Mr. green jeans UNDERGRAD
Lee Kisling Publishes HIs poetry By Isaac Faleschini
little sign outside
a small, independent bookstore on Hudson, Wisconsin’s main drag, called Chapter 2 Books, proclaimed the night’s event: a reading by Hamline undergraduate Lee Kisling (‘14) from his recently published chapbook, “The Lemon Bars of Parnassus.” Chapbooks are, generally, a smaller collection of poems than a full book of poetry, including as few as 15-20 poems or as many as 40. It was a Thursday night and blustery cold. The cozy warmth of the shop was a welcomed respite from the whipping wind, and the nineteen occupants that filled the main area of the bookstore on folding chairs surrounded Kisling, who sat in front of the store’s main windows while he read from his book and told stories about his creative process. Kisling is in his sixties and worked as a railroad engineer for most of his life. He dabbled in poetry long before coming to Hamline, before thinking that he might ever publish his work. “I was an engineer,” Kisling said. “My days were long and hard and strenuous. Poetry was a kind of release because I needed a way to blow off being serious all the time.” Like many artists, Kisling has found solace in his art.
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But despite the immediate differences between poetry and engineering, Kisling is no stranger to story telling. He taught railroad engineering as part of his career and mentions how would use stories to keep his students engaged. He said, “I would get that half mast eye thing [from students]. So I’d start to tell them a story, and it is the exceptional stories that fall in between two rules or guidelines, a guy that cheated the rule and here’s what happened to him, that would get the people in the room to find what I call the Buddha in the circuit, to go, ‘Oh now I get it, now I see why.’ And poetry is similar to that.” He equates writing to “finding the subconscious Buddha;” accessing that magic of inspiration when the writer surprises himself. “It’s channeling,” Kisling said. “All the best writers are just channeling, and when I do that, when I catch the homunculus man in my head, it is magic, you know. I guess that’s why I love writing.” In between readings, Kisling mentions how he happened to meet poet John Graber at a workshop in Lake Pippen six years ago. Graber is a graduate of the renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Iowa.
Kisling learned that Graber was teaching a poetry workshop class and decided to take it. Graber told him his poems were good. “I didn’t think of the poems as good or bad, but as something to do,” Kisling said. He went on to recount how he liked Graber, and liked to please him, and because of that he wrote more poetry. Kisling took three or four workshop classes from Graber over the course of three years. He said that at a certain point Graber told him, “You should submit these to Parallel Press.” So Kisling did. After nine months, Kisling said, he hadn’t heard anything from the Press, so he wrote a letter to them and asked if his poems had been accepted or not. When they wrote back, they explained that they had accepted his poems, and had sent him notification a few months before. Kisling smiled and said, “We weren’t very good with the mail back then.” The bad news, he said, was that he was on a two year waiting list to get his book printed. Creative writing professor Katrina Vandenberg, a published poet herself and Kisling’s advisor, wrote in an email interview, “Parallel Press publishes through the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library system and counts national writers like Kelly