Episode 48: Adult Poets
February 6th, 2020
Hosted by Katie Rainey
Guest: Abigail Kirby Conklin
Produced by Katie Rainey
Transcript by Jon Kay
Podcast Assistant: Dylan Thomas
We're back animals! And this week we've got special guest poet & radical educator Abigail Kirby Conklin. Abby is the author of the debut chapbook, Triage, out now from Duck Lake Books. She's been published in Duck Lake Journal, Garfield Lake, K’in Literary Journal, Storyscape Journal, The Lampeter Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Sugar House Review, among numerous others. Abby also works in the New York City arts education scene, and today we'll be talking about debut books, poetry, radical pedagogy, and being a grown up poet! Get your paws warmed and let's go!
>> Katie: Welcome to the 48th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by Animal Riot Press, a literary press for books that matter. I'm Katie Rainey, filling in for Brian Birnbaum while he’s taking some time off. I’m very happy to welcome my friend, the brilliant writer and poet Abigail Kirby Conklin.
Abigail Kirby Conklin is a native Brooklynite with a Virginian driver's license, a degree from Michigan State University, and a bedroom in Manhattan. She is an alumnus of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at MSU, where she studied radical pedagogy, arts development and social justice.
Kirby Conklin has been involved with youth development and public education for almost ten years. Currently, she works in college access and career development in the New York City public school system, in addition to her writing and performing.
Abby’s work has been published in Duck Lake Journal, Garfield Lake, K’in Literary Journal, Storyscape Journal, The Lampeter Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Sugar House Review, among numerous others. Her debut chapbook, Triage, is due out from Duck Lake Books on January 15th, 2020 - which is three days from when we’re recording this episode. Welcome, Abby.
>> Abby: Thank you for having me.
>> Katie: You're reading tonight at our reading series
>> Abby: I am.
>> Katie: Which is super exciting.
>> Abby: Yeah. I've been looking forward to this for months. You guys are the coolest kids. I just want to be on your reading series.
>> Katie: You're headlining tonight, so it'll be exciting. Where else are you reading this month? You've got a lot lined up.
>> Abby: Yeah, I do. I'm gonna be at Femme And Non Binary Art show reading with them next weekend in Poughkeepsie. And then I'm doing Amanda Miller Show downtown next week.
>> Katie: Lyrics Lit & Liquor. Yeah, and that's a great show.
>> Abby: I'm so excited. I have never experienced trivia and, like, jams happening between poets. And I'm very here for that.
>> Katie: Yeah, and they do all kinds of like they have some serious musicians, and then they have some, like comedy musicians. And then she does some great stand up bits, like she has this old woman whose name I can't remember. But this whole, like this bit she does is this old lady. And last time I was there was as the old woman she was presenting geriatric, like Apps for seniors and stuff and doing this whole it was really, really funny. So it's a good show. She does it down in the Lower East at Bar 2A. So you guys should check out Lyrics Lit and Liquor sometime.
>> Abby: True. And then, aside from that, I'm doing Poor Mouth with Aaron Linda, Melinda Wilson. Another great series. Yeah, down at everyone's favorite Irish tavern up the longest flight of stairs that anyone ever climbed in the Bronx. If you go every Friday, you can hear music and you can pretend you're not here, and then I have a gig in DC in February, I'm doing a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood with Hell's Gate Brigade no story us like I'm very lucky. I have a lot of good things coming to me, and I scheduled it all somehow, which is enough to be shocked. But I don't even have to go and perform now. It's just enough of a schedule. But it feels very cool to look at my calendar and go Oh, you know, I have this thing I've worked on. I pitched it to all of these events and they took me.
>> Katie: Yeah. What did you pitch other than a reading?
>> Abby: Me. The cover of my book is Bright Red.
>> Katie: Well, you pitched yourself right. You're gonna have to tell us all you did that. (laughter)
>> Abby: I actually said that in the message a couple of days ago, pitching for something, I think in March. And I was like, here's a pdf version of the book. It's ranty. It's a little ranty. It's a little rowdy and it's bright red. That's what I had to offer. How do I pitch it though? My ideal has been knowing people. So, like I'm still waiting to hear back from options in Detroit and Chicago and all of that networking as well as here and in DC was through, who do I know? What do they recommend? Where are my odds best? And then if I could get an introductory email through them? Perfect. If I couldn't, I name drop them in the subject bar. “Attention prospective: performer referred by ex name of person.”
>> Katie: Yeah, You gotta hit up the rest of the reading series of New York too. That's the connection. All those reading series.
>> Abby: Totally. I'm slowly working through it.
>> Katie: And what about your launch party? Did you plan one?
>> Abby: Yeah, I did.
>> Katie: Yeah? When is it?
>> Abby: Three days from now, I guess Wednesday, day of, over at Manhattanville Coffee.
>> Katie: Alright, I know this will come out after that, but we can post about it
>> Abby: Yay, please do.
>> Katie: What do you have lined up for the event?
