AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Joanna Klink and Holly Amos on psychic longing, attention and attunement, and their differing childhood dinner tables

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

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Joanna Klink:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Two Trees”)

I know another grammar holds me

but not together,

Holly Amos: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Holly Amos. This week, I’m speaking with the poet Joanna Klink, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Joanna is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Nightfields. Louise Glück refers to Klink’s poetry as an experience “harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable.” Whew! That’s how I feel about the new poems we’ll hear today from the February issue of Poetry. Joanna, welcome to the podcast.

Joanna Klink: Thank you for having me.

Holly Amos: So excited to talk with you and to hear your new poems. I do want to start the conversation just by asking, how are you? You’re joining us miraculously from Austin, where a storm just devastated the area. Your poetry and the poems we’ll hear today are very attuned to your immediate environment. So yeah, I’m just curious, you know, how are you doing? And how has it been for you to experience these dramatic environmental shifts?

Joanna Klink: Thanks for asking. I’m doing fine. I think people in Austin are pretty shell-shocked because we’ve had to deal with power outages on a regular basis. I just, Texas isn’t totally prepared for climate change. But yeah, I’ve been walking around the neighborhood and the trees are just destroyed everywhere. And this magnolia tree that’s in my poem “Two Trees” has just been wrecked, you know. So it’s beyond just the human cost. It’s sad to see all the destroyed trees in the city.

Holly Amos: Yeah, I definitely understand that. I live in Boulder, and I’ve not really ever experienced wind like we have here where, yeah, like trees getting ripped out of the ground, which is,

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I know.

Holly Amos: Yeah, it’s just like, shocking to see nature, I guess it’s more shocking sometimes to see nature destroying nature in this way. It’s like, wow.

Joanna Klink: Yeah. Yeah.

Holly Amos: Well, I’m glad you’re doing okay. And yeah, the new poems in the February issue of Poetry are so gorgeous. But it’s interesting, like, if I described very basically what appear in the poems, you know, it’s like rain, birds, trees, mirrors, feet, you know, very mundane sort of things. But then the poems themselves, at least the way I experience them, there’s like, this really deep uneasiness in them. And the unease is like gorgeous, or the gorgeous is uneasy. And so when I was thinking about how I actually like, experienced that, in myself, it feels like this really deep psychic longing to me or like a psychic turmoil. So yeah, does that resonate with you? Could you talk a little bit about what that feels like for you?

Joanna Klink: Yeah, oh, that’s really beautifully put. I feel like I am, I do have that kind of restlessness. And I’m, I think some of the stuff that I’m trying to work out in my poems right now has to do with, you know, who, who I am right now, in this moment in the century, and what it means to be a person and have an appearance in the world. And I feel really uncomfortable with that. I just wish that I could leave no trace of myself beyond my voice. I just am not situated well, I think, in this vast world of, you know, screens, and I understand that a lot of the poetry that’s being written today is very identity-based, for a reason, because people’s identities are just under assault, you know? And I, and I see it in my students, I see it in my fellow poets. And there’s extraordinary poetry being written out of that impulse to declare who you are, and insist that you have a place in the world. And especially in this country, in the United States. So, it’s in that backdrop that I, I feel like I don’t quite fit because I’m sort of a luddite. I’m an introvert, and I don’t like talking about myself. And it’s partially because I don’t really, I would rather not have to declare who I was, or say who I was. And it’s easier for me to talk about who I am in relation to what I love. Like, I love my students. I love certain poets, and I love my family and certain friends and I, you know, so I just have a hard time figuring out where I’m placed in all this. And that’s one of the reasons I think in all these poems, there’s a kind of impulse to want to disappear.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Two Trees”)

“Two Trees”

The shuffling of feet, then,
was my own, and the leaps of water
in a day otherwise listing with rain.
Of the mirrors inside my home
I asked what is my worth.
Overloved, the panes of silver showed me
nothing but myself from various
angles, touching my cheek,
smiling and extinguished.
I cannot even mourn what seems to live there.
I know another grammar holds me
but not together, and I miss
looking for it, forget, even,
to look. 

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Holly Amos: What did your parents do? Or what do they do? I’m just curious, I’m curious how you, who you arose from and how, how you came to be.

