Interview by–Natalie Solmer
When I attended Butler University’s MFA program many years ago, I had the good fortune of having Karen Kovacik as one of my thesis readers. We connected over the fact that we are both from northern Indiana, and we both have Polish roots. Ever since that meeting years ago, Karen has been very supportive of my work, and I’ve been honored to publish her excellent poetry over at Indianapolis Review when I’ve had the chance. She had a long career as a professor at IU Indianapolis, and she is also a former Indiana Poet Laureate. In addition to her own poetry, she is a prolific translator of Polish poets. I’ve been really excited about her new book of poems, Portable City, out since 2025, and I wanted to interview her. We had a wide-ranging conversation over Zoom, which I have edited below:
NS:
I just wanted to say, I love this book, of course. You know I’m a huge fan of your work, and every poem is so strong… There are so many things I wrote down, and I’m going to try to stay on track. In a previous interview we did, which was in 2019, by the way…
KK:
Oh my gosh, it doesn’t seem that long ago.
NS:
How was it that long ago? You did talk about how you, in grade school, had some great teachers who had you reading Carl Sandburg and others, and then you have your epigraph in Portable City from Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Prayers of Steel,” which I love, and I just wondered if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you chose that poem?
KK:
Oh, yeah, I mean, honestly, I think there are a couple of things. One of the poets I translate, Jacek Dehnel, is a huge Sandburg fan.
NS:
Oh!
KK:
He is coming out with a collection of Sandburg’s poems in Polish that he translated.
We sometimes think of translation as a one-way street where someone moves a text from one language into another, but it just so happens that from with some of the people I’ve translated, I’ve become weirdly more involved with some of the poets they translate.
NS:
Wow! Oh, that’s cool.
And, you know, I also wondered if it was a homage to your roots, growing up in the Chicago-area?
KK:
Very much.
Yeah, many of my relatives worked in the mills. My father did not, but many of my uncles and cousins did, at one time or another.
NS:
What city were you born in?
KK:
I was born in East Chicago but grew up in Highland, but… but, you know, the mills very much affected our whole way of being. The skies would kind of glow orange at night.
NS:
Mmm.
KK:
It felt like the skies were never really dark there. So, it was very much steel country.
NS:
Yes, absolutely.
I’ve seen different people describing your new book, Portable City, as a “travelogue,” and I mean, it is, but it’s so much more than that.
There’s so much going on here, and you have the four different sections. The first section, we do have some traveling with, you know, taking Indianapolis with you, the “Portable City” in the suitcase, and we see Warsaw, we see Mexico.
But then in the second section, we’re getting into language and, reading and writing and the history of English and also talking about the Polish language, which I loved.
But then we go to religious references, and then sex and relationships, and…okay, there’s a lot of, like, Eros and sex in this book, to be honest with you!
And then we have the whole arc of losing the husband and finding another love. This book is so rich, in the way I’m reading it, you know? And I was wondering if maybe you wanted to talk about how it was arranging these sections with so much different subject matter, and I know you were working on it for a long time as well.
KK:
I was working on the book for a long time, and I feel like this manuscript has had so many versions, so many iterations, but I did feel like there were four main buckets of poems, pretty much as you described. I guess I, too, don’t see the book so much as a travelogue.
NS:
Yeah, I don’t either, to be honest with you.
KK:
I feel like it is my most naked and my most vulnerable book.
You know, Czesław Miłosz once said to the Paris Review:
“Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else. Yet when you write there are certain obligations, what I call laws of form. . . . Nevertheless, there is always the feeling that you didn’t unveil yourself enough. A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that’s it” (Paris Review 133 (1994):265).
He feels like that dream of unveiling is always deferred, so it might be that what I see as naked or revelatory might not be perceived that way by other readers because there’s always form, and there’s always language, and there are things that maybe separate us from pure revelation.
NS:
Well, I thought it was very personal, very vulnerable. You had a lot of biographical stuff, I mean, like your poem, “Self-Portrait with Litany of Saints.”
I thought that was really cool how you braided your autobiography in with these biographies of the saints.
KK:
Yeah, I feel like my last book, Metropolis Burning perhaps had more of that travelogue quality, because one of the things I was trying to do there was to catalogue cities that had been affected by war, especially Warsaw, of course. But here, I felt like the impulse was more inward, in part because of losing a spouse.
