Finding an audience as a poet is often fraught and can feel more like a competition instead of a community-building enterprise. In the spirit of collaboration, Laurie and I decided to forgo a traditional interview format and interview each other about our recently released/forthcoming books. What follows is our conversation regarding our newest collections and what we got out of writing them, reading each other’s work, and what we hope our readers discover in these books.
Amie Whittemore: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this collaborative interview with me, Laurie! It’s been such a pleasure reading your latest release, That Infinite Roar (Gyroscope Press, 2023). In your own words, what is this book about?
Laurie Kuntz: If I had to pick one word to describe the work in my new book, That Infinite Roar, I would say, epiphanies—it is about that life light bulb going off and giving realizations to aging relationships, parenting, friendship, sisterhood, and living in concert with nature. The title itself suggests an announcement of light, love, acceptance, and all the light bulb moments we are fortunate enough to witness and to be a part of.
And thank you for the invitation! It’s been a fun process. Now, tell me about your new book, Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). How would you describe it?
AW: This is such a hard question—why did we choose it again? I feel like my answer has changed with time as my understanding of the poems has evolved through the editing process with my fabulous editor, Christine Stroud at Autumn House. Some life changes have reshaped my understanding of certain autobiographical moments in the poems as well. Which is all to say, I don’t think there’s one answer to what this book–or any book, for that matter–is about, and that the meaning is made by the reader (even when the reader is the author!).
Okay, I’ll stop dodging the question: I think Nest of Matches is about life cycles, and how experience is less a closed loop than a spiral that may cover similar territory but at different angles as it loops out and out. It is about the cycles of love, of moonlight, of getting to know oneself through relationship to others as well as to place. It’s about how dreams can be guides in this spiraling path. It’s about repetition as a means of discovery.
Now that we’ve covered what our books are about, I’d love to hear more about your process. How has the process of compiling a poetry collection evolved for you over the years? How has the process with this most recent book differed from previous collections?
LK: My first book, Somewhere in the Telling, has many poems about my experience working with Southeast Asian refugees bound for resettlement after the Vietnam War. At that time, I considered myself a political poet. However, I also became a mother at the age of 36 and that is when my poetry opened up to a whole new political baseline. I learned how to let go of poems.
As a poet writing a first book, I wanted everything I wrote to be included in my book. As I evolved as a poet, I learned how to let go…maybe that also had to do with being a parent…the whole letting go philosophy. Not every poem belongs in a collection. I like to think of a collection of poems as poems that are in concert with each other, that there is a link to the overall ambience of the work. Sometimes a poem just does not fit with the voices of the other poems and I needed to learn how to free that poem to the universe or for my next book.
What has it been like for you, putting together Nest of Matches?
AW: First, I love that idea of a collection as a poetry collection featuring poems that “are in concert with each other.” That definitely resonates with me and my process as well. For me, the first stage of developing a collection is always printing poems out and reading both for themes and connections across poems—aka, figuring out the songs that belong in the concert!—as well as for what feels finished and what needs work. For Nest of Matches, I began organizing the poems using a set pattern: a poem based on waking life, a dream poem, and a moon poem. My editor (Christine Stroud) was able to usefully disrupt this pattern and move toward an ordering of the poems that feels more organic and thematic; less rigid, more leaping. I think that is the main difference between this collection and my prior two: that the final order came from outside, that I needed a more collaborative approach to find this book’s shape.
In addition to thinking through how That Infinite Roar differs from your earlier work, I’m curious to know how writing it challenged you: what was the hardest poem(s) for you to write?
LK: Love poems are the most difficult. Solely because love has many layers and like an onion, those layers can generate tears. Every love poem of mine is bittersweet because all love is bittersweet. As much as I love movies, Hollywood has ruined love for us mortals… Hollywood has romanticized love to the point of it being unrealistic. No one wakes up in the morning and wants to kiss someone who has morning breath. Love is not moons, Junes, and Ferris wheels. Love is a project in the making. Sometimes you have all the tools you need for the building of this project, and sometimes not. So, short answer, love poems are the most difficult poems to write because to be honest in a love poem, you sometimes have to be mean and unforgiving.
What about you? What poems were challenging to write in your book?
AW: First, I also find love poems challenging—for all the reasons you mention, along with the inherent vulnerability in writing about love—it lays the heart and its desires bare.
Beyond that, I’m not sure any one poem was particularly challenging as much as I found myself returning to questions I (apparently!) haven’t answered for myself as a person/poet. I find myself circling what feels like the same ground, sometimes through the same images, as a writer. I have written what feels like countless poems about people and places I’ve lost over the years. I find myself returning to certain words and images—like meadows and ghosts—with a frequency that sometimes feels meditative, sometimes compulsive.
