Reviews/Interviews

Interview with Derek Krissof, Editor-at-Large

September 2023

DK: You’re a poet and professor of English at Appalachian State University. How did you come to App State, and how would you characterize your relationship to the place where you live and work?

KK: The search for a tenure-track position at a university tends to be broad-ranging geographically, yet because my advanced degrees are from universities in the southeast—Winthrop, UNC, and Emory—it’s probably not surprising that my job applications in this region received the most attention. ASU was already known to me because my favorite history teacher in high school received his training here. I will never forget reading historical documents and essays about the economic causes of the Civil War: the idea that moral arguments arose from such deep material and monetary contexts was a revelation to me. That high school history class planted the seeds for the approaches to literary history that would draw me in graduate school, in particular, the writing of the working class cultural theorist, Raymond Williams.

I’ve lived here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for over 30 years, and that’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. My father had been an enlisted Air Force sergeant, and we perched all over the world as we moved with his postings: in the Philippines, in the Carolinas, in Texas, in then West Germany. So I was never from one place, never southern in any thoroughgoing way, although my mother’s family has deep settler culture roots in the Dutch Fork (originally Deutsch Fork) area near Columbia, South Carolina.

From the moment I visited these mountains I felt an almost otherworldly connection to them that I’d not felt in the Carolina Piedmont. The land itself, the forests, the big sky are so immediately present here and the built environment hasn’t eroded the sense of being in a very particular place. I didn’t feel immersed in a car culture; Boone and its environs felt like a knowable place and at a scale I could take in. After a few years I was able to find a house tucked back in one of these hardwood coves, and my husband and I still live at the end of a road with a wooded ridge and watershed at our backs. It’s wild enough to have foxes, coyote, deer, rabbits and the occasional bobcat and bear. I know that our region is one of the most biodiverse in the world, and there really is a felt sense of that richness of flora and fauna. In the early years we had especially congenial relations with our Appalachian neighbors because we walked our dogs all over these backroads and traded news. I can remember coming home from a semester away in NYC where I had grown accustomed to the gray tones of that urban landscape. Waking to the lush greenness of this temperate rainforest where I live, I felt a palpable sense of gratitude.

DK: You have a new book coming out on the Irish poet Paula Meehan. Tell me a bit about your first encounter with Meehan’s poetry, and about what that encounter has meant for your own trajectory—not only your development as someone who writes (and writes about) poetry, but as someone involved with politics and activist thought.

KK: Paula’s book, Dharmakaya, arrived in my mailbox as a request for a review from the marvelous poet and astute editor, R.T. Smith at Shenandoah, so I like to think that the book found me. I was immediately in tune with the work, the strong craft and the working class childhood subject matter. I write about this in my introduction, that Paula’s work showed be a way forward as both a poet and a scholar. I had developed an approach in my critical writing that attended to the intersections of gender and class and Paula’s poems addressed the ecological concerns I’d long held as well. I don’t think I’d yet found the Irish poems that allowed me to bring all these strands together. So there was a marvelous alchemy for me in reading and exploring her work, and I went right back to the beginning of it, to her first books. What I found there was the journey through an interior life, transformed profoundly by Paula’s mastery of the craft. Her work helped me feel less alone. As someone who had become part of the academy and the larger literary world, I realized that I hadn’t wanted to turn my back on my own lived experience of life on the margins of an affluent U.S. culture, and I think in many ways her poems gave me the courage to reclaim that personal history. In some ways I had been “passing” as middle class, and I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. Paula’s poems changed all that and helped make me the writer, in both genres, that I am today. So my book also attempts to shine some light on the profound ways that we as literary scholars are changed by the work we address in our critical writing.

And then, of course, I’m also profoundly moved by the ways Paula’s poems bring in the public realm, as all great Irish poets do. There’s no question that her poems are as strong as any poet’s on the page, and yet she’s also able to bridge the gap into public arenas with her work. An obvious example is “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks,” about the death of Ann Lovett in childbirth because of the literal and cultural ban on abortion in Ireland. It’s a powerful, sophisticated poem that engages readers of many backgrounds, inside and outside the academy. It helped to galvanize in the last few years the referendum to overturn the ban on abortions in Ireland, aiding the astonishing work the Irish citizens’ assemblies have done. I think that Irish writers and artists in general—I was just reading an interview with the fantastic Irish actor Cillian Murphy—understand how important art as cultural expression is in the transforming of collective consciousness. It’s not incidental here that Paula is a mesmerizing performer of her own work, and she sees the poetic process as complete when the poems are shared with an audience at a public reading.

