Susan Kelly-DeWitt: California Poets Part 9, Four Poems

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Four Poems

Anniversary

We were married in Santa Barbara in June.

We didn’t know your heart was stressed,

that on the night of our sixteenth moon

I would dial 911, then watch (obsessed)

your labored breath and those whiplashed snakes

of green on the oscilloscope screen--moot

wife, little plastic bride of the disappeared cake.

The surgery was graveyard-shift, the scar a beaut

(like your wired sternum). We watched outtakes of Garbo

on ICU TV. I felt like the widow in a Noh play--

long loose hair, strain-powdered face; a hobo

riding the emotion-rails. Now that fraught day

was fifty years ago--our love was no rhinestone.

(I still feel the pain, smell your blood-cologne.)

The Wasp

I find my way in

through a chink in the screen

with my venoms and poisons.

I fly past their bed

with my glittering head.

With one black-gold eye

I watch how they sigh, old lovers

in a stupor—how they twist and turn

in the sultry afternoon.

I drift like a vapor

to an alley of shade

and gleam there like black jade.

Blue Hotel

if I say the world is all one story

a cluster of crazy ground floor rooms

annexed to a cheap hotel

a series of odd angles

roofed in blue tiles

bear with me

I’m learning to trust myself

not myself but the shadow

that breathes inside me

I’m learning to wander the halls

jiggle the doorknobs

which are painted blue

imagination is the central garden

there is a fountain there

I’m letting the waters splash over me

my hair is wet

my skin is soaked

my shirt is drenched

my blue shirt

three blue pigeons are pecking

at the fountain’s edge

blue feathers blue beaks

bear with me I know

sadness is the roof of the crazy world

and blue can be read as the color of dolor

but this is not a sad poem

this poem has opened a window

inside the blue hotel

it has let the sky rush in

a clear blue sky

Working Retail

In an early definition of strip

malls, I was in charge

of ladies’ coats.

It was pre-pre-

Christmas sales, halfway

through a busy night.

The news arrived

on the sales floor

in the form of my manager—

my father had been dressed

down by heart attack.

The rest of the night

was a blur of selling

myself on the idea

of the reality of his death

and a foggy three hour

drive to the mortuary.

Then I saw his new

blue-violet topcoat.

I touched his cold

new threads.

Interview

January 5th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Poet, Visual Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: At the intersection of your work is always the visual element, given your deep connection to poetry and art. You’ve written poems inspired by Van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Matisse, and others. What are some of your favorite ekphrastic poems (or works about art in general) written by others?

SK-DW: I have so many favorites when it comes to ekphrastic poems! Of course, many of the classics (“Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rilke, for instance) but on the contemporary front, I especially love those by the following: Charles Wright, Margaret Gibson, Laverne and Carol Frith (who also published the wonderful literary journal Ekphrasis), Dean Rader, and Sandra McPherson, among many others.

DG: As an artist, you must be more discerning about the cover art for each of your books. For which collections did you have more input and for which less? And was there ever a time where you had trouble deciding?

SK-DW: I did have input on the cover art for most of my books and chapbooks. Re chapbooks: For A Camellia for Judy, we used a photograph by a close friend of mine, for Feather’s Hand, fabric art by an artist I worked with in the Women’s Wisdom Project; for To A Small Moth, we used art by my publisher’s son; for The Land, a photograph by my son; for Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree, an old family photo from the early 1920’s. My daughter chose the cover art for The Book of Insects, and there was no cover art for my Greatest Hits chapbook. As for the full lengths: I researched paintings for The Fortunate Islands, and found one I loved online by the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles. (He donated it: “art for poetry, poetry for art”.) I found the image for Spider Season online also, from a nature plate in the 1700’s—my publisher designed the cover with it. For Gravitational Tug we used a painting by Odilon Redon (public domain). My two most recent books from Gunpowder Press, Gatherer’s Alphabet and Frangible Operas, were designed by GP’s Chryss Yost. She sent me several possibilities and I got to choose—I love what she did with the final covers.