However, I also think there are useful, even necessary repetitions across my work. My mentor, the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, once told me that I would keep writing if writing was my means of making sense of the world. Obviously, there are parts of life that resist complete understanding: the nature of love, the nature of self, the complexities of the nonhuman life with which we share existence. To continue to write about these mysteries is to recommit to curiosity, is to humble myself to life’s lessons. In other words, I am so thankful for my poems, and the way they keep instructing me on what I don’t yet know.
Let’s move on from the hard stuff and talk about what we love about our books! “My Wisteria” and “Gifting the Maracuja” are my favorite in your collection; can you tell me more about what inspired these poems?
LK: I love wisteria vines. They were abundant where I lived in Japan. I watched them evolve from vine to flower to bareness in their seasons. As I was going through my own personal aging seasons, I thought there was a connection between women aging and this abundant flowering vine—what I love about wisteria is that just when it is at its barest, the flowering season arrives and it comes alive with flower and color. For me, I feel that even as women age, we can still flower.
As for “Gifting the Maracuja,” maracuja is passion fruit. In writing, I often keep the names of trees and flowers in the language where I first learned the name of the flower or fruit. I was living in Brazil when I first saw the passion flower vine, called maracuja. I tried to grow this vine in Florida, where I currently reside (for better or worse) and just like the poem says, it got stringy and it was not thriving, so I gave it to a friend who lived a few blocks from me and had a sunnier patch of land. I gave it away and forgot about it. Years later, the neighbor had moved, and I was walking past her house now inhabited by an older man. I saw passion fruit growing and commented that I loved that fruit. He never heard of the fruit and knew nothing about it, so he told me to pick all I wanted. I picked many, and then had the epiphany that I was picking the fruit from the small vine I had given to my neighbor years ago! Hence the full circle of giving and getting back; hence this poem.
Okay, it’s my turn to pick a favorite! “Another Queer Pastoral That Isn’t a Time Machine” is one of my favorite poems in your collection; can you tell me more about what inspired it and its form (two columns, no punctuation)?
AW: That is one of my favorite poems in the book too! It is one of those poems that contains images that echo across my work as its primary setting is the pasture behind the farmhouse where I grew up. The pasture was my sanctuary: a place I played as a child, a place I visited for solace as a teenager. A place that continues to visit me in dreams, even though my parents moved when our landlady died and the pasture, auctioned separately from the house, is now someone’s well-tended backyard and not the wild, untamed place it was for me with its long grasses and deep quiet. The poem arose out of a yearning for that place, a yearning that will (it seems) always haunt me; since then, I’ve never lived somewhere where I had unfettered access to land into which I can vanish. The poem is asking questions of that feeling: could I disappear then because I was a child or was it something essential to that place?
As for the form, it was a longer, more narrative piece in its first iteration and I wanted to let more air in, I wanted it to be more of a mosaic than a landscape portrait. So, through some experimentation, I landed on this form, which isn’t quite contrapuntal, but certainly adjacent to that form.
As we wrap up our conversation, please share what events you’ll be doing to support your book; where can fans find you this coming year?
LK: I love the concept that there are fans out there. I am excited that I do have some things brewing in terms of readings and interviews, both live and online. I am thrilled to be invited to read for Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches via a zoom reading in October of 2024.
I love Alison Hurwitz’s Well Versed Words Zoom Poetry Reading Program, which she began during the pandemic so that poets did not feel alienated and without a community. I will be reading from my new book, That Infinite Roar, on Well Versed Words in February of 2025.
In the beginning of 2024, I will be featured in StoryTeller, with an interview and a sampling of narrative poems. I am working with Books and Books, which is a local and very popular bookstore in Coral Gables, Florida to do a live reading in the new year. Other interviews coming up are with Two Sylvias Press and with One Minnesota Crone Blog. All of these events will be posted on my website as the dates approach: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com.
And what about you, Amie, where can fans find you?
AW: I also love the idea of there being fans out there! First up in 2024, I’ll be at AWP, then touring to a few places around the country this spring including Chicago, San Antonio, Austin, and St. Louis. Dates and locations can be found at my website: www.amiewhittemore.com.
Laurie Kuntz’s books are: That Infinite Roar, Gyroscope Press, Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press, and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press. Simple Gestures, won Texas Review’s Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won Blue Light Press’s Chapbook Contest. She’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and other journals. More at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books) and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.