Katie Farris

- Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts, United States of America -

Katie Farris’s most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was shortlisted for the 2024 TS Eliot Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of boysgirls (Tupelo Press 2019), and the co-translator of many works mainly from the Ukrainian, including most recently A Country in Which Everyone’s Name is Fear, which was one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. Her books have been published in French, Ukrainian and Russian translations and Spanish translation is forthcoming next year. Her most recent work appears in Granta, Poetry, The New York Times, and several Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches at Princeton University.

Katie Farris (Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.

TO NOURISH WHAT IS STRANGE IN US: Notes On Form

“What is the most romantic meter?” A student asked in my prosody class.

“Iambic dimeter!” I said. “The rhythm of each line is ba-BUM, ba-BUM— the sound of two heartbeats pressed against each other… GET IT?!” I awaited applause and received groans as usual.

But after that, I wrote hundreds of love lyrics in this form. I have always been interested in the parts of love and marriage that don’t make it onto the television screen—my young vegetarian husband suffering from gout, hollering because I’d barely grazed his toe with a sheet. Or the way he reads at night, one eye open determinedly even as he falls asleep with the other. Or our arguments about him throwing apple cores in the street. All those things I love him despite, rather than the things that cause me to love him. I later edited most of these poems without paying attention to the dimeter, but “Irony,” for instance, about my husband’s gouty foot, is still very dimetric.

That takes us to roughly February 2020.

As the pandemic began and political rhetoric became even more toxic, I started trying to write more reflective poems. Like many folks in that time, I deepened my resolution to spend more time listening and less time speaking. I began to feel that my envisioned book of love poems was simply wrong. I was celebrating love when the collective was grieving—the deaths in this new millennia as well as centuries of hatred, and I wanted to respect that grief. At that point, I couldn’t imagine writing love poetry in a burning world. How could I? Why would I?

In August 2020, six days before my thirty-seventh birthday, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bad news kept piling on: shockingly, chemotherapy gave me heart failure. My mastectomy created significant nerve damage in my shoulder. My radiation had to be much deeper and more intense than the original plan, as it appeared there might still be cancer after nine months of aggressive treatment.

Because I was diagnosed in pre-vaccine pandemic days, I was (and for the most part still am) alone at every single appointment. No one could visit during chemo, and my husband had to pick me up outside the hospital after my mastectomy. I have never seen my oncologist’s face. The poems were coming with a new urgency now—the burning world felt like it had taken up residency in my own body, and I was so afraid I was going to die that I couldn’t stop reaching out into the world, trying to touch what I could, while I could, even if it hurt. I needed to know—how can I write love poetry in a burning world?

My most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is my messy, imperfect answer to that question. I have learned that the right time to write love poetry to a burning world is when it is burning—and it’s always burning. Whether the world “deserves” love is beside the point. It is the action of loving—the brave, ridiculous, absurd, delicious, silly, excruciating work of it—that answers the question why love?

In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I did some of my best growing up, you can be walking down a twisted narrow Colonial street with saltbox houses forming a solid wall around you, turn a corner, and suddenly find yourself on a bay, or in a pocket of woods, or in a very old graveyard. It’s a little bit surreal, the way the landscape seems to like to change the rules. I love a place with agency.

This is what I love about books, too: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities— I’ve been hauling the same copy around since I was 14, and the marginalia is like an archeological survey of my life as a writer, reader, and teacher. Anselm Kiefer’s “Starfall.” Beloved. Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Equus. I have a complicated relationship to Heidegger, but he’s been undeniably influential. Tom Waits. Erik Dietman’s “L’Ami de personne,” which I find myself ironically and almost obsessively drawn to. Lolita. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. As I Lay Dying, which is probably, and appropriately, the book with which I would request to be cremated. Gwendolyn Brooks, who has this incredible deft urgent elegance that excites me in the same way that Emily Dickinson does. Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror.” Mrs. Dalloway. Joseph Cornell—or perhaps more accurately Joseph Cornell as viewed by Charles Simic in Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. N. Scott Momaday’s Way to Rainy Mountain. Ani Difranco’s early music. Balthus, especially the “Nude in Front of a Mantle,” whom I love to visit at the Met, if I can find it. Invisible Man. Henry Darger. Marina Abramovic. Helene Cixious. Clarice Lispector, especially her short story “Love,” which is a nearly perfect thing, in its strangeness. At the end, if I had to pick one thing, one form, it would be hybrid-form work that I would choose, the kind of writing that feels most magical to me--books that stand on thresholds, refusing definition and creating themselves out of necessity. When I say that they are created from necessity, I mean that I think these works are best suited to communicate ideas that have never been communicated before: a new form must be created to contain them. The impossible becomes possible with hybrid forms (my favorite examples of this type of hybrid-form text range from Calvino's Invisible Cities to N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain). They nourish what is strange in us.

