AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Donika Kelly and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Desire Paths, Therapy, and Pleasure

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Donika Kelly:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Desire Path: Near Equinox”)

Blame Jupiter, its brightest moons.
Blame the scapular ache, a cry
I store in my wing—where my wing
would be. 

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Cindy Juyoung Ok, and I’m feeling lucky to cast a bit of poetry and poetics into the day. I’m super delighted to speak with Donika Kelly, who joins from Iowa City. Donika is the author of two poetry collections, The Renunciations, which Rita Dove called “poetry of the highest order,” no big deal, Bestiary, selected by Nikky Finney, who wrote, “Bestiary’s lesson is complicated, and also simple. Love can be hunted down.” The lessons of Donika’s poetry are infinite. Using erasures or Greek myths, writing from terror or travel, she never approaches any event, state, or image in only one way. Today we get to hear from another kind of multitude, a new series of poems featured in the June issue of Poetry. Donika, welcome to the podcast.

Donika Kelly: Thank you, Cindy. I’m so excited to join you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes! Your new poems are so attuned to sound. It’s kind of perfect for a podcast setting. And specifically sound and sense in the natural world, and especially the water. Have you been approaching and engaging with those spaces in a new or particular way lately?

Donika Kelly: I have been spending a lot of time recently at the water. I’ve been taking some research trips to do like, some whale watching, mostly, preferably, from the coast, which is tricky, because sometimes, one can’t see the whales from the coast. But moving into those space, I don’t know, it’s brought water more to the foreground of some of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So why particularly the coasts?

Donika Kelly: Going out on the boats feels complicated. I’ve been on some whale watching trips, really wonderful naturalists. So like, the Dolphin Fleet out in Provincetown. But then in other places, it feels a little bit more touristy. And it feels complicated to be adding more sound to the water, when that is the way that the whales are communicating. So it’s like, the whales and dolphins have to sing more loudly. You know, it’s like, they’re yelling through the water. And people will say, and I imagine to some degree, this is right, that the whales are habituated to the boats and the boats, they don’t find the boats disruptive. But that seems to me sort of fundamentally, it’s like, the boats are disruptive. They have just been disruptive for a long time, so. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And there’s always sound pollution of humans interacting with a natural environment where humans aren’t meant to be.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And there are actually a lot of marine sounds taken from passive acoustic recorders. I’m sure you’ve gotten to explore some of those sounds in person. But I was wondering if you would be interested to hear a recording of a whale together? This is a humpback whale.

Donika Kelly: I would love that. Let’s do it.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Donika Kelly: Wow. That’s amazing. Oh my gosh, so strange.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s very loud.

Donika Kelly: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it’s very, it feels very deep, it feels guttural.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. Something so lovely about sitting on the coast and looking at the water, because like, as a person who can’t swim, I’m like, this is where I am supposed to be. (LAUGHS) And the whales are where they are supposed to be. And there’s something really sort of magical getting to observe such large animals from so far away. It’s like, oh, no, they are actually so big. And the distance communicates that in some ways, for me, more powerfully than being on the boat.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Before we approach your new poems, Donika, and where you are now, let’s talk about your first book, Bestiary. So this came out in 2016. It was selected by Nikky Finney. How do you look back on that first book?

Donika Kelly: A bestiary is a medieval compendium of mythological and real animals. They are often presented in a small narrative. And it’s a Christian text, kind of, they get kind of weird and are delightful in their strangenesses. But they are meant to offer a kind of moral lesson or be sort of offer like, some ways of thinking about morality. And I think the, maybe the speaker across the collection is trying to figure out what is her sort of moral setting.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You mentioned in a conversation with Nikky Finney that as a child in Los Angeles, you sensed this juncture of tectonic plates that you were living on top of. That even the ground was sort of unstable. So how did this first book Bestiary come to exist in relation to place? And how sort of aware were you about it setting as you wrote it?

