a masterclass for me. I also teach this poem as a way to encourage my students to be stubborn in workshop. I suggest that most workshop readers would circle that "aquiline nose" and suggest something less earnest or distracting. I point out that as artists, we have to stick to our ideas sometimes. 

All to say, "The Blue Bowl" as a poem and Jane Kenyon as a writer, allowed me to see a place for my voice in poetry. Few things would mean more to me than writing a poem that would affect an aspiring poet in the same way.

The Blue Bowl

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole. It fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
that grew between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.
We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows much keener than these.
Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

What are you reading right now?

Contest submissions! So grateful for a chance to read for contests and see all the spectacular work that's being made. Outside of contest reading, for pleasure, I've gone into summer-reading mode. I just read and completely admired Katherine Heiny's Early Morning Riser. She has super sharp eyes like a raptor; she can take in so much. Early Morning Riser is smart, laugh-out-loud funny at times, profoundly truthful in its observations, loving, lovely, and expertly crafted. I also read Tayari Jones' An American Marriage, which I found to be fiercely provocative. It made me mad in all the right ways. And, right now, I'm reading Jo Nesbø's The Kingdom. I love his dark Scandinavian stories, and this one is super dark. I'm a huge fan of his work, but keep that a secret. As for poetry, almost all the poetry I'm reading, I'm reading on assignment for contest submissions. I've been blown away by and humbled by the level of talent I'm seeing. I have also been spending time with Kevin Young's anthology of African-American poetry - 250 Years of Struggle and Song. Before that, I read Victoria Chang's Obit and Reginald Dwayne Betts's Felon.