12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. Her recent work in various genres appears in Poetry Northwest, Redivider, Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first full-length book came out at the very beginning of the pandemic, so I guess I wish it had changed my life more than it did. But that's not being generous enough -- having my first book out in the world has opened all sorts of doors for me, from readings to whole jobs. It's irritating, on a systemic level, that a printed collection is required to open such doors. But on a more personal level, it is exceedingly gratifying to see those years and years of work coalesce into an object that you can hold in your hands, that other people can hold in theirs and have on their shelves. Unlike individually published poems, a whole book has the time to make a series of arguments that are, to use the old cliché, greater than the sum of their parts. My first book taught me that, to a degree; my more recent work really takes it to ridiculous extremes. What I'm writing now feels both much more experimental (formally) and much more rhetorically coherent; if my first book seems like it's aiming for a kind of formal range or virtuosity, my new work is just like these huge weird blocky or spindly bits of texts that are all hammering home a big, almost academic-critical point.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

This is probably a common answer, but: I cannot write plots. I've never been any good at telling stories; my imagination also seems incapable of the gymnastics required to actually make up a whole character. The first poem I ever wrote was in early high school, in response to a friend's sudden and devastating illness. I was trying to capture a kind of social shock, and it seemed to me at the time like a compressed, singular thing, like a bright light shining in your face. I suppose that's why it came out as a poem and not as a narrative. I've been stuck with the genre ever since.  

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'm in the fortunate position of having several ideas going right now; starting creative projects has always come relatively easily to me (starting scholarly ones, on the other hand, I find nearly impossible). I don't do a huge number of drafts of a given poem; I do, however, take a lot of notes. I tend to write a lot of single drafts of different poems and then discard whole drafts and start over; I tell my students that I'm a notorious "blank-page" reviser. 

4 - Where does a poem 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?

I'm definitely a "book" poet, though I suppose that always starts by being a bit of a "theme" poet, by which I mean I'll get stuck on a thing that I want to write about, and then write like ten poems about that thing, and sometimes that stops shortly thereafter (hence, for example, my chapbook BETWEEN) and sometimes it turns out to have legs. I wish, at times, that I could be one of those poets whose books are simply a series of only loosely connected poems. I'm not really sure if books like that exist anymore, so great is the impetus towards "project" books. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I adore doing readings. Adore it! If you are reading this, email me and ask me to read for your class/book club/friend group/rowing association! I'm not sure if I'd say they're a part of my "creative process," but I find them energizing and fun and an integral part of being a writer. 

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?

For better or for worse, the writing I'm doing now is 100% theoretical concern. My current project grapples with the question of how our lives might be different if we allowed sadness and slowness to be a part of them; it takes an explicitly anti-capitalist (which is to say, anti-productivity, anti-speed, anti-consumable-happiness) stance. The real current question, though--not for me, but for everyone--is climate change. It's not something I'm currently writing about in a concerted way, though of course one cannot write about degrowth without also sort of writing about climate change. My next project is about steel manufacturing, though (see, I told you I'm a horrible "theme" poet) so it will be interesting to see how it comes up when I can finally get to that book. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

There are lots of different types of writers, and correspondingly different types of roles for them. For poets and scholars, though, there's a type of demonstrated non-instrumentality to our work that is I think (a) increasingly vanishing and/but (b) increasingly important to safeguard. Lots of people want to be artists because there's some idea of "freedom" in there. Is that ideological? Probably. But is there also some truth to the idea that it's hard to alienate the work of a poet or a painter. When you do, you get slogan-writing and graphic design, which are not the same things, though of course they can be very good careers. The role of the writer, then, is maybe just to demonstrate that we should abolish all careers. A strange thing about me is that I am very pro-professionalism and very anti-career. I do think they're separate.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I've not worked with that many outside editors, but my experiences have been good. My poetry editor, Mary Biddinger, is a marvel. She will provide exactly the amount of help you need on a given thing. Usually the process of publishing poetry is a pretty hands-off affair. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Learn to recognize the people around you whose actions are dictated by opportunism or other kinds of jobbery, and then proceed to avoid them to the fullest extent to which that is possible.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I cannot do scholarship when I am writing poetry and vice-versa. The two genres influence each other enormously -- I'm a scholar of experimental poetry -- but I can't do them both at the same time. I'm a one-hat kind of person. That said, when I am writing poetry, I am thinking about scholarship, and when I am doing scholarship, I am thinking about poetry projects. In that sense they're inseparable, but the work itself happens almost entirely separately.

