Our volunteer, Nora Kipnis, interviews Big Wonderful author Jen Karetnick about her upcoming book and her varied writing life.
1. How do you feel your work has changed through the different chapbooks and anthologies you’ve published: Necessary Salt, Tales from Mango House, Eve and After? And finally, what’s new about Landscaping for Wildlife?
In many ways, the work has remained grounded–literally. I’ve always been influenced by place and where I am in the natural world, so there’s a thread of continuity regarding Miami, South Florida, the Everglades and the tropical environment running through many of my poems. I’ve been living here for two decades, so I suppose that’s only natural (pardon the pun). On the other hand, I love to travel, so I feel it important to look around and absorb new experiences and then breathe them out through poetry. That includes the sensory ones of smelling, touching and hearing as well as simply seeing. So growth has been in the direction of trying to include all the senses and creating a roundness of experience rather than keeping it to the flatness of merely employing the visual.
Right now I’m interested in creating new forms and expanding my idea of form, even as I’m continually attracted to classical ones as well as free verse. Eve and After, for instance, was all sonnets; Bud Break at Mango House takes its title from a sestina. But Landscaping has less traditional forms and a couple of those invented ones, either by other poets or by myself. I’ve always liked the idea of being able to write everything and anything–from sestinas to spoken word–and being equally rich with ideas in all the genres of writing. I hate the the thought of limiting myself. But in form, subject, and theme, I have the tendency to do just that. So my challenge is to break those barriers for myself.
The one thing I truly love about this latest collection is that many of these poems came from assignments. I gave assignments to my students, then wrote them models. In college or grad school teaching, if you did this, your students might find you egotistical. But I teach middle and high school, and they love that I write for them. They can ask me directly about the choices I’ve made in the poem. Why this line break, and why that metaphor, and why slant rhyme instead of no rhyme or full rhyme. It’s immensely gratifying to see them work on their own as poems and together as a collection as well as teaching models.
2. How does your work as a restaurant critic influence your poetry, and vice versa?
It’s obvious if you read Necessary Salt that I obsess about food and wine–these are all poems about one or the other. And I’m writing another collection that is largely about cheese called Brie Season, though I’m not sure yet if it’s a chapbook or a full-length collection. I adore cheese. In fact, selling cheese was my first job, when I was sixteen. It seems I can’t help but write about what I experience, and for the past 20 years a lot of what I experience comes the same way it does to a toddler–through the mouth. So I eat and drink my way through the world, and taste is the way I make sense of it. I think the constant evaluation of the most basic need–eating–has made me an efficient editor. I spit out almost immediately what doesn’t taste good, and keep going back to what does. That can result in a flood of sonnets or villanelles, which isn’t always a good thing, just as only eating salad or only eating chocolate isn’t healthy (even if it’s delicious). So I try to vary my diet even as I attempt to be moderate with it.
3. A lot of poems in Landscaping for Wildlife seem to be about letting natural instincts take over – whether in your backyard in “Landscaping for Wildlife,” or with your voice in “Adult Congregate Living Facility,” or when the lions in “On Lion Road” are “closer than they appear.” You live on an old mango plantation in South Florida, where the natural marshland always seems to be creeping in on the perfectly landscaped lawns of the residents. Do you often take inspiration from your surroundings?
I can’t help but take inspiration from my surroundings, be they my balding backyard–ideal for birds of prey to find fruit rats–or an auditorium. I think it’s because I become easily bored and look around for entertainment. I’m not spiritual or philosophical in nature. I don’t ponder the big questions. I tell the little stories I find around me. My mother once told me I would have a baby when I ran out of things to write about. She was, of course, correct in a way. After I got pregnant with a child, I got pregnant with poems. Experience, especially the natural, instinctual kind, is the way I fill the well.
Sometimes, that well is poisoned, I’ve learned, but even that’s inspiration. This summer, I’m starting a PhD at the European Graduate School in Expressive Arts Therapy, studying why people create art in times of stress–when they’re chronically ill, when their countries are at war, when they’re homeless or in prison–and at the same time I hope to be finishing a full-length collection of poems about illness called Early Onset and another of essays called A Body at Rest. I’ve had a lot of experience with the subject of chronic illness–both with my own and my husband’s. Even when you don’t want it to be, it’s material.
4. What compelled you to start writing poetry?
Honestly, I started the way all teenagers start–because of love and hate. I was in love with my boyfriend, who would become my husband, and I hated my mother, for some long-forgotten and completely temporary reason. Plus, I wanted to be a fiction writer, but those workshops were full. I got into Deborah Digges’ poetry workshop instead–it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I was probably one of the worst in the class, writing with all these abstractions about emotion with a capital E. Then midway through, I had an epiphany. Something clicked in my subconscious at 5 a.m. when I had an assignment due, and I began telling a narrative about my sister through metaphor. It was my first “real” poem. I remember so clearly how it felt to have my first success in workshop. That whole world was a complete mystery to me, and here were these jaded poetry kids in all black, smoking cigarettes, telling me my poem was so good it could “stand up and walk out of the room on its own.”
5. What advice do you have for aspiring authors and writers?
Keep writing, keep studying, keep reading, keep workshopping and keep your karma clean. I’ve had professors and editors tell me to quit writing poetry, and I’ve had professors and editors encourage me. Take their measures equally, and believe most strongly in yourself. Be generous to other poets and writers and they will be generous to you. The writing world is small. But it’s not a vacuum. You’ll almost always come across “that writer” or “that editor” again. I’ve always operated by the philosophy that there’s room for everybody.
6. What’s your next project?
I’m editing the 10th anniversary edition of Tigertail Productions anthology, a publication that features poets with a connection to South Florida. This year, the theme is “pairings”–one poem about wine and another about food, two poets writing about the same meal, two poets collaborating, a poet writing about the same event in two different forms–however you want to interpret it. I’m also finishing a cookbook for University Press of Florida called Romancing the Mango: Recipes for the Obsessed, that will come out in 2013.