I first read Of, Kai Ihns’ latest book, on October 28th, 2024, in anticipation of attending a reading of hers that would occur in Philadelphia a couple weeks later. (Shout out Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo’s Spit Poetry series). I read it out loud, into my phone—I like to “record” my own “audio books” as voice memos, sometimes, so I have something to listen to in the car when I don’t feel like playing music—and by the third poem I was already laughing. Not because the poems are un-serious—obviously—but because they are dedicated to an instability that, as you will hear Kai explain here, purposefully re-re-re-re-orients you, leaving you spinning inside of yourself:
it is all so fresh
nothing has been protected from me
i am a friendly neutral guy
i chum the seagulls their yogurt
At the aforementioned reading, alongside Matt Broaddus, Alyssa Perry, Mia Kang, and Ian U Lockaby, Kai performed long sections of her book from memory, modulating her voice athletically to suit the needs of different lines: “i like your little face and nose!”—“rejection is hard and may be processed through stabbing.”
Kai, a few months later, was gracious enough to sit down with me at the New Orleans Poetry Festival to discuss her latest book and her general approach to poetry. Around 8:30am Central, we sat down at a table in the New Orleans Healing Center, one set slightly apart from the main first-floor booth space, and talked until I ran out of questions. The recording itself is stuffed with the background noise of poets squealing at each other and shuffling to set up their booths. It was—I love New Orleans—sunny and 70 degrees.
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So, I love that one moment in “Blinker Description”:
I Love Film, It Never Becomes Information
Just Burnt, Flash, and Remains There
Though I first read Of in late October, that moment never totally left my thinking—and I think it’s partially because, though you’re talking about film, it calls up a really pertinent question about poetry. How much of the poems people write are actually made of information, and, if it’s a significant portion, how much of that information is actually reducible/summarizable?
I think the era of the AI summary would have us think that it’s a lot, but I, like probably a lot of poets, have my personal doubts. So, my question is: what do you think your poems communicate? Is it information, or is it something beyond it?
Not information! I guess you can’t really get away from information in language, and wrangling with the prevalence of informational modes feels like something art should do now, but I definitely also think the poem should do more than tell its reader stuff. I’m with whoever argued that if the paraphrase serves as well as the actual performance-in-time of the poem, then it’s probably not a poem.
I think about poems as experiential structures in time that are made of the reader’s reflexively-cognized experience, sustained in language. Poems are a choreography, or an orientational score. There’s a developmental movement: things mean different things because other things have happened before them.
But what do my poems communicate… maybe a defined complex or problem of orientation or feeling… I think that’s essentially what my poems are: they’re aesthetic forms of knowledge, not conceptual forms of knowledge, and not information, though they work with both information and concepts as materials.
That’s interesting… I think I have two responses to that: one, I think I saw the “conceptual knowledge” split come up in your essay on Joseph Ceravolo? What is the difference between conceptual knowledge and non-conceptual knowledge?
Well, I think it comes down to this paraphrasable thing. Concepts, ideally, are highly portable, paraphrasable, rotatable structures that you can give another person, and any way of saying it is functionally the same—provided it gives them this structure that they can distill out and apply. And a poem, I think, exists in time and experience, and those things are part of it… a discursive concept, I think, doesn’t require time—or experience.
Fuck yeah. It’s funny, Annelyse Gelman, in an old interview, started off by saying “Is a poem more based in space or time? Is it more like a sculpture or a film?” And I guess that’s for us to figure out…
I’m definitely on the time side.
I like that. We might as well keep talking about Ceravolo… there’s this one moment, I think it’s a little more than halfway through the essay, where you said: “Ceravolo, unlike the language poets, achieves a remarkably affectively coherent and forceful… something. Tone isn’t the right word, and neither is attitude. It’s something else, something like atmosphere, frequency, or “quality of feeling” or being-toward-the-world, one that can be tuned into.”
And I think you argued that very well in the essay—I definitely see what you mean, in that the openness of the I’s position in the language reflects an openness of, I guess, “mind-in-the-world.” I think that was argued beautifully…
Thanks.
I also hadn’t read his work, so thank you for that. But what you said got me curious about whether or not I felt like Of impressed upon me a similarly-unified “something.” And while I do think I have my own answer to that question, I’m not the one being interviewed here.
So, the distilled question: though there are obviously quite different kinds of texts in Of, I’m curious if you see them as doing a kind of unified work. I think you might have already answered this, but do you think they share a “quality of feeling?” I guess, if we’re using the word “feeling” specifically, are you even interested in doing that?