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?

I, like most people I suspect, am in constant search for the perfect routine. Right now, I'm finishing a scholarly project, and I write prose best in the afternoons. So mornings are devoted to walking and administrative procrastinating, and then I'll (hopefully) settle into writing after lunch. For poetry, it's the opposite -- I write it best in the mornings, so I'm going to have to change things up when I get back to it. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Reading in the general vicinity of what I might want to be writing about. Every time, no exceptions. Not just poetry, though that's a lot of it. The reason I have a current book project is because I found a PDF of Saturn and Melancholy on the internet and was so smitten with it I decided to write an entire book basically in response to it. That's it! 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I feel like my mom used to have a small bottle of White Diamonds lying around, and I'd bet almost anything that if I smelled that perfume again I'd be walloped right back to the suburbs of eastern PA. My other, adopted, home is central Maine, which smells unavoidably of pine.

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?

All of those things influence my work, which sounds like a non-answer, but when your guiding philosophy is that poetry is just particularly intense noticing, it kind of doesn't matter what the focus of the noticing is. It can all become fodder. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The classic answer: too many to name! John Ashbery's work gave me my start, in a real sense, even though that "start" was at the very end of my MFA. W.G. Sebald keeps me going. Dionne Brand is constantly teaching me how to think. John Keene is not only one of the world's most remarkable writers, but also one of the world's most generous and thoughtful people. I go to Brigit Pegeen Kelly when I want to be astonished. And to Brian Lennon when I want to remember what's important. There's no end to this list, really.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

[Insert a bunch of deeply un-laudable personal ambitions here.]

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?

This was always kind of it for me, I think, though had my knees held up I probably could have been a ski instructor forever. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being really shit at both team sports and acting?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just read Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers and it's just as devastating as everyone says it is. Last great film would definitely be Face/Off. I hadn't seen it until this past summer! It belongs in the Louvre. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

See question 6, though I'm also trying desperately to finish up a scholarly book called The Academic Avant-Garde that should be out with Johns Hopkins University Press late next year. Catherine, if you're reading this: I'm working on it! 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Garden

 

1.

Conversation: the shape              , and the duration.
An evening, left to stretch

past tenderness,                an August grip

of summer soil, tumblers. Kimberly and Alex, in
our socially-distant backyard. As she wrote: deep

as a ruffled pool.

 

2.

Tucked in, behind suburban brick, this metreage that occupies
such amplitude. Christine gardens,

a meritocracy of garlic, calendula, goldenrod,             lavender
and lemongrass; a disposition                           of tomatoes.

Her half-forgotten horseradish, leftover from last year, nearly
enough to separate

the skin of the earth like a tumor.

 

3.

In the children’s corner garden, a pumpkin
appears, unexpectedly. What

they did not plant.

Tanya Lukin Linklater: A person enters and reads.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, A Brief History of Fruit

In which I climb a tree, as a child, and find my
father’s initials about 16 feet off the ground

The season’s folding in Appalachia bearing witness
to a thousand slow implosions—
broad leaves falling like kneeling benches. An evenly knitted
blanket of maple and clay. In the canopy,
I am a small monkey, fiddling with the end of a stem
in wonder. Yes and no. The cooler reality
wears Keds and rustles slowly skywards. What we feel
when we discover something—expected or unexpected,
the temple you knew was somewhere within your reach or the pleasure
of a bittersweet drink—drives the colonial impulse. Our joy
is rigged.        C     F     A
Individual fault is a terrible entrée into any discussion about nostalgia.
Nevertheless, in the autumn, I search those worn-down mountains
for anything that has not changed,
for an ascension that I can halt, forgive me, by pressing hard with my hands.