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I grew up in Iowa City. So I grew up in, you know, this university town in the middle of Iowa. And my father is a quantum physicist.

Holly Amos: Oh, wow, this tracks. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: So he—yeah. So he’s a nuclear physicist, and he’s very interested in the intersection between theology and physics and principles of symmetry. And yeah, he’s always looking for symmetrical principles that underlie our universe. And yeah, I grew up in a family where if you had a question about physics, he’d always start by saying like, “This is an atom. Picture an atom,” and I’d be like, “Oh, no,” (LAUGHING) you know, so there was that. And then my mother was a high school English teacher. So she taught Chaucer and, you know, British lit, Shakespeare, which is why I didn’t read a lot of Shakespeare, because I didn’t want to take her classes. But it was in my, you know, in my house a lot. People were always talking about, you know, were always running to the dictionary and quoting lines and things like that. And my brother is a is a jazz pianist who lives in Europe.

Holly Amos: Oh cool.

Joanna Klink: So we all kind of had our weird private languages. And sometimes we would, after dinner, everybody would just like, separate, (LAUGHS) go into like our own, our own zones, you know.

Holly Amos: Were you, did you grow up, just like, were you always having these big conversations about yeah, like, big questions, and—my family was very different than that. Although I grew up in like rural Ohio.

Joanna Klink: Ah.

Holly Amos: Yeah, so I’m just trying to imagine like, your dinner table conversations, what they were like.

Joanna Klink: Yeah, they were really, they were really charged. And sometimes I was afraid to have friends over for dinner because it was—I told, in grade school, I guess it was, I told people for a while that my father was a fireman.

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: Because it was a lot easier to handle. And but I think in retrospect, you know, I don’t think I really appreciated how amazing it was, because my parents were like, parents of the ’50s, and they had dinner parties. And, you know, they were always like linguists and artists, and

Holly Amos: Oh, cool.

Joanna Klink: you know, people taking part in these conversations. And then my family is a musical family. My father plays the viola and my mom plays the piano. We always play like, string trios, and I play the violin. And so I always thought that was normal. And then when I went out into the world, I was like, “Huh.” You know? But also, I’ve had a little bit of dread of it sometimes, too. Like, I really love it in classes when, like, if you read a poem out loud, and like, there’s no commentary about it. I just, (LAUGHING) I love that, too. Because in my family it would have been like, everybody starts talking and weighing in.

Holly Amos: Oh, I love that. Yeah, what you’re describing, I think in my head was like, that’s like my dream, but.

Joanna Klink: No. (LAUGHS)

Holly Amos: But yeah, I can see how it would have been so exhausting. And you’re like, “Oh, God.” (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: Yeah.

Holly Amos: Please, not another conversation about the atom. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: (LAUGHS) I know, right.

Holly Amos: But at the dinner table, my dad’s famous quote was “Less talk, more eat.” So, (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: (LAUGHS) Oh, I would have loved that! I wanted to be at your table!

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS) We should have just swapped every other day.

Joanna Klink: How did you come to poetry then? Like, did you just find it on your own?

Holly Amos: Yeah! I mean, I was just a kid was such a longing, as you were talking about, like, I grew up very rural. Although also near a college town. I grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, outside of it.

Joanna Klink: Oh yeah.

Holly Amos: And my dad, he’s now a maintenance director at a nursing home. But like, he was a garbage truck driver at one time, so very working class. And my mom was, you know, like a secretary, a typist at one point. Yeah, it was always, I was just like, always a little bit of a weirdo kid who wanted to like, had like, deep interior worlds happening and writing and reading, you know, were how I could get in touch with that. Because I, there weren’t any other—I mean, there were, but I didn’t know where all the other little weirdos were, you know, it’s hard to find them. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: I know! Exactly, right. And that, yeah, that sense of like, oh, first you realize that you, you know, can have an interior world at all. And then you’re like, where are the other people in my, you know, like, who else will show up there? And that’s so, that really resonates with me, because I do think it’s like, some strange process of like finding like, “Oh, there’s another world that I can be in where, you know, my imagination can float around like this.” And when you first make contact with that it’s just so freeing.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Two Trees”)

I press my ear
to the wooden door and hear
something flame in the white
filigreed leaves.

