DRIFTING INTO THE OPEN WATER
An interview with Kate Northrop, Author of Homewrecker, Conducted by Rachel Layton
New Letters: Much of this chapbook reads like a memoir. In “Humidity,” we are walked through bullet points of adolescent memory, and “Old Wedding Photos” provides vignettes of family photos stuffed away in a box. Do you feel like your poetry grieves the loss of these times, or is the act of writing about these places and memories in a way immortalizing them?
Kate Northrop: I am so taken with the phrase “like a memoir.”
These days, memoir isn’t usually my first choice, my go-to choice in reading. Reading memoir is often a
Drifting Into the Open Water, an interview with Kate Northrop, conducted
by Rachel Layton featured writer | winter 2023
claustrophobic experience: the story feels too owned, too staked to the author? As a reader, I want something perhaps contradictory: I want both to connect and to be left alone. Often, memoir doesn’t leave me enough alone. And maybe it’s true I cannot connect unless I am left somewhat alone? But “like a memoir” is marvelous. I’d love for the poems in Homewrecker to feel “like memoir,” coming somewhat from the lived experience of “me” but also drifting more into open water, up for grabs?
And perhaps writing does make possible a ‘processing’ of grief over my lost time, but I don’t know that I am thinking to “immortalize” as much as
hoping to find a new shape, turn the events I’ve lived or witnessed about in the light of writing and thereby find a different story, find the options opening out from the old story? I think there’s a comfort to making something out of the past. I’ve never watched my mother pace up and down a motel parking lot at night; that image felt like a new image for my life. (I have watched my mother worry—in rehabs, hospitals, her kitchen.) In the image, the mother seems like my mother, more and less my mother, close to my mother but not her, and finally, the new mother feels pleasantly adrift from me. I never went on a hike with a bunch of older girls but in “Humidity,” that image seems a correlative for adolescence, the way those older girls walk back through the younger girls. Adolescence felt like that to me. I do worry about tidiness. I am one who tidies up. This is to say, I hope the poems aren’t too far from “memoir” into “like memoir.” They should still smell of me.
NL: At times, Homewrecker utilizes scans of old family pictures as punctuation between the poems. What do you feel these visual elements add to the collection as a whole? Were these images particularly influential in the writing of the poems as well?
KN: My father grew up moving from one foster home to another, mostly in New Orleans, sometimes returning to live, for a few months, with one or the other of his alcoholic parents. My father hasn’t seen his older brother, Art, since 1967 and I’ve never met him. My father’s mother, my grandmother, died in 1963, when my father was in college, and his father, my grandfather, died in 1967, two years before I was born. So for me, much of my father’s family remains a big blank. And into this blank arrived, a few years ago, a box from Art.
I think my uncle sought some sort of reconciliation. He sent my father a long letter along with this box full of old photos
and newspaper clippings. When my Dad decided not to respond, I brought the box back to Wyoming with me. And I am mesmerized by the photos, especially of my grandmother, Mary Lillian. I’ve only ever heard bits and pieces about her, and most of those bits are angry and dismissive: she was a prostitute, she got drunk and fell down the stairs and that’s how she died, she told embarrassing lies, she’d say “I’m just back now from the opera!” when of course she was not. The only nice thing I ever heard was that
she looked very good in a hat. So these photos, in Homewrecker, are mostly of Mary Lillian. I didn’t want to pinpoint or identify her in the photos, I wanted her image to sort of drift through the world of the book. I wanted to invite her in and let her be a part of the wrecking, to give her something of a voice. I guess I felt a little bit like I was working with her, together? After all, I think many existing structures must not have served her very well. From the box, I learned she went to SMU in 1927
though I don’t know where the money would have come from and I doubt she graduated. The newspaper clippings document her marriage to my grandfather in April, 1937. Art was born that September. From the
the photos. She’s a constant editor of her own words. One caption will read “Saber, my dog, and me.” Then, below it, in a different colored pencil, I assume from a later date, “he still doesn’t eat like a gentleman!
information of the box, I found out she died not of falling down drunk but rheumatic heart disease, which is often the result of inadequate treatment for rheumatic fever.