Yeah, I am. Whether I achieve that or not, I don’t know—I’m going to have to leave that to my readers. But I try to. I think the kind of coherence that I want for it is like the coherence of a storm system or like a thing that exists whose form of being has to do with motion or network or relation… that’s also partly why I do “Blinker Description” memorized, because I think there’s something interesting about the insistence on embodiment that memorized performance produces alongside a poem whose lyric I is like a whirlwind of shrapnel. And so, insofar as there is a unified thing, it’s, it’s, it’s like… *Kai begins making wide, sweeping motions with her hands.* I’m making a hand gesture that’s not going on the recording, but like—
I’ll describe it. It’s fine.
*Laughs* Okay. But yeah—I hope there’s a unified feeling, because part of the reason I admire Ceravolo so much is because I think his poems do a kind of magic: they induce reflexively understood orientational states in a reader…often states that are kind of impossible, or contradictory, or hallucinatory, almost… but the poem holds you in them. I think these kinds of poems allow you to make your mind or spirit move like someone else’s that you couldn’t have made it move like otherwise. And that experience is the form of knowledge that the poem is. Like, not quite inter-subjectivity but something like it. So that’s what I want them to do. And they’re coming from a specific chunk of my life, so they probably have whatever that flavor is, that complex of being-toward-the-world, the world as it passed through me, that kind of organization. When I edit a manuscript, I’m trying to produce a feeling of there being a storm system there.
No, I think that’s a beautiful metaphor, and that one in particular is really interesting to me… I think, like a lot of young-ish people who came into poetry in the late 2010s—I came in in like 2016/2017—I was, like, bathed in the lyric I, do you know what I mean?
Yeah, for sure.
I started reading all these journals that took part in a very solidified, kind of null-space, neutral, statement-y lyric, y’know? I’m going to start with an I-statement, I’m going to start building some images, and I perhaps might reach an epiphany—
Yep, exactly, by the end! *Laughs*
And, it’s strange… I think I’m just starting to see all the other possibilities, because of writers like you, and, I don’t know… there’s a million others. You guys break up the I so beautifully.
Thanks.
And I think your poems are so good at working from different vantage points. And by expanding the I by expanding its seeing, often, at least in a certain kind of poem, the reader ends up adopting that kind of fractured point of view, I suppose, which I think is a kind of growth.
Mm!
But let’s see… I should really ask a question.
I have a thought, kind of, in response to that.
Please.
I think this dispersed but somehow coherent ‘I’ that exists in relation and as a problem of negotiating how one is oriented… I’m interested in this because I do feel like it’s a way poetry can process its world, in this case a world that requires complex negotiations of… realities, and the selves that can exist in them. You have to actively negotiate what you think the ground is, all the time… and that partially determines how you can be in relation.
In that negotiation in one’s life there is a coherence that comes from being one person. And so it’s this kind of tension between… it’s not total dispersion because I think there was a lot of experimental work, for a long time, that was like total dispersion, it’s just like syntax operations and like… stuff. But I think I’m interested in a synthesis of a lyric-y coherence of a subject but as the negotiation of multiple ways of being oriented. Something like that.
And I think that’s a beautiful middle ground—I think you’ve really accomplished that. And I guess, if I can ask, like, a strategic question that goes along with that… as I’ve said before, I don’t have a scholarly background. I feel like I’ve been on the ground just reading journals for a really long time. But most of my thinking centers around imagery—at least lately. So I want to ask, and I’m just going to read the question as it’s written:
Believe it or not, there have been a lot of famous conceptions of the image. There’s Ezra Pound’s “The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy,” there’s Robert Hass’ “Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside of themselves.,” there’s Pierre Reverdy’s “The Image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from two realities, more or less distant, brought together”—that one’s my favorite—etc etc etc.
So, because there isn’t one answer, I was hoping to hear your go at it. And it’s especially interesting because it’s not like you avoid kinds of “classic” imagery, but you do go certain distances without using the kinds of images that, like, Robert Hass does. So, I wanted to ask what an image is to you.
Yeah—I love this question because I don’t think of myself as a poet that makes images. Like sometimes I’ll realize that one has happened, but I feel like the image is one of the things I think least about. I’m actually really glad to have all of these definitions… I’m drawn to the recognition that images in language don’t function like visual images. And I think the poets that are thinking through that tend to be the ones I like… those definitions are interesting to me because I think poems are non-visual.
Yeah, sure, I agree.
I mean, obviously. But we often think of the language image as going directly to visual image…but the way that language works in the mind is, I think, something else.
I totally agree.
I think a lot about how language cues orientation, and the experience of that happening… and so versions of the language image that focus on how it brings together two ideas that don’t go together, or that it’s a fusion of certain kinds of thought, those are attractive to me… yeah, that’s all I got.
