Poet-activist Kathleen Hellen, also known by her pseudonym Shiori, is the author of one collection of poems, Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2012), as well as two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and more recently Pentimento (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Hellen, who has been widely published and awarded, has worked as a journalist, educator, and editor. Currently, she teaches at Coppin State University and is a member of Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s editorial board. In describing the impetus behind her writing and the relationship between her poetry and activism, she tells us, “As witness, I am part of the process of the changing world, and it is my responsibility to act as ‘witness’ for others who can’t” and that her books are “[her] way of saying ‘no’ to the madness.” Reviewers have called Hellen’s poetry “sometimes quixotic, always kickass, reverberat[ing] through my skull like quicksilver” (Richard Peabody), “a feast for the reader, who will come away filled and changed” (Rhett Iseman Trull), and “work that could wake the dead” (E. Ethelbert Miller).
Before you get into the interview, here is a brief synopsis of the poetry that is mentioned in the questions below. “Wages” is a poem that explores the different interpretations of the word “wages” and experiments with the past meanings of the word compared to the present meanings. It is an important poem because it shows how Hellen does not limit herself to one definition, time period, or culture when writing but takes it upon herself to be the trailblazer for her readers. “Wedding of the Foxes” is a poem that was written after Hellen was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams. It awakened her “dream voice” which was what guided her through this poem. It takes a truly talented artist to take a movie and twist it into a short poem without losing any meaning from it. This continues with the idea of Hellen not limiting herself in her poetry but drawing from her experiences, e.g. watching the film, and putting it into a work that teaches readers a new culture and pushes them into a new way of thinking. “Picnic” is a peaceful poem from the point of view of a Latino person, which is shown through the references throughout the poem and how she integrates Spanish at certain points in the poem. “Aubade,” however, is not as peaceful in that it discusses how racism impacted the relationship between the speaker and an African American man. Both of these poems show the range of Kathleen Hellen in that she does not just write about what is familiar to her but pushes herself to learn about the experiences of other races and then shape that experience into a poem that reads as if she went through those experiences herself. It also speaks volumes about the depth of her character in that she recognizes the struggles that others are going through and refuses to stay silent about them. The Girl Who Loved Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento are all different collections of Hellen’s poetry, some of which feature the poems above.
To find out more information about Kathleen Hellen, visit Poets & Writers, Washington Writers Publishing House, Ascent, and the Enroch Pratt Free Library’s Poetry & Conversation series. You can also read more of her poetry by visiting The Faculty Voice, The Cortland Review, Connotation Press, and Evergreen Review.
Yasmine Zahra Kaminsky: Throughout your body of work, you make a plethora of formal choices. In The Girl Who Loved Mothra, your poems “Wedding of the Foxes,” “Hide the daughters, hide the rice,” and “Butterfly’s Difficult Kata” all give tribute to films. In Umberto’s Night, “Aubade,” in its very title, alludes to the poem’s genre; “The Persistence of Memory” is a prose-poem, and the collection as a whole is divided into five sections. In Pentimento, “Waiting for Tupac” and “Pictures in a Small Café” begin with epigrams, and “Red Sweater” begins as a series of tercets before shifting to a final couplet. What is the relationship between the form and content of your poetry? While you are writing, does one guide you more than the other? What is the thought process behind some of the formal choices you make?
Kathleen Hellen: A poem angles for its best expression—you sit at the shore with your line cast into the universe—thoughts, impulses, emotions, all trembling—and you wait for what comes. You have to believe it’s there, somewhere under the surface of things. You wait for the shimmer.
Many things float by on the current. Things you’ve learned about what a poem should be, what it looks like, how it sounds. Things you remember, like the idea some poets have that the most powerful emotions need form—a vessel—to contain them. This might be true. Take Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, those sturdy tercets like boxes, that careful rhyme. And yet in the last line of the poem there is the exclamation that insists through the parenthetical, “(Write it!)” — the opposite of restraint. This is brilliant. This is how form can shimmer with content, and for me, that content is always caught up with other arts, other artists—Kurosawa, Nina Simone, Matisse. Wherever the human condition finds its true expression, this is also one art.
YZK: In an interview with Kaite Hillenbrand on Connotation Press, you explained your understanding of grammar as “a set of possibilities…. It conveys something other than knowledge, and correlates with the poet and the crises of her times. Its best practice is the intersection of desire and beauty and meaning.” Could you elaborate on how grammar correlates with “the crises of [the poet’s] times,” and how grammar has informed your writing?
