JMW: What’s most exciting about this book to you?
KL: I have read Emily Dickinson since I was seventeen, taking her Collected Poems everywhere with me, reading it like a bible, and so to give a tribute to her in book form is something I could only have dreamed of all those years ago. I did not expect to write such a book: one poem about visiting her house led to another about her herbarium and then another about the poems she wrote on scraps of envelopes. Known and lesser known aspects or stories from her life seem to require their own poems. In a way it helped to have Dickinson as a focus in writing the manuscript, as her poetry has always given me courage.
Many readers and poets have their “own” Emily Dickinson, from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson to Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters to countless other tributes from such authors as the former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins to the American formalist Annie Finch or the 140th birthday tribute to Dickinson by one of America’s masters of the poem sequence John Berryman. The sequence of Dickinson poems collected in this volume is my, albeit less ambitious, attempt to continue in an ongoing poetic homage to Emily Dickinson.
JMW: Do you see it as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
KL: I’m sure it is a combination of earlier and new. Some poems in the volume were written twenty-five years ago. I have updated some, but others just seemed “done.” Some still do not feel done even though published. Other poems, like the Emily Dickinson poems, I wrote within a three-month period. I probably had been working on them my whole life and they were just now ready to be written.
JMW: At this point in your career, do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
KL: While I do not see my work associated with any religion per se, two religious traditions have been foundational in my life. My father's family comes from the Anabaptist tradition, but my mother’s family is Irish Catholic. The cultural aspects of both traditions inform my families’ histories and my own. I have always been aware of the striking juxtaposition of each—one where religious trappings are central and the other where community is central. Both traditions exist in the scenery of my poems, from working on a Mennonite dairy farm in Northern Indiana to helping a Benedictine nun in an abbey garden on the west coast of Ireland.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
KL: Of course Dickinson was a large part of my focus—to try to make her human, to bring forth her wonderful energy and wit found in her letters and in reflections of those who knew her. I felt the same about writing about Thoreau—that his sister brought him food that first night he was at Walden—and that he did not appreciate it—made me want to write about this beautiful and shared humanity.
Other poets who have been influential to me include Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Robert Lowell, Robert Hayden, James Wright, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jane Kenyon, and Anna Akhmatova (especially those poems translated by Kenyon). Their styles are always in my mind when I write, even if in the background. Sometimes it helps just to have their books beside me on my desk. I also greatly admire contemporary women poets like Kymberly Taylor and Cynthia Zarin, as their work pushes me further in my own. Zarin’s and Taylor’s precision with imagery and their clean lines, where each word has been carefully chosen, have always been inspiring to me.
Animals also often appear in my poems as they have in my life. They perhaps come along in the vulnerability required by the act of living and to that extent, writing as well. Animals do not question their right to be on this earth. I have always found their ability to “just be” comforting and therefore perhaps easier to write about.
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
KL: Sound is an integral part of my writing process, so I always recite drafts aloud. It’s also interesting to hear someone else read it; where a reader stops and starts helps me see the poem differently. I do like to think of an audience when I’m writing so that the poem doesn’t just stay in my own head. Ultimately poetry is a sharing of our connectedness as humans, even if we have different backgrounds, experiences.
Revision is also usually a necessary part of writing for me and patience and some (but not too much) doubt. I enjoy the revision process once a poem is almost complete, but I’m always a bit too eager for the poem to get to that place, to get to its point so to speak. I’m trying to be more patient in that process and open myself up to the uncertainty that comes with a poem being unfinished, to stay in that vulnerability and, by doing so, allow it to go further. I suppose the fear is that it won’t find its point, that it won’t become a poem.
For example, my poem “Now Horses” in a previous iteration had ended with the words “sparkling rocks”—and while the images and sounds appealed to me, I knew the poem needed more, especially to invite a reader into what I was trying to say. And so I imagined looking up from the cemetery rocks and seeing the Gothic Chapel and from there expanded the poem more—literally and figuratively following the buttresses to see where my mind and the poem would go.
Now Horses
Kylemore Abbey, Co. Galway, Ireland
When the white tour bus with square black windows
stops along the one-lane road, we are far beyond the
coiffed hedges, hidden in the brambles, our backs
bent over thick blackberries. “They like to see a nun
and a young girl in red overalls,” she says. If someone
approaches, she’ll pretend she doesn’t hear, let me
talk, I the quieter one of the two. What does it mean—
now that she is gone, and the fields have carried on.
Now horses graze where she had kept her Charolais.
The earth hoof-tilled in the muddy months by four-
legged beasts, through each dew and each frost.
She must be in the farm kitchen, near the table,
near the worn-down chair, or in the gray dappled
coats of the Connemara ponies, muscles twitching
as if touched by a hand that is not there—
an architectured but pliant anatomy they inhabit,
forelocks brushed aside in the Atlantic air. There
she would be and not down the lane in the cemetery
under a cross placed in sparkling rocks. Not at
the far static end of the skyward-pointing gables
of the Gothic chapel but in the mottled light of its
windowed tracery, adrift in the angled corners cobbed
with dust, along the path of its flying buttresses to
where I think of her standing beside me under a
tree’s wide canopy, sheltering us from an October
downpour one leaf-worn afternoon. But as soon
as it begins it will stop, and we’ll emerge from wet
hedgerows heavy with light. “Now then,” she’ll
say, and we’ll move on to the next thing. For a time,
we’ll forget life’s brevity, the narrow streams that
ran down our oversized raincoats while side by
side in stillness we watched, Wellingtons lined up,
two figures like horses waiting out the rain.
JMW: Is there a question we haven’t asked that you’d like to pose and answer to lead us to come things you’d like to say about the book.
A critic might wonder why I didn’t delve into Dickinson’s relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson. She was deeply important to Dickinson and was there when Dickinson was dying. I only briefly touched on their remarkable kinship, but Susan always seems to be “next door”—ever present, if not acknowledged directly, and maybe there’s a poem, if not a book in itself, about that.
JMW: Emily Dickinson’s Lexicon is available at
https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/emily-dickinsons-lexicon-by-katie-lehman/.