I’m also mesmerized by the number of captions she’s written on the back of
Benton Harbor.” I felt, from the photos, she wanted to be known. I’d like to work with the photos more. Homewrecker felt like a start.
NL: The voice used throughout your poems has a consistent, rhythmic sensuality when describing landscape which
made me think about the ties between environment and emotion. Setting can deeply impact the emotions and thoughts of a person. With this in mind, how does environment influence you during your writing process? Do you find it productive to surround yourself with the scenery that appears in your writing?
KN: Since I started writing, when I was in grade school even, my impulse has always been to try to say clearly what it is that I see. (Both what it is and what I see.) I live in Wyoming now, so I do see aspens, snow-crust, the Snowy Range, I-80 and at night, lighted-up rectangles of trucks and these sights make their way into poems. I experience this as satisfying, though at the same time, I am squeamish about this satisfaction. Perhaps what I love most about writing “environment” is the back and forth: was it this way? that way? Looking, looking again, trying to see better. For me, writing can be a tool, a way to see through scenery to a starkness.
Because images of a ‘western’ landscape (mountains, roads into mountains, snow) are so often used to sell something else entirely, I’ve tried to dramatize this allure, interrupt it somehow? In this new poem, “Harmythic,” there’s a moment, in the beginning, of “losing” oneself in something of sublime landscape, “the aspens overhead looking fantastic,” but we end up diminished, stunned and stunted (perhaps because of that initial getting lost?), end as plastic bird ornaments “driven into grass.” This is the poem
NL: Outside of how your poems deal with the tangible space in the world of Homewrecker, your poems also utilize space on the page in very intentional ways. Some pieces, as with “The Apartment,” wander across the page, as if being lost in fragments of memory. Others, such as “Maybe I am here,” are tightly condensed, almost restrained in the use of white space. I’m curious about your process when it comes to figuring out how to arrange
your poems in this way. What gives a particular poem its shape?
KN: Oh, I wish after all these years I had something better than this version of “you just have to feel it, man.”
I think of Frost’s observation about voice, in poems, somehow “fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.” For me, there’s isn’t ever a voice ahead of the writing, there’s never a voice already in my head that I need somehow, through writing, to fasten to the page.
Lately, in writing, I mostly juxtapose: place one line beside another line. I do that again and again and hope to get something started, some excitement, energy, urgency. By this placing of lines (or images, phrases) side by side, sometimes I hit on an animating force. This force becomes the voice of the poem and sometimes cleanly, once I catch it, calls everything home and into place. Sometimes more arranging, more tinkering
needs to happen. So I come to the shape of the poem by way of finding and preserving this voice. If a line gets long, what happens to this voice, this animating force? Does it falter? If it’s much shorter? Enjambed differently? So the finding of shape very much comes from the simultaneously finding and following and preserving voice. And when let go of writing a poem? When to stop futzing? When nothing about it bothers me anymore, then I stop. I stop when I hear a sound—a sound I didn’t know I’d wanted to make but now stand by. Or another way of finding shape: writing is like getting dressed, trying on different shirts with different pants (or whatever you wear) until they work together in an outfit you like the look of, one that will work for the needs of the day. (Is it raining? Are you going to work?)
NL: Many of the poems from Homewrecker end on the edge of something. For example, in the
opening poem “High Plains”(at 40 below),” your reader is left on a literal brink with the lines “Which we see tonight / As if on a brink: dark, moon-white.” There is a motion created by this foreshadowing and left me as a reader wondering if moving on from past events in this context is viewed as even more daunting than the events of the past themselves?
KN: Yes, that poem, which begins the book, leaves you on a brink. I think of this as one of the predicaments dramatized in the book: being stuck on the edge, unable to move forward or envision alternatives. I hope,
by the end of the book, one is left less at the edge of a void, a full-stop, but in a space of possibility: the rooftops, in the last poem, “The Man on My Roof,” flash in the light and darken “like large sea rocks.” We are still looking at edges (the edge of a roof) but I hope there are options now. You can see a way out, the flashing of rooftops is not the end, the roof-tops connect to something else, these wet sea rocks. And importantly, there’s a space between the two—the roofs, the rocks—and maybe this is a new home? After the necessary wrecking has gone on.