issue 3: Elaine Kahn
A friend once suggested that works of art were most moving when they prompted a feeling of sudden disolcation, a sense of having overstepped a boundary. “Where am I?” / “Should I be seeing this?” / etc.
Elaine Kahn’s writing places the reader in a private world. Her poems are visceral, sexual, and darkly funny. But if her work is confrontational, it is subtly so. Our sudden proxmity to the subject matter gives weight to her words. It isn’t Kahn who has overstepped a boundary; it is us.
As a teacher--first in an academic setting and now via her own Poetry Field School, Kahn eschews traditional analytic teaching approaches in favor of something more intuitive. Students don’t dissect poems, but listen for effect and emotional resonance.
Kahn’s workshops and her writing both suggest that the form is most powerful when we forego diagnostic tools and surrender, instead, to our senses.
The poem is not the recipe; it is the food.
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Discussed: Teaching, process, body language, vulnerability, police in LA libraries, humor, Instagram poetry, Poetry Field School, podcasters, etc.
I feel like I should maybe preface this interview by disclosing that I actually don’t really know very much about poetry. I don’t typically read a lot of it, and I don’t have a huge vocabulary for it.
[laughs] That’s OK. I mean, I don’t think you need to have any kind of special knowledge for engaging with poetry. That’s something that people worry about, it’s something people think, but I don’t think it’s true. In fact, I think having a relationship with weird music is much better preparation than most poetry educations, honestly.
Interesting. Why do you think so?
So much about reading and connecting with poetry is being open to having an emotional experience that’s triggered through unconventional means. Poetry does work narratively, but I don’t think the narrative is usually linear, and it’s usually not very conventional. Often people who are more accustomed to having their emotional experiences more guided, or legibly presented, get turned off by the kind of poetry I’m interested in. [I’m interested in] Poetry that’s more interested in working with language as a medium for making art, [rather] than poetry that’s trying to tell you about a feeling or an experience. A lot of art operates that way, and I definitely think experimental music does. Where the patterns aren’t always foregrounded, and you’re just willing to go with something and be open to seeing how it affects you. Versus expecting it to happen in a way that’s really clear. So much of it has to do with not being afraid of not understanding— being open to being moved by something you may not understand. Poetry can lead you to have an emotional experience for reasons that may not be immediately clear to you, and I think that’s the same with weird music, and frankly most art that I care about as well.
That’s a good point. Leading up to this I wondered why I haven’t spent much time with the medium, and I almost think part of it is because of experiences in junior and senior year of high school, taking this really analytical line-by-line approach to poems.