Kirsten Ihns: I’m Kirsten Ihns, and this is PoetryNow. I don’t think a poem should tell you how to live your life. That’s not what I come to poems for, mostly. I think that’s what I’m, in some sense, writing against. This idea that you should come away from the poem with like, vitamin pills for how to live your life your better. Or knowledge, or—I don’t think you should come out of a poem with things. I think you should come out of a poem with a kind of liveliness or energy, or just openness to the world. This also partially comes out of teaching. Encountering students who clearly think there’s an answer to be gotten to, or some distillable thing that you can get out of a poem. And I think that that closes a lot of people off from poems if they can’t decode it.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

make it language or rejoice

I think pleasure is a lot of what I come to writing for.

(READS POEM)

immediately motionless likeness
 
by going you have to be and
seek it
out
 
said the starlet in the shared volitional language of space and time
explanation thrashes round the thing but doesn’t touch it
the thing we know then as /style of thrashing/ or
ripples in the pond sufficient
in itself, she licks her tongue, it could be desired as a figure—
 
faithless as a class of examples
i found new objects swimming blankly in a common
sense, by going alone to listen
                                                to them
                         in the night
            light of their pool—
 
                                     to begin with life or stars
                                                              the spring as source or
                                                      season
                                         when to start—i love what you
                        said about the birds
                        as distance is required for attraction
                        & force keeps its distinctions
                        in a tall hull
                        called law—
                        clever in the style of depth in a painting
                        sumptuous for use, and briefly this
                        of fancy, pity, and devising,
                        wherefore as it is at the right door
                        make it language or rejoice
                        this is how you touch me in my other ghosts
                        & short of the occasion
                        just a frequent mist of atoms
                        all touching in the arms
                        like an error in the wish

* * *

I got to undergrad and I took a Modernist poetry class, and it introduced me to the idea of collage. And I was like, oh, whoa, it’s so energetic when you run textbook language up against a love lyric. So I was really fascinated with collage. And then, what I realized I could do was imitate the kinds of things I had been collaging fragments of—the sort of everyday speech of people, highly formal clinical language of journal articles about science, high lyricism of poetry, just kind of whatever struck my ear as strange—and learned how to speak in each of those kinds of modes. The better I got at each of them, the smaller I could make the units.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

this is how you touch me in my other ghosts / & short of the occasion / just a frequent mist of atoms / all touching in the arms / like an error in the wish

What I oftentimes hope for from my poems, and when I read other people’s poems what I hope to have happen to me, is to be danced by the poem in some way. For it to give me a way of moving that I couldn’t have known how to move without it. A lot of my favorite writers, and who I think are the best writers, do this amazing thing where like, you know it’s their way of moving in language. It’s their sort of rhythm, and oftentimes it feels improvisational but there’s something in it, even if it’s hard to identify, that’s distinctive. It’s like you know, how you know a salsa is not a waltz. There are sort of steps and patterning and ways of moving that are distinctive to each kind of dance. And if you just do the steps with it, suddenly you’re salsa-ing or waltzing, or whatever. And training helps, but the thing is what you’re also letting move through your body in some way.

Katie Klocksin: That was Kirsten Ihns and her poem “immediately motionless likeness.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.