Interview: Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Night Songs (2010), Compendium (2011), and The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments (2011). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her poems appear in Third Coast, Barn Owl Review, RHINO, Cider Press Review, Gargoyle, and many other journals. (Bio adapted from Barn Owl Review).

TCJWW: How did you conceive of Failure Lyric as a book-length project? Was it before you began writing these poems, or after you had a group of poems? How do projects for books usually find you (or you find them)?

Darling: That’s a great question. Failure Lyric actually began with a writing prompt from the wonderful poet Allison Titus. She challenged me to map my heartbreak across its many locations in time and space, to chart the crazy orbits that grief set me on. It wasn’t long before I started writing poems about a relationship and various cities that it took me to: Burlington, St. Louis, Iowa City, and the now infamous Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The work began as disparate fragments and bits of what would later become poems, so it was a joy to discover the larger narrative arc as I wrote. This is usually how my book projects unfold. While I work in long poems and extended sequences, I always feel as though I’m discovering the project, or the larger concept behind the work, as I write.

TCJWW: The poems in this book both show quite a range of form and also a strong consistency of voice. I’m curious how your poems came to take their current shapes and find their voice.

Darling: The book does encompass a range of forms, including lyric fragments, prose poems, and prose sequences. The more fragmented pieces are actually erasures, which came into being when I took a black marker to my four-year correspondence with a male poet, who out of respect for his work, will remain unnamed. Erasing the various letters, inscriptions, and messages was initially intended to help me move past my grief, but it did much more. It gave rise to the poems that you’ll find in the middle sections of Failure Lyric, in which I tried to weave together memory and imagination, grief and hope, to create meaning from what seemed like a heap of shattered glass and dead lilies.

TCJWW: There’s a lot that’s internal to the speaker, as well as quite a bit of observation of external symbols. Could you speak to how you view the internal and external in the poems?

Darling: What I love most about poetry, especially autobiographical works, is the breakdown of boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other. One’s innermost thoughts can be projected onto one’s surroundings, the landscape, or even another character within the poem. Affect can be made visible, tangible, and concrete. The reader is made to experience grief as an embodied thing.

I’m also fascinated by the potential for poetry to blur the boundaries between art and its audience. As the book unfolds, the affect that is depicted in the poems no longer belongs solely to the author or the speaker. Poetry affords a unique space in which the reader is made to participate in the speaker’s grief, particularly as they, too, attempt to create meaning from the various fragments and artifacts of the relationship.

TCJWW: The poems in this collection contain both long lines with strong rhythm and also short fragmented phrases. What made you decide to work with two types of lines that had such different music in them?

Darling: I love setting an expectation that the text will follow a particular pattern, then undermining the reader’s expectations in as many ways as I can. For me, readerly expectations are material to utilize in my own process, and they offer one more opportunity to surprise your audience. I love texts that allow many types of music and multiple textures of language to coexist within the same rhetorical space. These types of projects are often more complex, but also, filled with moments of surprise, awe, and wonder.

TCJWW: Who are you reading these days (any genre, not just poetry)? Why have you chosen these writers or books?

Darling: I’ve been enjoying Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert’s The Kind Of Beauty That Has Nowhere To Go, as well as Kelly Magee and Carol Guess’s new collaborative text, With Animal and Carol’s book that she wrote with Daniela Olszewska, How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents. I’m also making my way through the anthology Saints of Hysteria. As you may have noticed, I’m reading a lot of collaborative writing. This is because I enjoy working on collaborations with other poets, visual artists, composers, and even costumers, and am always looking for new forms and structures for my own collaborative practice.

TCJWW: This book contains meditations on memory and how it affects the present and future. It also happens at a crossroads in the life of the speaker. If you could say something to the speaker of these poems ten years from now, what would you want to tell her?

Darling: Because it is impossible to separate memory from imagination, stop trying.

TCJWW: Your use of archetypes and symbols such as beginnings and endings, birds, gardens, winter, and saints feels very Jungian and gives your poems almost a feel of another era in their use of such symbols. Did you go looking for your symbols, or did they find you? Why did you choose the symbols that you did?

Darling: Freud once said that the mind itself is like a literary text, in which we are presented with recurring themes, images, and motifs. Unlike the experience of crafting a poem, we have little agency when considering which themes and symbols emerge from real life. With that said, it is the task of the poet to excavate these recurrent images and motifs, to shine light on them, and transform them into something we’ve never seen before.

TCJWW: Do you have your next project in mind yet? If so, can you tell us about it?

Darling: I’m currently working on a collaboration with visual artist Kristin Giordano, which juxtaposes her beautiful black and white photographs with spare, image-driven poems. And my collaboration with poet John Gallaher will be published by BlazeVOX Books. It’s called Ghost / Landscape, and excerpts can be found in The Columbia Poetry Review, The Journal, and OmniVerse. I hope you’ll check it out!