DK: I want to hone in on ecocriticism and animal studies, which are growing fields but may be unfamiliar to some readers. How would you define these disciplines, and how do you see yourself participating in them?

KK: These are fields that have arisen during the course of my academic career, though it’s not the case that the perspectives weren’t out there earlier. I just didn’t know about them, and texts like Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), for example, weren’t taught in my graduate classes. I had been trained in the analysis of gender, race, and class in the 1980s, and when I heard the remarkable Vandana Shiva speak at a women’s studies conference about ecofeminism, I added “nature” to that list of categories. I don’t myself see ecocriticism and animal studies as separate approaches, and there’s now a rich body of work bringing them together in the fields of critical ecofeminism and critical animal studies. The idea is that all these conceptual categories are imbricated. Another way of putting it is that sexism, racism, classism, and speciesism are intertwined, one enabling the others. I understand that speciesism isn’t as readily accepted as a problem as the others, but you only have to look at our world now to see the parallels between the lack of concern for climate devastation in poorer countries and habitat destruction everywhere. Ecofeminist philosopher Karen Warren called it women-other human Other-nature interconnections: some lives and beings matter and others don’t. In our current hottest week for humans on earth, I keep imagining what the raging fires and temperatures are also doing to other animals. It’s horrifying to think about.

So at a certain point, I knew that we no longer had the luxury of assuming that the natural world was just a backdrop for our human concerns and other animals were only our instruments. Amitav Ghosh has written brilliantly and eloquently about this in The Great Derangement. And these weren’t only intellectual insights for me. I was treated for breast cancer in 2007, and facing my own mortality changed me dramatically. I had to come to terms with my own status as an embodied being! By 2009, eating other animal bodies felt untenable to me, and I’ve been joyfully vegan ever since. That choice has had other consequences: as Jonathan Foer wrote in Eating Animals of Kafka’s vegetarianism, “Now that I don’t eat you, I can see you.”

As a poet, I’ve begun to write poems that assume other animals are the subjects of their own lives and that those lives matter to them and ought to matter to us (or rather, I write poems out of my own changed way of being in the world). I don’t think this is a common perspective yet, but I hope it will become so, if for no other reason than the fact that we will die with them on this planet. We can’t make a world that won’t support their lives and assume it will support our own. That’s the energy behind all the work I do now, all the writing and teaching. I have a new poetry manuscript I’m finishing called Creature, and the title is meant to evoke the shared creatureliness of us all.

DK: How well do you know Ireland today? Tell me something about contemporary Ireland that might surprise me.

KK: Well, you know I haven’t been there in a while, not since the Covid era, and though I’ve visited a lot over the years, I’ve never lived there for an extended time. If I could bear to leave the other animals in my family, I’d like to do that one day!

It might surprise you to know about the ghost housing estates left over from the Celtic Tiger era. Irish developers built homes not many could buy after the crash. Paula’s “Death of a Field” addresses these estates, and she’s said that after 2008, the habitats the developments destroyed began to return. So the stalling of economic “growth” benefited the flora and fauna.

DK: Back to Paul Meehan specifically, you write: “Meehan’s poems demonstrate how significant a working-class subject location can be for what a poet is able to see.” I find that intriguing—can you give me an example?

KK: To start, she is able to see and represent the lives of working class and impoverished people in Dublin, period. I’ve argued that just as Eavan Boland brought the domestic lives of women into the Irish poem, Paula Meehan brought the working class. And another point I’ve made about her poems is that space and place are represented differently from what I would call a bourgeois perspective. As a working class subject, you don’t necessarily have a secure, private domestic space toward which to retreat. And you might live far more of your life outdoors and in public places. In Paula’s work this perspective serves a focus on the earth as oikos, our literal, planetary home. So we don’t gather rapaciously from the public realm for our interior lives because those lives really aren’t separate. It’s all home and all worthy of our care.

