AI: There is ongoing debate that poetry has become, to quote Dana Gioia, "the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group." There are those who believe that poetry can only reclaim its place in our culture if it is liberated from the bureaucracy of academia and marketed like any other bi-product of popular culture. Do you believe poetry has a place in pop culture, and should writers aim for that market?

 

EKH: I find that I am not very interested in the either-or arguments about poetry that pop up about every other year.  I think there is room for all kinds of poetry and all kinds of poets.  To feel you have to choose sides in these debates is to miss the wonderful possibilities for poetry.  I have been writing poetry a long time and I don't spend much energy anymore fighting the definitions going one way or another.  It is much more important to write, to find an audience, to just be a poet in every way possible and to get work out.   

 

AI: Mary Oliver believed in keeping a small journal in the back pocket of her jeans at all times to record ideas for poems. Do you have a behavior that helps bring your ideas to fruition?

 

EKH: I tend to carry a little notebook around and often give them as presents.  So, you might say I share that behavior with Mary Oliver.  I have given up trying to carry too much in my head.

 

AI: Do you have a vision for the role of poetry in the 21st century?

 

EKH: I am not having a vision as much as I am wondering how the new ways of reaching people will affect the ways poets interact with readers.  

 

AI: I’m sure you remember the first rejection letter you ever received.

 

EKH: Actually, I don't remember that letter.  I have gotten my share.  I now only give myself one day to be depressed or dejected about a rejection.  I usually publish most of the poems that I am willing to put out for public scrutiny, and I don't say that to make it seem as if I just get all my work published.  I have taken more time to feel poems are finished than I used to, and I'm pretty good at picking my spots.  It's probably time to get some new spots.

 

AI: What would you say to those of us poets who seem to receive them often?

 

EKH: Welcome to the club.

 

AI: I noticed that there is precise and beautiful attention paid to word choice in your poems. Do you begin with words first, or do you have to get your images down before you can be so precise?

 

EKH: Well, this thing you are talking about--precision--comes from hours and hours of writing to get things all lined up properly.  Image and sound and emotion and ideas and language--the dance goes on and on and the work of the poet is to find and keep the balance.  The balance is precise because the poet has learned balance by working toward it for years.  And, also, there has to be some testing along the way--giving readings, sending work out.  Those things let the poet know where the balance has not been achieved.

 

AI: Your work has one foot in the material world and another in the ineffable, straddling the elusive and the grounded. How do you negotiate that dichotomy between needing to go deeply into the self and needing to be deeply connected to the world?

 

EKH: I think this is the same issue of balance that you were looking for in the last question.  Learning to really live consciously takes much work just as every poem takes effort and sacrifice.  Every life is really a poem, you know, and each person is the poet of her own life.  So, the work is often very similar in creating a valuable life and having poems that matter. Remember, Keats said poetry is "the vale of soul making."  I really believe that.  

 

AI: Most writers write from some sort of obsession. Could you say that

your latest collection came forth because of an obsession with Sappho?

 

EKH: This book came from an obsession with finding where I come from.  I'm trying here to say there is a lesbian literary tradition and that I am consciously part of it and part of making it.

 

AI: There is a Zen saying: “Behind each jewel are three thousand sweating horses.” Can you talk about your writing process? Are there three thousand sweating horses behind each poem?