12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katie Naughton

Katie Naughton is the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021) and A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (Bunny / Fonograf, forthcoming 2025. Her poetry has been published in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poetics (www.etceterapoetry.com) and a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I really liked having a chapbook (my first, Study, from above/ground press) because it gave me something to give to other poets when I met them. Incidentally, a lot of the work in my new book, my first full-length collection The Real Ethereal, predates the work in Study, which was both composed and published relatively quickly. The Real Ethereal is poetry, whereas Study is a kind of essay form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read a lot more fiction as a young person, and hardly any poetry before college, so it was a bit of an accident to become a poet. I found, though, that my attention was inherently attuned to detail, the momentary, and the sound of language, more than narrative or character.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I tend to draft a poem fairly quickly and in a form close to its final version, but it takes me a long time (a few years) to figure out how to frame a collection. So far. I don't know how my next big project will start and am interested in exploring other methods. I've been inspired recently by reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's drafts for Empathy at the Beinecke Library and seeing how the poem emerges from notes, sustained and direct inquiry into them, and iterative drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm not necessarily working on a "book" from the very beginning, but I am thinking about the questions or possibilities a collection of short poems operate in and what else I need to write to fill out that line of inquiry.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am moved by the hushed quiet of a room of people listening. I haven't done too many readings yet, but they feel like a good way to gather with other poets and bring the poems into the mouth.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I'm interested in perception, the relationship between thought and feeling, the relationship between language and experience, and how any of this can become relevant and present to others.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writing can help expand the possibilities of perception and change, even if often only slightly, the way we experience the world and our lives. Writing can also be a friend, sometimes a funny one, to keep us company.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's such a generous use of an intelligence to work as an editor. I appreciate that someone is thinking with me about what I've made and that I can use their attention and vision as a tool to refine or strengthen the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read more than you write; risk sentimentality. Both Susan Howe via Sasha Steensen, at least as far as I remember it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
 My thought in poetry is never more strongly animated than when I am reading and writing critically, and my work as a critic is deeply informed by the experience of writing poetry. I do tend to have seasons for different projects, though, only because I like to place priority on one thing at a time to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I'm not very good at routines, but I prefer the house to be put in order before I sit down to work. I have to clear a space, for better or for worse.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading, bodies of water, but also, I just wait.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Unfortunately at the moment, stale cigarette smoke that comes through our apartment walls from some untraceable source. I would prefer my answer to be warm pine wood, lake water, or traditionally milled French lavender soap.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Other human structures, like money and cities. I like how visual artists often think iteratively about material or process and would like to emulate this but don't know if I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Bernadette Mayer, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, Cass Eddington, Allyson Paty

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Surf (regularly/well)

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Maybe a historian. Which is still a kind of writer. All the other occupations I would have other than writer I do have (teacher, editor, arts administrator, grant writer, publicist . . .).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was what I was best at making, and it was thrilling to make something that I liked and that sometimes other people liked too.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm currently reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, though it has moved away from Hardy-the-poet writing about sheep farming and deeper into the romance plot and I'm becoming less interested. Have been neglecting film recently, accidentally, though there are so many good theaters now that I am here in NYC. Enjoyed some Ernie Gehr shorts at the Met earlier this year, with the filmmaker in attendance, and seeing the parallel world of avant garde film and its audiences, glad to know they've been there all along, too, while I've had my nose buried in poems.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My dissertation -- on opacity as a component of experience, and how this is used in poetry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Katie Naughton, The Real Ethereal

 

the question of address (elegy: apartment)

with you I have reached
the limits of reason with you
described the trajectory
you had two chairs and mine
was never close enough
at breakfast I want to you
close to you be to you
I tell you everything I see
the kitchen every day I map
my heart the morning for you
the cat circles us lies in the sun
the large room at the top
of the old house
everything I said to you failed
it my self and the limits
of what I could know I felt

Following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dancing Girl Press [see my review of such here] (the second of which is folded into this current work) comes Brooklyn, New York-based poet and editor Katie Naughton’s full-length poetry debut, The Real Ethereal (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2024). Set in four sections of staggered, staccato lyrics—“day book,” “hour song,” “the question of address” and “the real ethereal”—Naughton examines fragments, frictions and accumulations, allowing individual points and posits to gather, cluster and group into larger structures that reveal themselves slowly, as the forest through the trees. There is something of the collection that offers itself as a single through-line, a single, extended thought or lyric sentence that runs the length and breadth of it, from one moment unto the next. “the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it,” she writes, as part of the opening section-sequence “day book,” “the picture taken / upstairs the light and heat coming through / the window then the house / torn down the waste mass / of drywall plaster and beams that was the most / money I ever knew and so much [.]” The accumulations are layered, and propulsive: one line and then another in sequence.

