Kevin Holden is a poet, critic, and translator. He is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Solar, which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Birch, which won the Ahsahta Press Award, and Pink Noise, recently out from Nightboat Books. His translation of Jean Daive’s The Figure Outward is forthcoming this spring from Black Square Editions. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn) and If Bees Are Few (Minnesota). He has taught at Bard, Harvard, and Iowa and is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is also an activist and cares a great deal about trees.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Back in 2009, Cannibal Books published a chapbook of mine called Identity. I'd published two little ones before that, but this was a different experience. The publisher of Cannibal, Matthew Henriksen, deeply, passionately believed in the poetry. There’d been validation of my work before, but this came from another space, an editorial one, and outside of the contexts of people I knew or of an academic program. Matt was extraordinary, and I got to know him more at the Frank Stanford Festival he organized in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He convinced me that I was doing something significant. That my work was unusual. There's a lot to say about him, that time, the press’s energy and community. For me, in short, he made me feel that my work merited being published in book form, that that was something that needed to happen. When my first full-length book, Solar, won the Fence Prize, that was something on a larger scale of course, and the attention the book received was very meaningful to me. But that earlier work with Matt, on something that was “only” a chapbook, was really important and encouraging. As to how the more recent work compares, I’d say it’s… stranger? It’s certainly gotten more complex. Matt was actually one of the people who convinced me that the stranger and “harder” work was the right trajectory, that it was rarer, surprising, unique. I think Pink Noise is definitely a further step along that path. In certain aspects it might actually be more “accessible” than Solar, but it is likely also deeper, more dimensional, and more complex.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
For me it was always poetry. I like novels, but poetry, once I began reading it, spoke to me and seemed right; it made sense to me in a much deeper and more immediate and natural way. I came across The Waste Land more or less by accident when I was eleven years old. It felt true, like a world, and like magic. It harmonized with how I felt and perceived, I suppose. (Syntactically, emotionally, musically, imagistically.) It was that way onward. I also started writing poetry around that time. I've never tried writing fiction. I do write essays, and philosophy is very important to me. But the novels I care most about are often considered to be “closest” to poetry: Woolf, Faulkner, Genet, Toomer… Poetic grammar just feels... accurate. And where beauty resides. I can't imagine it otherwise.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’d say it comes and goes. When it’s there, it often comes fairly quickly, but then the process of putting it all together is slow. And there are lots of notes and scribbles, but when something feels like it’s happening as a “poem,” it’s usually quick (and often close to what will be its final shape). The process of arranging the pieces is more arduous, especially as some of the poems and sections are quite long.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
They begin in perceptions, feelings, or in the words themselves. I think I’m mainly an author of pieces that combine into larger projects, but fairly early on, once there are more pieces and different kinds, I’m trying to think of how they will come together and harmonize into a book.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
After all this time, I still get nervous before readings. But I do enjoy doing them, and I think hearing the work is important. The poems’ sound is very central for me, and they are usually pretty musically dense. I certainly write hearing them in my ear, and the poetry’s internal architectures become clearer when read aloud (especially as they often involve distortions of grammar). I often read at a somewhat fast pace, and that’s intentional; there’s an intensity and a kind of heaping up of rhythm that is important for me.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m interested in the way in which poetry is or makes reality. I suppose, in a sense, these are Modernist (or adjacent) concerns. There are things said by Vicente Huidobro and Tristan Tzara that feel very right to me. I also feel close to something Paul Celan said: “I try to reproduce cuttings from the spectral analysis of things.” And to various aspects of the polyhedron that is Objectivist poetics. I don’t know if there are theoretical concerns “behind” the writing — the writing is, I’d say, just itself, emergent and organic — and I’m certainly not trying to write so as to “demonstrate” or enact some theory. But there are theoretical questions and apparatuses out in the world that interest me, for sure. Adorno’s aesthetic theory feels right. Wittgenstein. I’m interested in the poem and the book as their own monadic worlds, being or extending into reality. And I believe that poetic objects are like bundled up cross-sections of perception, feeling, and actuality cohering in language and sound. And they are formed. And in all this there is a kind of politics, to which, it seems, your next question speaks. So, the questions the work is trying to answer, as it were, regard the nature of this word I keep using, “reality.” And memory and desire, for example, are just as much a part of that as grammar and physics. Lastly, queerness, in all its own kaleidoscopic entanglement, is central for me.