Phyllis Klein: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Phyllis Klein

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Phyllis Klein

Five Poems

How My Architect was Found 

            —for Connie

your architect sits 

in a corduroy chair 

in your new house 

the floor warm now

ceiling high enough 

for sky to touch roof 

over which he plans 

to build a canopy

for the child who was you

I didn’t understand who he was 

this inner builder

of a body hiding from itself 

in a hallway of bad dreams

until you explained 

he is the surveyor of remedies

and when you say 

he is ready now 

I want to find my architect 

I know she is hiding 

in my torso or is it my jaw 

or an ankle

because the rules have changed

to a new order of kindness

for the child without wings

that was me

crushed into the seams 

of a favorite sweater

at the back of the closet

do you remember when 

you read me that poem  

you wrote about a black squirrel 

who frightened you 

I knew then we could be friends 

of a deeper nature

I want to ask my architect

to visit, warm her hands— 

remodel the dark spaces

add skylights 

I know she is capable 

of what you and I imagine

in the restorative floor plans 

maple tree walls

and cashmere underfoot

surrounded by hedges

that glow in the dark

My Architect Loves My Museum

The periodontist’s office our first meeting, 

architect holds my hand. Lower front teeth 

determined to slip off foundations. 

Her heart pounds. My gums swell.

Devotion, a feathered shawl.

I send her a drawing titled Worry Box. 

She answers with orange wings

in pastel. Every time I understand 

how she saves me, I draw her a bird 

because it can fly. Blue bellied roller,

painted bunting, goldcrest. My architect loves

my museum, huddles outside on the ledge

of my first story, watching. Thresh of wings 

in watercolor, feathers flicker in and out 

an open window. She stays up nights reading 

on restoration and history of edifices built on lots 

over graves. She walks in circles, me on her mind, 

my bone chips, my coat of desert skin, paces 

the portrait gallery filled with children painted at play. 

Her favorite painting of mine, the motorcycle cop, the bridge, the crossing. 

Her Architect Writes a Poem 

My magnifying glass on blueprints 

& floorplans

Her body groans its house structure 

of bones reasons for pain 

wall-to-wall stories                                         

After the floorboards smashed 

shoulders surrender as in white flags             

Disappearances shadow turnings away

untethering from a bicycle leading

to concussion 

sidewalk cracks

landing on fractures of elbow 

Mother’s silent treatments

Wheeze tornado infection 

breakdowns in lung scaffolding

I hold a lantern near the bedroom wrapped in blackout 

Father’s stares

stucco skin 

blister-weeds overgrowth

gardens of rash

I translate from body 

to mind where a thought signs its name

on a page of what matters like a pen

without a hand making its marks 

Where no longer alone or disappeared

I walk in circles of her on my mind

She tells me everything never a secret between

Believing, I can believe in her

I build harbor of refuge for cuts stings

renovated careful with reassurances girded 

in asylum walls & high enough ceiling 

I don’t give up because some scary stories 

are best when rendered ended past tense

She got hurt she got up it happened  

I want to tell her 

It’s over 

You’re safe now

I can sculpt in marble-centered pillars

I will lay my body across her lintel

She answers I love you like a beam 

loves its rafter ever and always 

My Architect Wishes                                                

Inside every healer is desire

She wants to go to the redwood forest

alone to observe how wood grows

into fog sky She wants to open 

herself up fold out of persona

become an awning 

her name on a cornerstone

with music and art furled

like green lights of YES please

It’s not that she’s tired 

or running out of giving 

it’s just that she wants to be a tree 

if she wants to 

for the rain to plant its hands on 

her needles and bark to feel her roots

in their feet or anything else wild and sweet

Inside every desire is a healing

She wants the chance to tell her own

story have a history with forest

how she was born in the wild woods

how she grows

My Architect Meets Maya Lin on Video

wants to sit alone with her at the sharp corner

of those granite walls she designed at twenty-one,

sun glittering over the names etched into black

until all fades to dark. No one believed

I grew up in Ohio. Only my Chinese face. Only

my youth, my womanness is what they believed,

made up their own stories about me.

The monument’s veneer so paper thin

cutting and polishing a wound with those names

my architect wants to remind herself

about the worlds we can enter and the worlds we can’t.

She wants to know if when she holds my hands,

can I feel her shimmer in me?