KH: The crises of our times are reflected in language that is the surface of what is real. How to write about nature, for example, without, as the writer Greg Wrenn puts it, “photo shopping out any hint of our current crisis,” the man-made environmental disaster? How to find substance in the language of political corruption? In the aggregated sound bites of war and poverty and racism? In the stock reports of a troubled economy? How to say what is true when the very language that we use is, as the philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva would argue, the source of our oppression? In my best writing I am trying to subvert grammar, relying on juxtapositions and nuance, on image and intertexuality, to gesture toward the unsayable—toward meaning that resides in the spaces where language fails. I bend language to “tell it slant,” rooting among the possibilities of grammar because the truth is unsayable.
YZK: In 2013, you participated in the Pratt Library’s series Poetry & Conversation and, in listening to the podcast, I couldn’t help but admire the strength and lyrical quality of your performance. What is the experience of giving a reading like, and how do you prepare for one? How do you feel hearing/watching a poetry performance differs from reading/seeing a poem on the page for the audience? How does performing and writing compare for the writer?
KH: Thank you for the kind words. Readings are always a terror for me, but over the years I’ve gotten better at hiding that fact. I practice. I read aloud to myself, over and over. As another writer recommended, I try to relive the emotion I experienced while writing the poem, though that can sometimes rattle, especially if the emotion is overwhelming. Some poems are songs that are meant to be sung, or ride on cadences that must be read aloud to fully appreciate. Some tell stories that when delivered by a true griot, inhabit and find presence when performed. Other poems delight in their visual expression (line, space, for instance) and when read again, open on the page to colors of meaning.
YZK: I remember you mentioning in the Poetry & Conversation podcast that one of your early poems was written for a crush during your adolescence. How do you feel that your art has transformed and matured since you first began writing? What has changed, in terms of content and technique? Conversely, what has stayed the same?
KH: It’s still a crush. But now the affection is for the world and everything in it. Hopefully, since that first experience, I have learned more about writing, the craft of poetry, but in a sense, all the poems I write are crushes.
YZK: Before becoming a professor at Coppin State University, you worked as a journalist. How have your experiences as an educator and reporter influenced your writing? How has creative writing informed your choices while teaching and reporting?
KH: My work as a reporter has informed much of the poetry I write. I feel compelled to “report” this continuing history of atrocity and destruction, what the philosopher Berel Lang in discussing the Holocaust calls “shock waves from the past that continue to ripple forward shaping both institutional structures … and individuals.” There is a story I love of the poet Anna Ahkmatova standing outside the prison in 1930’s Stalinist Russia, waiting to plead for her son who had been arrested. When asked if she could describe the purges, the murders and terrors, Akhmatova answered: “I can.” So it is more than vicarious, more than projection. As witness, I am part of the process of the changing world, and it is my responsibility to act as “witness” for others who can’t.
In teaching, I am always learning, and what I learn I give back to my poems, to teaching.
YZK: What does activism mean to you? How do you conceptualize the intersection between poetry and activism? In what ways do you think The Girl Who Loves Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento relate to this conceptualization?
KH: The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek talks about the “authentic ethical act,” which is at the core of activism, which is the choice to be “free,” and he disposes of the so-called “commonsense” opposition of acts and words. He is right; we can do things with words. The Girl Who Loves Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento are my way of saying “no” to the madness. Here, I refer to Lang, who said, “Without words, no record at all would remain of events, nobody would know how what happened happened, or even that it happened—as if the writing alone would survive.”
Joy Njoroge: I noticed that in “Wages,” your ideas are very fragmented throughout the poem. Why did you choose to do this? How do you think writing in this style conveys your message better?
KH: “Wages” took shape as a series of vignettes, delivered in the way that the news is delivered, in fragments. Each “scene” explores meanings of the word “wages,” as in “pledge” for services, as in “just reward,” as well as in the possible relationship to words like “wager” and the Old English word for “wagon” or “weight.” It is a variation of the ghazal, with multiple, autonomous themes and including my signature as a “wage-less,” working poet in the closure of the poem. An American ghazal, if you will.
JN: In “Wedding of the Foxes,” I definitely admired the rhythmical structure to the poem as well as the arrangements of the shifts in tone--they made the poem a very interesting read. What was your writing process like for this poem or for your poetry in general?
KH: Thank you, again. The process of the poem began when many years ago I had the opportunity to see Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams, and the episode titled “Sunshine Through the Rain,” in which a boy defies the wish of a woman—presumably his mother—to stay at home when the sun is shining through the rain. This is the strange weather when the kitsune—foxes—are believed in folklore to have their weddings. When he witnesses the wedding procession from behind a tree, the boy is spotted by the foxes and he runs, only to return home and find the woman refuses to let him in unless he commits suicide with the tantō knife the foxes have left for him. It ends with the boy setting off for the mountains, where the foxes live, and a rainbow.
