A Conversation with Poets Jill Khoury and Sarah Stockton
Transcript:
Sarah Stockton:
Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Stockton and I'm here today with Jill Khoury, fellow poet and author of her new poetry collection, Earthwork, published by Switchback Books, with an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous cover. I also have a new book coming out. (We're launching around the same time.) My book's called The Scarecrow of My Former Self. It's published by MoonPath Press. Scarecrow focuses on the themes of chronic illness, loneliness, resilience, and grace. And now Jill, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your new collection?
Jill Khoury:
Oh, thank you so much. Hello, and welcome everyone. It is really good to be here. I am Jill Khoury. I am a poet, an editor, and a mixed media artist. Earthwork is my second full length collection with Switchback Books. And you can order this book by going to their website. This collection, Earthwork, explores, I would say, themes of mothers and daughters, childhood, family, grief, and transformation. And you'll probably hear a little bit more about that as we start to read poems.
SES:
Wonderful. Thank you. Jill and I talked over what we wanted to do today. And for our conversation, we thought we'd each read a poem from our books, which we partly chose for the way they seem to speak to each other's work. And then we'll respond to a general question we came up with that arose in response to these poems. And we will do that twice. So I'm going to ask you, Jill, to lead us off.
JK:
Absolutely. I would love to. This is a poem called "All Aspects of the Dream are Aspects of The Dreamer." And after this poem, we're going to discuss Sarah's poem and this poem together and we're going to talk about dreams. So here we go.
all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer
I spy silverware in the trees. / Pots and pans weigh down
the low branches of the post oaks. / She's hung whisks, metal teardrops /deflated
shapes knock together / manic kudzu - My feet snag, and it all feels so real
here's the entrance to her trailer inside a mouth of vines / I hear that metal
rattle again and look up ? She's rigged a sort of awning, with knives pointed
downward: cleaver, parer, deboning. / bent screen door almost comes off in my hand
when I push / inside is dim, and my feet slog over the mauve carpet she hates
I mean hated it's swampy in here, with no AC and the blinds drawn /
on the TV an adman shills rare coins / my mother is perched on the couch,
dying properly, wrapped like a mole beast in a baby blue blanket / one claw protrudes ///
My therapist asks me what does dying properly mean
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JK:
And now Sarah is going to read a poem that really resonates with this one, which I think is funny because we didn't even know each other when we wrote these poems. And it just so happens that Sarah wrote "Dream State in Red." Would you like to read your poem?
SES:
Yes. Thanks, Jill.
Dream State in Red
Every part of a dream, Jung believed,
contains something of oneself.
The scorpion in a sunlit corner. A bowl of rotting fruit.
A faceless man pacing endlessly, hospital corridors in the dark.
A small child in a red dress, the virus in her, your, veins.
You are the swords in your spine. You are the pain healer.
Spilling potions from Jung’s red book.
You are what is what is swallowed up.
JK:
Wonderful.
SES:
Thank you!
JK:
We were talking and we collaboratively came up with some questions about dreaming. And so these questions include, how do dreams and their relationship to the body play a part in our collections, and how do they inspire us? So would you like to go first or should I go first?
SES:
I'll go first.
JK:
Okay.
SES:
I rarely have positive healing dreams. So often for me, morning time is a relief. While dreams have been keeping me company all night, but they're not inspiring me or encouraging. They're very dark most of the time. However, during the daytime and in my writing, there's something that... There's a kind of dream state I can enter into. And I know readers and poets will understand this. It becomes almost an altered state. Not hallucinogenic, but just something a little more enhanced than the kind of dreary existence of having a chronic illness. So dreaming for me is something that I both resist and then try to almost use to my advantage. I try to work with a kind of lucid dreaming. So that's what this poem is trying to get at, that you are what's in the dream, but you are also more than the dream.
JK:
I love that. You are also more than the dream. It's kind of helpful when our dreams take us down to dark places. Yeah.
SES:
Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your... I noticed that you have four poems in your collection all with the same title around dreaming, and I wondered how that came about. Did you feel like you just wanted to keep saying more about that process, or what happened?
JK:
When I started writing poems for this collection, it was very soon after my mother's suicide, and it was absolutely devastating, of course. It just exploded my reality. All of sudden things were possible in my world that I just hadn't conceived of before. And I think my dreams were a way for my unconscious to start processing this information.
And so it began as almost a note-taking because these dreams were so strange and vivid. And I had about, I don't know, eight or nine dreams that I jotted down little notes about because they really haunted me because they were just so unusual. And so I think that the aspects of the Dreamer poems, they sort of speak to this dream state that I was in, following her death. It was like dissociation, not quite... Everything was not quite real. There's memories that I can't get back, things that I don't remember of that year. And so I think that kind of magic, realist, dreamy state pervades this collection, because I'm trying to explore something that has almost, I don't know how to say it, but made me into a new version of myself because there is so much grief, if that makes sense.
