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.