The episode haunted my dreams—the woman, in particular, the “mother,” and the tantō knife. The images recalled my own mother telling me once, when I was a little girl, how a samurai woman always kept a dagger in her kimono’s sleeve—and so the poem was finding itself, becoming. In “Wedding of the Foxes,” I was scripting Kurosawa’s dream as my own, and I let my “dream voice” speak without interruption. This is Keats, isn’t it? This is “negative capability.” What I discovered only later, after the poem had been written, was that I was trying to give voice to this “authentic ethical act.” I need to trust this “dream voice” more often.
JN: Some of your poetry is written through the perspective of different races/ethnicities that are not only Japanese American but also Hispanic and African American as well like in “Picnic” and “Aubade.” Why do you choose to write from these different viewpoints? Is there anything that you do to be culturally sensitive?
KH: Along with the fractures of being mixed race, there is at the same time a freedom in how you define “belonging.” The choice to write from different perspectives reflects that awareness, an awareness so eloquently rendered in that great quote from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when the character of Tom Joad says, “I'll be everywhere … wherever there's a fight…. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy….” It’s like that with people of color. We are everywhere, and more now than when I was growing up.
To identify as multiracial is to refuse being reduced to a single identity. What I see today is a generation investigating the complexities of racial background, and my perspective as a poet mirrors that investigation. The answer to the question—What are you?—is a “little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody,” as Tom in the novel says.
JN: Some of your poems seem to be a record of your experiences. When you write a poem like that, do you have a message in mind that you want to get through, or do you just let the poem write itself?
KH: A perceptive comment. The work in The Girl Who Loved Mothra, in particular, resisted form—both Western like the sonnet or villanelle, for instance, and Japanese (haiku, tanka, haibun), although there are some haiku embedded in the lines and prose poems like “Festival of Season Words.” These are hybrid forms.
The collection is closer to a pillow book and deeply personal, but unlike The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon, it is not a collection of everyday observations and opinions but a record of the past, a lyrical memoir, including “things of beauty” and “the awful things,” as Shōnagon might list them, in which I scratch at the paradox at the center of my life. Memories are like dreams, shifting and tangled, where narratives take shape, inviting self-awareness. They connect you with family, ancestors, and in doing so, a history is written. A culture accumulates.
Before you get into the interview, here is a brief synopsis of the poetry that is mentioned in the questions below. “Wages” is a poem that explores the different interpretations of the word “wages” and experiments with the past meanings of the word compared to the present meanings. It is an important poem because it shows how Hellen does not limit herself to one definition, time period, or culture when writing but takes it upon herself to be the trailblazer for her readers. “Wedding of the Foxes” is a poem that was written after Hellen was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams. It awakened her “dream voice” which was what guided her through this poem. It takes a truly talented artist to take a movie and twist it into a short poem without losing any meaning from it. This continues with the idea of Hellen not limiting herself in her poetry but drawing from her experiences, e.g. watching the film, and putting it into a work that teaches readers a new culture and pushes them into a new way of thinking. “Picnic” is a peaceful poem from the point of view of a Latino person, which is shown through the references throughout the poem and how she integrates Spanish at certain points in the poem. “Aubade,” however, is not as peaceful in that it discusses how racism impacted the relationship between the speaker and an African American man. Both of these poems show the range of Kathleen Hellen in that she does not just write about what is familiar to her but pushes herself to learn about the experiences of other races and then shape that experience into a poem that reads as if she went through those experiences herself. It also speaks volumes about the depth of her character in that she recognizes the struggles that others are going through and refuses to stay silent about them. The Girl Who Loved Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento are all different collections of Hellen’s poetry, some of which feature the poems above.
To find out more information about Kathleen Hellen, visit Poets & Writers, Washington Writers Publishing House, Ascent, and the Enroch Pratt Free Library’s Poetry & Conversation series. You can also read more of her poetry by visiting The Faculty Voice, The Cortland Review, Connotation Press, and Evergreen Review.
Yasmine Zahra Kaminsky: Throughout your body of work, you make a plethora of formal choices. In The Girl Who Loved Mothra, your poems “Wedding of the Foxes,” “Hide the daughters, hide the rice,” and “Butterfly’s Difficult Kata” all give tribute to films. In Umberto’s Night, “Aubade,” in its very title, alludes to the poem’s genre; “The Persistence of Memory” is a prose-poem, and the collection as a whole is divided into five sections. In Pentimento, “Waiting for Tupac” and “Pictures in a Small Café” begin with epigrams, and “Red Sweater” begins as a series of tercets before shifting to a final couplet. What is the relationship between the form and content of your poetry? While you are writing, does one guide you more than the other? What is the thought process behind some of the formal choices you make?