I would presume that Naughton would be well aware of the implications of composing such an opening sequence, especially writing from Buffalo (where she has been a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program, only recently relocating to Brooklyn), as an echo of the late Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). While it has been more than fifty years since the publication of that particular work, Creeley’s shadow looms large across contemporary poetics, after all, and nowhere more than Buffalo, where he taught for thirty-seven years as Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics, from 1966 to 2003. “the image world shimmers in our neighbor’s windows / the vacant house,” she writes, “and who left it / pink hearts and red a sugar crystal glitter / in winter [.]”

Naughton begins this collection with her “day book” poems, suggesting a movement through time, but the poems of The Real Ethereal hold to an immediacy, a perpetual moment across the American present through parsed and penetrating short-form lengths. “morning takes me take the street traffics / daily time through me though morning,” she writes, to open “my love in strange places,” the poem that begins the second section, “comes already strange and I leave / the choirs of history and their small bells [.]” Her lyrics really do propel with their expansiveness, their ongoingness, offering a simultaneous, infinite and open-ended present. “dawn is not mine day still breaks yellow,” begins the poem “warming ending what it may you persist.” Naughton seeks questions of elegy and address, between what is real and what is less than, and what makes the difference, striding the line between concrete and abstract. She seeks questions around the complexities of ethics vs. capitalism, and what can be held, or held against; seeking answers to how not only to be present, but to somehow survive. As part of the sequence “a second singing,” set in the final section, reads:

Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them and also
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation the body
turning to heat to waste pass
or spend a life its imagined
or remembered textures. So most time
stopped to remember happens
in an empty room with the internet
the flat word of the screen
standing in for some other place
where something happens. The
news is who stays poor in
the necessary rooms waiting
for dinner. I’m in some threshold
looking through two doors.
The rooms are empty but feel
like weight   like world.

Laura Ulewicz, Why It Is I Choose To Be Alien: Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Vincent

 

Both from her and her archives which, as literary executor, I ultimately helped to acquire, I learned more of her history. She arrived in San Francisco around 1950, in her early 20s, definitely on the run from Detroit, and never went home again. Was there child abuse? Her much younger cousin, Dona, whom I would meet after Laura’s death, said her father was difficult. But her middle class home was full of books and a piano. She was clearly bright; the parents wanted her to become a math teacher. She was no doubt rebellious. Arrested for shoplifting what she later told Dona was a “sexy dress,” her parents refused to pay her bail. A friend paid it and she married him; they moved to Chicago where the marriage would not last. It is not really clear what she initially did in San Francisco. Gradually she migrated into a Bohemian life whose center was in North Beach. Refusing to take an office job, she worked in nightclubs as a “camera girl.” She began to write a loose kind of open-ended verse and published in small, local magazines. Attractive, with a thick head of whiskey dark hair and physically strong, people might have wondered if she had just wandered in off the family farm. Indeed, as the poems clarify, her Polish ancestors were peasants. (“My proper source, my past madness. What do they know that I don’t? Defeat? Victory in it? That people die?,” Stephen Vincent)

I was fascinated to go through this posthumous selected poems by American poet Laura Ulewicz (1930-2007), her Why It Is I Choose To Be Alien: Selected Poems, edited with a hefty introduction by San Fransico poet and editor Stephen Vincent (Delete Press, 2022). I hadn’t heard of Laura Ulewicz prior to receiving this title in the mail, and Vincent’s introduction explains why: articulating a sequence of misadventures and near-misses that caused her work to not be picked up in one anthology or another that might have allowed her some further attention. Having fallen in with the Beat poets in San Francisco, her short biography at the Poetry Foundation website includes: “She had an intense love affair with Jack Gilbert, who dedicated his first book to her, and she ran the I-Thou coffee house on Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a time, and allegedly escaped. Her first and only book, The Inheritance, was published in 1967; she published sparingly during her lifetime, although her work appeared in literary magazines in the US and the UK, in anthologies such as Richard Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation (1997), and as broadsides in the Bay Area during the 1960s.”

