Kimberly Kralowec

The Interview

From William Carlos Williams to Gottfried Benn to our contemporary C. Dale Young, there’s a long history of incredible poets who work in other professions. As a well-known California lawyer, how do you feel your legal and academic perspective affects your writing?

I think there’s an indirect influence. Certain tenets of legal writing carry over to poetry. For example, in appellate brief writing, it’s important to consider where you want the judge’s mind to go and not go when she reads your brief, and what detours you want her mind to take or not take in receiving your arguments. Poetry is a kind of argument, or it can be. Where do I want the reader’s mind to go or not go as it traverses this poem? 

Although your poems explore significant human concerns, your approach is often subtle. You tend to focus on the tangible, intimate minutia of landscape and experience, instead of making sweeping statements. Can you tell us about your process of using the little things to examine bigger issues?

I’ve been heavily influenced by the work of Tomas Tranströmer. He often uses minute details as the vehicle for what might be called “truths,” or ideas that feel true, at least to me as the receiver of some of his translated work. I have been trying to imitate Tranströmer’s approach for the longest time. My ideal aspirational goal would be for each line of the poem to carry as much of a broader “truth” as it can. Attempting to achieve this tends to generate shorter poems. 

Inherently linked by both theme and structure, are these poems part of a larger sequence? Can you tell us about the sequence as a whole? How else do you explore how we all “retreat into the stillness of our own bones” in your other poems?

Yes, the poems are part of a larger sequence of untitled poems, many of which will appear in my first chapbook, forthcoming in May 2022 from Tolsun Books. The sequence was written over the course of about three years and began as a series of love poems to my husband. The poems explore intimacy and the private spaces where emotions exist at their most intense. In these spaces, even the “stillness” carries a heightened emotional intensity. I’m hopeful that some small idea of this will be communicated in the poems. 

Though you do write from the first-person perspective, your poems also frequently use the communal pronoun “we” and the always enticing second person “you.” What draws you to these varied POVs? What does each add to a poem’s unique dynamics?

I don’t see the points of view as varied because in each of these poems, the addressee (the “you”) who inspired its writing is an intimate other and the “we” is the speaker plus the other. That said, I purposely omitted any specific biographical context from these poems. If your question implies that the “we” can be read as a collective “we” and the “you” as a potential reader, that’s consistent with my intentions for these poems. I wanted to maintain a degree of ambiguity that leaves space for readers to draw something from the poems based on their own experience that I may never have thought of in writing them.

What is your philosophy of literature, if it’s not too pompous a question? 

What I’ve found in legal writing is that there is an articulable list of rules, and when you’re a beginning writer, you have to stay more consciously aware of the rules. As you get better, those rules are internalized and clear writing becomes close to second nature (which means less revision, because your first draft has already gone through sort of a mental edit before it ever hits the page). Revision becomes easier because you can more easily see the brief’s shortcomings, where you need to add more, where you’ve said too much, organization, etc. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can move on to more difficult and challenging briefing projects, and you can start to use more interesting rhetorical techniques of persuasion. I believe a similar learning process happens in poetry. This isn’t a “philosophy of literature” but it’s something that feels true to me as a traveler of the parallel tracks of legal writing and poetry. 

Has your writing process changed during this chaotic, terrifying time of disease and quarantine? How do you retain your creative inspiration?

A significant amount of space opened up for me last year due to the temporary court closures caused by the pandemic. When the Hugo House abruptly moved all its classes to an online format, I enrolled in a poetry workshop. I owe a lot to Jeanine Walker, the teacher of that workshop. For me, the retreat into poetry became a coping mechanism, and many draft “pandemic poems” came out of that time. My poems started becoming longer, both in terms of average line length and number of lines. I can’t really say why this happened, but it might be a function of having more time to work on them. It was a significant break from my previous style. Before the pandemic, I was consciously trying to write new poems without using “I,” “we” or “you” (see this example at The Night Heron Barks). That became harder when the pandemic hit and the necessary “shelter in place” orders intruded so deeply into our collective private spaces (not to mention the terrible wildfires). Another thing that changed for me is I started submitting again, which I hadn’t done in many years. I learned from Jeanine Walker that the risk of disappointment is lessened if you allow the submission, not the possible publication, to be the end goal. With her help and encouragement, and with the support of some talented workshop mates, I revised and finalized my first chapbook manuscript, submitted it to a number of places, and lightning struck.  

Can you tell us about what you’re working on now? What does 2022 hold for Kimberly Kralowec?

I’m working with the amazing editors at Tolsun Books on preparing my chapbook for publication. It’s called We Retreat into the Stillness of Our Own Bones and it will be available for pre-order later this year. I’m thrilled to be joining the Tolsun Books family, and I’m super excited that my brilliant sister, Kathleen Kralowec, is contributing the cover and interior art for the book. Aside from that project, I have two other chapbook manuscripts in the works. One of these includes the rest of my sequence of “stillness” poems and the other consists of newer poems, mostly written since the pandemic began. I hope to keep working on these manuscripts and writing new poems.