___

I felt far from anything that
mattered. The routine of a day loses
force—you work, clean up and eat,
plunging to sleep—what happened to those hours.
Those hours were yours and they still
pulse with heat and dream, like brown
butterflies lifting from dense twigs.
Some days I’m nothing more than hearsay,
a story read back to me that makes no sense.
In front of screens I feel my eyes turn
dusty, my grief diffuse. But sometimes
when I sense a slight shaking in the magnolia tree
I’m the girl staring at something on the lawn
her family cannot see, unfolding in layers of air
and water, close to everything
unspoken—a pause, a stare, a slow
movement of hand around a tool.
A voice taking time to say Good-bye or No more,
the sudden ease of speaking with a neighbor,
which was hard the day before. They spoke
easily with one another—their lives were words
that held in summer air, their thoughts leaden
and complex, their answers poor, their need
punishing, and huge, while the sidewalks themselves
were hot, the stone walls cool,
and just before dawn animals scavenged
for water in highway ditches, feeling their bones
flash inside their own fierce thirst.

Holly Amos: That feeling of being unmoored. It’s like really nice to not feel alone in that feeling. Although there’s something about your poems that sort of feel like they’re needling into that feeling for me. And that makes me like, a little bit scared too.

Joanna Klink: (LAUGHS)

Holly Amos: It does! Like it, you know, like, what if that feeling takes over, you know? I mean, I’ve had these moments of being like, who even am I? You know, like, where you just really don’t know. But I’m curious, for you, well, does that feeling or the things that come up in your poems, do they ever scare you? And like, how do you cope with that? How do you get comfortable with that feeling?

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t figured that out yet. (LAUGHS) I’m not, I don’t, and I often have a little trepidation when I start writing, because I believe in beauty and sonic power, and all these things. And I feel sometimes that I start wanting to capture that somehow. And then I get derailed by my own unsettledness, you know. There’s something about the sense that I have that there’s this other, another grammar holds me, but it doesn’t hold me together. And that fragility of sort of giving up your sense of self and looking for this other thing that will hold you together is part of why I write poems. So, if you think about the, the self as the center of everything, the self that you see in the mirror, and the selfie and the photographs on screens, like, for me, that sort of self is, it’s deceptive. It seems like it’s centering, but it’s actually weakening, or sort of extinguishing your energies. And then the other self, the one that you—I don’t even know how to talk about it, if it’s a self at all, but it’s this sort of dispersed self, where you momentarily forget where you are, you know, and become so absorbed in doing or perceiving that that absorption leads to a kind of current of peace or something. You just, like when you can tap into the energies of the world, and that’s when there is a kind of power or strengthening, you know, a sense of things really mattering. I guess it’s the going back and forth that is troubling, you know, but once I’ve tapped into it, I feel like that’s where I’m meant to be.

Holly Amos: Mm.

Joanna Klink: And there’s a kind of, like, if you’re really paying attention, there’s a kind of deepening of the world that happens. Like, I love this quote by Jane Hirshfield, where she says, “Attentiveness only deepens what it regards.” And that you, just if you’re just attentive, the world sort of opens up to you, but you have to let go of yourself to even get there.

Holly Amos: Yeah, it sounds to me like, or at least how I think of it is like a, maybe like a cosmic self. You were talking about this other grammar. But then of course, you’re working in this grammar that we have. I don’t know, maybe you could say a little bit more about how you think about that other grammar, how it relates to this grammar.

Joanna Klink: I think about poetry as being, you know, it’s unnatural language, even if it sounds natural or like, you know, as you said, I feel like a lot of the vocabulary here is sort of transparent like, “tree,” you know, “tree,” “highway,” “ditch.” It’s not even, the diction isn’t even especially interesting, but there’s a, there’s a non-naturalness to it. Like it’s, poetry, I think, no matter if it’s highly ornamental and artificial, or if it’s plain spoken, it is separating itself from regular language or ordinary daily language. And it’s, it’s putting language to a different use, you know? And I think that’s part of the other grammar that I feel holds me together, the sense of like, I’m using language for some other purpose. And that’s to be, to have access to a world that’s more charged. Real poetry always feels sort of ancient in that way, even if it’s contemporary, you know, it just feels like it just cuts through time, and it moves you into a different state. And you can’t stay there, but if you say the words, sometimes they will put you in that state, and that’s why people memorize poems or have beloved poems, because those are the poems that give you—they’re the portals, I think, into another way of being that, that matters, that makes life matter more.