NS:
Yeah.
KK:
And going through what we all went through during the pandemic, and my father died, and of course, you recently experienced that yourself. All of those things cause us to reach out to others, but also to go within and contemplate our lives, our mortality.
NS:
Do you want to talk a little bit about that poem, “Self-Portrait with Litany of Saints,” as far as, the process for you writing it?
I mean, I remember, my grandma had one of those books about all the saints, and for [the Catholic sacrament of] Confirmation, it was like make sure you go look through the book, and find a saint, pick one, your confirmation name… Did you end up doing that?
KK:
Yeah, well, I did. I chose Christine, I guess, because… Christ-like [laughs]. What was your Confirmation name?
NS:
I chose Felicity, but I cannot tell you right now what she was the patron saint of or anything!
I liked the name, you know?
KK:
Oh, yeah.
NS:
Yeah, those lives of the saints books were really something…
KK:
I think my litany actually started with a Diane Seuss poem from Four Legged Girl.
NS:
Oh, yeah.
KK:
We were reading her book in a couple of my classes, and we did a writing exercise where we worked with some of her first lines, but then we could kind of modify the line. I put a number of those first lines in a manila envelope, and I drew, “as a child, I ate and mourned.”
So then I thought, what did I do as a child? And then I flashed on when my sister and I would pray, “Angel of God, my guardian, dear,” and how we would fold our arms over over chests like angel wings. And so initially the whole poem was just a version of the first section, but without the saints, you know?
But the poem felt too derivative. So as is typical, I just let it rest for a bit. And then I started putting it into sections, but I still didn’t know what to do with it. You know, I think I had maybe the first section and the second, and then I was still kind of stuck with it, but then on sabbatical in 2019, I had more time. I looked up saints and reacquainted myself with them, and I even found some weird ones that I’d never heard of.
I reflected more deeply on the arc of my life, and I guess one of the benefits of being an old person is you have more life to chart.
NS:
Yep.
KK:
But I still had a hard time ending it, and so I probably wrote the ending, like, 10 times or something. I decided to end with massage. I have a number of massage poems maybe because I’m a cerebral person, and whenever I have had a massage, I’m able to connect the body and the mind better.
And this will not come as a shock to you, because you’re a priestess, who is in touch with all the mysteries, but I’m not a priestess, and…
NS:
You’re so sweet.
KK:
No, no, you are. And I’m more like the cerebral Catholic schoolgirl, so for me, I have to get in touch with the mysteries, either through the erotic, cooking, or through massage.
NS:
The same way with massage, every day my partner and I, we massage each other, but I think it is, like, connecting and grounding and you know, relaxing at the end of the day.
And the poor guy, his ancestors evolved at the equator, and so his skin is not adapted for this climate, and I have to slather him in Vaseline every day because his skin gets so irritated!
Whereas, if I put on any type of lotion, I will break out. I don’t really need lotion. My DNA comes from Siberia or something. (editor’s sidenote–According to 23 and me, my maternal haplogroup is most commonly found in Siberia.)
KK:
Oh, yeah, same. It’s the Slavic skin!
NS:
Because people are always like, oh my gosh, how do you do that? I’m like, I don’t know, I was just born this way. I think we were born for that cold, harsh environment. Anyway, sorry, I’m getting way off track here!
So, anyway, I know in 2019, when I did that interview, you said that your latest book, Portable City had been getting some semi-finalists and finalist awards, and you were sending it out, but how was this process for you, and how did you decide to end up going with Hanging Loose Press?
KK:
Right, well, I was giving a reading in 2022 in Boston, and, Mark Pawlak, one of the editors of Hanging Loose, was there with his wife, Mary Bonina. I was doing an event with Krystyna Dąbrowska, one of the poets I translate, and it was a small event, maybe 25 to 30 people, but we were all sitting around a big seminar table, and even though it wasn’t huge, it was an intimate and lovely event.
So Mark came up to me after and asked me if I would consider submitting some work to the journal Hanging Loose, and I did, and they accepted a few poems, and then after I got these journal pubs with them, I contacted Mark and asked if he would be interested in looking at the book, and then he ended up accepting it. So that’s how it happened. And, you know, they have some strong editors. One is Richard Lourie, who is himself an historian and translator of Slavic literature.
