Get to Know a Local Poet: Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo is a poet, blogger, pie-maker and registrar and volunteer coordinator at Hugo House, but, most importantly, she’s one of my best friends.

Over the last two years, I have come to know Lebo’s poetry well through our workshops with fellow poet Jennifer Borges Foster. Lebo has a knack for finding mystique within the ordinary, an example from her poem, “What’s Left,” that always makes me shudder—“My eyeball burps a blue sink and spoons sunk / in their cold suds / clamor. Listen, your absence is speaking / in the hush of things that have needed / a good cleaning.” Wow. Can you feel the hush?

Since I’ve known Lebo, she’s had as much of an obsession with poetry as she’s had with pie, volunteering for and participating in Seattle’s Edible Books Festival and writing about pie on her blog, Good Egg. Recently, her obsession has become a full-blown disorder (if you can ever call baking delicious pie a disorder) that’s led her to create “A Commonplace of Pie,” a chapbook of recipes and prose poems about—you guessed it—pie! Mmmm… pie.

Brian McGuigan: Now that you’ve completed “A Commonplace of Pie,” what are you working on next?

Kate Lebo: More pie! The energy I have for this project is immense, and the response I’ve received has been surprising and gratifying. I plan to write more prose poems and collect more quotes and facts and snips of pie trivia so I can expand "A Commonplace of Pie" into a full length manuscript. My hope is to write a book of poetry that deserves to be shelved with cookbooks and a cookbook that fits nicely into the poetry section.

BM: Chefs often say that cooking is an art. Do you find inspiration for your poetry in pie?

KL: Lately, yes. Pie has been my muse because of how people respond to it. They get emotional. They get hungry. They want some pie. It makes me think about how appetite is a simple human thing that can be sated only for a little while, which makes it complicated. Stanley Kunitz said it best in his poem “Touch Me”: “What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.”

Pie also makes me think about how some people respond in the exact opposite way to poetry—they approach it like broccoli, like something noxious but “good for you.” Something they should appreciate, which of course takes the fun out of consuming a poem. “A Commonplace of Pie” is having some fun with poetry, but it also explores how our appetites (and not just for food) make us who we are.

BM: Do you find inspiration for your pie in poetry?

KL: I think the impulse to write poetry and make pie come from the same place. I don’t know what to call that place exactly—just that I love to make things and go slowly crazy when I stop. Pie is a welcome break from poetry in that it engages my body. Working with my hands feels good. And when the pie is done, it’s easier to say “that’s a good pie” than “that’s a good poem.” I need that simplicity in my life.

BM: You write regularly about pie and food on your blog, Good Egg. How does your approach to blogging differ from your approach to writing poetry? Are there any similarities?

KL: With a blog, the important thing is to produce content. “Right word, right order” is what I aspire to with poetry, but a decent blog doesn’t have to be perfect to be readable. In fact, what I love most about blogging is the rough edges—how I can transition between one idea and another by pasting a photo between paragraphs, or how I don’t have to weave the loose threads of my narrative into a cohesive whole as long as I’ve got a recipe to keep people busy. I’m not saying that blogging should be sloppy. I’m saying that blogging has let me loosen my expectations of what good writing can be, and I think that’s helped me write more, which in turn helps me write better poetry.

BM: You, Jennifer and I have workshopped poetry together over wine and cheese for a couple of years, which is how we’ve become such great friends. Can you tell me how the workshop process informs your revision process? Or is it just about the wine and cheese?

KL: It’s always about the wine and cheese. You know that!

Our group was incredibly valuable and fun because it was small and we could trust each other to say what worked and what didn’t work about our poems. Being taken seriously by my peers helped me take my work seriously and helped me see poems as a process, not a final “ideal” poem. For much of that time we were in poetry group, I had a habit of revising TOO much, which you gave me endless shit about. Thanks for that. It helped me realize that revision can become a way to avoid writing.

BM: What rules of poetry do you enjoy breaking? Are there any that you absolutely live by?

KL: When I write, I don’t think about rules at all. By rules I mean some external edict handed down by supposedly wise, old English professors, things like “don’t use gerunds” or “don’t break a line on a conjunction” or whatever.

But if we’re talking about rules, I’ll say that this year has been all about breaking my own. Basically, I’ve been thinking about how my expectations of what a “good” poem should look like can straightjacket my writing. For example, this past week I’ve been trying to use the phrase “my feelings” in a poem to confront my fear of writing cheeseball poetry. Somebody, maybe it was Hugo, said that good poetry has to risk sentimentality. I’m getting comfortable with that.

As for rules to live by…the only one I find helpful is “follow your gut.”

BM: What’s the best thing about Seattle’s poetry community? And the worst?

KL: Well, being a conflict-averse Northwesterner I really don’t want to answer to the worst things about our community. Maybe that’s the worst thing! It feels like a huge faux pas to say anything negative. That’s a cop-out of an answer, I know.

The best thing about Seattle’s poetry community is that there is a deep pool of literary talent and resources in this city. It is so deep that we can be completely immersed. Perhaps I feel that way because I work for Hugo House—the “can poetry matter?” debate just doesn’t have any traction around here. Of course it matters. Duh. That that’s a given is a rare and beautiful thing.

Nibble on Kate Lebo’s writing on her blog, Good Egg.

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