Kim Addonizio: California Poets Part 5, Five Poems

Kim Addonizio (photo by Johnna Crawford)

December 22nd, 2022

California Poets: Part V

Kim Addonizio

Five Poems

Cigar Box Banjo Blind Willie Johnson could coax music from a single string. God plucked a rib and found a woman. Concert aria in the gypsy song, long groan of orgasm in the first kiss, plastic bag of heroin ripening in the poppy fields. Right now, in a deep pocket of a politician’s brain, a bad idea is traveling along an axon to make sure the future resembles a cobra rather than an ocarina. Still there’s hope in every cartoon bib above which a tiny unfinished skull in its beneficence dispenses a drooling grin. The heart may be a trashy organ, but when it plucks its shiny banjo I see blue wings in the rain. From My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014)

Heraclitean In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet. In goes the philosophy teacher explaining the theory of eternal return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet, still owing money to Mozart. In goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten. Every river is Lethean, so why should we care if it’s not the same river? I hate how everything changes, tree to failing term paper, chatelaine to beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc. The heart softening faster than cereal but then hardening to a relic which turns into another line of depressed poetry to recite to the next eager trainee anxious to be more than lint. Going up, you’re also going down, so either way, as your mother said, Be nice. When she went in, she was very thin. Earth, air, fire, water, mother. Fish pulse slowly under the river ice. From My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014)

Creased Map of the Underworld Nothing is so beautiful as death, thinks Death: stilled lark on the lawn, its twiggy legs drawn up, squashed blossoms of skunks and opossums on the freeway, dog that drags itself trembling down the front porch step, and stops in a black-gummed grimace before toppling into the poppies. The ugly poppies. In Afghanistan they are again made beautiful by a mysterious blight. Ugly are the arriving American soldiers, newly shorn and checking their email, but beautiful when face-up in the road or their parts scattered like bullet- or sprinkler-spray or stellar remains. Lovely is the nearly expired star casting its mass into outer space, lovelier the supernova tearing itself apart or collapsing like Lana Turner in Frank O’Hara’s poem. Nothing is so beautiful as a poem except maybe a nightingale, thinks the poet writing about death, sinking Lethe-wards. Lovely river in which the names are carefully entered. In this quadrant are the rivers of grief and fire. Grid north. Black azimuth. Down rivers of Fuck yous and orchids steer lit hearts in little boats gamely making their way, spinning and flaming, flaming and spiraling, always down-- down, the most beautiful of the directions. From My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014)

Grace Let go & let God is my guard dog Beware the ragged shithole hordes & bless my Chrome Moly Bushmaster .223 rest your asses nowhere near my rod & staff I raise my beacon-hand & torch anyone who doesn’t believe Jesus was calved from a virgin & then ascended to his penthouse & will raptor down to smite Jews abortionists niggers Muslims fags Obama the AntiChrist SATAN WAS THE FIRST TO DEMAND EQUAL RIGHTS outside the Knoxville Baptist Tabernacle while a boy puts his tongue in another boy’s mouth & they lie down together shy & barely breathing From Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton, 2020)

Art of Poetry Between coffee & fentanyl, between Love Me and Go Fuck Yourself there’s so much life to be gotten through So many mirrors to challenge in your ragged robe & collagen essence Korean facial mask Eventually you have to go out & walk around in the world like you belong there You have to smile at work, & buy things when you just want to crawl into a closet & live in an old cowboy boot & write witty unhinged verses which sometime before the death of the sun an advanced civilization will discover, etched into the ancient leather, preserved in a rock formation & display in a luminous floating interdimensional sphere Q: Ever notice how many writers write about writing? A few centuries ago Horace wrote approvingly of a poet He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke which I think is good advice if you can follow it but he also said that to paint a dolphin in the trees or a boar in the waves is an unnatural distortion & I thought about how much I’d like to see that & how unrealistic it is to expect things to stay in their places Why not someone’s grieving widow consoled by a nebula A suicide vomiting flowers In the 20th century Pablo Neruda wrote his own “Arte Poetica” lamenting all the things that called to him without being answered & reading it, I thought about that time in a tiny fishing village in Mexico, a third mangorita waterfalling through my liver the waitress coming toward me in a white T-shirt with black lettering that said I HAVE NO TITS which was clearly a lie although her stomach was kind of big which had the effect of making them appear to recede like the single taillights of two antique Model A Fords sputtering together toward obsolescence Q: Does she even know what it says? I HAVE NO TITS What is the message, is this perhaps a code, could it be from the future Is it a “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” situation like in that painting of a pipe or a new far-reaching campaign from the US Ministry of Enlightenment & Propaganda The thieving president wearing a golfing shirt that says I HAVE NO CLOTHES Q: Who killed poetry again & who cares? Between false flags and homeless laundry lines Between long-lasting eyebrow gel & little-known destinations profiled in the New York Times I don’t know where anyone is going or where there is to get to The days & nights keep drunkenly arriving, the guests are all dying & I’m starting to feel pretty sick From Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton, 2020)

