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The Charm and Evasiveness of Kristen Orser

Kristen Orser

an interview
Chicago, IL, USA

Re-reading this, I know that interviewing Kristen was a stupid idea. She’s one of my best friends and, while this was being conducted, I felt a great surge of something close to home-sickness for the last two years I spent in college at SUNY Fredonia (which Kristen and I graduated from).

I know her too well to ask corny, interview-y questions and all the really interesting things I would like to ask her are not for your eyes (or mine, or my ears, rather), or would require some interpersonal backstory or personal history with either of us to be anywhere near interesting.

But Kristen’s charming enough and thoroughly poetically evasive in her answers to make this readable. And fun. When she found out I’d be posting this she wrote that you’d have to be on LSD to read this and thus we will have done a service by encouraging drug use.

Whatever. Kristen’s finishing her MFA at Columbia University in Chicago. She’s lovable and scary sometimes and a wonderful person.

I foot-noted some stuff.

-mike

......

Have you ever stolen anything?

Yes. Other people's conversations and a pack of gum. I think I returned the gum.

What's worse, freezing your ass off in Chicago or freezing your ass off in WNY?

In WNY people were wild and drunk enough to jump in Lake Erie, dead winter, naked. The Midwest, sadly, is mostly flat. I miss the mountains, I miss the skiing, I miss the close by Pennsylvania breweries and Fredonia mulled wine to warm up a cold night.

Do I sound nostalgic yet?

You just finished your first year of your MFA. How was that?

Wonderful. Painful. Somewhere in between.

Learn anything relevant?

If you hide behind a cloud you are Emily Dickinson. If you hide behind a cloud and you aren't Emily Dickinson, you aren\'t hiding right, or even at all--everyone can see you, it's a cloudless day.

Make something up that's truly horrifying about your program and then add something true to it.

We have to write with quill pens and take on multiple lovers a la Byron. There is our very own Trelawny who claims to have known Keats. Nobody will buy a boat from him since Shelley died. Also, I am the only person who still eats meat and writes poetry, so I\'m considered only half human.

So is it worth it? Should I, or anyone, get their MFA?

You should get an esoteric degree or become a bounty hunter. The rest of you should seek an oracle or look to the stars. For me, it is worth it because I'm head over heels about having the time to write and to think about writing.

What are you doing for the summer? Are you doing any conferences soon? Ones where they don't belabor what constitutes a prose poem and let you sit around and drink as much as you want?

Strawberry eating takes time, attention to seed. I'm a research assistant for Critical Encounters (art and activism program) and I'm an editor for Columbia Poetry Review (begging fancy pants poets for fancy pants submissions that'll make me drop to my knees and sing). I babysit for James, Emery, and William; when they aren\'t looking I turn them into poems.

You ever look at these kids and then think of your own bullshit life and think "Kids, it is a big, tough world out there." I mean, where's the store for emotional armor and maces and emotional broadswords?

This seems like a rhetorical question. I look at the kids and think, yes, standing on your head is a perfect idea.

Your went to college (and grew dreads) in Vermont, transferred to Fredonia, and now you're in Chicago. You\'ve been to Europe, Venezuela and the Czech Republic. Do you see value in big geographical leaps?

Don't you know a person can only be in one place at a time? The plan is Eastern Europe, the plan is to eat chocolate. And then the plan becomes the south of France, to dry laundry outside. And next it is California. Roots are for trees.

Fucking-A right. I agree. What are other things that you think that I agree with?

Um...maybe you like Nick Cave too.

Are you following this shit in Palestine?

Unabashedly.

There is a professor in Chicago who was fired recently. He was accused of anti-Semitism, but he seems to be against Israeli occupation. He is, not that it really should matter, the son of Holocaust survivors. He says he remembers his parents saying something like, "There are people who are monsters and nothing is to be done about them, but what of the people who are silent?" I think education should be more open to ideas and opposition. I think we are living in a really dangerous and quiet time. Has it been too long since we have read of Plato's cave?

If you could eat a person, guilt-free, would you be interested?

I would be more interested in eating some grilled pineapple.

If you could eat any mythological creature or historical figure, what/or who would you eat?

The minotaur.

Do you know Joe Meno?

The Chicago wunderkid. Do you know the oak?

Who is your favorite poet who was a raging alcoholic (dead I guess, to stave off hurt feelings)?