>> Abby: I'm making a lot of hummus. I'll read a little bit. And then I invited three lady poets to read ahead of me, so Meher Manda, Melinda Wilson and then a peer of mine who lives up in Connecticut. Her name is Shereen Gilmore, okay, and all three of these women write poetry that is unabashedly, first of all, but in vastly different ways. Like Meher has, like almost a floral capacity with language. If that makes sense, just very, very artistic and very embellished.
>> Katie: She's been on the podcast. I forget which episode but think eight or nine, maybe.
>> Abby: And so I wanted that. I wanted her voice. And then Melinda is not quite stripped down in her writing, but is pushing it like she really evokes Elizabeth Bishop for me and a lot of ways. And she's in my writer's group, and so I've gotten to watch her like I get to watch her brain work and I have. I love how she writes. And then Shereen is kind of a cross between the two. Plays with language really, really well, but also weaves differences in time. Like jumps a poem back and forth along the timeline in the way that I really struggle to do, and she doesn't really effectively in all three of them. talk about being like the act of being in the female body 24 hours a day. They talk about illness, They talk about identity and motherhood. And I felt like that... I considered having a couple of gents reading as well, and I was sort of like based on the content of this book, because it is loudly feminist and many points these three women Stuck out to me as like, No, this is who I want shoring me up while I do this.
>> Katie: Well, let's talk about that book. You said it's loudly feminist. How so?
>> Abby: So one of the poems in the book is called "Literally Feminine", and I sent... I remember this so acutely I sent sort of the first work over of it to my mother. At this point, I think I wrote it the first time three years ago, I sent it to my mom and she wrote me back. She goes, Well, you weren't in a very happy place when you wrote this. (laughter)
>> Katie: I can't tell you how many times people in my family were like, Can you read something happy? Like what?
>> Abby: I think you know this. I make prints as well as like dental prints, and I have a bunch of them up in a big collage on my wall right now in my living room. And my brother walked in and saw them, and he looks at me and then looks at the wall and looks me goes Do you ever make anything like groovy? YLike something chill? How about chill art? I'm fresh out.
>> Katie: That's such an interesting conversation to me because I always talk about it in the way of feeling Understood, like reading, say, Anne Carson's worker like Cormac McCarthy, for me feels more uplifting in a way because I feel understood the universe as it is. And I feel understood in those worlds rather than reading like I don't know, some Nora Roberts airport novel that doesn't really reflect me at all in any way. And I'm not. I'm not even saying like in terms of my identity, I'm just saying, like in terms of human understanding. Those books aren't trying to... I don't know. Do you have a reason like the way you create certain things like why you do and look, why don't you make happy things, Abby?
>> Abby: Because as an artist, I was born to suffer. So some things and and to be in my in the books defense, I do write funny things as well, and I do write light things. There are a couple of love poems and this book there are definitely funny poems. They definitely... and as a performer, I lean on my humorous poems often. I'm working on a new poem with you guys tonight at the reading that's called "I wanted to love me, too, but the timing just wasn't right", you know. And so but I just My understanding of humor is very much couched in the realities of life being like a little bit sandpapery.
>> Katie: I like that description. What does that mean to you?
>> Abby: It's funnier when you understand... something is funnier, I think, when you understand it to be a true thing. The number of stories I've heard from dear friends after Thanksgiving dinner, where shit just goes AWOL. Like terrible things happen. But the way they recount it is hysterical, and you understand that the crux of the meltdown was the family collectively being unable to manage grief. Or they're being a political issue that everyone could not find their way around. And that's a really uncomfortable sandpapery thing in life. I don't know. I just think it's that much funnier because it's it's that tinge of like, Oh, I get that like that. That must have been so hard. That must have been so uncomfortable. But also that's hysterical because, I mean, humans are very funny. Humans are very good at getting themselves into heinous situations. But then you laugh at them, and that's just always been my understanding of humor.
>> Katie: Yeah, no, I would feel the same way also. Just if you can't laugh at it like you get sucked into your own suffering.
>> Abby: You have too. Because I also get myself in trouble all the time. I open my mouth too often. I don't fix my face in time, or someone decides I haven't fixed my face properly, and I just find myself in a really uncomfortable situation. It's like if I can't laugh at this, I'm gonna be a sorry excuse for a human being.
>> Katie: Yeah. So what would you want to kick us off with with one poem now? I don't know if you wanna try your one you're gonna workshop tonight or if you want one from the book.
>> Abby: Sure. I want to do one from the book because this is... I start most of my sets with this poem because I'll explain after. Okay, so this poem is called "Brutality".
“Brutality” by Abigail Kirby Conklin
You ever want
someone so much,
your chest empties
out? That violent,
pressing nullity
up against the underside
of its cage, need
hiking your shoulders,
filling your throat,
forcing
the breath from your body
like a flatbed truck spun
off the highway,
trailer pitching after cab
?
Yeah.
Me neither.
>> Katie: I like that.
>> Abby: I think it sets listeners up nicely for me because it is like there's a grief and there's violence in a way, and there's an unpredictability, but events also like it just yanks you back like mourner. But also, as my father has said to me time and time again, love makes everyone of fucking idiot. Okay, I put the fucking in it. My dad says love makes everyone an idiot and that sentiment carries through there. Or that's what I wanted to do. So that's how I open a lot of my sets.