SES:
It does.
JK:
Thanks.
SES:
That's beautiful, Jill. Thank you. The poem you read too is also so visceral, tactile.
JK:
Oh, yeah. The landscape... The landscape in central Georgia is just very different from where I grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and it really struck me. It's so different and strange. It was strange to me, and so it had to make its way into the poem.
SES:
Yes. Really, it permeates the poem. (pause) Are you ready to go on with our next two poems?
JK:
Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.
SES:
So I think you're going to lead us off with, "Here, It's Eternal August."
JK:
Sure.
here, It's eternal august
amid the ferns
lilies, venus
fly traps I pull
petals from orchids-
one, one, one
i brush the hairs
on a fly trap
so its mouth
closes on
nothing
i prune roses
with my teeth
swallow blood
scrawl a letter
in my palm
wash it off
in the black water
hallelujah
for the bracing
clasp-
cold rush
reminds me
i'm here
and she is
where?
storm shivers trees
trees beat siding
and I think
it's the clatter
of her
arrival
humid kitchen
i break
cups and dishes
against the enamel
sink-
black & white & red
one, one, one
in the wet dirt
road i sit/
attend to
power line hum
& cow calls
from the next
farm
when i laugh
gears grind
inevitable night /
run me over
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JK:
For our second pair of poems, Sarah's going to read another one. She's going to read, "4:00 AM."
SES:
Thanks, Jill. That made me shiver, that poem.
4:00 AM.
It starts with the coyotes
down by Duckweed Pond, yipping
a feral concertina.
Then the trees shift, rustling witches
in their living dresses, twigs rubbing
against branches like broken hip joints.
The geese took flight hours before,
ahead of the storm. I heard them go.
I'm waiting now, window open.
Light on the elder tree transitions
from purple bruise to moss. I pull off
my shirt, shuddering, sweat dripping.
The weathervane spins in raucous screeches
and the cat is under the house, tail wrapped,
scenting the incoming tide when again,
something shifts. It's raining. The solitude
of night's kingdom takes its tongue
from my mouth, flees in the receding dark.
____________________________________________
JK:
That really gives me chills too. You really managed to evoke quite an atmosphere with all of your image details. My goodness.
SES:
I actually wrote this at 4:00 AM.
JK:
That whole thing? Wow.
SES:
There's a lot of insomnia (laughs)
I mean, this is cleaner. The first draft though, came right out. I could hear coyotes, it was windy. I heard some geese go by earlier in the evening. It started raining. So I thought, "Okay, there must be a reason I'm awake at 4:00 AM."
JK:
You might as well write!
SES:
Usually I'm pretty incoherent in the middle of the night, but this one worked out.
JK:
The coyotes are haunting. We have our collaborative question about these poems, and the question we came up with was, how have the experiences of grief, trauma and loneliness impacted the process of writing poems? So I think in both of our shivery poems, you can feel the isolation. You can feel the loneliness.
SES:
Yes
JK:
So for me-
SES:
I think this question permeates our entire collections. Yes?
JK:
I think it does. I think it does.
Going back to the idea of writing poems, and how does grief and loneliness influence that, I had a lot of time where I was writing quite fluidly in the beginning, when I think my grief was new to me, and then years went on and I couldn't. At some point, something shifted. And I think when I made this little rough collection of poems into a book form, just to see what it would look like, I got so scared by the idea of telling this really vulnerable story. And honestly, I was still really actively grieving years later. And so this is why Earthwork took 10 years from start to finish, because there were a lot of years where I was like, "This is so heavy. I'm still feeling impacted by it. How can I ever send this out into the world? I can't let it become an art object yet because I'm not done feeling it."
SES:
Wow. Yeah. That speaks very profoundly to me, Jill. I had a similar process. The title poem of my book was published I think 10 years ago. And I don't even think I realized at the time I was writing about illness. I didn't even understand the image or the title completely. And it was over the course of time. I have to write very slowly because of being sick. So over the course of time, I felt like the symbology was revealing itself to me. And like you, I find it difficult to even talk about chronic illness with people I know. The experience of it, never mind putting it down on paper. And I feel like in some ways, I'm still hiding in my book. And that there are things where I know there's a phrase in a poem, and I'll think, "Wow, that represents so much more than I'm actually saying." Of course, that's the gift of poetry. So in a way, I feel very revealed, and yet I also feel like it's still a gloss. It's still...
JK:
Right. Yes. That makes sense. Tip of the iceberg, kind of.
SES:
Exactly. But I think like you, it felt... I don't want to speak for you, but it feels like an important part of the process, to translate this experience onto the page and shape it, and then send it out.