Maya tells my architect she is more than her drawings

and more than her buildings. My architect is a roadmap,

she is a weathervane, a lantern.

This monument is for touching, to come alive, each name

a grave, each breath a longing for yesterday or tomorrow

or anything but the burn of today. The granite cuts

into the earth, an edge, an open side, a geode.

Interview

January 28th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Phyllis Klein, Poet, Psychotherapist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You’ve had a long and successful career as a psychotherapist. How has this affected your creativity and do you use poetry in your sessions?

PK: I haven’t ever thought about how my career has affected my creativity. I think of the practice of psychotherapy itself as a creative practice although there is a lot of theory that’s very important to know. I have always thought of each person I work with as a unique individual with their own special needs, so even if there is a technique involved, I will try to be creative in how I offer it for maximum helpfulness. And I come from an intuitive place which fits in well with creativity.

As for my poetry, I am certainly influenced by my work, and the honor of witnessing others in pain and in healing. I am drawn to writing about trauma for many reasons and my profession is one. My own personal life and story is another. And the trauma of the world comes up in my desire to write about the news.

I am trained in Poetry Therapy which is a branch of Creative Arts Therapy along with music, dance, and art therapy. In general, the poetry therapist brings poems to groups or individuals to use for connection, empathy, and healing. We try to bring poems that have some experience of suffering or loss but also something hopeful to offer. I do bring poetry and exchange poetry with people who are interested and find it useful to read and talk about. Sometimes a poem will show up that expresses something that is perfect for someone’s needs. Leila Chatti’s poem, Tea, is a wonderful example of the kind of poem I am thinking about, but for some the references to suicidal thoughts are too distressing. You have to be careful to bring poems that are not triggering.

DG: Has there been a time when you counseled a poet? If so, did your approach differ in any significant way?

PK: Maybe once or twice. And no, it wouldn’t change my approach much. We might talk about writing prompts, but I wouldn’t assign something. I’m not into giving assignments, maybe suggestions if they seem helpful. And it’s always okay to say no. I did have an ongoing writing for healing group which went on for over 15 years, with new people coming and some staying a long time. It was a therapeutic group, different from therapy, and we wrote together and read our writing out loud, with positive and empathic comments only. That was a truly wonderful experience.

DG: As of May 25th, 2024, you’ve produced thirty-four videos featuring talks with poets. How do you prepare for each conversation and to what extent is there an improvisational, spontaneous element involved in the process?

PK: Thanks for asking about this! What I have learned is that interviewing is a far different skill from being a therapist. For some, the improvisation and spontaneity comes more naturally than it does to me. But over time and with experience I did improve. I evolved into trying to be prepared and then seeing where things go. The best part of doing a series like this is getting to know the poets. I always meet with them beforehand to get to know them just a bit and I read carefully the poems they choose for the reading usually from a book of theirs. We exchange books. Sometimes they will find one of mine they want me to read. Every time it’s different and truly magical. Sometimes they choreograph the reading together. And then I get a chance to read with good friends and people I love.

DG: Are there plans to pick the series back up or has it definitively been concluded?

PK: Definitely not concluded. I’m in the process of trying to organize a reading for a group of poets published in an anthology called The Nature of Our Times. I’m working hard on another book myself, and that is the big reason for the hiatus. I do hope to resume once that book is on its way.

DG: You’ve lived the majority of your life in San Francisco. How has the city changed and what do you wish would change?

PK: Actually, I have lived in the SF Peninsula (currently in Palo Alto) about the same amount of time as I lived in San Francisco but I do still go up there for work, just not as often. San Francisco is a very changeable place, one of the most beautiful cities we have here in the US. Unfortunately, the Pandemic hit the city hard and businesses are still not back in the Union Square area. Even the beloved Macy’s is going to close but they keep extending its tenure. And offices are still under occupied. There tends to be a boom and bust cycle in SF that also can correspond to earthquakes and the health of the tech economy. Fingers crossed we won’t be feeling temblor activity increase, but of course there are more fires and this does change the beautiful air at times causing toxins and smog. Other neighborhoods are doing well and the museums are treasures. And great restaurants of all price ranges abound as new ones take over when older ones close down. I wish the drive from Palo Alto wasn’t as far as it is and that the train station were closer to downtown. But in general there is good public transit. I would also like to see more progress in helping the unhoused and underserved communities throughout the Bay Area. There was a big piece of legislation to help with funding but I don’t know if there is progress. That’s a big topic.

