Christine M. Kendall

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At Home on Upper Beaver Creek (2020) is Christine M. Kendall’s third book (after Talk, A chapbook, 1998, and Resting in the Familiar, 2017). To create her books, Christine seeks coaching and input from her writing group, and has the books professionally designed (by Jack Kienast) and printed (by Norman Green of Threshold Documents).  She put together At Home for a show at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington, for the residents of Upper and Lower Beaver Creek Roads where several artists of the Methow Valley reside.

Because I know Christine, I invited her to answer some questions.

1.What is your process in assembling a poetry book? Do you imagine the book — perhaps its theme or title — and write into that, or do the poems come first? 

For both the chapbook and my first collection I had a stack of poetry I had written, some had been published in journals, a few in anthologies, but publishing the poems in a collection was for me a way of giving them a home.

For At Home on Upper Beaver Creek, responding to the call for the Confluence Gallery exhibit was an incentive to create a collection of poetry about living on Upper Beaver Creek and as I began the work, orders to shelter in place began because of COVID.  All but two of the poems in the book were inspired by what I experience here on our 20 acres.  A few of the poems were published previously, but most came to me on daily walks with our dog Gus.

2. How do you decide the order of the poems?

For Resting In The Familiar, my editor, Mary Gillilan, ordered the poems into five sections with poems about family, places I’ve traveled to, general observations, grief, and self-reflection. For At Home on Upper Beaver Creek the book is ordered by the seasons, beginning with my favorite season here, winter.  The sections have a pen and ink illustration for each season (by Kathy Brackett).

3. How do you know when a book is “done”?

I think for me that’s where a good editor comes in.  I hope to do another book as I have a lot of poems that need a good home between covers and someone to say, “enough is enough!”  Also, I need someone who can help me shape the collection into a logical order, as I tend to write on a variety of subjects.

Bellingham poet, editor, and blogger J. I. Kleinberg writes of this book:

In At Home on Upper Beaver Creek, Christine Kendall shares her wonderment at the cycle of the seasons. From her home in Central Washington–a landscape of ancient glacier-scraped, boulder-strewn hillsides, forests, and fiercely nourished homesteads–she shows us the ‘hierarchies and appetites’ of eagles and ravens, torrential rain and fire.

I’m amazed at Christine’s adept switch into “pandemic mode,” her ability to capture the early, difficult months of the lockdown and make us all see that perhaps being in forced seclusion wasn’t a hardship, but an opportunity for sabbatical. My favorite poems here are the ones in which the poet is out walking. Because I have a fondness for coyote poems, this one made an obvious choice to share. We can credit Christine’s dog, Gus, whose perspective reminds us to look at the world through other eyes.

The Prize

The dog brought home a coyote
skull, a bone to him,
a scent, a treasure, not kith
and kin. Stripped clean,
there’s no connection
to howls that prick up
his ears after dark.

No connection to marks
left–intoxicants to sniff–
he knows coyotes by whiffs
on a breeze, he’s seen them
in the distance tracking across
fields. Once, a coyote chased
him, my high-pitched screams
diverting it.

We kept the skull. Hollow
sockets once held watchful eyes,
the cranium a brain, and
ears to hear other packs howl
on hillsides; tonight progeny
will watch a full moon rise.

–Christine M. Kendall

Christine’s books are available from Village Books in Fairhaven, Bellingham, and also through confluencepoets.com, her group’s webpage, which has a shopping section.

The featured photo for this post is courtesy cottonbro from Pexels.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

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I have a modest goal to post something here each week, and this week–quite busy with other things–I thought I’d simply stick in a quote. But the book I picked up was Muriel Rukeyser‘s Out of Silence: Selected Poems, and it inspired me to try a little harder.

In February it was my pleasure to attend a 2-day virtual conference on Rukeyser’s work, reception, and influence.  I knew Rukeyser, previously, from a handful of anthologized poems and her splendid book, The Life of Poetry. I’m still processing all I heard there, reading and rereading her poems; I’ve just begun reading her novel, Savage Coast. (Until a panelist presented on it, I hadn’t known the novel existed.) I particularly enjoyed the presentation by her former student, Dennis J Bernstein, a poet and radio producer who documented Rukeyser in her final years. My friend and mentor, Professor Vivian Pollak, presented on the Elegies and their contemporary reception (often brutal, despite Rukeyser’s ground-breaking work).

I wanted to share a passage from the preface to her poems:

She was never what is sometimes called a poet’s poet–the exquisite practitioner of craft capable of making other poets envy her sheer technical skill. She wrote for a far larger audience, seeking readers in ordinary people, as well as among those who understood the difficulties of modern poetry. “Writing is only another way of giving,” she believed, “a courtesy, if you will, and a form of love.” And so the search for the mot juste gave way to the larger goals she pursued in poetry: “the universe of emotional truth” and “an approach to the truth of feeling.” -Kate Daniels, “In Order to Feel” [Rukeyser’s words, in quotations, are from The Life of Poetry]

This strikes me as a manifesto for writing, something I need to post, and circle back and reread.