I think that is its own answer—that’s really interesting to me. Because there are poems in the book that are made up entirely of, one could say, seeable images… there’s that one “Ideas for a Painting.”
I can explain that one.
Say more, please!
I actually didn’t want to be a poet at first—I wanted to be a painter. I like seriously tried to be a painter, and slowly and painfully realized I was not very promising at it. But I still paint—and so literally this poem was a notes app thing in my phone of painting ideas, and then one time I read it and I was like: Oh, this is interesting as a sequence!
That’s funny—a really common problem for poets, it seems.
Being failed painters or artists of some other kind? Yes!
Well I’m glad you’re here with us, personally. You may have already partially answered this… but this question asks about your presence in time in a particular way, so if you want to go back and shade in some of what I’m going to ask about that works too.
There’s this one moment in ALWAYS ON THE INSIDE BUT THE GOES OUTSIDE that I’m curious about: “arranging the songs it occurred to me i had accepted that all making must express an inner state of the maker,”—which you have touched on—”though i had spent years making work i believed opposed this idea. i still felt the idea was wrong. yet i found it had spread inside me like… (disease?)”
Where do you stand on that question now? Have you been thinking of it? Said in a related way, where do your poems come from? Are they still made of you?
Wow, okay. You’re a very observant interviewer. *Laughs* I think Of changed a lot—it was originally a manuscript in four parts called Love, Not Fear, Not Love, Fear. I wrote it sort of at the beginning and throughout the relationship I’m now in that changed a lot of things about my perspective and my life, and I think I was reckoning with the fact that I am a person… or like with the finitude of being a particular person, having lived a particular life, and having to kind of look at that and think through that in poems with at least a little bit of awareness. Before this, I had thought “I will not be doing the subjective, this is not about me, I am not in it,” and then I realized, writing Of—it was an interesting experience—I knew I thought that poems shouldn’t be about inner states, that there is no such thing as an inner state, that interiority is like a Romantic bourgeois concept, blah blah blah, that even though I had all these thoughts, there was some part of me at the level of feeling that was standing somewhere different than where my ideas about what the poem should be were standing. And that tension I think is where most of the poems that were originally in Of came from. Probably 70% of that material was unworkable, and I cut it out of the manuscript and then made a different shape, but that “What is a subject, what is it to be a person, to what extent does that enter into one’s poems always?” question is in there. And relatedly: to what extent is one organized by the logics of the world, no matter one’s ideas about how things “should” be.
That’s interesting. I think this next question kind of rhymes with the beginning of your answer: for better or worse, I’m always interested in both how poems change once they’re written down, as well as how poems change the people that write them—in kind of an un-sentimental way. And I guess how the relationship between them, if we’re talking about relationships, starts warping once the two are situated together in time. Let’s go with that.
I read Kelsi Vanada’s latest book from Bench Editions just recently. Really good book, actually—
She and I went to school together! We were housemates.
Poetry is so funny. Anyway, she’s really good at folding statements of poetics into her poems. And she ends this one poem: “The you in the poem changes when you make it.” I guess you could answer this in a rounded way… you can approach it how you’d like to. But I guess I’d like to know… the easiest phrasing is: how has the book changed for you? But I’m also asking in the sense of the Kelsi Vanada quote: how have the “you”s and the “I”s in the book changed for you? Or, both in the poems and outside, how have those “yous” and “I”s changed? Has the book changed them? And does it keep differentiating you, I guess.
Well, yeah—also, it’s funny, there’s a sequence of lines in Sundaey that’s like very, very similar. “The object changes once you’ve made it/ carry the shape of what you were/ it was/ struggling to originate.” So, similar brainwaves… but yeah, I think if you’ve done a book right there’s a consciousness in it that is not exactly coextensive with you. And I feel like when I have a manuscript where I read it and some language consciousness comes out of it that feels excitingly a bit alien to me, I feel like I’ve gotten somewhere. And so it always I think is me, but also it should have its own organic coherence… some super-additive entity-thing should live in it that is self-sustained in some way.
To your other question, when I read Of now this thing happens to me where lines I… I write mostly following my ear and so stuff just comes out, and I have this experience oftentimes now of reading it and being like, oh, I guess that’s… not that you predict your own life, but things that you didn’t think were important and that you just wrote because you thought they sounded good, then you read them later and you’re like, oh, yeah, I did do that later. So, yes: it changes because my life has changed and that new standpoint changes how things appear to me because of my new context. But it still has this kind of like shimmery, iridescent gray-pink-orange-green…—*Kai makes an enigmatic hand gesture*—and that has stayed consistent. *Laughs*
That’s great. Let’s see—we’re getting to the end… I also think this is a more straightforward question. I think I just want to ask about the titles. Because you have a lot of different kinds of titles in the book: some are descriptive, some point to references in the poems, some are little stand-alone jewels, etc etc. So, really straightforwardly, how do you approach titling? It seems like every poet has their own idiosyncrasies around the process.