Holly Amos: Earlier, you were talking about, it’s the shift that’s the hard part. And the way you’re talking about poems, right, it feels like poems are the thing that make the shift a little easier.

Joanna Klink: Yeah.

Holly Amos: I love that, that like art in general does that, it makes that shift to like, attunement, easier. It’s like, well, I don’t know if you’ve seen Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it’s like, the weird thing you have to do to like, open up the magic, open up the connection. Like, that’s what poems are. They’re like the weird things that we’re doing. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: Yeah, totally. And it doesn’t even just have to be poetry, it can be just taking a walk.

Holly Amos: Yeah.

Joanna Klink: You know, you can take a walk and be tapped into things that are happening around you. And sometimes, like in this poem “Two Trees,” I’m talking about trees or a neighbor, or something like that, but when you’re really paying attention, yeah, it’s kind of like honoring, like you’re honoring your neighbor, or you’re honoring the tree. And when you honor something, it just opens up to you. And then you can have a connection to it, you know?

Holly Amos: Yeah.

Joanna Klink: And poetry is so interested in our not feeling isolated, and our feeling connected to these energies in the world and to other people. And so I think it’s, it’s one way in, you know. And even though it’s very simple, and it’s only made up of words, there’s no canvas and, you know, backup singers or whatever, it’s just, you know, it’s just, it’s just its own thing, but it’s so, it’s such a pure way to enter, to enter into this other place.

Holly Amos: I love that. I do kind of want to know what a poetry backup singer would look like. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: (LAUGHING) I know, right.

Holly Amos: That’d be amazing.

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I’d like to have them. (LAUGHS)

Holly Amos: (LAUGHING) Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Holly Amos: Joanna, you said of your newer poems, that you’re trying to better listen and better pay attention to the sensory world around you, because attention matters more and more as you get older. I’m wondering, like, why that is to you, you know, how that relates to aging and just being around in the world longer? And yeah, like, what are the stakes for you? What, what’s, where’s the urgency come from for you?

Joanna Klink: I think, because I’m getting older, I am more aware of time passing and wanting to hold onto time. And one of the things I love about poetry is that it, you know, it opens up a moment in time and lets you just stay there and not feel like you’re rushed on to the next thing. Because I know many people speak about this phenomenon of aging, where, as you get older, you have more and more memories and thoughts. And you’re still imagining things for the future. And so your brain gets more and more crammed with stuff, and you’re trying to sort through what matters and what doesn’t matter. Whereas when you’re young, you can have these moments of like, true boredom, or true, like, longing, and it’s just sort of, you know, it’s sort of excruciating, but it’s lovely, you know. And I don’t have those very much anymore. And then there’s also the fact that, like, everything is so happening so quickly, and technology is advancing so quickly. And like, when I was in college, we barely, you know, we all were on these ridiculous old Macs in, you know, a computer room that we all shared. And every once in a while, one of them would like catch on fire.

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: You know, it was just like, you know, it was not the world we live in now. And, and I feel like I can’t quite keep up, as many people feel. And I have a sense of my attention being corroded. Like, of just like being, my attention is being drained away, and I can’t remember who said that, like, we don’t actually need to have all this information. Speaking about the internet, we don’t need it. And in fact, it is, you know, it’s, it’s amazing, but it’s also harmful. And so, I think I have a real sense of wanting to protect my own attention. So I, I try to limit how much time I spend online. And I try to make my connections with people direct, you know, but I just, I don’t do a very good job of that. And I think other people feel the same way. Like we’re all kind of trying but just flailing around.

Holly Amos: Yeah, I definitely feel that. Yeah, it’s hard. The information makes you feel like you need it.

Joanna Klink: Yeah.

Holly Amos: Because it’s there, you’re like, I must have, I must have at all, I guess. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: Yeah.

