Kerry James Evans is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon), a Lannan Literary Selection. The recipient of a 2015 NEA Fellowship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, his poems have appeared in Agni, Narrative, New England Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. He lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he teaches in the MFA program at Georgia College & State University and serves as the poetry editor for Arts & Letters..

Kerry’s poem “A Little Gristle to Feed the Cat” appears in the Winter 2021 issue of Carve. Order the print issue here.

Why is poetry your genre of choice? Have you ever written in any other medium? 

I have tried writing fiction. I was even approached by a major literary agency after my first book of poems, Bangalore, entered the world, but at the time, I didn’t really feel I had the credibility needed to enter into the world of fiction, as I had had so little practice writing it. Out of respect for the profession, I politely declined the opportunity. That said I love fiction, and perhaps with time I might write a few short stories or a novel, though I cannot really convey how much I love poetry. My heart has always been in poetry—not only the making of poems—the craft, but also its mysteries. There are poems I return to over and over again, Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” for example, and though I have the poem memorized, occasionally a line will wash over me and completely change the light in the room. There are hundreds of poems like this one that I’m in conversation with, and they each have moments that almost seem like a symphony’s strings in my heart. Poetry not only moves me forward, it also moves me inward. It is, more than anything, anyone, or anywhere, my home. 

Your poem, “A Little Gristle to Feed the Cat,” has a very distinct narrative voice, referring to the poem’s narrator as “The I”; what inspired this choice? A line in the poem asks, “who is this I”; can you answer that question for the readers?  

I have loved to BBQ for a good long while—half my life, I’d say, and while I love the end product, what I love most is the process, all the thinking one does in the downtime. I’m reminded of Sisyphus walking down the hill just to push the rock back up—it’s in that space, when walking down the hill, where he catches his breath and reflects—that’s what I love. I love those moments when the coals are burning at the right temperature and the smoke is sky blue. It’s in those moments where I feel most at home, where I can actually see the I not as my whole being but as being a part of the greater whole. Like many people, I’ve always wondered who the I is, because it doesn’t always seem like the same person. Sometimes the I is more like the higher self—the part of us that always says the right thing, means well, and loves unconditionally. Other times—most often in my own experience, the I is ornery and egoistic. It’s all me, me, me. Over the years I’ve cultivated an inner dialogue with myself, because, as we all know, there’s just as much inside as there is outside, and I’ve discovered what Whitman and so many others knew—we truly do contain multitudes. I think, to some degree, I was hoping this might come across.

What are you reading right now? Do you gravitate more towards poetry, or do you read in various genres? 

At the moment, I’m reading several collections of poems, but one I’m particularly enjoying is Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia—an incredibly necessary and accomplished collection of poems. Introspective and wise, it is a masterful collection that combines autobiographical poems with historical narratives, dramatic monologues, and lyrics that truly investigate Virginia’s riddled, racist past. The whole collection is vibrant, nuanced, varied, and quite simply one of the best books of poems I’ve read in the past few years. I highly recommend it.

To your second question, yes, as a poet, I absolutely gravitate to poetry, though I definitely love to read as widely and diversely as possible. I’m also currently reading The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, by Felicia Rose Chavez. 

I’m also teaching a literary translation course this year, so I have been reading a great deal of work from international poets as well as essays on the craft of translation. But as I get older I’m realizing I won’t be able to read everything I’d like to read, so I have to be choosy—to read with purpose. 

What do you most like to write about, and what subject matters are the toughest for you to tackle?

I’d say the toughest subject matters to write about are those located more in the public sphere—recent events in particular. One way that I try to write about these subjects is to balance this public with the private—to show the interiority of the speaker at the same time. I don’t know how well I do this, but it is something I consciously try to do. Bangalore attempts to address white privilege and toxic masculinity as they exist in the military as well as my upbringing in the South. One poem, “Elegy for the Kudzu Vine,” goes directly at these issues while also talking about a group of white characters enjoying themselves at a bar but failing to acknowledge their privilege. In many ways the poem is calling for an end to the willful ignorance so many white people have when it comes to acknowledging not only their privilege, but also the systemic and institutional racism upon which their lives greatly benefit. And while that was one of the more difficult poems I’ve written, I’ve also written plenty of others that engage these issues, to include a longer poem recently published in Agni, titled “The Kraken’s Lair.” In ten sections, the poem weaves a number of narratives ranging from the former President’s insidious tweeting to gun violence to the idea of America as a collection of images sinking in the ocean. Ultimately, the poem resolves itself with the speaker moving inward, finding themselves trying to stay afloat/alive—all the while the speaker is changed, and by the end, the world doesn’t sound the same.

What are you working on right now, and what do you hope to work on in 2021? 

With the pandemic, the insurrection on the Capitol, and everything else that seems to be going on right now, I must say that it’s a miracle any of us are getting any writing done at all. We’re living in dangerous, divisive times, and I hope we’re all giving ourselves time and space to simply be. That said, I have been drafting—I do my utmost to keep to a fairly respectable writing regimen, though I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been interrupted more than a few times these past few years by rage-scrolling and days of hopeless anxiety. 

Anyway, I have high hopes for a second manuscript that I’m currently shopping, and as far as this year goes, I’ve just made an agreement that I’m going to write without restriction. Anything goes. If it’s good, great, if it’s not, even better. This year isn’t about how great my poems are; it’s about showing up. If I can just keep showing up—especially with everything that’s going on—I see that as enough. Next year I might look back and think, I wrote nothing useful, but I might also say, “Hey, you worked. Keep going.”  

What advice do you have for aspiring poets? 

If it’s okay, I’d like to flip this question a little. Rilke famously wrote in one of his Letters to a Young Poet: “If the Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.” Like Rilke, I believe that all poets must be beginning, or as your question posits, aspiring. 

I would go so far to say that poets and poems are aspirations in and of themselves. Aspire, which has its roots in the Latin word aspirare, means to breathe upon. This idea of breath, of spirit, of inspiration is, I believe, what is at the root of all poetry, whose root means “to make.” Poetry, then, at least for me, is active. It is the embodiment of breath inhabiting that liminal space where tenor (or the unseen, ineffable) meets the vehicle (the seen, the word, the image), and, ultimately, it is breath which animates language and gives it life. 

And finally, I would say this to all of the “accomplished” poets out there: not all poems sound or look the same. Just because a poet’s work does not reflect our own aesthetic sensibilities does not mean we must be so quick to judge it. We must learn to accept that poetry is a living, breathing act far older than ourselves, and the moment we begin to place ourselves and our limited knowledge of poetry on a pedestal is the moment we forfeit the right to call ourselves poets.