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Ideally, it is a role of truth, beauty, complexity, rigor. Perhaps to be guardians of language. For a long time, I’ve felt that there is a politics of estrangement in aesthetic work, a resistance to the flattening of thought and experience that is inflicted by commodification and capital, one that is made possible through the complexity and strangeness, through the distortions and reformations of grammar and thought, that are in poetry. This is, along various axes, a Marxist sentiment. And it also suggests something as simple as the awakening and expansion of consciousness. I believe this. But lately, as we seem to be entering an era that is sometimes called “after truth,” I also believe that poetic language — in its particularities and nonconformities, but also in its perceptions, accuracies, and recordings — is necessary for holding on to how things really are, as weird and complex as that realness is. Among other things, this is to say that poetry is also a form of vigilance and witness. In a very pragmatic, honest sense, the “there there” is slipping away in social media algorithms, AI, and political misinformation. Poetic language can and should work to resist that. Though poetry’s relation to truth is an ancient topic that could be exfoliated forever, one thing that is accurate, however complicatedly, is that it can be “extra true,” so to speak. Practically, there’s a small audience, surely, especially in the US. But that doesn’t mean the “role of the writer” is any less real.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I often find it helpful. It can be clarifying when it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
For poetry, “make it new”? For life, the Heart Sutra.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translations to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
They’re doing quite different things, and they each involve or require, for me anyway, pretty different “mental states.” If I’m really in the rhythm or mood of poetry, it would be difficult to pivot suddenly and try to write essayistic prose. So, they would come in different phases, at different times. That said, they are also just different forms or focal points to which to turn attention, so sometimes the rotation is not as hard. All of the forms are difficult, but I’d say that translating poetry especially can be very intense cognitive labor. In a sense, it’s also nice, because you’re working off of something that is already “there,” a surface, not trying to bring something into being all on your own, as it were. Anyhow, each mode and activity can say and show different things and do so differently. And that multiplicity feels valuable.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
It’s a little sporadic. When I was at Iowa, I had the open time to write every day. That was also part of the culture. Sit at the kitchen table, go to a café, write things. That’s the luxury and also (kind of) the responsibility. I don’t really have the space to do that now. Hopefully there’s time and “head space” for notes, scraps of things. And then windows open where more fluid or focused work is possible.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Nature (or the thought of it), woods, rivers, snow. And to other art, pretty much all genres. For a bare language engine, Modernist fiction. For something like a world aspect ratio, “art” film like Bergman or Tarkovsky.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
That’s a beautiful question. I’ll conflate it a bit with “childhood.” I grew up in more than one place. Succinctly: for my father, woodsmoke; for my mother, honeysuckle.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Oh, absolutely. I’d say all of those. The natural world is extremely important to me, trees and forests especially. There’s a lot of math and science in my work, especially topology and geometry. Ballet, lots of music, maybe especially electronic and minimalist, and lots of painting, particularly abstraction of the 20th Century.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
For poetry: Paul Celan, Leslie Scalapino, Louis Zukofsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson are some. For philosophy: Adorno, Thoreau, and Wittgenstein. And the novelists I mention above, especially Woolf.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In life, go to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In art, somehow make a film?
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Perhaps visual art curator. (Maybe of sculpture, specifically.) I’ve written on art history and theory at points in my life, and a long time ago I almost worked at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In completely different directions, maybe a math teacher or psychotherapist.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Perhaps it’s a cliché, but I honestly can’t imagine not doing it. It’s a fundamental part of me and my perception of reality. It’s how I hold on to the world.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I will do 2x2. László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below and J. H. Prynne’s Poems 2016-2024; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a book called Firn. It’s a book of long poems/sections, and the title is a kind of snow. I also finished a translation of a book of Jean Daive’s that I’ve titled The Figure Outward; it’s coming out from Black Square Editions this spring.