Donika Kelly: That conversation with Nikky was so interesting, because I learned so much about the book. There’s like what we make when we’re by ourselves, and then how we come to understand the thing that we made when we are in conversation with other people about the work. Part of what the first, like, major movement of the book is addressing, I think, somewhat obliquely, is familial violence. When that speaker is an “I,” she is a mythological animal. When the speaker—sometimes the speaker is a “she.” There’s a lot of distance in the first part of the book. But it’s thinking about family and violence, and I think in some small ways, desirability, or like how that speaker understands her body. And the latter half is the speaker trying to—the speaker is going through a breakup. And so there are these love poems, “Love Poem: Centaur,” “Love Poem: Siren,” “Love Poem: Griffin,” etcetera. So I didn’t think of the book as being about place. And it was through conversations with Nikky and some other folks that I was like, “Oh, I’m writing a lot about LA and a lot about California.” But I think it makes sense that that first collection would be thinking about place. Not on purpose, though.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Sometimes our minds have maps that we’re not conscious of.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. Well, and it’s just like how poems have logics and intelligences that are hidden from us. And only later do we realize, “Oh, yeah, that’s what that poem

Cindy Juyoung Ok: In community, in conversation.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. So yeah, so I feel like putting together a book also does that. It’s like, “Oh, this is my mind revealed to me.” And I, living in California was a lot. Like a lot of things happened while I was there, and in that first part of my life. And so I think it makes sense that intuitively, that’s what the first book would sort of move through, especially in that first, like, sort of major movement of the book.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your second book, The Renunciations, used a workbook that was important to your process in writing the work, The Courage to Heal Workbook by Laura Davis, and Los Angeles comes up in that book as well. And your collection is always using language in that healing, resulting in poems that are almost a kind of evidence of that courage to heal. This speaking happened, it was created. How does your poetry in that collection or otherwise serve as an artifact or measure of process, whether in therapy or in life?

Donika Kelly: That’s a great question. So The Renunciations is a collection in which there’s one speaker. Well, that’s not true. There are like two speakers. But there’s one main speaker, and she is in the process of going through a divorce, and also is dealing with the reemergence of memories of having been abused as a child, sexually abused as a child. And when I felt done with Bestiary, when I felt like the manuscript was done, and this was like, maybe like a year and a half before it was accepted, was chosen for the Cave Canem Prize, I thought to myself, I wanted to be more present in the work. I wanted my speakers to be more like me, like more recognizably like me. I wanted to be direct. But right before Bestiary came out, I was living in California, I was adjuncting, I was very tired. (LAUGHS) I was incredibly exhausted, because adjunctive is exhausting. And I was without a therapist for the first time in maybe 15 years, something like that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Donika Kelly: And I needed some kind of support, because being in California actually activated a lot of old feelings and trauma. So I turned to The Courage to Heal. I didn’t, again, I didn’t have health insurance, really, like I had, like, catastrophic health insurance. I don’t know if you know what that is, but it’s something. Yeah. But I just like, there wasn’t money for therapy. And so, I realized I needed that support. And there’s a really good scaffolding in The Courage to Heal Workbook. So there’s The Courage to Heal that’s a book, and then the workbook is the companion. And so that was really helpful because it really helped me begin to name a process and to begin to relate more to my work as process, that the work itself was not a product, but was like, was a practice. And that practice runs alongside being in therapy. It’s not therapy, it doesn’t do quite the same thing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And actually, therapy is where I go to, like, say the thing that’s hard to say. And then once I’ve said it, I can start to figure out how I feel about it. And then figuring out what I, how I feel about the hard thing, or the complicated thing, becomes some of the work that I do in the poems. So, after Bestiary came out in 2016, I got a job in Western New York. And I had a great therapist there. She’s really, really wonderful. And I saw her every week. And we just like really did a lot of close work around my experience of childhood sexual abuse. And that made it possible then to do different kinds of work in the poems that would become The Renunciations.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It sounds almost like poetry was a meta text, where the conversation in therapy was one way of putting into words certain feelings, certain experiences, and being able to create a narrative of your life. And then poetry came out of reflecting on that text, but also having a new relationship to it mediated through your feeling.

Donika Kelly: I think that’s exactly right. Because in the poems in The Renunciations, I’m not retelling what happened. I’m not like, “This is the narrative of what happened to me.” It’s more, in my experience of writing the poems, how does this sit, why does this sit at the center of my life, why does this experience sit at the center of my life in the way that it does? And do I want it to? Can I move it?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And the answer is, I do want to move it from the center. And I can do that a little bit.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. And with support as well.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. With a lot of support. The support from my friends, the support from, you know, people in my family, and with the support of poetry and poems. I mean, like, The Renunciations, my experience of having published The Renunciations has just been one that’s been really generous. People have been really generous and really kind, have been careful. And I just feel like, so grateful to have experienced that measure of care from the poetry community and from readers.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The book is so not a product of catharsis. It’s so measured and thoughtful, and its languages of a world that’s being built, not just reflecting an existing world, but building a new one in that book.