Interview

January 20th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Kim Addonizio, Poet, Writer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with the writing retreats you lead near Terni in Central Italy. When was the last time you were there, how would you describe the atmosphere, and what can participants expect the next time you’re present?

KA: For several years, I've led poetry retreats at La Romita. It's mostly a visual arts school, started by the painter who owned the property, a 16th-century former monastery in the Umbrian hills. It's a mix of workshops, a peaceful retreat with time to write, and a tour, with several day trips to the surrounding hill towns and other locations for inspiration. I often bring along a co-teacher, and two of us teach together. None of which conveys how magical a place it is and the amazing people who show up each year. I'm not going back until September 2027, so I'm trying to finally learn some Italian in the meantime. (If people are interested, they can check out laromita.org.) I don't often go on vacation, but poetry has taken me all over the world.

DG: One of the most fascinating aspects of your work is its range. One may begin with your experiences in Assisi and later discover Robert Johnson. One will find mythology and philosophy but they’ll also encounter the body. How do you see poetry’s primary role—is it coming to terms with the fact that the sacred and profane, light and darkness, beauty and iniquity, are always inseparable from each other?

KA: I don't feel qualified to really talk about the role of Poetry, capital P; I can only speak to how it has affected me. "Coming to terms" is a pretty good way to think about it. Being a human animal, in a body that ages and dies, in a world that contains so much beauty and pain.

DG: In a prophetic statement, you said the following twelve years ago in an interview: “My poems always imagine a reader .... I’m not interested in reading a poem authored by language .... Machines can generate language for language’s sake. You know, sometimes I read poems and feel slapped in the face. It’s like the poem is saying ‘Fuck you’ to the reader.” Given this, how concerned are you, honestly, about AI wiping out good writing?

KA: From what I've seen so far of AI-generated poetry, we're not in danger. Not in terms of creating real poems. I worry a lot more about literary artists going the way of wet photographers and musicians. The Spotify model taking over books. And readers of poetry are an endangered species. I do think there will always be a way for people to share poetry, few as they may be.

DG: It’s been your great fortune to have won prizes and received fellowships. Would your writing have been very different today had you not been granted those honors?

KA: It helps to have encouragement, wherever you find it. I can't imagine I would have ever stopped writing poetry. It feels so much a part of my core self. I was financially insecure well into my forties, and that didn't keep me from writing. Or let me say it this way: since my late twenties, poetry has been my vocation, and I was lucky to eventually make it my career as well. If I hadn't had the career—books, fellowships, that kind of recognition—I'd still have the vocation.

DG: One of the most difficult moments in your writing life came when you had to pay back the advance on a two-book deal with a big publisher. How close, at that point, were you to giving up writing and how did you overcome the temptation?

KA: I did give up on writing novels. I'm not a natural novelist. I published two, with a major house, and I hope never to have the urge to write one again. The slog of the day after day, the structuring of plot—ugh, ugh, ugh. I feel happy and at home in poetry.

DG: Few poets have devoted so much time, energy, and passion towards instruction. From colleges, to workshops, and individual feedback sessions, you’ve done it all. Could you speak about the rewards and challenges you’ve faced in this respect and what your favorite teaching settings are?