>> Katie: So what's in the book? Well, what about the title for a minute? Triage. Where did that come from?
>> Abby: Triage has been... this has taken many forms. The title has been the title of many different things and in the last six years post my significant break up in my early twenties. I was journaling a lot, and I'm not historically a journaller and I thought, You know what? I'll hold on to this. I'll keep these notebooks because maybe I can turn this into, if not fiction, like maybe some kind of... if it's not a poetry collection, something stream of consciousness that could be that just shows the narrative arc and how non linear the arc is post heartbreak. And so Triage was what I was calling it in my head, and then it drifted. I found myself in my grief really boring and redundant in my journal. So I was like, no one wants to consume this. But then it's what I came back around two over and over again for titles of things like, Does this fit here? No. Does this figure it? No. And so it was always like alright, that book at some point And then So now I have. And it just happened that when I was stringing this manuscript together, it still has an arc of losing, managing, metabolizing loss and assessing what it means to come out the other side of it and have to live with knowing that it happened. And I felt like Triage kind of applied to that because, like you can What is it? You can staunch the wound. The blood will stop rushing out, but then you still have to stitch it up. You still have to keep it from getting infected. You still have to take antibiotics. And you have to be careful to not get sunburned because then it'll scar even worse. Like it just There's so much work that goes into grief after the loss, and I find that interesting.
>> Katie: So is the feeling that the whole book is really a response to this break up that you went there. I mean, how long ago was that? By the way?
>> Abby: I think it was six years. But like this book is there are a couple of poems in this collection that speak to that break up. But this isn't a response to that. This is a whole different beast. And this is very much just sort of the exploration of again, Like the humor that comes up when things are really difficult. There are some poems in here that don't speak to romantic loss at all. It's very much like the suffering of, like being of the female gender. Of what you suffer at the hands of that. Or, you know, I explore parenthood a little bit. And what loss looks like there and it's that general narrative arc of like what happens? Oh, my God. You lost. You lost. Now what?
>> Katie: Oof? I'm feeling that right now. Yeah, maybe one day I'll be able to one and talk about the situation that I am in greatly and make light of it. But it is true like I have. I don't know if I've ever said this on the podcast, but this is the way I teach. I have been a massive journalist since I was, like, six years old.
>> Abby: Huge respect.
>> Katie: Yeah, I have them all in that trunk over there. So I have, like, 50 something journals filled up. Brian has found some humor in picking up my high school journal, which, like I used to never before I started teaching, let anyone look at my journals at all. And now I feel like I wouldn't let anybody look at my journal that I'm writing in currently but old ones from high school or from like, college or whatever I'm like a while ago. There's a giant distance, and now I do the first year of class. I teach ninth grade girls, and on the first day of class, I bring in my high school journal and I read from whatever date it was when I was in high school. And that's how we kick off the year. I take that first step in being vulnerable and sharing my crazy high school ramblings, and I give all my students journals as well. But I definitely like my novel that I'm editing right now is... I took situations from my journals and was able to step back and read them and it's really funny, I think. I think my novel is really funny. But it definitely has that sarcastic lens of looking at the suffering I was going through at the time.
>> Abby: Is the novel that you're working on young adult or adult fiction.
>> Katie: It's adult, even though it's told from the point of view of a 15 year old, very like there's like It's not YA language or anything like that.
>> Abby: I'm noticing that increasingly in the young adult fiction world like starting to bleed over to a point where I guess the content is young adult, but the way it's conveyed and the writing... You could call this adult fiction.
>> Katie: I also whatever was on offer when I was a young adult, the young adult books that were out there were like I'd already read them in middle school. And it was well on toe like adult fiction, so yeah.
>> Abby: Yeah. I mean, I consume young adult fiction at a rapid pace. Oh, I love it very much.
>> Katie: Yeah, because you teach.
>> Abby: Yeah, well, now I don't. Now, I oversee folks right in the education world. But even then when I'm visiting one of my sites, especially middle schools, I scope out the libraries and see, what are they one of the kids reading? Like, what are the librarians recommending? And I try to find it and read it too. So I know it. The kids are consuming.
>> Katie: Well, yeah, Let's talk about what you do for work because we're in the same field for our day jobs were in arts education here in the city. So what is it exactly that you do?
>> Abby: So I'm a manager with a small company. We are generally what happens is a school uses state and federal government funding to pay us as one of their service providers to bring in something that they are unable to provide. Don't have the bandwidth for or can't be bothered to provide you know, especially cause, like trying to pay it's hard teachers. Staying after school is rough. You are like supplementary, like we're supplementing what's happening in the schools. And so what we do is college and career readiness. And so that looks and K through 12. So that looks like with younger grades were teaching elementary schoolers about all the different jobs they could have. We have 40 lessons to choose from in our elementary curriculum. 40 different careers that are not doctor, lawyer or nurse. And then interactive activities and creative activities to go with. We helped fifth graders in New York City apply for middle school. We help eighth graders apply for high school. We're part of an initiative with the DOE that wants to get every New York City seventh grader onto a college campus by the end of their seventh grade year. Part of that, like we get paid with those grant monies to help make that happen. We organize college trips also for high schools, and we helped juniors and seniors prepare applications and essays. And then we also do socio emotional young men's and young women's groups, and we do some art programming as well. And so I have a portfolio of schools that I place teaching artists at, and they deliver the content that the school has contract id us for.
