Michael J. Kolb

The Interview

So many of your poems explore illness, both physical and the physical’s emotional effects. What drives you to these themes? And in a poetry world filled with illness poems, how do you keep yours feeling fresh and personal?

Illness changed not just what my body could do, but how the world reached me. After a traumatic brain injury, memory, language, balance, and perception stopped being dependable. The body, usually silent beneath a life, got loud. Fear began as pressure in the skull; grief arrived with a missing word, a lost memory, or the inability to trust my own mind.

One of my doctors told me to write poetry as a way to heal my brain. Poetry did not repair the injury, but it gave shape to an experience that resisted ordinary explanation. I felt compelled to communicate that altered reality—to let another person feel, even briefly, what it is like to live inside an unreliable body and mind.

I try to start with the exact experience, not the category: what the body remembers of a car wreck, the words a doctor uses, a landscape gone strange, the second before a familiar word refuses to come. I care less about explaining a diagnosis than about what it does to time, identity, and perception. That pressure shapes the poems themselves: the fragments, the repetitions, the silences, the sudden turns of image.

Freshness does not come from claiming a suffering no one else has felt. Illness is old, and sooner or later it reaches nearly everyone. What stays singular is the consciousness moving through it. My job is to render that consciousness as exactly as I can.

These poems are consistently walking that tightrope between narrative clarity and ambiguity, often from a less linear perspective. How do you work to balance lucidity, precision, and abstraction?

Clarity does not require a poem to explain itself completely or to move in a straight line. I want the reader to know where they stand, even before they know why it matters. A physical image—a door, the operating room, a damaged forest, light moving across water—gives them that foothold while the poem moves through memory, association, and altered perception.

I let the poem follow its own associative logic first. That logic is often nonlinear because memory and emotion are nonlinear, especially after trauma. One moment does not lead to the next so much as open beneath it, revealing an earlier moment or an image carrying the same pressure. Abstraction has to rise out of something seen, heard, or felt. Otherwise, it just goes vague.

Revision is where I test the balance. I look hard at syntax, image, and lineation. I ask whether each leap creates resonance or just confusion. I cut explanation. I add one precise detail where the reader needs solid ground. Lucidity and ambiguity are not opposites for me. Precision is what makes ambiguity possible: the clearer the physical world of the poem, the more mystery it can hold.

Some of your poems employ traditional punctuation and capitalization, while others remove both. Can you tell us how you make that decision and how you feel removing both changes the reader’s experience?

I do not begin with a rule about punctuation or capitalization. I begin by listening for the voice and movement of the poem. Some poems need the architecture of sentences. Punctuation controls pace, marks a shift in time or speaker, and gives narrative material a firmer shape. When a poem holds several layers of memory or a tangled sequence of events, conventional punctuation helps the reader move through it without losing the emotional current.

In other poems, punctuation starts to feel too directive. Taking it out lets one phrase lean into the next and lets the line break do more than decorate the sentence. A line can finish one thought while starting another. That creates hesitation, doubleness, and sometimes disorientation—effects that matter in poems about brain injury, uncertain memory, and altered perception. Lowercase can soften the edges between statements too, so the poem feels more continuous, more intimate, more exposed.

But taking out punctuation does not mean taking out structure. It puts more weight on rhythm, spacing, syntax, and lineation. Every break has to guide the reader without seeming to. I often try a poem both ways and read it aloud. The decision comes down to how much direction the poem needs and how much uncertainty it can hold and still work. I want the form to enact the experience, not just announce it.

How does the study and the teaching of archaeology inform your relationship with text and with your own writing?

Archaeology has taught me to begin with what remains. A potsherd, an inscription, a disturbed burial, the placement of an object—all of it can carry meaning, but only in context. Texts are artifacts too: made for a purpose, preserved by circumstance, shaped by whoever held the power to speak. What survives is never the whole story. That makes me watch not just what a text says, but its silences, its erasures, its uncertainty.

Teaching archaeology sharpens the line between evidence and interpretation. I ask students to look closely, make connections, imagine what might explain something, and also see where the evidence stops. I bring that same discipline to poetry. I want an image or object observed precisely before I ask it to carry metaphorical weight. And I try not to fill every gap or explain every connection. A fragment can stay a fragment and still gesture toward the larger life around it.

My work has also taught me to think in layers. A site holds different periods on the same ground; a poem can hold the present, personal memory, cultural history, and deep time in the same space. Writing, for me, is often a matter of arranging those layers so they stay distinct but still speak to each other. Archaeology teaches a useful humility: recovery is never complete, interpretation stays provisional, and sometimes the most honest thing we can preserve is the shape of what is missing.

In these poems, corporeality takes the spotlight, while the speaker observes the body, seemingly surprised by its workings. This offers a key to a reality in which we manifest our thoughts and our meanings out of our own physicality, even as it overcomes us in the end. What kind of tension do you feel between the centuries- long span of your research and the smaller span of one human life?

My work has taught me to think in centuries, but illness has shown me that a life can change in seconds. That gap is hard to ignore. Centuries become a period, a phase, a layer in the ground. But each object in that layer belonged to someone who lived one day at a time, inside a body that tired, desired, suffered, and finally failed.

The body pulls that human scale back into view. A healed fracture, a worn tooth, a fingerprint in clay. The past stops being abstract and becomes evidence of one life. These traces remind me that thought and belief are always made physical: hands that create, mouths that speak, bodies that labor, worship, and bury their dead.

My own injury made that less theoretical. Consciousness likes to imagine itself independent, but thought depends on tissue that can fail. When the brain is hurt, memory, language, perception, and even the sense of self can change. That is part of why the speakers in these poems seem startled by their own bodies. They are meeting the body as both the instrument that makes meaning possible and the wall the self cannot get past.

That tension gives the writing urgency. A poem does not defeat mortality, any more than an artifact restores the person who made it. But both can leave a precise trace: not the whole life, but evidence that a consciousness was here, paying attention, for its brief span.

What are you currently working on? What can readers expect to see from you in the future?

I am completing two full-length manuscripts. A Folding Sky grew out of traumatic brain injury and its aftermath: rupture, altered perception, memory, and the effort to live inside a changed self rather than return to an old one. Stitchwork centers on chronic illness and the imperfect ways we repair what has been damaged.

My more recent poems are moving outward, toward objects that hold memory: an ancient ornament, initials cut into a picnic table, a junk drawer. Nature enters too, not as backdrop but as another body under pressure, failing and healing on its own timeline.

Embodiment is the ground I keep returning to: what it means to think inside a body that can fail you, and to trust a self that memory no longer confirms. Readers can expect poems that continue to explore memory, nature, illness, and loss—as well as the stubborn human wish to make something that might remain.