Kathleen Hellen: A poem angles for its best expression—you sit at the shore with your line cast into the universe—thoughts, impulses, emotions, all trembling—and you wait for what comes. You have to believe it’s there, somewhere under the surface of things. You wait for the shimmer.
Many things float by on the current. Things you’ve learned about what a poem should be, what it looks like, how it sounds. Things you remember, like the idea some poets have that the most powerful emotions need form—a vessel—to contain them. This might be true. Take Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, those sturdy tercets like boxes, that careful rhyme. And yet in the last line of the poem there is the exclamation that insists through the parenthetical, “(Write it!)” — the opposite of restraint. This is brilliant. This is how form can shimmer with content, and for me, that content is always caught up with other arts, other artists—Kurosawa, Nina Simone, Matisse. Wherever the human condition finds its true expression, this is also one art.
YZK: In an interview with Kaite Hillenbrand on Connotation Press, you explained your understanding of grammar as “a set of possibilities…. It conveys something other than knowledge, and correlates with the poet and the crises of her times. Its best practice is the intersection of desire and beauty and meaning.” Could you elaborate on how grammar correlates with “the crises of [the poet’s] times,” and how grammar has informed your writing?
KH: The crises of our times are reflected in language that is the surface of what is real. How to write about nature, for example, without, as the writer Greg Wrenn puts it, “photo shopping out any hint of our current crisis,” the man-made environmental disaster? How to find substance in the language of political corruption? In the aggregated sound bites of war and poverty and racism? In the stock reports of a troubled economy? How to say what is true when the very language that we use is, as the philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva would argue, the source of our oppression? In my best writing I am trying to subvert grammar, relying on juxtapositions and nuance, on image and intertexuality, to gesture toward the unsayable—toward meaning that resides in the spaces where language fails. I bend language to “tell it slant,” rooting among the possibilities of grammar because the truth is unsayable.
YZK: In 2013, you participated in the Pratt Library’s series Poetry & Conversation and, in listening to the podcast, I couldn’t help but admire the strength and lyrical quality of your performance. What is the experience of giving a reading like, and how do you prepare for one? How do you feel hearing/watching a poetry performance differs from reading/seeing a poem on the page for the audience? How does performing and writing compare for the writer?
KH: Thank you for the kind words. Readings are always a terror for me, but over the years I’ve gotten better at hiding that fact. I practice. I read aloud to myself, over and over. As another writer recommended, I try to relive the emotion I experienced while writing the poem, though that can sometimes rattle, especially if the emotion is overwhelming. Some poems are songs that are meant to be sung, or ride on cadences that must be read aloud to fully appreciate. Some tell stories that when delivered by a true griot, inhabit and find presence when performed. Other poems delight in their visual expression (line, space, for instance) and when read again, open on the page to colors of meaning.
YZK: I remember you mentioning in the Poetry & Conversation podcast that one of your early poems was written for a crush during your adolescence. How do you feel that your art has transformed and matured since you first began writing? What has changed, in terms of content and technique? Conversely, what has stayed the same?
KH: It’s still a crush. But now the affection is for the world and everything in it. Hopefully, since that first experience, I have learned more about writing, the craft of poetry, but in a sense, all the poems I write are crushes.
YZK: Before becoming a professor at Coppin State University, you worked as a journalist. How have your experiences as an educator and reporter influenced your writing? How has creative writing informed your choices while teaching and reporting?
KH: My work as a reporter has informed much of the poetry I write. I feel compelled to “report” this continuing history of atrocity and destruction, what the philosopher Berel Lang in discussing the Holocaust calls “shock waves from the past that continue to ripple forward shaping both institutional structures … and individuals.” There is a story I love of the poet Anna Ahkmatova standing outside the prison in 1930’s Stalinist Russia, waiting to plead for her son who had been arrested. When asked if she could describe the purges, the murders and terrors, Akhmatova answered: “I can.” So it is more than vicarious, more than projection. As witness, I am part of the process of the changing world, and it is my responsibility to act as “witness” for others who can’t.
In teaching, I am always learning, and what I learn I give back to my poems, to teaching.
YZK: What does activism mean to you? How do you conceptualize the intersection between poetry and activism? In what ways do you think The Girl Who Loves Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento relate to this conceptualization?