>> Katie: Yeah, and we haven't really talked about teaching artistry, To be honest on this podcast. We're so literary focused that I think we've had a couple of teaching artists on, but I really haven't branched into that. What's teaching artistry for you?
>> Abby: Lind of everything, isn't it?
>> Katie: Yeah.
>> Abby: Teaching artistry for me... because I've been teaching artist and now and what I was as a teaching artist, and what was asked of me is so different from what we ask of are the people who work with us as I've always understood it, teaching artists are folks who bring in like performative or creative, appendices to the everyday of a school and what's being taught. But increasingly, I can understand teaching artists to be just like bringing in something supplemental to enrich what's happening in that school. But it's a very vague term. When I moved to New York I was 21. The second time I moved to New York or came back, I was 21 and I understood teaching artistry to be You are teaching, writing or theater or dance or studio art or like film or photography. You're doing something in the creative world. And that's changed the longer I've worked in public education or adjacent to public education. How about you?
>> Katie: Oh, I know a lot of teaching artists who aren't actually making their own work now. It's like, Yeah, because it's not a sustainable, it's not as sustainable as the way people would like it to be.
>> Abby: No. Or maybe as it was when it started.
>> Katie: Yeah, the idea, like for a teaching artist, the idea behind it is really like an artist who is currently working on their own creative work. And that's kind of the center of focus, and they bring in and translate that craft into the classroom, and you don't have to have a secondary education degree to do it. That's still true. So the idea is that they're not like bogged down by the education system, and they're like a new voice in the classroom.
>> Abby: But, well, that's increasingly not feasible. They have to have degrees. They have to have certain kinds of certification or training.
>> Katie: Yeah, well, what's you write a lot about radical pedagogy. And I said that in your bio earlier. What does that mean to you? And I know you're very active in the social justice world and like the way you talk about certain things. So I'm guessing like I don't know what is radical pedagogy? What does that mean to you?
>> Abby: For me, radical pedagogy is making it possible for learning to be student driven or student informed instead of student reactive. And what makes that radical is this idea of no longer letting... I have found in my experiences as a public a student of public education and public school systems in New York and in Virginia and now working, having worked alongside students in DC Public schools in Michigan State's public schools and in New York public schools that learning is punitive. Learning is no longer a space of liberation in a lot of schools. It's a holding cell, and it is sort of... it's a microcosm of where lines are drawn socioeconomically and racially and so to radicalize pedagogy would be in my perfect world. And what, like sort of, you know, nudges me on the day, is how we disrupt those patterns. You know, there's all of this. There's all of this dialogue in the education world, in the academic world surrounding education, as a study about how this is how to better facilitate small group versus Whole group, and this is how to differentiate so that different levels of learners can be accessed in one classroom. And so there's all these dialogues going on. But at the end of the day, there's still a lot of teachers not getting their needs met, and therefore their students are not getting their needs met and students are suffering. And so, yeah, radical pedagogy is what happens when it's the student who's the center of that universe instead of the politics, the data, the money and the power play.
>> Katie: How has that... just becoming involved in this world and thinking about education that way? How has that influenced your writing? If it all.
>> Abby: So I actually, I write quite a bit about students because I used to be localized to a singular school and I was responsible for 100 students. I wrote a lot about them and my experiences with them in their community and their family. And I write about it now too. I generally don't share it. I don't feel like it's my business. As a young white woman with a college education. Yeah, out here saying like, Gosh, this was so poignant like, Yeah, sure, it was good for you, honey. Like I can pipe down. I have notebooks full of thoughts on kids and teachers and their educational experiences. But I haven't found a means by which to write them in a way that feels respectful as opposed to voyeuristic.
>> Katie: Yeah, that's a good point. I'm thinking about it ever in a couple of essays about my students and some in collaboration with my students. My students are always... but I'm also dealing with high schoolers. There's a little bit different, like I've never written an essay about younger kids because I just think that's like not entirely fair. You can't say one way or another, but my students, the few essays I've written have read those essays or collaborated on them with me. So we had one published in the AWP The Notebook in The Writer's Notebook last year with three of my students and they got to, like, published their work for the first time to. But yeah, I definitely feel that line of like, Okay, what's okay for me to write about? And generally I just try to come at it from my own experience and what I am experiencing and not what my students are thinking or feeling. But I guess the impact that I'm feeling in the moment was now a good time to read another poem?
>> Abby: Sure.
>> Katie: Are you feeling something else? Anything inspired by this conversation?