Donika Kelly: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I think that thinking about the relationship between therapy and poetry is really generative. And 15 years before that workbook is a long time. Did that give you tools that helped you into that process and into the healing?

Donika Kelly: (LAUGHS) I’m laughing because it absolutely did. I had really wonderful therapists leading up to the writing of these poems. But it really felt like I was going through levels like on a video game.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Leveling up.

Donika Kelly: You know, it was like, “Oh, maybe you should practice being vulnerable with your friends.” And I was like, “Leave me alone.” Or, “Maybe you’re having panic attacks because of your family.” And I was like, “Leave me alone.” But then I’ll be like, “Okay, this seems right.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And I’ll be like, okay, I’m gonna try to have healthier boundaries with my family, I’m going to try to be more vulnerable with my friends, I’m going to try to figure out how to have a good breakup. I’m going to try to figure out how to, you know, engage in conflict, in a way that’s caring, and not that, you know, like, in my family, there’s a lot of like, “Let’s burn it to the ground,” you know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Donika Kelly: So I really felt like I was getting to, like, I had done such good work, and I was feeling really good about the work I had done. And then it was like, oh, here’s the big boss.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: You know, like, here’s like the final villain. (LAUGHS) And it’s not true,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The moments of resistance

Donika Kelly: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: leading up to it.

Donika Kelly: And so like, when I first started working with my therapist in Western New York—her name is Heather—I remember saying to her that I did not want to do this work. I was like, my preference would be to take the memories, burn them to ash, put the ashes in a trash or in a coffee can, I think is what I said, bury the coffee can and then salt the earth. I was like, I don’t want to deal with this.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You’re thorough. You’re thorough.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, I was like, let’s get it out of here. But, you know, the poems were coming. And I don’t think the poems would have come in the way that they did, if I hadn’t done the work in therapy. And I think I’m also very lucky that like, talk therapy works for me, I’m an external processor, I really like talking about myself and about my feelings.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, and maybe the last thing I’ll say about that is, one of the things that I got to in the process of working with my therapist, and working with Heather, was a place of tenderness for myself, for myself as a child, but also for like all of my selves, between like the beginning of that experience and the present in which I was writing those poems, that I could be careful, I could be tender, I could create the safe spaces, I could create that sense of security that I lacked as a child.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The collapsing of time gives you a sort of power as an adult.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then I could reassure myself. Lots of folks ask about writing about, like, working with traumatic material, right, and with traumatic memories. And the biggest thing that I learned is that I could just stop. I was like, nobody’s gonna make me do it. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: You know, it’s just me. So I could actually be the person in charge of how that experience went. (MUSIC PLAYING) That was such a game changer. It just ended up being so much gentler, and so much softer than I thought possible. And that was maybe like the biggest gift of the process.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s really lovely. And I’m sure, the product of not only understanding yourself and your past, but also understanding it in community the same way you mentioned, being able to understand your book through Nikky Finney’s conversation with you, being able to understand your memories in your past through those connections and those practices.

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, let’s get to your graceful and new poem “Desire Path: Sequoia.” This title, “Desire Path,” also repeats in the sequence in another poem we’ll hear. Would you share about the state and making of these poems and read “Desire Path: Sequoia” for us?

Donika Kelly: Of course, Maybe I’ll say just like one thing before reading the poem, which is I’ve been really interested in desire paths, which is, there’s like a paved, there’s often like a paved path, and then there’s the shortcut that people will take across the grass. And sometimes that shortcut is taken so often that it becomes its own sort of clearly marked path through the grass.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Demarcated.

Donika Kelly: And that’s called a desire path. Because there was something about that path that felt more desirable than the paved path. And I’ve just been interested in that as a, as a concept. What that has to do with this poem I, maybe we’ll, we’ll find out together in our conversation. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: So, okay, so this is “Desire Path: Sequoia.”