KH: The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek talks about the “authentic ethical act,” which is at the core of activism, which is the choice to be “free,” and he disposes of the so-called “commonsense” opposition of acts and words. He is right; we can do things with words. The Girl Who Loves Mothra, Umberto’s Night, and Pentimento are my way of saying “no” to the madness. Here, I refer to Lang, who said, “Without words, no record at all would remain of events, nobody would know how what happened happened, or even that it happened—as if the writing alone would survive.”
Joy Njoroge: I noticed that in “Wages,” your ideas are very fragmented throughout the poem. Why did you choose to do this? How do you think writing in this style conveys your message better?
KH: “Wages” took shape as a series of vignettes, delivered in the way that the news is delivered, in fragments. Each “scene” explores meanings of the word “wages,” as in “pledge” for services, as in “just reward,” as well as in the possible relationship to words like “wager” and the Old English word for “wagon” or “weight.” It is a variation of the ghazal, with multiple, autonomous themes and including my signature as a “wage-less,” working poet in the closure of the poem. An American ghazal, if you will.
JN: In “Wedding of the Foxes,” I definitely admired the rhythmical structure to the poem as well as the arrangements of the shifts in tone--they made the poem a very interesting read. What was your writing process like for this poem or for your poetry in general?
KH: Thank you, again. The process of the poem began when many years ago I had the opportunity to see Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams, and the episode titled “Sunshine Through the Rain,” in which a boy defies the wish of a woman—presumably his mother—to stay at home when the sun is shining through the rain. This is the strange weather when the kitsune—foxes—are believed in folklore to have their weddings. When he witnesses the wedding procession from behind a tree, the boy is spotted by the foxes and he runs, only to return home and find the woman refuses to let him in unless he commits suicide with the tantō knife the foxes have left for him. It ends with the boy setting off for the mountains, where the foxes live, and a rainbow.
The episode haunted my dreams—the woman, in particular, the “mother,” and the tantō knife. The images recalled my own mother telling me once, when I was a little girl, how a samurai woman always kept a dagger in her kimono’s sleeve—and so the poem was finding itself, becoming. In “Wedding of the Foxes,” I was scripting Kurosawa’s dream as my own, and I let my “dream voice” speak without interruption. This is Keats, isn’t it? This is “negative capability.” What I discovered only later, after the poem had been written, was that I was trying to give voice to this “authentic ethical act.” I need to trust this “dream voice” more often.
JN: Some of your poetry is written through the perspective of different races/ethnicities that are not only Japanese American but also Hispanic and African American as well like in “Picnic” and “Aubade.” Why do you choose to write from these different viewpoints? Is there anything that you do to be culturally sensitive?
KH: Along with the fractures of being mixed race, there is at the same time a freedom in how you define “belonging.” The choice to write from different perspectives reflects that awareness, an awareness so eloquently rendered in that great quote from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when the character of Tom Joad says, “I'll be everywhere … wherever there's a fight…. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy….” It’s like that with people of color. We are everywhere, and more now than when I was growing up.
To identify as multiracial is to refuse being reduced to a single identity. What I see today is a generation investigating the complexities of racial background, and my perspective as a poet mirrors that investigation. The answer to the question—What are you?—is a “little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody,” as Tom in the novel says.
JN: Some of your poems seem to be a record of your experiences. When you write a poem like that, do you have a message in mind that you want to get through, or do you just let the poem write itself?
KH: A perceptive comment. The work in The Girl Who Loved Mothra, in particular, resisted form—both Western like the sonnet or villanelle, for instance, and Japanese (haiku, tanka, haibun), although there are some haiku embedded in the lines and prose poems like “Festival of Season Words.” These are hybrid forms.
The collection is closer to a pillow book and deeply personal, but unlike The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon, it is not a collection of everyday observations and opinions but a record of the past, a lyrical memoir, including “things of beauty” and “the awful things,” as Shōnagon might list them, in which I scratch at the paradox at the center of my life. Memories are like dreams, shifting and tangled, where narratives take shape, inviting self-awareness. They connect you with family, ancestors, and in doing so, a history is written. A culture accumulates.
Yasmine Kaminsky is a junior English major and psychology minor at Johns Hopkins University. She tutors at JHU's Writing Center and interns at Johns Hopkins University Press, and she plans on pursuing an MFA in poetry.
Joy Njoroge is a junior at Baltimore City College who sees poetry as a platform to educate others. One day she hopes to use her talents to help in educating the Black community on their history and the value of their Blackness.
Joy Njoroge is a junior at Baltimore City College who sees poetry as a platform to educate others. One day she hopes to use her talents to help in educating the Black community on their history and the value of their Blackness.