Vincent structures the collection chronologically across four sections, each of which hold to a different geography and living situation for Ulewicz across her writing life, opening with elements of the one and only collection she published, which appeared with Turret Books during the period she lived in London, England: “The Inheritance (c. 1960-1967),” “Expatriation (c. 1960-1964),” “California (c. 1965-1972)” and “Locke (c. 1973-1980).” There are conversations one could have about a history of women artists and writers that get set aside for the sake of male writers, a number of whom have found new readers through a variety of readers, critics, editors and publishers taking it upon themselves to reclaim what had otherwise been lost, from Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) and Mina Loy (1882-1966) to Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961), and, from Vincent’s introduction, there is certainly that, combined with multiple shifts in her geography and living situations which prompted a shaky stability, too uncertain to maintain enough ties to keep a literary momentum flourishing, despite her ongoing output. Her work, as evidenced here, has a momentum, a propulsion, that keeps pushing, even beyond the ending of her sharp, critical, observational and occasionally caustic, first-person lyrics. She existed, and she wrote, and these poems are worth reading, and worth savouring. From that opening section:

TAKE 5, DETROIT

Down from the cosmos of these abstractions, TRACK IN
To this imperturbable arm of the orange machine.
This is the first of the beasts: Slave-kind of that
Prosperity by which we are doomed to freedom.
Inch along the arm with your lens to the jaw-hand.
It is noon. The jaw rests raised and silent.
CUT to the sun where one bird esses then glides
Slowly down to light on the knuckles. Follow
The bird, its down-flit to the fence. The place
Where all things mesh is this galvanized fence
Within which my mother kneels to set out
Gladiola. Beside it she knitted sweaters
For some godling to outgrow in casual hours.
that was her serious business, was her prayer
While the orange machine gauging a pit next door
Made mood music, mood music, mood music.
Freedom is what she knit this fence against.

Soham Patel, all one in the end—/water

 

That September when I first saw Lake Michigan, I wanted it to be the sea. Inhales and I would pretend I could taste salt from the air in my nose.

In the many months hundreds of articles twenty pounds three books all the injury and essays mouthfuls and loves and songs there were births and murders and deaths disasters storms and protests—and some semblance of home now every day when I see this lake.

Like that cocooning settle downhill into Manitou Springs in Colorado—closer to Pikes Peak’s white cap of snow and closer to my apartment, another threshold, so far away from the megachurch and from the military bases where I worked—or Bloomfield into Friendship neighborhood in Pittsburgh where the red house brick red house line the avenue to school. (“ON LAKE MICHIGAN”)

I’ve been eager to see further work from Soham Patel, rewarded this past week through the publication of her third full-length collection all one in the end—/water (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2023) [see my review of her first two full-length collections here]. one in the end—/water is a collection that is, in part, set as an intimate and book-length response via lyric to an array of poets working a blend of lyric, deep attention and ecological concern, including Lorine Niedecker, Brenda Iijima, Matthew Olzmann, Maggie Nelson, Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo V. Wilson. The title of the collection, for example, is directly borrowed from Niedecker’s poem “Paean to Place.” Blending lyric, line-breaks and prose poems, Patel’s is a lyric attending the very consideration of being, and being present, and the variety of perspectives and observations provide multiple directions upon the same sense of attending those moments. “Debris left standing is dead and so won’t be cut down for the humans’ safety so the power company says accordingly a fear I now hate but have conditions towards each tree from the middle to the end of our easement where I warranty me to learn all we can about this here rooted lands we’ve just moved in.” (“EXACTNESS COMES WITH WIND GUSTS”).

Patel writes colours and waves and lights across the ether. Writing on place names and ancestors, rain and what it uncovers, these are poems around a singular sense of geography that just as much explore how writing is thought and composed. As part of the poem “ON LAKE MICHIGAN,” she writes: “Matthew’s poems about shipwrecks in the great lakes lists fish and it all makes me so thirsty.” This is clearly a book composed in conversation, and in response, and there is something startling in this approach centred in a poetics of Niedecker and Iijima (the book is dedicated to Iijima), of space and rock and ecological concerns. Something startling, I suppose, in how clear-minded the poems read, amid, or even through, such polyvocabulary. It is interesting to think, as well, of this collection, as Patel offers in a note at the end of the collection, as “reassemblages from the previously published chapbooks,” blending previously-published material into an entirely coherent book-length form. There is such deep, abiding care through her attention. “Once I found a shiny layered rock on // Brighton Beach in the sand,” she writes, as part of “LISTEN IT’S MY DAY OFF,” “All over the darkness is real though // And oil fueled the plane not a boat [.]”

LIKE SNOW IN THE SUN I WANT TO S(T)AY. Opaque and at arm’s length with screens and the satellites, how this new word we learned, beautiful, is so. We are a dangerous thing, candles uttering against trees. We are dismantling from within under&uncommon and yet here to illuminate or else we’ll correct or uncover. Our light awaits warm and burn. It means renewal.