>> Abby: I'm thinking about how I like something, I want to push myself with in time to come in soon. I'm trying to not say in 2020 I want to do more of. In soon times, something I'm pushing. I'm pushing myself to move into writing personal, like writing, personal essays and creative nonfiction. I would really like to move into that space, and I might be able to then write about the education and the public education system in a way that I just have refused to let myself do publicly in poetry.
>> Katie: It's hard because I think people need those essays like, I think those things need to be out in the world. There's so much in the world about the education system as it is and from people who are deeply inside. But I think teaching artistry and people in arts education walk this fine line from being in the middle of it, to a more objective or as objective viewpoint. And you could be about the education system here. And so I think more of those stories are needed and how, I don't know, just I guess, what the arts to do in general in a classroom and how that changes a classroom to a community and that kind of thing.
>> Abby: Right. And I don't even exist really in the arts world as consistently as you do, like I'm very much in the minute of What does it take to reinstate liberation in the public classroom and arts? Part of that, you know the acronym STEAM like I really struggle with because we've gone from stem to STEAM and STEM even those STEM includes ELA in the acronym who don't know science, technology, English and maths is you know, this category in learning like a sort of track of education that was introduced like 10 years ago? When did this come on the scene?
>> Katie: Yeah, I have no idea.
>> Abby: You know, sort of around the time my personal, my personal like rain man suspicion is that around the time that everyone realized who were running out of money and we should take it out of art programming and public schools, someone was like, Well, if we bills everything else as more important and call it something people won't be as upset about losing the arts. And so they came up with STEM this acronym that and then there's been like STEM focused charter schools and STEM scholarships. And so but then in a couple of years ago, they were like, we're gonna throw art back in there, and now it's STEAM. I grapple with it because on the one hand, yes, there absolutely has to be creativity and the arts in a classroom and in a school in order to facilitate a development of holistic learning. Absolutely. But it's funny how it just, it still, it feels sloppy. Almost. Nothing's changed. They just put the vowel in there. (laughter)
>> Katie: Yes, that's true.
>> Abby: And I'm thrilled that everyone is now thinking about the letter A more, you know, well done. But also what's happening?
>> Katie: Yeah, honestly, it feels like the same way they deal with, you know, during this work, you talked to tons of different affinity groups and stuff about the way their culture is taught in schools. And it arts feels like it's been thrown in there the same way that, oh, students just focus on black history for one month or focus on indigenous peoples for a day or something, or taught, you know.
>> Abby: Yeah, or how those communities perhaps grew up learning or understanding the world it becomes commodified and so on. So those kids who can really only understand things through, like visual learning aids and creating. You know, that's cute, but they are not permitted that as their way. Their way of understanding the world or the knowledge systems they operate through, unless it's in art class more. In the case of like if you grew up in a community where, you learned or spoke a certain way, that's cute during the heritage. It's conditional, and that makes me crazy. But we still have STEAM. Never five get.
>> Katie: Alright. Okay. What do you read for us?
>> Abby: I have all these post it notes and have no organization. Okay, Speaking of art, this is a long poem. Okay, I say that, but there's 70 poets in the world who say that it's seven minutes long. This will take me two minutes. But so one other thing about arts education I've noticed in me getting older is I'm starting to... I react really intensely to very intense pieces of art, especially theater, in a way that's making me think that perhaps this is sort of my body belatedly saying we didn't get to do this in school because we had to pick and choose, and it didn't always work out. And so now, my system just reacts as if going into anaphylaxis. And so I saw a staging of Angels in America on Broadway, not this past summer, the summer before, and it was phenomenal. And it also fucked me all the way up for a good six weeks. I was wrecked. It was because it was just the way it was staged was phenomenal. But also it brought history to the four that we don't really talk about in school, talking about what HIV and AIDS did to the gay community and subsequently in Americans in American history and that erasure and the way that show conveys it. Like I just felt it in my bones. So this is a poem about that.
>> Katie: Okay.
>> Abby: Yeah, it's called. “I Saw the Revival of Angels in America Last Weekend and it Wrecked Me”.
“I Saw the Revival of Angels in America
Last Weekend and it Wrecked Me” by Abigail Kirby Conklin
I saw the revival of Angels
in America last weekend
and it wrecked me.
I staggered home afterwards
and drank two inches
of vodka, pausing only to hide
the Playbill in my bookcase
where I could not mistakenly
come face-to-face with it
for the foreseeable century.
I logged out of Instagram,
Facebook, the New York
Times, closed
every window left open
on my laptop reviewing,
interviewing, waxing poetic
about the cast, director,
whomever the hell,
Tony Fucking Kushner
and how cuddly he has become
in middle age.
I saw the revival of Angels
in America last weekend
and it wrecked me,
every seam unstitched
with one violent yank,
like a bad party trick begun
with the best of intentions,
but resulting in blood
and thirty feet of digestive tract
burst all over the guests.
I’ve been waking up
the mornings since
feverish, jaw clenched
too tight to chew.
On my lunch hour,
I find busy restaurants
to slip into, lock their bathroom
doors, crouch against a wall
and scream,
the ambient noise of the $11
soup-and-salad crowd
conspiring
to keep me to an undetected
minimum.