(READS POEM)

Today I see the faces in everything:
the trees across the street, the clouds

in Ansel Adams’s The Golden Gate
Before the Bridge, San Francisco,

California. In the picture, I’m not hugging
the sequoia; I’m showing the woman

behind the camera I am small, young,
that I’ve always been vulnerable

to fire, and I am smiling to know this.
I am holding my arms perpendicular

to the plane of my body, which is parallel
to the plane of the tree, the tree

between my arms, outstretched,
and in so doing I am saying to the woman

behind the camera: You too are small, young,
you have always been vulnerable to fire.

In taking the picture, she says: I agree.
You are small. The picture is on a screen

in a hotel room. The woman behind the camera
a figment of memory, her face smudged,

imprecise. There is pleasure in planes
gone to silt, in time (as with water, as with wind)

doing its sedimentary work. Pleasure
in what’s past—the feeling of the tree’s

rough bark, its trunk as whole
between my arms as the Golden Gate,

through either peninsula, running
into ocean under only one horizon—

pleasure in not knowing (fire, steel,
grief) what’s yet to come.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Donika Kelly: So it’s funny to read that because it’s like, I think I know what I want to say, what I wanted to say about the poem, and then I read it and I was like, oh, there’s all this other stuff. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It has a life of its own.

Donika Kelly: Well, one of the things is that I was in Seattle last summer on a research trip, which involves standing on the coast and looking at the water and doing some, a little bit of whale watching on the boat, which felt complicated. But I saw at the Museum of History & industry, MOHAI, in Seattle, there was an Ansel Adams exhibit. And there was a picture of the Golden Gate before the bridge. And I just never, I just didn’t know that was the name of the body of water, or like the sort of geographical

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, Golden Gate

Donika Kelly: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: is not the bridge, but the body of water. And Golden Gate Bridge came after that body of water’s naming.

Donika Kelly: I was like, tell me something! This is thrilling.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: (LAUGHS) I really felt like a little bit astonished. And the photograph is so beautiful. And I was like, oh, right, this is the way to see this. Like without this, it’s like maybe the path that I desired was one where there was no bridge. But Golden Gate is such a dope name. Like, this is the Golden Gate, it comes through these two peninsulas, it flows out into the Pacific. I was like, “This is amazing.” I mean, that was part of the reason that I was out there. I mean, part of the work also was standing on the coast and being near the ocean. And also on that particular trip, being a bit harrowed by Mount Rainier, was just like to orient myself to my smallness. Right? To being human, to being able to effectuate some small change, negative, positive, neutral, you know what I mean? Like that like, I have an impact, like, my life has some small impact on the earth, but that, in the grand scheme, I’m quite small. And that photo actually contributed to that. Because for thousands of years, millions of years, I don’t know, the Golden Gate did not have a bridge.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And the poem describes so well the experience of viewing a meaningful photograph. And the way photography offers that moment, but also, having that moment be interacted with in its future. It reminds me of Camera Lucida, the Barthes book about the kind of nature of photography. There’s this perfect photograph of his mother, the Winter Garden photograph that he talks about. He finds it after her death, and he says it really indicates her exact essence, even though it’s her as a child before he was born. And he writes about the photo, but he declares he’ll never print the photo or show it because that would ruin its perfection in some way. It would just become a normal picture to somebody else, because it’s such a special picture to him. So its power is in the delicacy in private. And in this poem, you’re sort of letting the reader into the privacy of the photograph. But also, we don’t see the photograph.

Donika Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. And there is like, as you were talking, I was like, oh, right, there’s this other photo. It’s like, oh, yeah, we’re talking about Ansel Adams, this is great. I was like, oh right, I was actually looking at this other photograph.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your photo.

Donika Kelly: And just like what it brought forward. And I was at the National Park, Sequoia National Park. And I was with the woman who is now my ex-wife. And we were having a good time. I think we were both just like, so thrilled by how big the sequoias were. Like, they are so big, it’s not a game.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: They’re like big and they’re old. Like you feel how old they are. And typically, wildfires don’t harm sequoias. And in fact, the fire is helpful to open up the seed pods.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Hmm.

