An Interview with Julia Kasdorf
By Sarah Jane Abbott
Stadler Center Intern, Fall '11
Sarah Jane Abbott: In the Christian Living article "Kasdorf's Striptease", Shari Wagner states, "readers of this book will have to work harder." In Eve's Striptease especially (although also in your other books), there are many layers of religious allusions and connotations. Undoubtedly, you have many readers who are not familiar with Christian theology. How do you feel these references would ideally work for a reader without this context?
Julia Kasdorf: I think religion is a cultural product like politics or economics. It's a set of stories people have created in order to explain experience and find names for mysteries. These are not private stories, but public, shared ones, and it's easy enough to type an unfamiliar religious term or phrase into "Google," as one might a Greek mythical allusion. My guess is that the reviewer in Christian Living was not thinking of religious allusion when she said her readers would have to "work harder," because those readers would likely have immediate access to the religious allusions. I think she was probably thinking that the work in the second book is a bit more difficult compared to the fairly straightforward narratives in Sleeping Preacher.
SJA: Much of your poetry is deeply rooted in a sense of place, especially rural Pennsylvania and farm country. Do you subscribe to the advice "write what you know"? How much of your inspiration comes from landscape?
JK: Yes, place matters very much to me, and by place I mean not only location—landscape or cityscape—but the people who live there, too. (My work in editing an anthology of poems about Brooklyn, New York, speaks to this concern as well.) There's a lot of quotation in all of my books, but especially the most recent—that attempt to capture the voices of people in a particular time and place.
As for "write what you know," I guess that's fine advice, but so is "write what you don't know," by which I mean write into those places that mystify and trouble you, what Rilke called "all that is unresolved." I think my best work comes from the places of deep concern and not knowing.
SJA: Many aspects of your work could be interpreted as autobiographical. However, many poems could also be interpreted as non-specific and universal, using identifiers like "the mother" and "the girl". Do you want your work to be read as autobiographical? What do you think is the role of autobiography in poetry?
JK: I think assumptions about autobiography are inevitable, especially for women who write narratives about domestic life. We have a long tradition of reading American poetry with these assumptions that goes back to Dickinson via strong voices like Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath and so forth. I'd be the first to admit that I make my poems out of my life, but I would also say that the poems are not my life. They are made things, creations, the product of memory and imagination and knowledge--all of which are human constructions. I mean to say I do not transcribe every day life, I write poems, and my hope is that they function as public works of art that can enter a broader conversation. Reading personal narrative and domestic writing as merely autobiography has been a way of belittling and marginalizing the work of certain writers, often women.
SJA: Your poetry has musicality throughout and demonstrates constant attention to sound, including alliteration and assonance. Is this the result of conscious effort or does it come naturally? Is reading your work out loud ever part of your process?
JK: I write for the ear and speak aloud as I work. I am interested in honoring poetry's roots in oral tradition and believe that the natural vehicle for my poetry is the human voice. The decisions I make in revision are the result of those commitments.
Julia Kasdorf will present a reading of her poetry at the Stadler Center on Tuesday, November 15. She will share the reading with Todd Davis. This reading and all Stadler Center Writers Series Events are free and open to the public.