NS:
Awesome. And…I don’t know if I will keep this in the interview, but, you know, I’m just kind of fed up with the whole contest thing in general.
I mean, your work is so, so, so good. Somebody should’ve jumped on this sooner… this should have been a contest winner, you know? It’s frustrating.
KK:
I’m not the biggest careerist, though, so…
NS:
And neither am I… I mean, I don’t know, maybe some people might think I am, because of doing things like Indianapolis Review, but, I feel I’m not good at that stuff either. I feel like it’s such a weird combination if somebody is a poet, and they’re also really good at careerist stuff. The two things, to me, seem like opposite skillsets.
KK:
Well, and I think, you’re obviously in the same position even more so, because, you know, you’re working a full-time job, have kids, and you’re editing the review, and you’re doing all this other stuff, and for me, I had a sick spouse, my mother has had some health challenges, and until May, I was working a full-time job that had its own demands.
Also I was translating, and I did publish a number of books.
NS:
Do you want to talk at all about how you chose the cover art for Portable City?
KK:
Oh, yeah, sure. I went to this Remedios Varo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it really resonated with me. I mean, she was an artist who fled Franco’s fascist Spain to resettle in Mexico, and there’s this surreal quality in her art. She has a lot of recurring images of, like, nuns and other female protagonists trying to outwit masculine authority. I responded to the dreamy quality in her work.
And although my title poem, “Portable City,” could be read as a travelogue, I feel like this book is also a journey to the interior, and there’s this sort of intrepid female character in the image I chose for my cover. She’s traveling in a mechanical koi boat in a watery landscape.
Jung said that in dreams, water images have to do with emotion.
NS:
Yep.
And you’re also water sign.
KK:
And I’m also a water sign.
Also, I love maps, and this female character has a map unfolded in her hands, and she has little Hermes wings on her head.
NS:
Yeah, I mean, and talking about that journey, you know, your last section has the title, Ithaka, which is referencing Odysseus’ journey, right? His journey home, and I did feel like there definitely was this arc of, like you said, a journey towards the interior, and then also moving through this loss, and through aging, and talking about the body, and talking about what you lose along the way. I thought it was very vulnerable, very refreshing to read, and very brave. And also talking about finding new love, even after the loss of your husband.
KK:
Thank you. That means a lot of coming from you, because obviously I feel similarly about your book— how much you’re able to braid together with your Polish heritage, your partner’s heritage, and your coming to terms with complicated truths, about being in relationship, about parentage and lineage and the place one comes from.
NS:
One of my favorite poems in your book is the poem that opens your second section, “Pandora Speaks,” that opens the alphabet section, where you are talking about your aunt in Poland and how you had a good relationship in the beginning, but then after her daughter eventually ended up moving to London, then she sort of cooled on you, because you were bringing in the Western influence or something.
KK:
That’s the version of the truth I settled on for the poem.
But also right around the time my aunt banished me, my mom had asked me to take, like, 20 or 30 bucks to my aunt’s sister, who lived in the same village, and was married to an alcoholic.
My aunt did not want me to go there, and was angry with me that I did do what my mother asked of me, you know? And so I think there are other layers to the situation.
NS:
Has your mother been there and met…
KK:
She has been there three times. And the most recent time was when I had my Fulbright in 2004-2005. And Linda, my sister, also went that time. Another layer of this complicated reality is I have a PhD, and I learned Polish as an adult. And so I have a pretty big vocabulary just because I’ve translated a lot, and poets tend to use out-of-the-way words, you know?
So sometimes I would say something to my aunt, and then she would ask her more worldly, coal miner husband, “What’s she talking about?” And he would translate my words into the kind of language she would use.
NS:
And, did she speak Silesian? It’s a dialect, right?
KK:
Yeah, she does use certain dialectal terms. She would braid these wicker baskets to make extra money, and she used a dialect word for them, and then her vowels are very much like other accents in the Polish mountains.
NS:
Oh.
KK:
I could understand her, but when I spoke, I didn’t pronounce my words like she did, which made me appear more foreign, you know? So I… I think there were probably other layers of disconnection. Also, I’m not a heavy eater, and every time I went to her house, you know how it is, she set a massive plate in front of me. I would eat as much as I could.