Donika Kelly: So like, they actually need fire in some ways. So all of that sort of came, that information came rushing back, and I was, like, scrolling through the folders on my hard drive. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, this photo,” and I look so happy. I’m just hugging this tree. (LAUGHS) I don’t think that was true in the moment that the photo was taken. But I think the vibe is right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: You know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it takes on different meaning, maybe, it perfectly encapsulates a period of time or a moment for you, whether or not those feelings were conscious in that moment.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, to see an image of myself. It’s like, oh, there I was. So young and so happy. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And I’m less young, but happier now. And so, also to be able to write from that place, like, to write this poem not from a place of intense feeling, but like a recollection. That also felt like a bit of a different process and was, had its own delight. There is pleasure in sort of

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The plane’s gone to silt in what’s past.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, the way that memory softens, right? The way that memory softens things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Donika Kelly: There’s pleasure in that, that sort of smoothing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I think the power of photographs and of also, poems as artifacts, maybe returns us to Nikky Finney, in a way, and her words on your book. I wanted to play an excerpt of her speaking at an event, actually at Vanderbilt, your alma mater, in 2022, about these artifacts.

Donika Kelly: Okay.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Nikky Finney: For my entire life, I have saved the things that have my reflection on them. Photographs, scraps of paper, first terrible poems, photographs of my mother at 25 or 26. And when I’m wondering, late, much later on, “What was she thinking about as a young woman?” She was a young mother. What, in a crazy, violent world, what is my father? Why is he always smoking those Salem cigarettes? What weight was on his shoulders? I was the child in the family with the interior space that was as large as the continent of Africa.

Donika Kelly: Mm. Nikky’s so interesting in the saving. I think there she’s talking about Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And I remember like, the first time I opened that book, I was like, “Wow, she keeps stuff.” (LAUGHS)  

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Donika Kelly: And I was I was curious about that impulse. Because I don’t, I haven’t had it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So you don’t keep photographs and scraps?

Donika Kelly: Well, it’s a lot easier to do now, because everything’s digital. So it’s like, oh, yeah, I’ll put it on the hard drive. And maybe there will be some cause to look through.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: And I do print out photos occasionally. My family doesn’t, like my immediate family, we do not have a record keeping impulse. But I think my biggest archive of feeling and memory are the poems that I’ve written. And I do have almost all of those. I was saying to someone recently, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I gotta make sure I delete them all.” (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: Because no one needs to see the college poems. Because no one does.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I don’t know if I agree with that. I wonder if maybe one day you’ll (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: I will not. Like, the college poems are really important.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Donika Kelly: They were so important, because again, I think they were useful in terms of process. Right? Like just to be writing and to be writing it to be generating and generating and like, this is where the feelings go, this is a place to think about feelings, this is a place to have feelings where it’s safe. As artifacts of a developing practice, they are precious. As poems, they are sometimes not (PAUSES) poems. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Well, and I think the idea that your family doesn’t have an impulse to keep everything and to record makes sense with this idea of burn it to the ground style conflict, right?

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And this kind of just emptying and restarting. But for your own practice, you have, maybe, a sense of preservation. And you once said, “I am my own preservation project.” And I wonder if maybe it’s you as a person who is the project of preservation rather than objects related to your life?

Donika Kelly: Mm-hmm. That, I think that might be true. I mean, I just don’t know what else I have. You know, like, what else is mine, but me? And even then sometimes that feels like, am I my mind, I don’t know, my body seems to do whatever it wants to do, so.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: I’m not the boss entirely, but I was just thinking about Nikky again. You know, it’s like, some people keep things, like, some people make the archive of things, of artifacts that are, like, tangible, that they can hold and look at and read in different ways. And then some people make other kinds of stores, you know? So I don’t know, I don’t think any is right or wrong, but I don’t know. I’m just like, I find Nikky fascinating. That’s all. She’s very interesting to me. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Was it a great shock to you when she chose your book for the prize?

Donika Kelly: It absolutely was.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: And it was just like, it felt so (PAUSE) it felt humbling. I felt humbled, and I also felt so, felt so happy that it was her. You know, like, to be seen in that way by Nikky Feeny, as poet, as a black lesbian, you know, like it just like, it felt like so affirming,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. So many connections.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, and that she’s been so generous with her time. Actually, she and I met once before, like, a few years before she chose the book. And it wasn’t about poetry at all, it was about, I was struggling to find the motivation to finish the PhD. She’s friends with one of my advisors. And we talked on the phone, Nikky and I talked on the phone, and she said, “You just need to finish it.” And I was like, “Okay.” That was like, basically the conversation, that was the whole conversation.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Donika Kelly: She was like, “You need to get this done.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Donika Kelly: “And I don’t understand what you’re saying about whatever this ambivalence is.” She was like, “Just finish it.” And I was like, “Yes, ma’am.” (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Donika Kelly: So.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You needed to hear it in her voice. It doesn’t work as well, from one’s own voice.

