Kathryn Nuernberger on The Social Distance Reading Series
Kathryn Nuernberger’s poetry collections are Rue (BOA 2020), The End of Pink (BOA 2016) and Rag & Bone (Elixir 2011). Her essay collections are Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (The Ohio State University Press, 2017) and The Witch of Eye (Sarabande 2021). She teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Here’s Kathryn reading from her new book RUE, available at BOA Editions.
RUE is a brilliant meditation on corporeality, history, and what it means to move through the natural and material world—be it a field of pennyroyal or the Dollar General—in a female body. Kathryn Nuernberger’s astonishing poems present an urgent and devastating discourse, via many-layered gut-punch narratives, of the complex ways in which we are connected to one another that together become a powerful reckoning on female strength and desire in the #MeToo era.
—Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly, Carry Me
This collection lets you open yourself to the possibility of truth stripped bare of the cultural baggage that keeps us from speaking our minds to strangers and friends and lovers alike. Let RUE bewitch you, let it charm you, as rue strung around the neck to keep your vision sharp and deflect from plague and remedy what ails you. Let it locate what ails you, and extract it with whatever needs to be said.
— Jennifer Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein
GMR: How do you begin a new piece of writing? What conditions help your writing process?
I like to invent daily research rituals for myself to inspire new work. When I was writing RUE my ritual was to take a morning walk across the meadow laying fallow on my homestead in rural Missouri. I would pick a flower and go home to research its botanical and folkloric stories. Often I returned later in the day to harvest the plant for food or medicine. Over time these notes and experiences evolved into poems.
GMR: What was an early experience that taught you language has power?
Like a lot of girls, I internalized the notion early on that I had no power. I was mouthy and bossy and brassy, which felt like my great flaws. I spent my childhood scolding myself for failing at various vows of silence. When I started writing RUE I was so lonely and sad that I decided I had little to gain or lose by just telling the truth. Truths like: I want a divorce. Or: I was sexually assaulted. One of the unexpected joys of writing this book is that I have found the richest and most meaningful friendships of my life emerge from that honesty. Truthful language makes love possible and I was about 40 years old when I learned that.
GMR: What poets or writers do you continually go back to?
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard; Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris; everything by Hahn Kimiko, Ross Gay, Brian Teare, Camille Dungy, and CA Conrad.
GMR: What is your favorite childhood or adolescent book?
As a child, E. L. Konigsburg’s The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was my first introduction to the beautiful wilderness of research and docupoetics. More recently I’ve loved reading Louise Erdritch’s Birchbark House series with my nine-year-old – the books have deepened my understanding of how the Dakota land I live on now has been shaped by settler colonialism and also how people have lived sustainably within its ecosystems.
GMR: What are your thoughts/experiences on social distancing?
During this pandemic we must practice social isolation with commitment and understand it as a show of solidarity to everyone we love and miss.
I mention in my reading that I wrote this book about a different form of social distancing – the isolation I felt as a radical feminist living in rural Missouri and also the feelings of isolation bordering on the sensation of being gaslit that can go along with a certain kind of passive aggressive “niceness” white Midwesterners often perform.
GMR: Where can we find you? Link to your blog or website:
The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
We’re thrilled to host The Social Distance Reading Series, a collaboration between Green Mountains Review and The Vermont School poets. In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. At this point, we are focusing on collections by poets whose book events have been cancelled between January through May 2020.
Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Thanks,
–Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Kerrin McCadden, and Elizabeth Powell, series curators.
–Kylie Gellatly, editorial assistant, interviewer.