These are such good questions! Titling is something I’ve thought about really intensely. I remember in grad school, when I first got there, I was titling poems… like when I applied to grad school I had just finished a period of writing Louise Glück imitations for like, a year—
We all have to do it.
*Laughs* Yeah, everyone goes through it. And then I was titling poems in this very simple, like, “October” kind of way. Then I got to grad school and I found myself wanting to throw everything I had been doing out and kind of go back to my undergrad love of modernist experimentation and collage. And so I started writing these titles that were like a paragraph long, composed of short phrases with two slashes between them. And I’d assemble a long composite phrase-like thing out of them—so the title would be like THIS big and the poem would be like this big. And these titles were, like, dumb, but I just allowed myself to throw whatever at the wall of the poem, even if it had nothing to do with it. And I don’t do that now. But I think it allowed me to let the world or chance enter, sort of, and for me to learn to recognize the right title rather than try to intentionally produce one for the poem.
I’m interested in what titles can do, because they can change what a poem means, the whole thing, I mean obviously, or if they seem to refuse to define it there’s an interesting little energy that comes out of that problem.
It’s interesting where we do and do not overlap… I only title my poems reluctantly, and I actually have a really bad habit of not reading titles… I’ll go through a whole collection without reading even one of the titles.
Wow! I mean—
It’s not a good thing. *Both laugh* And then I want to talk to people about all these books I really like and I can’t remember the titles of the books! Anyway, we all have our flaws…
But another thing that’s interesting: in the beginning of the interview, we talked so much about how poems are structured in time—let’s go with that—and how they form structures for the reader to inhabit.
Mhm.
And also restructures the reader as they’re doing that. I want to use that as a way into another straightforward question… you have a lot of different forms.
Yeah.
Totally. Let’s just say it like it is, I guess. And it’s funny, when I—this interview isn’t about me, but I’m trying to relate…
It makes for a better conversation. *Laughs*
That’s true. But I’m not, like, a formal gizmo unto myself—most of my poems are formally pretty straightforward: prose poems or usually short-lined lyrics, a lot of couplets. And I normally draft in monostiches and, wherever the “best” line break would be—let’s say, if it’s after the second-line, then couplets. If it’s after the third line, tercets.
Hmm!
And then I use that to help me structure it as it goes on. Easy-peasy. I doubt you do that—*both laugh*—so why don’t you talk about how you do it.
How do I do it? Variously. *Laughs* When I started writing poems, I was writing rhyming iambic tetrameter quatrains in high school about my broken heart. Prosody remains one of the most interesting aspects of poetic form, to me, even though I don’t write in regular meter any more: I’m still interested in how organizing but kind of invisible it is, like a kind of logic or current. I also think experience is rhythmically-structured (and of course also relational, contextual, historical)—I think that poems are rhythmically-structured (and relational, contextual, historical). The poem is well suited to being a kind of structural metaphor.
Or like, I think the thing that I’m actually always attending to when I write is like the movement of mind in and as language. It’s intuitively composed. A key question is always how long… because I think poetry, like comedy, is very much an art of timing, knowing exactly how long things should take. And what will interact with what, and how… language is a very chemical kind of medium.
That pattern of intensities and how they meet associative networks is I think a lot of what gives a poem liveliness or not. This is why it’s not paraphrasable—because whatever that thing is is what I think the poem actually is, and that isn’t something you can summarize and transmit in another form. It has to be experienced in that form, because that’s what it is. Different forms facilitate different kinds of experience, though not in a one-to-one way.
In terms of both rhythm of thought and rhythm of language, sometimes those things come apart and sometimes they come together—and then I’m also composing the rhythm of when they come apart and when they come together. And so form to me is whatever it is that can sustain a structure of experience—the form that I’m actually making is not made of the words on the page, but language and literature determine the horizon of its possibility because it’s a poem. The words on the page and the strange and various vectors and glues that organize and arise between them are a way to hold another kind of form that’s made of experience, rhythm of thought, the way that intensities of sound and rhythm do something embodied and cognitive and animal, almost. How that moves together with emotional and conceptual/linguistic processing in my given historical moment… that’s what I’m using words to compose in, actually.
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