Donika Kelly: You know, I, my voice was not saying that. My voice was like, “We could just stop.” (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Really?

Donika Kelly: “It would be fine.” Yeah. But I also wanted to do it, right, like I, there was a reason I was in the PhD program. But I did just want to write poems, you know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Has your academic work often been at odds with or had a difficult relationship with your creative practice?

Donika Kelly: So, the academic work that is like reading and having conversations, it feeds the work. Writing papers, and also working on a dissertation, like that next level, it was hard to work up the energy for it because writing poems is so much more pleasurable.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Donika Kelly: Like, it’s so much more delightful to write a poem and also, poems are small. And not 200 pages. But I’m glad that I did it. And I hope no one asks me to write critically. To write like literature analysis, literary analysis ever again. Even though it was fun. There was parts of it that were really fun, but it’s hard!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You’ve put in your time.

Donika Kelly: I did. I did. I did. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No one will have to ask you again. And speaking again of pleasure, can we read “Desire Path: Near Equinox”?

Donika Kelly: Sure, sure. I really like, I like this poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Beautiful.

Donika Kelly: Oh, gosh. Okay. So this is “Desire Path: Near Equinox.”

(READS POEM)

Blame Jupiter, its brightest moons.
Blame the scapular ache, a cry
I store in my wing—where my wing?
would be. No reason, of course,
for blame but: blame the mask
I buzz. I’ve been at myself,
fingers pruned and smelling
of lemon, of sweet moss,
late twilight and banked ember.
I stoke my own tinder, make fire
of what’s left. Don’t call it dream
but prophecy: an astronomer’s
eye taking time for distance.
Each constellation a bird drawn
by an amateur: seagull. Seagull.
A cry that carries over the water.
Oh, I whisper your name
when I’m close. Look, I say, look.
I become the shortest distance
between two points: seagull,
seagull, horizon. I misspoke,
earlier, said fire instead of fountain,
drought instead of deluge. Once,
I was a mask, made a mess
of your face. Would do it again,
be worn, but for a distance so great
it becomes time. How long before
a gull arrives in the desert, parched,
aching, blown off course? Oh,
it was meant for sea, would settle
for river, as you were meant for me
though we settle for time, for time,
soon its wake, soon collapse. Look,
I say into your mouth, your ear,
not near but soon. I fill the room,
a cloud scudding the moon, fingers
glinting in a light of my own making.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your read of it is so lilting, and the last line, “glinting in a light of my own making,” light is not only reflected but actually made by the “I.” Is this a new kind of light that has emerged for you?

Donika Kelly: I don’t know. I mean, I write, it’s funny, I write lots of poems about masturbation. I just like,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There’s a lot to say.

Donika Kelly: There’s a lot to say and not enough has been said, I would argue, about it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Donika Kelly: One of the things that I really enjoy about this poem is the way it sort of scales up the sort of experience of masturbating, where it’s like, it’s the equinox, it’s Jupiter, it’s moons, it’s constellations, it’s birds, it’s, you know, the sea and the river. (LAUGHS) And, and so it does feel like, your question is about the “I” and the light, it’s like to be both the sun and the moon to oneself feels kind of interesting. At the end of the poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Maybe the moment of orgasm is a moment of control and, at the same time, a lack of control and a connection outward.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, and a kind of, I mean, there is the thing that happens like when a star collapses, right, and it goes (IMITATES SOUND), right? And so there is like, there’s something about celestial and, like, cataclysmic, I guess if we’re lucky, experience of orgasm, right? And this just feels like exactly the kind of thing I would do. Just be like, yes, I’m gonna take this very regular thing that most people do, and most animals do, and I’m just gonna be very absurd.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Elevate it.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, just elevate it. Just make it do too many things, maybe.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Which animals are you talking about? Which animals masturbate?

Donika Kelly: Animals that masturbate that I know of are dolphins, they absolutely masturbate. And then also, I think the great apes are masturbators. And I’m just assuming that other animals do it. Because why would they not? (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And maybe it’s a spectrum. Maybe there are different ways to masturbate.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, but I, but dolphins are absolutely masturbatory animals.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Make sense.

