Get to Know a Local Poet: Kary Wayson

I didn’t understand what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” until I stumbled on “Garcia Lorca.” It’s a poem that starts “Green I want you green” and loops between sense and sound and image so fast it made (still makes) my head spin. The author, Kary Wayson, was local—even better, she was teaching a class at Hugo House that quarter. So I signed up to meet my poetry crush. Turns out she’s a talented and generous teacher, too.

Kary’s poems toy with words, flirt with syntax and mess around with sound. They lead you by the hand through rooms where emotions are solid objects and what we mean is impossible to say perfectly, even with perfect words. I wouldn’t say she’s a narrative, confessional or academic poet. Rather, she is comfortable with the physicality of narrative, open to the vulnerability of confession and unintimidated by intellectual abstraction. Emily Dickinson might prefer to be scalped by a poem, but I’d rather be punched in the gut. That’s why I like Kary’s poems—they come out swinging.

Kate Lebo: Your first collection of poems, “American Husband,” won the 2008 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in poetry and was published last year. Over the past couple years, I think I heard three or four different titles for the manuscript. How did you decide this was “the one”? That these were the poems that should be in it? Maybe I should put it this way: Can you talk a bit about the process that helped you create the final version of the manuscript?

Kary Wayson: For many years (like more than ten), I mailed and re-mailed differently-titled versions and re-versions and –visions of my first manuscript to book contests and poetry presses. During that (long) time, when I made a new poem, I’d stick it in the stack and pull an older or lesser one out. I didn’t think of the book as a book—it was a stack. After many (many!) years of this, I guess I just stopped. I felt all the poems in the stack were strong enough to stay. At around the same time, which was a couple of years ago, I started a new project—a long poem that will someday be its own book. It was in this way that the final version of "American Husband" became final, though to my mind it was still less a book than stack of poems.

In my last go-round with sending it out, I gave the manuscript to my friend Olena and asked her for help with it. One poem in particular was problematic. For many much-discussed reasons, I could not settle on a last line for it. I kept sending Olena the same poem with a new last line on it. It was her idea to repeat that poem throughout the book, each time with different ending. It was a brilliant idea—and I wouldn’t have thought of it myself. The repeating poem gave the stack a body—a body making a kind of progress—and the stack became an actual book.

To answer your question about the title, let me use a line from Wallace Stevens’ “Things of August:” “The woman is chosen but not by him.”

I didn’t think of it at the time, but I guess it felt right to make the book’s title express a kind of angry, unrequited longing, which is a recurring theme/tone throughout the work. Also, “American Husband” is the title of the first poem in the book, which I placed before anything else as not-so-cryptic dedication to my father who, for me, stands as a kind of an ur-husband, and to whom, for better or worse, a lot of the poems are addressed.

KL: When I read "American Husband," I noticed a few differences between the poems published in that book and the versions published in your chapbook “Dog and Me.” When do your poems feel done? Or do they ever? Are there things you would revise about “American Husband” if you could?

KW: I’ll often begin a poem with its last line. That is to say, I’ll know how I want to finish a poem and the trouble is how to begin and then make a middle for it. In any case, I know the poem is finished when I hear a little click in my head, which corresponds to something super-dumb like the sound of boom! coming out of my mouth and then my hand’s throwing the pen on the table, and I’m up and pacing with my heart racing while I scramble to call one of a few very good, very patient friends in order to beg them to listen to what I just wrote. Days later I’ll go back and see or hear that I have a certain amount of revising to do. I could revise forever.

KL: Why are you a poet? Why not a novelist? An art critic? A journalist?

KW: Good question! Today I’d say I make poems for two reasons. One is that I tend strongly towards order and compression in all of my aesthetic choices. For instance, my responses to these interview questions feel scarily sloppy to me—totally out of my usual tight control. I really could (and would if you let me!) craft and revise these answers for weeks on end. In writing, my interest lives at the level of syllables: syllables strung together into words and turns of phrase into lengths of line and then when I’m focused and lucky and I’ve worked a good long hard time, those lines into stanzas. But paragraphs??? I can make them, but uneasily—they’re so incredibly unwieldy!

The other maybe more/maybe less real response to your question borrows a line from the poet and professor Allen Grossman, who says, “Poetry is the speech of last resort.” Along a similar line, I must admit that I am always so urgently wanting to finally say a thing and be done with it—each of my poems is an attempt at this. Inevitably they fail and so I try again.

KL: You’ve said, “I feel is my best work comes from interactions with other artists’ best work.” Who have you been interacting with lately, and what work has it inspired?

KW: Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Wallace Stevens, and a lot of Helen Vendler for help with Wallace Stevens. This week, along with EVERYTHING ELSE, those two are teaching me how to elide the lyric “I,” which is what my long poem needs right now. (“I” is finding this very hard to learn to (not) do.)

I’m also reading essays by Peter Schjeldahl, my man, the art critic, at the New Yorker. His writing is brilliant and his brain is amazing. (He started as a poet!) If I could do the job anywhere near as well as he does, I’d wish (I do wish!) it were mine.

Also on my table: the newest ArtForum, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (half finished), "Absolom Absolom" by William Faulkner (just started), "A Lover’s Discourse" by Roland Barthes (read and re-read and dog-eared and overly underlined) and my mother’s old copy of "Franny and Zooey," which I’ve been reading out loud to my boyfriend. Tomorrow, I’ve got to go get a new copy of Auden’s "The Dyer’s Hand."

KL: What “rules of poetry” do you enjoy breaking?

KW: What did Rick Kenney say—or say somebody said? Something about “free verse” poetry being like tennis without a net. In other words, what rules? I don’t write in the traditional forms, so I’m usually on my own, very cautiously feeling my way through the lines of what I’m writing. In that sense, I can say that I truly do enjoy breaking the rule of that habitual caution—by wildly repeating myself  (“there’s joy in repetition!”) or getting slack-lined and long-winded after sections of too-tight a control on the sounds of the language. Other than the tyrannical rule of my tendency towards, like I said, order and compression, my only real rule is this (and there’s no reason to break it): if I’m gonna call it a poem, that poem better (try! try! to actually, physically) move the reader.

Read more about Kary Wayson and her collection of poetry, "American Husband," at ohiostatepress.org.

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