Holly Amos: But not really. And I appreciate hearing that. I hadn’t heard that before, Joanna, about like, the idea of, the older we get, sort of the more crammed our brains are. Because of I just, I’m going to turn 40 next year, and so I’ve definitely been thinking about aging a lot, too. I feel like that’s like a decade where you’re tipping into a different side of life. (LAUGHS) And yeah, so that’s really helpful. It is very overwhelming. It’s very overwhelming to be a living human being. (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: Yeah, it really is. And then if you want to not just feel like you’re intact, but you want to be connected, you know? Like this morning, like, this death toll of this earthquake in Turkey is overwhelming. And you know, and I keep, I do the numbers, just like we all did the numbers during the pandemic of like, how many people have died? What is the scale of that death? You know, what, what does it mean that it’s happening all the time, all, you know, I want to stay connected to that. Sometimes it’s hard just to connect with one person, you know, let alone make sense of death and you know, the death of one person, the life of one person, a moment in your friend’s life, or in a stranger’s life, you know, it’s so hard to connect with these things. And I feel this sort of need to constantly bust through some screen of, or some, I don’t know, some fog, maybe, of information and just make a connection with one person for just a moment, you know?

Holly Amos: Yeah. Joanna, have you ever thought about like living in an ascetic life of just like, just, you know, like, meditating, connection, nothing else?

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I also, I think I would just be terrible at that, because I really, you know, I actually, right at the moment, I’m loving teaching. And if I just had to write poems, I think I might crack up, because I, I’ve liked going into class and hearing my students’ poems, because they’re just incredible. And talking about what poetry is and talking about art and what we’re all trying to cope with. And they’re, you know, they’re young, and they’re so intelligent, and they’re so thoughtful about the world that they’ve inherited. And they’re angry about it, rightfully so. And so I just think I do feel like I would want that community somehow. I’d probably be the kind of person who’d like, start talking to trees, and then nobody would want to hang out with me, you know, like, “What happened to her?” you know.

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: But there is, yeah, I just, I do, like, needing, needing to have a connection and then wanting also to have a connection through things that you love. Like, I love poems, so I love talking to people about poems. Yeah, I think increasingly, too, I really care about being able to make contact with strangers or people you feel, you know, somewhat frightened by or destabilized by. And I think wanting like, I’m looking for some kind of connection, and it’s, it’s hard to know what shape that connection should take.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Holly Amos: Let’s hear another poem, Joanna. Can you introduce and read the poem “Called”?

Joanna Klink: This poem, as I wrote it, I was dedicating it in my head to Muriel Rukeyser. It’s a response to Rukeyser’s poem, “Then I Saw What the Calling Was.” And that poem, I didn’t even know that poem existed. And I had to do a reading with Rita Dove. And Rita Dove has, you know, an exquisite ear and exquisite taste. And she, she chose this poem because we were supposed to read a few poems together in an antiphonal way, where she would read a few lines and I’d read a few lines, and we’d go back and forth. And so, she chose this poem and I just thought it was so radiant and beautiful. So, I wrote this in response to it. So this is “Called.”

(READS POEM)

Here there is no one to
appear for, no one
calls me by my name,
Joanna,   jolt, ghost-moth,
notion or an O, and the an in
and, where another
road appeared, gravel and
alcoves of cold, my compass
a far field, and a syllable from
enough or nothing, in the rising
scale of that bird I cannot
see, burst of burbling
gold from the trees where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by these branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I
was, a, the smallest cell
packed with low autumn
sun, and dedication,   for
anyone, inside the sudden
dusk’s apple-whistle.

Holly Amos: That’s beautiful, Joanna. Do you want to read the Muriel Rukeyser poem as well? I feel like they’re in such interesting conversation together.

Joanna Klink: Yes. So, Muriel Rukeyser, she lived from like 1913 to 1980. And she was a figure in American modernism. And she was also very politically active, part of the left. And yeah, I just feel like if you read about her life, it was a sort of fluid mix of political activism and just an incredibly gorgeous relationship to poetry where she, she refused to not be political in her poems, but also to just embrace a kind of language that was, you know, capacious and sonic. And then just always alert to injustice. So, this is “Then I Saw What the Calling Was.” And you’ll hear her say her name, and then the pieces of her name, which is some of what I was responding to in my poem.

(READS POEM)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Holly Amos: I love “but I offered an all was well.” That’s such a beautiful,

Joanna Klink: I know.

Holly Amos: a beautiful place to move to in that poem.