Robert Creeley.

Is pizza really that deep in Chicago? Like an inch-deep trough? That seems impossible to me.

It seems impossible to imagine something impossible.

What's drawn you to writing?

Being unable to draw.

I'm drawn to the materiality of letters and the nonsense of sense (read nursery rhymes). I'm drawn to the way a poem is a song and a song is a story and a story isn't a story at all, but something I heard while I was walking in a row of pines.

A lot of your poetry deals with familial concerns and, at other times or additionally, reveals undertones of personal guilt. Do you let your poetry frame yourself judgmentally, or does it steer itself there? Could you use poetry as a light to take yourself from those darker recesses or are you trying to mine them?[1.]

There is a mirror in a tree in a woods, have you looked into it?

There will be a night with no moon, then a night with a moon.

We can never be sure of a lover's consistency.

There is a bird flying into the window, which means someone will die unless they've kept a feather in their shoe for fourteen months.

If you could re-create the workshopping that we used to rock with Thomas, et al, would you? Is your program structured where that sort of thing is possible, or are things more competitive?[2.]

Minus (or adding) some secret kissing, yes! Can you all move to Chicago or Russia?

Nobody cooks rice and beans like Thomas and I haven't heard any Gumby poems since Dustin.

So, would you consider your environment, as it stands, conducive to workshopping like this? P.S. I have no clue what you\'re talking about with all this "secret kissing."

You missed the kissing because you had a girlfriend.

I think my environment is ideal for good workshopping, but it isn't the environment that matters as much as the people. The difficult part, for me, of an MFA program is the way we are all "peers" but not really friends. There is no boxed wine and tangent conversation. Good poetry grows in the margins of talk, in the acts of shared thinking.

In general, I think people (not just poets) take themselves too seriously. In Fredonia we were lucky...we could walk to the lake and just hang out, we could have bonfires, we could pick grapes, etc and all of those acts were making us think and approach life with genuine engagement. It's this kind of engagement, which can happen in mundane happenings like taking a nap, that make you look at your self, your world, whatever and attend to its very being.

Read anything superbad (and by that I guess I mean good) lately?

Ann Quinn, Three. Gennadi Aygi. Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar. Dan Beachy-Quick, Mulberry. Lorine Niedecker, New Goose. Louis Zukofsky, Anew.

Clue us into something we have no idea about.

You might know that Cicero's tongue was pulled out and pierced by Fulvia's hair pin, but you might not know that an astrologer had predicted all of this before it happened.

......

(Kristen asked if she could interview me, so I gave her three questions. Here they are.)

1) Have you ever wanted to be a woman?

Well, you're assuming the construction of my gender to be consistently male, right? If you're talking all the way, full-blown, I would say no. Although I look good in a skirt, I got all these sweet perks as a white male that I can twist to subvert all the expectations entrusted in me and eventually overturn conventional society. Or it'll be easier for me to sell out and be a misogynist, booze-hound author.

2) How would you tell someone you hated them without telling them you hate them?

I'd get one of my friends to tell them. Or write an audacious send-up of them for some local satirical paper using a clever pseudonym. Klike Mepfler.

Actually, I feel comfortable being direct these days. I'd just fuckin' tell them I hate them.

3) Do you ever want to make out with your own poems 'cause you think they're that good?

No. In that my poems are still awkward enough to show sincerity and actually expressive character, I'd probably be so intoxicated by their idiosyncrasies that I'd probably eradicate my chances of making out with them by getting too drunk at a party and saying something stupid and maybe sarcastically racist (but they don't know it's sarcastic.)

Extra: Why isn\'t Emmylou Harris considered as cool as all these other folksy women when she is, clearly, the coolest?

I don't know. I have Paradise Hotel on vinyl. It\'s one of the coolest records I own. Maybe you should scoop her up and re-invent her like Tarantino.


Footnotes:
_____________________________
[1.]God, I am such an asshole.
[2.]After attending Mid-American Review’s Winter Wheat conference at Bowling Green, Ohio in December 2005, Kristen, Thomas Schwartz, Colin Scharf, Dusin O’Brien and I started informally workshopping at Thomas’ apartment. We used this team-spirit reading at The AAAlliance’s show in April ‘06 at EBC in Fredonia. Do you remember rock’n’roll radio?

Check out Kristen's gallery here.