JK:
I mean, well, it's amazing because we both started with pain, and we both made art. And this was really... I mean, it was really hard, but it was really transformative to tackle such a big subject.
SES:
I agree.
All right. Are we good? Shall we move on?
JK:
Sure.
SES:
Okay. I mean, we could talk all day.(both laugh)
JK:
I know. I feel like that subject, grief and the process of writing poems and loneliness, I wonder, there are probably a lot of people out there who could relate to that.
SES:
I think so. Certainly as an editor,- we're both editors. We've read a lot of poetry that's been sent to us, and it's a repeating theme.
JK:
Common theme. Yes
SES:
I think it'd be nice if you read a poem that just... I think you've chosen a poem from your collection that you would like to read, not necessarily in conversation with mine, but to share with us.
JK:
Yeah. I chose a poem that represents... It's a touchstone of the collection. It touches on some themes that are prevalent throughout. And it's called,
Curtain, Colic, Bassinet, Calf
the infant’s howl strafes
the mother's earthwork
the mother's mare has flown
into the eaves and nested
the infant is captured in a rogue wave
out back / the cornfield crackles
the mother swaddles her own head
in curtains / one eye on the twilight
the infant is the webbed variation
in cipher/ whipped and willow
the mother battles disequilibrium
her eyes remote / her taut, facsimile smile
the infant's movement is a snarl up
unhinged, her crisis face
the mother's bloom drains southward
the skin on her torso starts to prickle
in the cell of their new house, a cornice
cracks / each day, the branches advance
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JK:
I actually chose this poem because it is kind of a big representation of the themes of a great love, having shared a body of the mother and daughter, but also a conflict that is starting pretty early in life. And that really resonates throughout the rest of the collection, from the speaker's childhood, all the way up through her adulthood.
SES:
Really powerful. It's a poem to sit with and read again and again. Every time I read it, something new comes out.
JK:
That's the beauty of language, really.
SES:
Especially a distilled poem like that, where we're not being given so much information that we don't need (in order) to invest ourselves in it.
JK:
Right.
SES:
I like when there's space so that we're invited into the poem like that.
JK:
Thanks. I like writing poems where there's a little mystery. It's not always plain.
SES:
Right.
JK:
You also chose a poem, didn't you, from your collection that you would like to read?
SES:
I did. I'm going to read the title poem. It's a shape poem.
It's supposed to mimic the scarecrow getting down and walking around.
The Scarecrow of my Former Self
The scarecrow of my former self
dislodges from her pole
and walks on stilts, crossing
untouched over roadside ditches
filled with mud, blood and broken glass.
she’s a straw dancer
with raven claws, rustling cloak
and apple blossom grace.
She stalks the fields of my memories
scattering swarms of regret.
Poised on the horizon, barn-wood limbs
outstretched, beckoning.
Why is she wearing that ridiculous hat?
I must go see. The crows fly to greet us,
as we waltz against the thunderous sky.
JK:
What a banger of a poem to end the book on. My goodness. No, seriously. I love the scarecrow's journey throughout the book. I mean, she starts out in the beginning quite differently, and wow, look where she ends up.
SES:
I wanted to leave (the reader) with some hope. I also feel like when I wrote this, it was a promise to myself, which I probably didn't even understand at the time.
JK:
I love the image that she's walking on stilts and she has barn wood limbs. This is a serious scarecrow. This is not your ordinary scarecrow.
SES:
Well, and the interesting thing, Jill, is at one point, I was, (as we do), I was googling scarecrows. And the image first came to me because my son, interestingly enough, had told me about a dream he’d had about a scarecrow. And I took off from that. And later, I was remembering scarecrows I had made when I was a child or at Halloween, and I was looking them up, and they're pretty universally either androgynous or male, and they're either scary or a Halloween cartoonish figure. And so I thought, "Well, I never saw it that way. It was me. It was me walking around." So it was an empowering thing to reclaim this image.
JK:
Love that.
SES:
Thanks!
Well, this was really fun!
JK:
This was fun.
SES:
How about you flash us your book one more time and tell us where-
JK:
Well, this is Earthwork (holds up the book to the screen) and it came out from Switchback Books. You can order it on the Switchback Books website.
SES:
And it's available now or it's pre-order right now?
JK:
Oh, it's available already.
And how about you?
SES:
My book is the Scarecrow of my Former Self, MoonPath Press, and it is available now. There's an official launch with the press on April 7th.
JK:
Excellent. Thank you so much, Sarah, for sharing this time with me.
SES:
Thank you, Jill, for answering the call when I said, "Hey, do you want to try this?"
JK:
Oh, I think it's fun!
SES:
It is fun (both smiling)
JK:
I think it's a poetic experiment.
Sarah Stockton:
Nods-
Thank you to everyone who is watching and took the time to go on this journey with us. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Jill Khoury:
Thank you! Bye
March, 2024