Perhaps we have now done so much damage to the natural world that even the bourgeois notion of insular domestic spaces can no longer hold. Staying in a secure indoors during a wildfire can to some extent buffer one from smoke but not necessarily from encroaching fires. The very rich no doubt still feel that they can buy their own safety, and perhaps they can for longer. But they’re doing it at the expense of everyone else. In the end, they’re helping to destroy a biosphere that won’t be able to support them either.

DK: For readers who may not be familiar with Meehan, what’s one poem you’d suggest as a start?

KK: That’s difficult because I love so many of them. Perhaps I’d say “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet,” as well as “The Solace of Artemis.” The first illuminates the class dimensions of her work, bringing in the links between classism and speciesism. The second is a remarkable poem about polar bears and survival, two words you don’t often see together. I love that while Paula’s poems are full of painful witnessing and critique of our globalized capital status quo, they also include abundant alternative perspectives that are hopeful. 

DK: The chapter about Meehan and gardens feels like it offers perspective on nature that could be generative when it comes to thinking about Appalachia. Do you see anything emerging from your book that puts the region where you work into transnational dialogue with writing and thought from Ireland? 

KK: Yes, certainly. I think that standing in a marginalized place can in both instances produce a clarity and difference of vision. I’m not saying that Ireland isn’t immersed in neoliberalist stratagems as much as any other place, but the critic Luke Gibbons has called it “a first world country with a third world memory”. Appalachia has historically been an impoverished and overlooked place. In both cases, the land has been seen as a resource for others to take, the people and culture to degrade or, alternatively to romanticize and monetize. Ireland’s colonial history means that it wasn’t heavily industrialized, and so it theoretically has choices about how to relate to and hopefully protect the land. In Appalachia there’s a palpably different sense of time and community, what might be called in mainstream environmental discourse, degrowth. Neighbors take the time to talk and there’s a felt assumption that this kind of human connection matters, even in the smallest of ways. When I stop by my neighbor’s greenhouse, the patriarch himself walks through, sharing how the wildfire smoke from Canada is affecting his breathing and how much of his social security check goes to the medications he needs. He leaves me on the honor system to pick out my plants and fold bills into an envelope to insert into the metal box left out for the purpose. When I drive down “off the mountain” as they say here, I’m aware of the hurry and hustle I no longer want as background. That’s all oversimplified, of course, but its possible that the differences of marginalized spaces harbor alternatives we need to retrieve.

DK: I wanted to conclude by asking about the relationship between writing poetry and writing about poetry—and about how both relate to engaging publics. In your various roles, what communities do you see yourself speaking to? What effects do you hope to catalyze?

KK: You know, at different points in my career I tried to give up one for the other, but that never lasted. For one thing, when I started writing poetry in the 1970s, I was given so few models of women poets that I felt I could emulate: the examples of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton made an impression. I felt I needed to put some ground under my feet, so I trained as a scholar to find the lost texts of women writers. I had a wonderful mentor, the poet Susan Ludvigson, who supported my work, and she helped to keep me stubbornly committed to the writing. As I worked at my scholarship, I began to understand the ways I could become an advocate for other women writers by writing about their work. So I really value my scholarly training for the ways it allows me to give back to a literary tradition we still need to find and protect. But the joy of creative flow never felt so full as when I worked on poems, and gradually, over time, I saw that one activity fed the other. I’ve learned so much from the poets I’ve written about (though I actually have written a lot about early Irish women’s fiction as well) for my own craft. And the poems help me get at the work of other poets from the inside out. Paula once paid me an incredible compliment when she said that finding out that I too was a poet helped her understand better the qualities of my writing about her own work. I don’t actually see one genre as subordinate to the other.

Lately, however, I’ve wanted to allow the associative method of poems influence my prose writing, and I’ve also wanted to explore the theoretical/critical concerns of the scholarship more readily through the poems. I’m interested in new ways of making meaning, and once again, Paula has been an influence. Her Poetry Professor of Ireland lectures are astonishingly rich, and they aren’t like other prose I’ve read. My book on her work is marked in its form by her own prose writing. And the interviews in the book, their collaborative quality, these were aspects of the book she encouraged. I think the finished product will be as much of a surprise to her as anyone else, and we always kept a respectful distance in that regard, but it’s nonetheless been a lovely kind of dance.