Words are creatures I live amongst. I love to collect words like I used to collect clothing hang-tags and rocks and books from the library until they were overdue—I believe the delightful word “overzealous” would be appropriate here. I have always loved the words “liminal” and “limn” and “lintel” and “threshold”; they are magical words. I love playing around with constraint, alliterations, assonances, I like using a limited number of consonants or vowels. That, to me, is romance of romance. I usually start from a word or phrase, and add in a couple of other sounds as the piece progresses—something like a train-ride, something like a fugue. And each new word added into the line, too, must nourish what is strange in us.

my chest, a thing so ephemeral

yet held so firmly in your fist.

Essay written by Katie Farris

More about the poet

Poetry

Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World /

To train myself to find, in the midst of hell
what isn't hell.
The body, bald, cancerous, but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—
This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
In the Event of My Death /

What used to be
a rope descending
my vertebrae to the basement of my spine
grows thin.

In solidarity with my first chemotherapy our cat leaves her whiskers on
the hardwood floor.
I gather them, each purewhite parenthesis, and plant them
in the throat of the earth.

In quarantine
I learned to trim your barbarian hair. Now it stands always on end:
a salute to my superior barbary skills. In the event of my death, promise you will find my heavy braid and bury it—

I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth. I’ve hidden others strategically around the globe, a net to catch
my body in its weaving.
The Man You Are the Boy You Are /

The man you are opens the door
to your anguish, a mirror

of my own – we’ve both grown
silver around the eyes. But in your pocket,

the boy you are brings me a melted
candy bar. You issue commands

like an old man, then take out
my trash like a young boy

with a crush.
To the God of Radiation /

Given the unexpected choice between uncertain death and certain damage,
I find in the mirror a woman—breastless, burned— who, in an advisory capacity,
asks, How much do you want to live?

Enough.

O God of Radiation, let your light
like a ship pass through me, your radiance exposing, exposing what’s inside me like film a god takes—

but must you clatter the eaves of my scapula, scurry
the grasshopper nest of my heart, scythe my nerves and cobweb my muscles
to the rungs
of my ribs? How much more can one body take?

Enough.

Light every deadly cell like a wick
burning in the paper lantern of my chest—
WHAT WOULD ROOT /

Walking through a cathedral of oak trees
and bristlecone pines, scolded by squirrels
in their priestly black, their white collars
wagging with the force of their scolding, I
was struck, simultaneously, in both eyes,
by some sort of flying detritus—pollen or seeds—
and stopped to lean against a rock
to scrub it (I thought) away. It was May,

it was May, it was May, and the air was sweet
with pine and Island Mountain lilac. The squirrels,
I mentioned them already, etc, and the lizards
ran down the spines of rocks like a bad feeling. I
could see everything: red-headed hummingbirds
dipped their beaks into the little red hoods of penstemon,
and I, a redhead, could hear everything: a red-crested
woodpecker, who was not offended I did not know his name.

And I could see everything: it was all green, really;
even the red was anti-green, and though my eyes
ached from everything-seeing, I could taste the granite
in the spring (oh yes, I drank water from the ground; I
was wild, even then, though the squirrels scolded
me and tried to convince me I was not). Soon I crested
a rise; the land spread itself greenly for me and I
wished I had seed to toss into that green, just to see

what would root. My right eye would not close to this
view; why would it; but when I reached up to touch it, I
felt that there was a twig emerging, and another from my
other eye; that they were a part of my body I could not doubt;
they were living and enervated and jutting out. I
sat down, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck,
understanding for the first time they were not hairs, but roots.
I could see everything; it was all green; the twigs in my eyes

tasted sunlight with my mouth; the roots drew the salt
from my sweat into their vacuum, and I was no longer hungry:
my metamorphosis had rendered me perfectly self-sufficient. I
could see everything; the roots in my skull shifted and I
lay down beneath my own branches. I had to wiggle a bit to
find a place to lay my head; the rock was very hard,
and I needed softer ground—yes, a place for the top
of my head to come off, to nuzzle into the earth, to drink.

Katie Farris

- Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts, United States of America -

Poetry

Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World /

In the Event of My Death /

The Man You Are the Boy You Are /

To the God of Radiation /

WHAT WOULD ROOT /