There were many sins I committed that maybe added up over time.
When she first banished me, I was so full of sorrow that I thought I would never, ever be able to write about her, in part because I felt this deep shame. But then after I found my way through the first section, I felt what I had was an origin story that I was writing into being.
NS:
I love all the details in the poem and the world that you create for the reader so that we really feel like we’re there, and we get a sense of the atmosphere, and how it was at your aunt’s house. But then we also feel the love and respect for her, and it doesn’t feel like you’re judging her or anything like that. To me, I really liked the way you did this, and I know that that is not easy, because you know that I sometimes write about my interaction with my partner’s Jamaican culture, which is obviously not my culture, and it’s just so fraught. I will admit, I know that there are some people, it doesn’t matter how I write the poem, they’re never really going to be okay with it. But I try my best to write in a way that’s respectful, honest, and vulnerable.
Do you have thoughts or advice for writers on how to be successful when writing about other cultures?
KK:
You know, I don’t feel like I’m an expert. In my last book Metropolis Burning, I feel like I over-romanticized certain things, and now don’t feel great about some of the poems from that book.
NS:
I certainly didn’t feel that way when I read your book, by the way.
KK:
I won’t offer this as a panacea or anything, but I do think that for myself, having a knowledge of Polish history, of the city of Warsaw, and, you know, not only how it looks now, but how it looked in 1982, understanding somewhat how it looked in 1945 and in 1939, has helped me go beyond the superficial.
NS:
Yes, definitely.
It comes through—your personal connections and relationships, tying it to things, but then also you always, in the book can see your research behind it. It’s not like this heavy, dense text, but there’s, like, little references where you have history tucked in here and there, and so we see the history, we see the research in a way, behind the poem, and I think that’s really helpful and makes the poem much richer.
KK:
Okay, yeah. There’s my ghazal also.
NS:
I love that poem, too! It’s about the history of the English language.
KK:
Yeah, yeah. It’s the most research-heavy poem, and yet, I mean, there are plenty of things that I didn’t say that I could have said about the English language.
NS:
I think it’s just so much fun! I don’t know, did you have fun writing this? Because I feel like that while reading it, the playing with the language…
KK:
Yeah, when I was Indiana Poet Laureate, I remember physically cutting the ghazal into couplets. And then when doing a reading, I would farm out the couplets to people in the audience, and I’d call out the year, and then a person would read a couplet out loud.
And my friend Susan Shepherd who’s a linguist, when she was teaching at IU Indy, would use this poem in her History of the English Language class.
NS:
Nice!
KK:
It made these centuries of history more immediate for people. I was both trying to get at how the language has evolved, in part through conquests and wars, and how, as a global language English is crowding out other languages with fewer speakers.
In the poem, I say, “This language is a murderer disguised as Mickey Mouse.” I was thinking of the cultural hegemony of English, but also of the ways in which certain cultures are trying to keep their languages alive. For example, if you go to Wales, you’ll see the road signs in both Welsh and English, with Welsh on top, and then English, and, you know, there’s Welsh instruction in the schools. And so these languages that were nearly eradicated by English are pushing their way back. Yet every year, speakers of small languages die.
NS:
Yeah. It makes me think of the Indigenous languages that people are trying to save. And it’s also terrible that there are people in our country that don’t believe you should speak any language other than English. There is a certain group of people hellbent on whitewashing everything.
KK:
Right, and they want to try to enforce a monolingualism that will never be, you know. We’re at least a bilingual nation with English and Spanish, depending on where you are in the country.
I think what I was also hoping to get at in that poem is how anarchic language is, and how for all the efforts to subjugate it, or to control it, those efforts are always ultimately futile, you know?
NS:
That’s a good message at the end of the day, that they’re not going to be able to keep you down. I mean, my maternal grandpa would talk about how the part of Poland that he was in, which was sort of near Poznań, but out in the country, they were not allowed to speak Polish in the fields. They had to speak German.
We had no idea that he spoke German, but the one time I went to Europe, my sister and I were talking about going to Germany, and then he just said something in German, and we’re like, wait, what?
KK:
When was he born?
NS:
During World War I.