I saw the revival of Angels
in America last weekend,
and it wrecked me.
Unable to face
the subway trip home,
I walk the five miles
instead, the 6:00pm sun
over the Hudson drilling
into my left-side virgin skin.
Commuters whip past, deaf
to the bent figure emitting
her ancient, ugly translations of grief,
streaming with salt water
until driven off the path
and onto the riverbank,
squinting out against
the brutal glare of the light .
We let them die, I tell
the rough, gray water.
I do not realize
I have begun to scream
until the gravel buildup
in my throat strangles
its own sound.
We let them die. We let
them die, God fucking
damn it, we let
them die.
>> Katie: Hm. Yeah, that gives me shivers.
>> Abby: I remember after I saw it, when I was really in the throes of my reaction to seeing it, I called... my parents lived in New York. They moved to New York in the eighties separately and met here, and they worked in the Village at a publishing company. And I just called. I think my dad and I said, You know, I don't know what to do with this. I'm feeling all of this and this grief and this fury that, like we don't talk about this, I like what it's fucking... It's a crime. It was a crime. And my dad, there's this pause, and my dad just goes, Abby, I know. We watched it happen. And he just described watching the the Village die. Yeah. Yeah, which is so not long ago.
>> Katie: Yeah.
>> Abby: And to then And now we're in this place in the political landscape, and, like amongst the American citizen, right where it's just like, Why don't we learn? Why don't we learn? Our government still isn't taking care of its humans the way it's supposed to.
>> Katie: Yeah. Mmm. Well, honestly, all this speaks to me. I don't know, just going back to the radical pedagogy... I lost my train of thought. Now I was, like, really into this question I was about to ask.
>> Abby: Radical pedagogy. Is that your experience as a professional or as you growing up?
>> Katie: No, I would say as a professional.
>> Abby: Anyway, it'll come back. Yeah, and you'll interrupt and there will be no contact will be perfect.
>> Katie: I mean, that's the thing about good poetry when you're in it, you have no other thoughts while it's happening.
>> Abby: My brain has left the building the moment I put the copy down. My brain is like, are we done?
>> Katie: So this is your first book?
>> Abby: Yeah.
>> Katie: How are you feeling about it?
>> Abby: For once in my life, my brain is letting me be excited about something. It's so nice. I think it really hit it, let's say Friday afternoon, because people pre order copies as evinced by yours.
>> Katie: Yeah, I got my preorder.
>> Abby: Yeah, you did.
>> Katie: Before the publication.
>> Abby: Exactly. So people are starting to get it, which means because I have no intel was ordered from the publisher. So I'm just hearing from people whom I haven't seen since I was 19. Let's say I haven't spoken to since before that. You know, we were both in the dorms for a year and 1/2 and then we never saw each other again. But we were connected on social media, and I have people reaching out to me, saying like I got my copy. I'm so excited to read it and that's kind of when it hit because, you know, I built a website. I've tried to build a media presence. You put in the work because you understand it's what you must do. The only reason I started performing on mics in New York City was because I have had stage like I hate being on stage. That was a thing for much of my life because I tried doing theater in middle school and it was some, you know, some voice in the back corner of my brain. A dusty, dusty, you know, Corner just said like you have to perform because there's too many people in poetry for you to get noticed just by submitting.
>> Katie: Yeah, particularly for poets. You have to be out there performing,
>> Abby: Yeah, and so you keep going. I just kept working on it and I kept showing up in doing the open mics and then, you know, after two years of that's when I started getting asked to feature after two years of, like, really falling on my face. And then so you do that you build like I still can't use Twitter, but I have one and I can't use. I mean, I refuse because if I have one more media account that I have to look at all the time like I will lose my sense of identity.
>> Katie: Yes, I know.
>> Abby: Using my instagram using my Facebook developing this website so I can have a place to collate my links to media and videos and all the rest of it. You do it, but it never really registers, really that someone besides your die hard 3 to 5 friends who have come and sat in the basements in the dank, creepy ass bars, have paid $10 to hear you work on something that's still not good yet. You forget that perhaps people beyond that subset have been paying attention to you at all. And what you're working on. And so now I had I had, you know, folks, just going like I haven't seen them in seven years, eight years, nine years, 10 years. And they're like, I got my copy. And then I think that was blowing my mind. And then on Friday night, a friend of mine who... we like we were buddies in college, not super tight, but we knew each other and he suffered really grating loss after we both left school and I had moved out here and I wrote a poem that was not directed at him but was for him. It's sort of like to be aware of like, this is what I wrote in response to this loss, this grief and he had ordered a book without telling me, and he texted me on Friday night, just quoting directly from it. And then he said something when he was like, I feel like shit because you've shaken up my box where I keep all my stuff. But I'm so happy you put this out in the world and I'm so grateful. And I said, I'm really sorry about your box and he said, I'll find all my shit eventually.
>> Katie: That's the title of this episode. I'm sorry about your box.
>> Abby: I'm sorry about your boss about your box. But I think that's when I would really just sort of Oh, wow. Okay.