The featured photograph is by Imogen Cunningham.

 

 

 

Welcome to the New Website!

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Today is my birthday — a big one, 65. In The Hobbit, on one’s birthday you give gifts to everyone else, so I’m thinking of this post as my gift to you. (Though if you want to drop by and pick up a piece of cake, we can do that, too.)

Here’s the story. I have been sending my mystery novel to agents, and learned that my website needed to be “professional,” so I made some effort, hired a terrific expert to do all the stuff that was beyond my skill set, and here we go. I’m grateful for Priscilla Long‘s creative nonfiction class which required me to get my CV up-to-date. (It took me two years to do that, and even so the dang thing needed more work before it could be posted.) When I flinched from sharing it, Priscilla said that other people would not look at it closely, but that I would have a record, where I could find it, where I couldn’t ignore it, for the rest of my life. So. There it is. (You don’t have to look at it.)

The old blog was scooped up in January, and if you’re missing a few blog posts, my ineptitude (not realizing they wouldn’t ride along) is to blame.

One of those posts was about my intention to submit work — poems, essays, stories, novel — every day for 100 days. I am now 50+ days into this (I started two days after the Biden inauguration). And, yes, I do have news to report:

My creative nonfiction piece, “Doll Eyes” is a feature at Helix Magazine. There’s a whole story behind this — I revised it THE DAY BEFORE IT WAS ACCEPTED and started sending it out as “Doll Stories” (which I like better). Helix, when I suggested that they look at the new version, said, “We like it the way it is,” and they posted it!

I FINALLY have another short story acceptance. This is one of my historical pieces, based on my maternal grandparents’ stories, and I’ve submitted it dozens of times. As with the doll piece, I had decided to revise and cut this (by 500 words! I retitled it!). So it was “out” in both versions, to several places. But Passengers Journal accepted the old version, “Abednego Thornes,” and reported that their editors unanimously voted for it. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

age one, with my dadI’ve had several poems accepted, and just today NVQ’s Issue 8 [Not Very Quiet] with my poem, “A Mask of Water,” went live.

I’ve had a couple poems appear in print publications this year (those do still exist, and I’m grateful), Constellations, and Plainsongs; you can find my recently-published poems on-line at: Boxcar Poetry Review, The Bookends Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Third Wednesday Magazine. The link goes to their blog, but I have a PDF of 3rd Wednesday, which I can forward to you (I have permission) if you contact me; it’s also available in a print edition. Just in case you’re looking for places to submit your splendid poems, I also have one  forthcoming from Clementine Unbound. 

So I’ve submitted about 70 poems multiple times and had 8 accepted? That’s not a bad ratio, and I’m grateful.

A lot of my friends don’t realize that my superpower as a child was to be invisible. Even now I sometimes imagine disappearing, dropping off everyone’s radar, moving to a desert island or a cabin on a creek somewhere. I’d write for the joy of it, for myself. (My brother and sisters would say that I’m already doing this. “Where are you?”) I’d stack all my notebooks up on a shelf and admire them, all by my lonesome. But here I am, well into this journey called life, and my art (not to mention my husband and three daughters) has consistently asked me to step forward and be seen. Yes, it terrifies me. Again and again, my poetry friends and the writing world in general has scooted over and made a place for me. They brought cake.

Thanks for being here with me.

me at age 8, with siblings

 

 

 

Writing the Political Poem

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“I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder.” –Kaveh Akbar

In November I took a Hugo House class on “writing angry poems,” taught by the poet Sharon Bryan. One of my discoveries was that it is freaking hard for me to express anger. Feel it, yes; turn it loose in a poem: no. So I struggled. “This is like a poem about repressing anger,” was one of the comments I received. Another: “This poem doesn’t seem to be about anger, but maybe mild annoyance.”

One of Bryan’s recommendations was to read Deaf Republic: Poems, by Ilya Kamnisky. I dutifully ordered a copy and have been avoiding it ever since. This week, I read it. It could not have been more timely for me. In the 1960s people used to say, “the personal is political.” Over the last ten days, we have seen how true that still is.

Deaf Republic is profoundly personal. It struck me as being less a collection of poems than one poem, or a play-in-verse perhaps. Tracy K. Smith writes that what she finds here is “conscience, terror, silence, and rage made to coexist alongside moments of tenderness, piercing beauty, and emphatic lyricism.” Kaminsky’s story opens when a young, deaf boy is shot down by soldiers in an occupied town, and then it winds through the perspectives of other characters in the town, which is struck deaf by the violence, introducing a couple expecting a child, then Momma Galya, the puppeteer who rescues their infant. But the poems transcend their place of “otherness.” As Smith, who has served as the United States Poet Laureate, continues in her cover blurb: “It hurts to read these poems. It hurts to read them and find the world I belong to stricken by a contagion of silence.”

The first and the last poems stand apart from the rest, and address exactly that: meaning, us. Us as we  watch atrocities, then “pocket our phones” and go to the dentist.

We Lived Happily during the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house–

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth moth
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

This is always our charge. Let us write poems that capture the bewilderment and push through it and call out the truth.