Joanna Klink: Yeah, and it just has a—what I love so much is that she hears all these voices calling her name and it’s, you know, just breaking down her name like, are the voices saying “health” or are they saying “hell”? You know, like it just, it doesn’t feel like she’s being spoken to. And like the sense that like, there’s a world out there, but it’s not including me and it’s not speaking to me. And the poem just keeps saying that, “not to me, not to me.” But then when she says, “Then I saw what the calling was: it was the road,” it was “the clear time,” which I think is the time of poetry, you know, “the clear time and these colors of orchards” and the gold and the shadows and the things that are behind the tree and behind the slope, they’re hidden, and not to me but to anyone . You know, it’s not—why was I thinking it would be just for me? It’s for anyone, you know, and Holly the line you’re pointing to, the “but I offered,” you know, it’s just that moment which when she says, “Nothing was speaking to me, but I offered and all was well.” You know in the ‘all was well” happens so fast, you know, all I had to do was be receptive to it and then bring something back to it, and then I was there. You know, and then “I arrived at the powerful green hill.” So that offering is a late realization, I think. It comes out of her sense that it’s okay to be uncalled. You know, you can, you don’t, your name isn’t so important maybe, or what you think is important about your name, Muriel, or your name, Joanna, is not so important. It’s the fact that, that the world is, is there and if you, if you just are patient enough, you can see those roads and you can see those, those golds and those shadows and, and then you can feel comfortable with the fact that it’s not speaking to me. And she also makes it into a kind of incantatory thing, like, “not for me, not for me, not for me,” and then it’s a song, you know, and it’s the world that’s sort of reaching out to you. And then you can say, I offered, “I offered and all was well.” And I just, I’ve never even heard that in a poem before that the poet says, “Okay, then I did this and it was fine,” you know?

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: “All was well,” you know, so great.

Holly Amos: It is. I think more poems should end that way. (LAUGHS) Even if it’s not true, putting it there, maybe it makes it true.

Joanna Klink: Yeah.

Holly Amos: I wanted to play a short clip of Rukeyser speaking in 1959, about the role of the poet. It definitely relates, I think, to, yeah, just what you’re pulling out of the poem there.

(CLIPS PLAYS)

Muriel Rukeyser: I think the kinds of meanings that exist in the words of poetry are shut away to a certain extent from us now, in which we have a time when the moment, the attempt to hold onto the moment is almost being made a last stand struggle, the attempt to think of time as a static succession of points. And that the ways in which the poem living and moving in time, the shortest of arts, if you like, of those that live in time, can call upon the ideas of flow, of growth, of transformation in us. The language of this can be drawn from many different places. I know I go to the language of water, of embryology, of morphology in books like Thompson’s Growth and Form to make a vocabulary, which seems to me to be almost lacking in present English, of process, in the giving up of self during the writing of a poem, as in love, in bringing to birth, we do reach each other and there is a way of sharing this kind of experience. And that seems to me to be the center of this function.

Joanna Klink: I love the way she says, she just, her voice is so incantatory. You know, like she, the way she speaks is like a poem, you know. But I can’t remember how she put it exactly, but just belief in the moment. Like that’s what a poem is grounded in, belief in the moment and flow and growth and the transformation in us. And just like, you know, it’s so hard to hold onto any moment, as you move through time. But to just believe in it, you know, to believe in it is like the precondition of art, you know, that you would, that you would think there was enough to enter into in a single moment.

Holly Amos: Yeah. Joanna, do you feel there’s like an effect or a consequence to having been a poet this long? Like, what are the ways that you have been changed by being a poet that have surprised you?

Joanna Klink: I think when I was younger, I—and I see this, I see this in my students too, like, when you’re younger, you are more, you’re paying more attention to other people, you care a lot what other people think, and you’re full of longing and desire. And there’s a kind of extravagant longing, I think, in being young, which is beautiful, and should not be messed with, you know? And I think I had some of that. Yeah, I had a lot of that when I was younger. Like, even in my book, Raptus, I had gone through this terrible breakup. And like, I was consumed with, you know, my breakup and was just, you know, it was the whole world was shot through with it. And now I kind of look at that and I’m like, “Oh, my God, what was I thinking,” you know? (LAUGHS)

Holly Amos: (LAUGHS)

