What I Learned From Julia Spicher Kasdorf: an Open Letter

"there's your life, and there's what you make of your life." -J.S.K.


Dear Julia,

I want to know how it is that you do it. I want to know the inside rhythms that make you tick, the ways in which you pull words from your mind, beauty from paper, poems from life. Do you leave your desk lamp on in the late hours or do you start fresh when the house is still asleep? Do you use a pen or pencil? Did you ever feel insignificance as you made letters become words, that the time you poured forth would never amount to anything? Why is it that we have this need to create, the compulsion to strike flame with language, to make ourselves known and make sense of the lives we live? Does the art matter? Will the poem explain a deeper self to the stranger reading breathlessly in the dark?

After hearing you speak, I thought so. You made me want to believe that a poem matters simply because it exists. Even if I can't explain exactly what I think you tried to say in "What I Learned From My Mother" even if I couldn't always tell you the different between assonance and consonance and where the figures lie in each verse, I felt the small tinge in my belly when you read your last line, the invisible part of me connected with the invisible body of the poem, the limb that lives and breathes without consent. I could never explain what happens to me when an artist like you reads her work aloud, except that I get cold all over. I get that adrenaline rush that I can't mistake for anything but admiration, passion; that recognition within myself that I want to do this, too. I imagined the kindergarten kids you spoke of sitting in a circle, being taught to hold their pens and scribble about what their fathers taught them, and it made me marvel. It takes strong, beautiful women like you to help us carry on what we are sometimes at liberty to forgot in this busy life: we must carry the words along so they are not forgotten, so we never cease the creation of unspoken truth.

My father taught me this: that you can never rise too early to read, that you must always carry two pens in your pocket, that a good run and a cold shower will fix anything, and that showing love can be as simple as washing out a pair of white tights for your stubborn daughter. He also told me that you came to him as a freshman when he was the college newspaper editor with a big black portfolio, and you said you wanted to write. You have unwillingly taught me that these moments are what must be preserved, if only for the self.

So I will leave, and I will take a bag of my words, and I will write. I will tell the world I need to write because I must. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Kate

playgrounds and habits of the short.

As I sit writing college essays on the lawn, I can hear the kindergarten class in a game of tag.
I am amazed by little kids in play, how they spend so much time shrieking, making their voices known, raising themselves to the heavens without thought. It is though they feel the need to expel their presence, their joy. I want to be that bold, that brave. Why is it that we grow up and feel the need to get silent, smaller, quieter, almost to the point that we're aren't there at all?They say you learn it all in kindergarten, but then you're bound to forget what it's like to scream, to let loose the passion of the soul. Here is a pledge to myself: I will not be afraid to yell, I want to make myself big and loud and uninhibited.

Like I'm being chased or fleeing down a slide, I will shriek. 

I will be heard. 

The Emily Imitation

Dedicated to one of the greats; Miss Dickinson, i hope you don't roll over in your grave at the absurdity.

Peace is the Light

Peace is the light at Goshen
That weaves between the dorms
And floats among the branch that lists
In every -- Winter -- storm --

And closest -- in the classroom -- it winds
And hurt must be the war --
That tries to come to this old school
That's been for so many a door --

I've felt it on the bleakest night --
And in the longest week --
No homework, test, or drought of love
could tear this peace -- from me.

Definitions of Undefinables

 When asked to define poetry, I think every person would have a different idea. To state the obvious, poetry is words arranged on paper. Emily Dickinson knew a poem was a poem when “it made [her] body so cold no fire could ever warm [her]” (Flanagan). Every classmate on Tuesday had their own opinions as to what constituted poetry. For me, poetry defines the undefinable – it says what cannot be said by taking the deepest feelings or ideas closest to the human core and attempting to define them. How does one begin to express the kind of love in a lifelong friendship? The death of a grandparent? The firsthand effects of a bloody war? A poet certainly tries to put into words those most important feelings and experiences, so that a reader can look into a poem and say, there – I've felt that, too.

Poetry itself is not a new concept. For centuries, poetry has been written and shared and felt deeply, and while it has evolved and grown, there are fundamentals about poetry that I believe stay the same. The goal of poetry is to make the reader feel emotion, to approach life in a new way, to see the world at a different angle. Poetry shares the poet's personal experiences and differences but also connects people in new ways and gets to the heart of the human mind and soul. Most poems address or create within the reader some type of emotion – sadness, anger, love, hate, peace. They are expressions of life lived and I believe that anyone who has experienced life is qualified to write a poem. Poetry is often viewed by unfamiliar readers as an elevated form of writing that is almost untouchable, that only the very important are able to understand and think about and create, but human experience in itself is poetry. Poetry can get down to the bones of life in the simplest of ways. There are so many different ways to write and view poetry, and so there is a poem for everyone, a poem each person can connect with on some level.

A poet that I connect with deeply is Sharon Olds. She is a contemporary writer known for her accessible poems and she writes about everything from her parents and kids to sex to her earliest childhood memories – she even has a poem about a pet hamster. She takes the simplest parts of life and creates gorgeous poems with them. Because of this, her poems are easy to understand and accessible to the common reader. It is hard to name why her work resonates with me so much but I think it is the depth of emotion she uses for each piece, while not masking the idea with flowery or strange language and form. She doesn't say things in a round-about or confusing way – she writes the truth, plain and simple, but beautifully.

While I have never experienced a troubled childhood, or childbirth or a lot of the topics she chooses to write about, I can still relate to her poems and feel them very deeply because whatever emotion she has put inside them – the beauty of a sunset, how it feels to love a person, the loss of a pet – comes through to my experience in life. To be able to make a connection with a reader one has never met is what, in my eyes, makes a good poet. The other reason I connect to her poetry is that I have always loved language and its experimental forms. I love stumbling upon new ways of saying something, I love rolling the sounds of words around on my tongue and I love reading and being read to aloud. Her poems are rich in their manner of language, in how she chooses to describe objects around her, relationships, a walk in the park. It is the beauty and connection I feel to language that also makes Olds a delight to read for me.

Olds' poem “I Go Back to May 1937” was what I chose to share with the class. It is one of my favorites, not only for its descriptive language such as “tiles like bent plates of blood,” but because Olds' has taken the concept of a troubled childhood and transformed it through new eyes, through the eyes of her parents first meeting. I believe that shifts like these are what make poetry exciting and real.

In conclusion, poetry says what we as humans have trouble expressing. Poems can make us laugh, cry, and get to the meaning of what is truly important in life. They say the unsayable. They take that summer night when you were nineteen and kissing the very first boy you ever let stick a tongue down your mouth and they let you feel it on the page; the sweat dripping down his shoulder, the corn whispering behind you, the curled love there in your stomach; the same kind of love in all those words.

the Whitman Trials

Attempting to imitate the work of a great poet is like attempting to sleep in your roommate's bed...



When I Came to the Last Place
      (an ode to Whitman's When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer)


When I came to the last place,
When I was long, lean, wrangled before myself,
When I came to dance in the spit of soft blood, to take,
pull back, and to change the floors
When I went before the people in the room
     with much dismay, and explained how it is
To shake yourself out all over the world,
How I knew they wanted to laugh,
How tired they were of experts, and I found
Myself alone under the languid moon-hair of
The sky, knowing the fool who preaches an expert
Life might as well be trying to sell the stars.


A Girl's Recall
  (an ode to Whitman's A Child's Amaze)


I was often stripped down as a little girl
to the pendulum under my clothes,
surprised to find time in my belly, in mid-swing.

Read Whitman's A Child's Amaze & Astronomer