>> Katie: I've had that happen a couple of times where people have quoted things that I have published, and I've had this weird moment where I'm like, Did I think that?
>> Abby: Yes, yes!
>> Katie: like somehow. But once it's gone It's like I couldn't. I can't tell you I'm re reading this novel like, for the third time that I'm working on. And sometimes I'm like I wrote this. Must have been because it's in the copy (laughter). Like I had to come from my brain. What's best is when you have the moment where you come across the line that you're like, Damn Yeah, I wrote this is fire.
>> Abby: Yeah, my go to is when I re read something I've had. I've written a couple of poems in the past, maybe a month or so after, like, a four month drought. A couple of problems in the past month or so where I've just been very pleased with the direction they're taking in my poems. Yeah, that's something an adult poet. (laughter) That looks like something grown like a grownup wrote that.
>> Katie: Well, let me ask you about... you're publishing with Duck Lake Books. They're out in Washington is that right? How many places did you submit your chap book? I'm really on a mission to have everybody who comes on the podcast talk about their rejection life because I just think it's so important to talk about rejection.
>> Abby: Oh, please, let's only talk about that for the rest of this episode. So, actually, you and I are connected on instagram on my instagram a few months ago. Which side note, I discovered the like film your screen sort of like addition. You can put onto your drop down menu on an iPhone a few months ago, and so I've gotten, I think, 15 rejections just for singular or pairs of poems in the past three months. And so I was looking at it at my submittable account and like all of the little gray rejection boxes and then I thought, I'm just gonna tape this. So I turned the recording on my screen, and then I just scrolled all the way down for a good 30 seconds because it's green if there's an acceptance. So let's say we pass four green boxes and about 63 grey rejection boxes, and I got a pretty sizable response from people who write comedy in my life and perform and people who are lit writers in my life because I don't know how many places I sent this manuscript to. I reached out to Duck Lake after they accepted two poems of mine for their journal because they were two of the poems that I just hadn't been able to place for a year and 1/2. Like kickback constantly. And they took these poems and I thought, You know what? I'm going to solicit them and just go like hi. You took really good care of me with these poems that no one else was taking. Here's my manuscript. What do you think? And that happened to land with them.
>> Katie: Oh, I like that.
>> Abby: Yeah, but it was. And then this was so great, actually. So Devin Kelly, your co host. Your tripod. He was a judge for 30 West Chap contest last summer. I got the manuscript accepted, and then I found out that I had made the first couple cuts in that contest and I had to withdraw from the contest because I had this publishing thing as. And so it's just one of those... it itches, bugs you. But you also I know so many people who have thrown hundreds of, if not thousands, of dollars into prizes. And actually, Okay, that's something I don't submit to prizes. I submitted to some chapbook prizes this summer, if they were, like, less than $10 fees, but I don't submit to prizes generally.
>> Katie: It gets expensive really quick, even if this amenable is, like $3 for an inquiry.
>> Abby: Yeah, that, uh, absolutely. I blew through, like, $15 worth of fee money last Sunday. Just shooting stuff like just trying to get stuff out into the ether.
>> Katie: And I think for poets you have your rate of rejection is probably higher than fiction writers. Just cause you're submitting even more individual poems everywhere.
>> Abby: Yeah, and also because everyone who is an editor or reviewer for those publications, like, basically works in academia or for a like a nationalized publication. So everyone reviews the submissions over the same three day weekend when they don't have to teach on the Monday. So you get all your rejections because they're all online across the globe like No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Merry Christmas.
>> Katie: Oh, God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I just I always like having these honest conversations about rejections and how hard it is to get any manuscript published.
>> Abby: Oh, my God. It's so much easier to get a poem published than a manuscript.
>> Katie: Yeah.
>> Abby: Jesus.
>> Katie: Well, we're coming towards, then you want to take us out on a couple poems?
>> Abby: Sure.
>> Katie: Oh, also what's your instagram handle?
>> Abby: So my universal media handle is a_k_c_poetry. So it's my initials poetry. And that's my That's my twits. That's my grams, that's all. All the good stuff.
>> Katie: Got it.
>> Abby: Okay, so let's talk about...
>> Katie: What's your website? Abigail Kirby Conklin dot us. Okay, so, actually, I'll read "Feminine" the poem that I mentioned earlier in our chat. And then I'll do a poem about motherhood loss in motherhood, and then I'll read the last poem in the book. Okay.
“Feminine” by Abigail Kirby Conklin
We’re inculcated with
the intimacy of blood
early. Touch it, feel it, get used
to being ashamed.
Scabby knees? Please.
Get your resignations in order.
By the time this is done,
you will have bled more
than half a field of Civil War
soldiers. For all intents and purposes,
you ARE one. Your body,
Antietam, crosshatched with wired
wooden barriers.
Break out the violences,
strip back their flesh,
make a slapping noise when you force
your knees together in public
places. As I said: civil
war. As I also said:
you.
Does it hurt yet?
Good.
>> Katie: Snap.