Joanna Klink: And it’s like, you sort of wake up to the fact that oh, yeah, like, you were hurt, and everybody’s hurt. So, now, I don’t know, I think now I’m more—I’m less concerned about what other people think. And I’m more worried about, like, figuring out some things before I die. Like there’s so many things in what Rukeyser said in that audio that I—those are the things I’m thinking about right now, and those are the things that are like, I’m trying to figure out in my poems. Like she talks about this need to give up the self, you know, in writing poems and love and giving birth and all these experiences where we give up the self in a very profound way. But we do reach each other, you know, we reach each other. And I think that’s the thing that I’m trying to, I’m, you know, I feel like in my poems, I’m just trying to make contact with something that’s not me, then to reach maybe another person or just reach something that is sustaining. But that there’s, it is possible to just forget yourself in the writing of the poem, or in any experience, and come out of it by making contact or reaching someone or something. And so most of the poems I’m writing right now are struggling with that. And also, I think, because I’m getting older, I am, I still have my parents alive in the world, but their friends are dying, they’re getting close to death. And, you know, I’ve lost people in my life. And I think, yeah, just, I think I’m thinking more about disappearing. About just, you know, what it would be like to not be here anymore. And that’s also a kind of being absorbed by the world. And, you know, there’s so much fear of death, but it’s, it’s part of the same process that you go through when you feel connected to the current of things, and you forget who you are, you’re just absorbed, you dissolve into it, you know. And in this poem, “Called,” I think, I was like, “Oh, I’ll just dissolve myself,” you know, I’ll just say goodbye, and see what happens, you know? And I’ve been doing that, and it probably is getting out of control. But just, you know, that sense of, you know, what would happen if you weren’t there anymore. And the durable quality of the world, you know, that it will just continue on without you. There’s something reassuring about being absorbed into it. In this mysterious way, I look forward to that, you know. So I’m trying to, I think, deal with my own sense of death and the shadow of death, but also try to be curious about it, especially since my parents are approaching death, and I don’t want them to be afraid of it.

Holly Amos: Yeah. I feel that. I feel like some people really find this kind of stuff to be so morbid,

Joanna Klink: (LAUGHS)

Holly Amos: but I find it to be, I find it to be so interesting. I’ve had that thought too, like, oh, it’ll be so interesting to finally die and know what happens or what it feels like or if anything happens. I’m just curious, Joanna, do you have like, do you have a hope? Do you have a hope for what death is?

Joanna Klink: Yeah, I don’t, yeah, I don’t know. But I do, sometimes when I’m really frustrated with, you know, just the perpetual injustice and suffering that’s happening all around me, I think, “Oh, it will just be wonderful not to have to be so intensely, you know, in this world, and maybe there’s some softer instantiation of things that will follow. But I don’t really know, I just, but I do also think that the suffering is, is part of—maybe that’s kind of what I’m trying to say, too, that like, as I get older, I’m more aware of suffering and more aware of how little I can do about it. And I feel more and more like what we’re supposed to do is we’re just supposed to be listening to each other. And trying to understand what everybody’s going through and just to be present with it. And sometimes practicing being present is all that you can really do, so, I don’t know, maybe that’s what I feel like we’re charged with doing until we die, and then whatever happens with death, I don’t know. But I imagine that there’s some other vision that replaces it, you know? But it would probably be okay too if it didn’t, if there was no vision, if it was just nothing.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READING OF EXCERPT FROM “Called” REPLAYS)

Here there is no one to
appear for, no one
calls me by my name,
Joanna,   jolt, ghost-moth,
notion or an O, and the an in
and, where another
road appeared, gravel and
alcoves of cold, my compass
a far field

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Holly Amos: A big thanks to Joanna Klink. Joanna is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Nightfields, out from Penguin in 2020. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. You can read three of Joanna’s poems in the February 2023 issue of Poetry in print, online, and in the app. Our upcoming April issue is going to feature the poetry of Sandra Cisneros, CAConrad, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Juan Felipe Herrera, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhubuti, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Patti Smith, and Arthur Sze. Whew! If you want to get all of that you can subscribe today at poetrymagazine.org/podcast offer to get your copy of this historic issue in time for National Poetry Month. This show is produced by Rachel James. Music in the episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. That’s it for today. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)