KK:
Right, so Poland was still divided then, so he was in the Prussian partition. Yeah, so, that makes sense.
NS:
Well, they tried, but they did not eradicate Polish!
KK:
They did not.
The Russian sector was really strict and had a strict policy of Russification for the schooling, the educational system, and so on.
And then, in the Austrian section…
NS:
This was where your family was from?
KK:
Well, it sort of depends, because the border’s shifted, but yes, for the most part.
NS:
I think that’s where my dad’s family was from as well.
KK:
A lot of people emigrated from that area to America because there was a lot of poverty, but the conventional wisdom is that because the Austro-Hungarian empire had to control this large, multilingual population with the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Austrians, the Serbs, etc., that it was harder for them to dominate as the Russians and Prussians did. But I have read more recently about the ways in which the peasantry was really exploited in that area, which led to famine.
NS:
So anyhow… Do you want to talk about anything that you’re working on currently?
KK:
Yeah. I’ve been writing quite a lot lately. Some of the work is dystopic, inspired by recent events, including one poem that started as a meditation on my writing desk [shows a porcelain-topped table that’s cream-colored with an ornate pattern of corncobs and flowers, made in the 1920s]. It was once my grandmother’s kitchen table, and it got me meditating on the 1930s and our current moment.
She was widowed when she was 34, and it’s kind of, history repeating, and so on.
NS:
Wow.
KK:
And then I have a poem coming out in the Southern Review.
NS:
Oh, nice!
KK:
It’s about Mexico City, which is another place that’s layered in time, and I wrote another one about this doll island, south of Mexico City, where people picked thousands of dolls from the trash and arranged them all over the island to ward off ill spirits.
NS:
Yeah, I’ve seen that! On TV, not in person.
Have you been there?
KK:
Yeah, it’s a homage to all the women who’ve disappeared, and no one is searching for them.
I’m writing poems, but, at the same time I’m trying to publish two books of translations.
They’re both under consideration at two different presses at the moment. So, I keep hoping that they will come out sooner rather than later, because they’re very different from each other, but they’re both wonderful books. One by Marta Eloy Cichocka is inspired by how AI shapes our understanding of. Its English title is, Image May Contain. The other one, by Krystyna Dąbrowska, is called Sorrowbalm, its name derived from an invented plant. I see the book as responding to griefs, both personal and cultural. It contains that bread poem that we read aloud at the end of our Pierogi Tour reading.
NS:
Oh, wow! That was such a good poem.
KK:
So my hope is that, maybe this year, they’ll both be accepted. So, we’ll see.
NS:
Any, upcoming trips to Poland, or…?
KK:
Yeah, I will be there in July because I’ve been invited to a Congress of Translators.
NS:
Okay, great! I guess that’s pretty much everything, except that…people wanna know…is there going to be another pierogi poetry reading, because I’ve had a bunch of people ask me!
(Editor’s note-last fall, along with writers Anya Spyra and Rachel Sahaidachny, we threw a ‘pierogi tour’ reading for about 60 or 70 people which featured homemade pierogi, along with music and poetry. Needless to say, it was a great success!)
KK:
I mean, remember the day of, when we were heating up all the food, and we were like, never again?
NS:
Yes! It was the craziest… I kept telling my mom, “I wish somebody was videotaping us,” because I have the smallest, teeniest, tiniest kitchen, and while my mom and I were frying up the pierogi, and, doing this and that, and putting the stuff into the oven, it was absolute madness. It was really funny but also really crazy. I don’t know if I can handle it again.
KK:
I am definitely open to it!
NS:
Okay, I will just put down, “to be continued…!”
Karen Kovacik is the author of two previous collections, Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture, a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets. A former Indiana Poet Laureate, she is Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University Indianapolis.
Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, a granddaughter of Polish and Silesian immigrants. She worked in the field of horticulture for many years, including 13 years as a grocery store florist, before becoming a professor of English and creative writing. In addition, she is the founder and editor in chief of The Indianapolis Review. Her work has been published in journals such as North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, ANMLY, and Tab Poetry Journal. Her debut book of poems, Water Castle, was published by Kelsay Books in the fall of 2024. You can find her poems, visual poetry, and visual art at http://www.nataliesolmer.com