Donika Kelly: Yeah. That’s their vibe. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: These poems are so filled with light and desire. And although light has always featured consistently in your poetics in your first collection as well, what is it like after writing about great grief and difficult trauma, to also write, maybe, a new world of love, a new world of pleasure, and a new, maybe, self?

Donika Kelly: One of the things that is true, or a thing that is true, is that I, I have often been writing, like, love poems alongside those other poems. And I think the, with the poems about trauma, or the poems that are doing some more of that heavy lifting, there’s a different kind of urgency, a way that they propel themselves, and those subjects propel themselves, like, to the front of the line a little bit. And so in some ways, I guess this is the opposite of the big boss, where it’s like, okay, we start in intensity, and what comes after that?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Donika Kelly: And that’s been my question, like, I’ve been looking at the poems that I’ve written in the last, like, six or seven years, and I’ve just been thinking about how those poems reflect a desire to be alongside, to not have hierarchy and high drama, but just like, what is day to day? Like, what is it to be riding in a car with a friend? What is it to look at an ex and be like, there’s a little bit of grief in here, but also, that’s what time does, you know, like that there’s a softening even like, towards that relationship and towards that person?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, you smiled together at the sequoias.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, like, and so what is the, like, what is—there’s a different kind of difficulty and challenge in capturing those moments in poems, to create not a sense of urgency, but a reason why I might ask the reader to come over here and look at this. Like, why I’m spending time with these moments, why I’m asking the reader to spend time with these moments, that there’s something useful—maybe useful isn’t the right word. Maybe there’s something worthwhile in just spending time with those smaller moments. I’ve been really interested in that, in part because I do want to write poems that reflect what I’m so grateful for now. And I have been writing these poems, but I’m really grateful for a life that is so much more stable, and so much more loving. That is, generally, except for working at the university, and, you know, being a Black person in America, without hierarchy. (LAUGHS) Like that is not the, that’s not the primary mode of interaction that I’m engaged with, with the people I love. And it feels really good. And so I want to celebrate that. (MUSIC PLAYING) That there’s a whole life on the other side that is worth documenting, and maybe archiving.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: On the podcast, we have an artifact we’re trying out for the first time. I wanted to connect poets across episodes. So we have a question from someone interviewed last month that we’d love for you to respond to if you’d like.

Donika Kelly: Great.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And then if you record a question, we’ll be sharing that with a future guest who we haven’t booked yet. And it’s a question into the void, because you don’t know who you’re asking yet, but it’s creating this kind of multi-poet conversation. So our first question that we chose for you is from Brian Tierney. I think it’s interesting because your work centered so much on Greek mythology and the oracle. And this is sort of maybe an update on those ideas.

Donika Kelly: Let’s do it.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Brian Tierney: Hi, this is Brian Tierney. I’m going to ask a question via the late Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski: “And what if Heraclitus and Parmenides / are both right / and two worlds exist side by side, / one serene, the other insane”?

Donika Kelly: Well, that’s a funny question. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s more of a statement.

Donika Kelly: More of a statement, more of a statement. I think that seems right to me, that there might be probably more worlds than that even, side by side. It seems to me that the worlds we are in are, forgive me for saying, multitudinous. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Cannot be counted.

Donika Kelly: Yeah, just like, to me, like, some of it’s the multiverse, some of it’s Whitman, right, that there are the worlds that we carry inside ourselves that are serene and are madness and are loving and are pleasure and despair.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Donika Kelly: I mean, I just feel like it’s all, I don’t know, just like, trying to like sort the world in that way. It feels really interesting to sort of circle back around to that, that measure of sorting that we’ve been talking about.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Donika Kelly: That process of sorting.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, of cataloguing, of naming.

Donika Kelly: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A perfectly complex response to a complexly perfect, strange question.

Donika Kelly: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you, to you and Brian, for taking part.

Donika Kelly: A pleasure, a pleasure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s been a special kind of radiance to get to chat with you. Thank you so much for making room for us on the desire paths.

Donika Kelly: Oh, this was wonderful, Cindy. This was so fun. Thank you so much.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A loving thanks to Donika Kelly. Donika is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, both from Graywolf Press. She teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. You can read three poems by Donika in the June 2023 issue of Poetry, available in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, all our best, and thanks for listening.