>> Abby: This is called “I Do Not Listen to Women Singing Sad Songs.”
“I Do Not Listen to Women Singing Sad Songs.” by Abigail Kirby Conklin
Whatever the maximum
number of listens is
one can clock of Radiohead’s “Creep”
without starting to bleed,
I haven’t cracked it.
Ditto, Cold Play’s “Fix You”.
Ditto, the entirety
of Frightened Rabbit’s discography.
Apparently listening to white men mourn
is the store brand Valium
I’ve been praying for my whole life,
the better to keep deep-sunk
that otherworld in me:
blood diamond-edged badlands.
Grieving.
The first time I heard
a woman sound her hurt:
the summer her son
got killed, at the family wedding
four weeks later.
As if her jaw had unhinged,
a fist forced down her throat,
took ahold of her guts and hissed,
now, tell ‘em how you really feel.
And keening, undone
crisis burst from her.
An erasure. Every tree,
human stomach, pipe
running beneath the Earth
should’ve split open, sent souls
streaming upwards.
Hot wound geysers.
Guests averted their eyes,
discomfort crowding
the room until it collapsed
her windpipe, and the in-laws
bore her away. I felt
the far reaches of myself falter.
There is a time and a place.
There are pills for this.
You learn once.
>> Katie: Sound her hurt. Sometimes it's the simplest turn of phrases there.
>> Abby: When I wrote that, that was a wow. An adult poet moment. So the poem I'm gonna end with is actually the first poem that I ever got published anywhere on, and I wrote it.. I've had many run ins with therapy. I think I'm finally onto a successful run in right now, but I had many unsuccessful run ins with therapy, but one thing that's not super successful practitioner said to me once when I was in a dry spell, not really writing, not really anything in my life except being a teaching artist and a barista and a babysitter. They said a field is not fallow just because you don't see anything growing. In winter seeds recalibrates that they can germinate come spring. There is something happening. There's something it like you're writing, comes back, Life comes back And so that was sort of the starting place for this poem.
>> Katie: The word fallow is one of my most favorite words.
>> Abby: Yeah, it's a really good word.
>> Katie: It's really beautiful.
>> Abby: And also cutting, like just that that abandonment like giving up. You're useless. You've been drained. Alright, "Seasons".
“Seasons” by Abigail Kirby Conklin
When I have almost convinced myself
that April isn’t coming,
I imagine holes opening in the Earth
and filling them with water.
Watching it soak away, and wondering
at the cupping, loam palms,
how they take faster than I can give.
A relentless season of their own.
Maybe there’s been
a drought in the underworld.
Persephone, waiting
for her season of cold stone and murk
to give way and return her
to the surface of the world.
A deep thirst at the back of her throat
for a sip of something of life.
It’s been argued she loved him;
the god who stole her down a hole,
trapped, bribed. Damned her to a half-life
in the land of the dead
with the pearl pulp of fruit seeds.
But I imagine her, each spring, crouched
below the openings in the Earth
with palms upturned in faith
that spring will come.
Thaw will streak the marble skin
of exhausted ice overhead.
Life will return, come pouring in to salve
the drought of her winter. And she will open
her eyes and be home.
>> Katie: Ah, thank you for sharing that.
>> Abby: Absolutely.
>> Katie: And so that's available on by January 15th from Duck Lake Books. What's the website? Do you know that is?
>> Abby: No. But if you put it in the Google, yeah, it'll show up, and that's in their catalog, and it will be on our transcripts. On the cover is bright reds. You can just scroll through the graphics until you see something alarming.
>> Katie: Okay, what's next?
>> Abby: I'm turning part of Triage into a one woman show that will be up in April.
>> Katie: That's right. You told me about that.
>> Abby: Yeah, I'm working on another manuscript.
>> Katie: Where are you gonna be performing this one woman show?
>> Abby: Under St Mark's Theater with Feast performance series one of their spring shows as yet undetermined.
>> Katie: They're gonna have a recording?
>> Abby: I don't know. I mean, at least it can. It can happen on the dicy iPhone.
>> Katie: That would be cool to be able to share that to our listeners who aren't in New York and can't make it down.
>> Abby: I'll need tape anyway, because it'll be the first time that I've been a theater person, really especially alone with props on the stage from memory. So I mean, goodness knows all need. I'll need something to take notes on.
>> Katie: For someone who feels like they're about it performing, you're really throwing yourself out there and doing it.
>> Abby: I have the sneaking suspicion that I have to keep growing my writing in my practice or else I won't have anything useful to say anymore.
>> Katie: That's interesting. Yeah, well, thanks so much Abby for being on today, and sharing Triage with us and I'm excited for the reading tonight.
>> Abby: Me too. Thank you for having me.
>> Katie: OK, that's it for today's episode. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and review on whichever platform you're listening. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @animalriotpress or through our website animarlriotpress.com. This has been the 48th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast with me your host Katie Rainey and featuring Abigail Kirby Conklin. Our transcripts for our Deaf and hard of hearing animals are provided by Jonathan Kay and we are produced by Katie Rainey… me. See you animals later.