Based in Austin, TX, E. Kristin Anderson is the author of nine chapbooks including We're Doing Witchcraft, 17 seventeen XVII, and Behind, All You’ve Got . Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water.
E. Kristin Anderson’s poem “Don’t Look Back” will appear in the Winter 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
One aspect I’ve enjoyed about all of your work that I’ve read is seeing where you found inspiration—from pop music to The X-Files, and in this case Cat Power. Can you talk about how you find influences for your work?
I think I find influences the same way most poets do. But I where I know some writers feel that pop culture cheapens poetry, I think it’s just as valid a subject to write about as flowers and trees and bodies and ex-boyfriends. Movies and TV and music—as a teenager I filtered most of my experiences and my fears and loves through favorite shows and songs and it seems only natural that a lot of us are still doing that as adults. And to me pop culture is a lens through which we can let readers into our lives. It’s a point of entry that begins in a space that writer and reader share—or can share, with a quick googling—and that makes the rest of the poem more accessible. Most adults I know spend a lot of time time consuming media and most of them have a lot of thoughts and feelings regarding that media and I don’t know why that shouldn’t influence our writing just like the heartbreaks and the gardens and the birds.
How did you balance the musical influence with keeping this piece in the realm of poetry vs. lyrics?
I’m not a musician. I wanted to be, I wrote a lot of lyrics when I was a kid, and I sure as hell sing my feelings to my cats while I’m watching the news because yelling scares one of them. But I’m not musical. I never learned an instrument. So maybe just the fact that I’m approaching my poems as a poet is how I’ve managed this?
These poems are about me and the world I’m living in. This Cat Power song (“He War”) came out in 2003 and that world was somehow incredibly different from the world outside my door while also being incredibly the same. Maybe I’m looking for that space where I can tell my story and our story while speaking to songs that inspire me from all over my musical timeline. Which in itself is a mess.
I just got into Cat Power this year—I’m from a very small town in Maine and even though I worked at a record store in high school there were so many women making amazing music in the 90s/early 00s that I didn’t find until I sat myself down in my 30s and was like, self, you didn’t have an auntie who shared Cat Power and Sleater-Kinney with you so let’s do this. It’s honestly been amazing and I love how infinite music is in this way—it will always wait for you. So maybe I’m just really shamelessly enjoying myself as a writer in this infinite space and I hadn’t even thought of that blurry line between lyrics and poetry because lyrics aren’t my job. Poems are. And I’m always looking for a new path to new poems.
I thought your use of couplets did an impressive job of keeping the poem moving forward. How did you decide on the formatting for this poem?
I wish I had some clever response to this but honestly it’s mostly that the first poem I wrote in this series was couplets and I have a compendium of anxiety disorders that all insisted I keep writing in couplets until I finished the manuscript. Which I haven’t done yet. It’s couplet city over here.
Who are some contemporary poets you enjoy reading?
I read for Cotton Xenomorph and Sugared Water/Porkbelly Press and honestly one of the most exciting things to me as someone who loves poetry is finding those gems in the submission queue that remind you why poetry is your favorite thing. I’ll also say that I’m consistently impressed by Sarah Nichols, who also works with pop culture themes and experimental poetry. I also have really enjoyed poetry by Chen Chen, who brings a certain joy to poetry, even in the most visceral moments of his work. And Rosebud Ben-Oni wraps quantum physics into her work and as someone who loves science but is not science-inclined, career-wise, I love how her poems bring the worlds of science and art together—as if they were ever apart, truly.