DG: Do you have a fairly strict writing schedule? And if you could have either every morning or evening free, which would you prefer?

PK: I really don’t have a strict writing schedule. I am a lot less encumbered these days with work (I still work but very part-time) so I tend to write when I have something I want to say. I also participate in a class with Mark Doty on Zoom that meets every other week and that helps me keep writing. It’s a hard balance for me when I’m trying to bring a book together but I really do like having new poems arising.

DG: How do you get the creative process going? Silence, listening to music, a combination of things?

PK: I usually write at the computer, except if I am in a workshop or retreat, and I sometimes have classical music on in the background but mostly it’s in silence.

DG: As a psychotherapist, you specialize in trauma. I’m interested in how creativity is so inconsistently situated in it. Many artists have turned their pain into great works of art, but there have also been those for whom the burden was too great and were destroyed by it. In a clinical setting, is it possible to see immediate signs of how a person will handle the difficulties of their past?

PK: There are so many different ways that can go. I know poets who are writing in response to psychedelic therapy sessions. I’m not involved with that modality but it can be super powerful and healing for eliciting poems about trauma. I’ve heard that antidepressants can make people feel less interested in creativity. I don’t know if that’s because of happiness or a dampening of feelings that could happen in certain situations. I very much believe that happiness and joy are capable of becoming great poems, just read Ross Gay and others. But even in his poems there is the difficult to rub up against, that creates the depth of a great poem.

As far as the burden being too difficult, I agree that many people who carry trauma to a greater degree than others need to go slowly in diving into it. And at the same time, people sometimes feel a strong desire to rush in. In my experience even very wounded people have ways to regroup. Often that is what we are working on, how to go slow and stay in balance. Healing serious trauma is such hard work. Self-expression in the form of writing, artwork, and anything creative can help especially if there is pacing and permission to move with respect towards the depth of the pain. What is most wonderful is when someone can write something about their experience that is helpful for others and share it.

DG: Who are poets you turn to consistently for inspiration and who are some you’ve discovered recently?

PK: Oh I am constantly reading new poems—I get way too many in my inbox. I also love recommendations from friends and people in my poetry class and peer poetry group. The latest of these is Matthew Dickman. I always love reading Li Young Li, Sharon Olds, Ada Límon, Tracy Brimhall, and Natalie Diaz and so many others including all my classmates and poets in my peer poetry group. I recently went to a reading in San Jose with Patricia Smith who just won the National Book Award. That was thrilling. She came with 10 books that she raffled off for free. I didn’t win one but it’s on my shopping list. I just can’t make enough room on the shelf for all the poetry books I want to own. I also adore so many of the poets I have hosted on Poets in Conversation. Two of them, Jenn Martelli and Mary Dederer, died last year and I am forever grateful I got to meet Jenn and to know Mary better before it was too late. I am still in touch with many of the poets from this project. Each of them has given me so much.

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

PK: As mentioned, I am in the throes of another book and I have a chapbook that I hope will come after that, as long as I have the energy. My new book is so different from the first one, which is a poetic newspaper. The next one is focused on “The Body” from many different angles. In fact, the poems you chose to publish (for which I am so grateful) are part of a section in the book about two personas, the Tiger and the Architect. This is a way of writing about childhood from the perspective of self-understanding that happens in metaphor and blending of actual experience with creativity. These poems come from a very right-brained place. The whole book is taking a walk through the body as it experiences illness, aging, also kindness, and love. It’s book about a body that is also a teacher, a vessel for memory, a weathervane, a building.

The chapbook will come next and will be a second volume of The Full Moon Herald. It’s been really hard to write as many political poems but I have been able to manage enough. Of course I am hoping for better news.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this interview. And for all the work you are doing for California Poets!

Author Bio:

Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The New Verse News, Sweet, 3Elements, I-70, The Minnesota Review, and Swwim Everyday, among many others. She was a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. Her book, The Full Moon Herald, from Grayson Books (2020) won poetry finalist from the Eric Hoffer Book Award, 2021.  During the Pandemic she started a reading called Poets in Conversation.