Katherine Riegel is the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of Sweet Lit.
Katherine’s poem “The Country of After-Grief" can be found in our Summer 2021 issue, order here.
I admire your control in guiding us through the narrative. How did you decide where to begin?
At least half the time, I end up cutting the first few lines of a draft—or the first and sometimes second stanzas. Those are usually the poems that have happened because I sat down to write without any particular topic in mind. But with this poem, I found myself alone on Easter, a holiday that would have meant something to my sister but that really meant childhood memories to me. Practically every day of that first year after her death, I thought, “It’s Friday, and she’s not here” or “It’s the summer solstice, and she’s not here.” So, starting, “It’s Easter” was easy. The language of the holiday—one of death and resurrection—helped shape what came after, allowing me to fit text messages into a poem. Funny how no matter what technology we use, the same content will come up as it would if we were all sitting around a dining room table together: the old stories of families, or the old stories humanity has been telling itself for thousands of years.
Every line break in this piece feels so precise. What is your process for finding the right place to end a line?
If I can, I like to create just a bit of ambiguity for readers, so when the line is read separately from the sentence, there’s a moment of different meaning: “later. My sister wore bright clothes” can be understood, if only briefly, as pointing out that when she was no longer a child, my sister chose bright clothes for herself—something she did, deliberately, while as a child she wore the plainer colors my mother picked out for her. But mostly it comes down to my sense of what word I want to emphasize, and I put that word at the end of the line, right before the pause created by the line break. The end of a line is the place of greatest impact, I believe, though I’ve seen poems that subvert this “rule” beautifully. When my best friend (and oldest writing exchange pal) saw that I’d put the word “live” at the end of a line in this poem, she pointed out how that word hangs, for a moment, suspended. It’s a pivot point for the sentence and for the poem. But the truth is, few readers get to the end of the poem and think much about line breaks. They are like invisible scaffolding, able to affect us as readers but usually on a subconscious level.
Loss can be so difficult to write about, even more difficult to revisit and revise. How did you know it was time to write this piece?
I couldn’t write about anything else for the first year after my sister’s death. I wrote poem after poem, some good, some bad. I sometimes shared them with my best friend, and sometimes put them away to look at later. Eventually I realized I had more than enough for a chapbook, and as usual for my process, I did a lot of the revision of individual poems when I could see them together as part of a chapbook/book. I don’t know if the chapbook will be picked up—it’s been rejected by a few presses—and I suspect that’s because it has narrative elements that require more context. So now I’m working on a hybrid/collage style book that will include poems, essays, lists, experiments, and images. I think as writers, we understand and process the world through our writing, so it’s natural to write about loss. The hard part is figuring out what’s so personal to us that it’s sentimental, and what might be compelling to others. I count on editors to help decide that, but I also have to remind myself to take risks, try stuff out, so I don’t shut down a possible work before it’s even had a chance.
What did you carry with you when writing “The Country of After-Grief” ?
Eggs. It sounds silly, but it was the sense of touch that got me through. If someone blindfolded you and put an egg in your hand, you’d know immediately what it was: the size and weight of it, the smooth surface that still always has something that catches under the sensitive skin of your fingertips. I’m one of those people who can’t listen to music when I write because I hear the words so clearly in my mind and they have a music of their own, so what generally comes with me to the page is an image.