KA: For a while, teaching was important because I could earn a living doing it, and outside of academia, which I abandoned years ago. I felt academia would kill me as an artist. But teaching has also become a vocation. If I read a poem that turns me on, I start thinking about how I can show it to my students and use it as a writing exercise. I love talking and thinking about poems. I just did a five-day intensive on the turn and poetic structure. I'll dream up a topic and spend hours online searching out just the right poems. I'm very lucky to spend my time with people who care about poems and language.

DG: This upcoming June will mark ten years since the publication of Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. Some people believe a poet’s autobiography is their poetry, but a memoir makes no pretensions about it. The title itself is deeply personal and symbolizes the triumph over one critic’s statement regarding your work. How did you feel, at the time, opening yourself up in a new writing genre and how do you see it all now with the passage of time?

KA: I love personal essays, and I'm still writing them. I've been working on a new manuscript on and off for the past ten years. It may be odd to say, but I don't really feel that any of my work is exactly self-revelation. Can I say that I don't take myself personally? As with poems, I think a lot more about finding the voice of the piece, writing interesting sentences, and figuring out wat each one has to say. Place seems to be a trigger: I've written essays about visiting the Tower of London, the Museum of Death in New Orleans, and the high desert of New Mexico.

DG: So much of your work is inspired by the blues, a genre too often misunderstood as the music of suffering, which it describes, but only to make survival possible. What it’s really about is overcoming a miserable drought with a sorrowful rain. If you could collaborate on a song with any blues artist, who would it be and why?

KA: There's a lot of joy in the blues. That's as intrinsic as the sorrow. As for collaborating, since we're fantasizing, I'll take Elmore James; I've got the perfect poem for some kickass slide guitar.

DG: You’ve performed your poetry on stage and have also recorded it. Could you talk about the relationship that a standard reading event, a performance, and recording have in relation to the poem on the page?

KA: I write for the page first, for the internal music I hear, and ideally a reader will hear it, too. I'm not a natural performer, but I keep working on it, so that when I recite a poem I can fully inhabit it and bring out that music. Lately I've been working with my partner, guitarist Danny Caron, to create musical accompaniment for various poems. Music can create an immediate emotional connection. I think it helps people hear the poems more deeply.

DG: In addition to the recordings of your poems, My Black Angel also features woodcuts by Charles D. Jones. How did the visual aspect complement the project and are there other types of art you enjoy?

KA: They're woodcuts of various blues musicians, and they pair beautifully with the poems. I've never studied visual art. In a way, the less I know about a piece of art, the better. I let it just take me over. I remember walking out of the Van Gogh Museum and having mild case of Stendahl syndrome in the gift shop; there was something so marvelously overwhelming in Van Gogh's work. I could feel his consciousness emanating from those late paintings. Seeing Bernini's Apollo and Daphne in Rome just about made me weep.

DG: Speaking of art, let’s return to Italy. If you had to leave the US and settle on these shores, which city do you see yourself living in?

KA: As fraught as America is becoming, it's hard to imagine living in a foreign country. We recently visited Abruzzo, a gorgeous part of Italy where a couple of Danny's friends had just bought a house. They were struggling to fit into Italian small-town life. I'm sure they'd think I'm the Whore of Babylon. So that's the countryside. Sleepy, provincial. And they eat a lot of lamb (I'm mostly vegetarian). Rome is too busy and loud. Is there a Goldilocks spot? Is there any place we can escape to? Probably not, which leaves trying to make a better place here.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

KA: I've mostly been reading and listening to books about animals, evolution, and extinction. I always browse poetry books, looking for something to wake me up. I'm playing a lot of banjo, which I've been learning for a couple of years, and have just finished creating a piece as a backing track for a poem I wrote about the Civil War. I'm working with poet Brittany Perham on a new book on creativity and poetic craft, on a word/music album with Danny, on the book of essays, and I'm also teaching classes. That makes me sound busier than I am, as I don't work on all of those things every day. Well, maybe with the exception of banjo.

Author Bio:

Kim Addonizio’s latest poetry collection is Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton). She is the author of seven other poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius, as well as a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). Her awards include fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation and her collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches poetry workshops on Zoom.