The full-length debut by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, a poet and critic newly relocated from Maryland to Ottawa to teach at the University of Ottawa this fall, is A Brief History of Fruit (Akron OH: The University of Akron Press, 2020). A follow-up to the small volume, BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press, 2018), A Brief History of Fruit is a collection that writes on, as Diane Seuss writes in her blurb on the back cover, “history—personal, familial, postcolonial, geopolitical, ecological—and indeed the history of fruit, fruit as sustenance, pleasure, exploitable product, as image, parent, love, and wound.” Chosen by Seuss as the winner of the 2018 Akron Poetry Prize, A Brief History of Fruit uses fruit as a framework to articulate a space of the two perceived sides of the author’s cultural identity, as Andrews discusses as part of an interview with Jon Riccio, posted on The University of Arizona Poetry Center blog on August 19, 2020:

But the honest answer is this: when I started writing this book, what was guiding me was a fundamental confusion about what it meant to be me, culturally speaking. Racially speaking. In a world formed and destroyed by white supremacy, what does it mean to contain and embody whiteness alongside a racial identity that it has traditionally othered and exoticized? What does it mean to contain both of those things? One can see the difficulty inherent in this question just in the debates over terminology: identifiers like “mixed-race” and “half x” and all of the bi- and multi- prefixes reinforce a kind of blood-quantum reification of race, while terms like mestizx, for example, refer to very specific subsets of people. But what else are we to call ourselves? I am, and am not, Filipinx American. I am of two races, and yet I myself am one person. So this notion of how to name oneself is at the heart of the project. And even now in this answer, you can see the ways in which I am turning that fundamentally solipsistic argument (“what the hell am I anyway”) into one with obvious scholarly implications and roots. Part of this is because, as I’ve said elsewhere, the book went through two very distinct phases: an initial drafting phase, done a long time ago, in which my only real concern was portraying my family, capturing certain moments, certain places, certain relations between those things. The second phase was a rewrite of almost the entire book, undertaken much later and on the other side of a doctorate, in which I went back through the portraits and the stories and tried to force them outward, a bit, beyond my personal situation and into more conscious contact with extant discussions about the nature of whiteness and American colonialism. I learned, in that later phase, that (at least for me) successful poetry is more interpretation than expression, more analysis than anecdote. It’s what still guides me.

Andrews writes expansive, narrative lyrics that examine cultural legacies and identities surrounding produce, from politics to labour, and histories from both sides of her families, including her maternal grandfather’s stroke, varieties of light, questions around water, and the notion of “ethnic foods.” To end the poem “Acquired Taste,” she writes: “This is the part where I say // of course I like it now, that my life is sour and analogous foods / make me feel like weights clicking into the right place on a scale. // What I mean is that grief is nothing if not the inability to tell / and retell the beloved of their own significance.” Andrews articulates her narratives by stretching the lyric, staggering and even deconstructing her lines, such as the poem “How to Get Into a Poem,” that opens: “[A Startling observation about the nature of human life] / or [A concrete description of trout] / [Backstory, alluding to an individuating experience]” Her poems are expansive, opening a lyric of story and inquiry to get at the very heart. “I have wanted to explain certain things about the difference between the brain / and the body.” she writes, as part of the poem “Apostrophe.” To introduce the collection, Seuss writes:

            Despite the love that the speaker expresses, her realm is existential loneliness, and she owns it. “It turns out that any constellation    can lead you astray,” she writes, “that any sky    can ask you I’m sorry   do I know you.” Still, her poems do not spin in a cosmic fog. They are solidly placed. In Manila, where the rains are so persistent that “roofs become radios, the gray noise sweeping every    room with a broom made of profound differences.” On American rivers, “their greenish syntax letting all the silk / slip to the floor.” In her grandmother’s kitchen, “the aproned comma of my lola cleaning squid…the smell of the sea—the presence of death, / the preservation of salt—laying its net upon my face.” In an American hunting camp, “(w)hich is a man’s / place, a white man’s place. Which inheritance, / which ‘tradition,’ which deed marked 1804 stashed / in the floorboards. Which America.” These are hard-won poems, fought for, lived through. They do not resolve; to resolve would equal self-abandonment. Nor do they locate or repair the single center that will not hold. Instead they inventory a parallel history—“Raspberry, cherry, coconut, santol, passionfruit (dislike), apricot, lychee, mango, blueberry. So many different centers.” The history of fruit.