DG: Do you see painting and poetry as inherently intertwined in your life, or do you have specific periods where you paint and specific periods in which you write?

SK-DW: Painting and poetry have always been intertwined in my life—beginning with my early childhood years living on the grounds of what was once an old artist colony in Hawaii, and playing in the gallery/studio (full of paintings) that had once been an artists’ salon, and watching the founding artist, Lillie Gay Torrey, while she was (in her 80’s) painting—we also hung around at the same time as my parents entertained the famous island poet Don Blanding in our living room. Still, I didn’t start to paint or write poetry seriously until I was in my early twenties. I studied watercolor with Jimmy Suzuki at Sacramento State—he mentored me for quite a while and I began to think of watercolor painting as a method for writing poetry. You don’t always know where the water is going to take you or the paint—the painting discovers itself, like the poem. For a while I combined words with my paintings and collages. Later I was the program director for the Women’s Wisdom Project, (in those days an arts program for homeless and low income women) and I taught both visual art and poetry to the women. I also opened my own art studio for several years, and taught poetry there too. I often use paintings by others as subjects for my poems (ekphrasis). I tend to paint/do visual art in spurts but my poetry time is usually more steady, though sometimes I go through a dry period, especially if I’ve just published a book.

DG: With the publication of Gatherer’s Alphabet, you were the inaugural poet of Gunpowder Press’s California Poets Series. Could you talk a little bit about the composition of this manuscript and what other books in that series you enjoyed?

SK-DW: History in its many forms is always a big part of my organizational focus so that my poems use natural history, art history, personal history, women’s history, political and social history, along with cosmological breadth and perspective—which I try to weave together in the manuscript, rather like a patchwork quilt or a collage. I also try to have a beginning and end that includes—draws in, speaks for the reader. 

As for other books in the series, I love them all (two by my dear friends and early mentors, Sandra McPherson and Dennis Scmiltz, and two by poets whose work I have always loved, Lee Herrick, and Gary Soto, and I feel so lucky to be included among them.

DG: In a 2017 interview you talk about how Plath, in the beginning, had been a big inspiration, given your own difficult period at the time. How do you see those early years in Hawaii from this vantage point? Is Plath still an influence and do you feel any nostalgia?

SK-DW: Plath is still an influence because she is the poet who gave me permission to write about things that I wouldn’t have felt I could write about otherwise. And she was a young woman poet in a world where the poets I grew up with were mostly men. Of course, growing up in Hawaii before it was a state and when it was basically a postwar country (I’ve written about digging up bullets from the yard and finding a WWII bomb under a cottage we lived in) had a tremendous influence—the ethnic mix, the tropical rainforests, the Polynesian myths. I have always loved telling the story of how my first grade teacher, Sister Philomena, stood at the front of our class in her nun’s robes, under a picture of Jesus with a crown of thorns and blood, while she lectured us on Pele the fire goddess.

DG: How intensive is your editing process? Do you trust the first impulse or revise heavily before submitting?

SK-DW: Sometimes one, sometimes the other.  Frost said “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” I am always looking for the surprise—the poem as a mystery to be solved, the poet as the detective solving the mystery. So, occasionally I “get it” in an early draft, but I have also kept revising some poems  for many years.

DG: As a writer, how do you deal with rejection?

SK-DW: Ha! As I’ve always said to my poetry students: If you’re getting rejections, you’re a poet!

I also love that sometimes a poem that was rejected many times willfind a home in a good journal many years later.

DG: The High Window, a UK journal featured some of your work in 2023. These previously unpublished poems were different in the sense that they included pieces written recently and one as far back as thirty years ago. Despite this, the works fit well together. Would it be right to say that you never—or at least rarely—give up on a poem?

SK-DW: See my comment above! (That said, I did revise a couple of the poems a tiny bit.)

DG: What do you enjoy most about writing and what’s the most difficult part?

SK-DW: I think what I enjoy most about writing is that it is a chance to make something which, like a quilt, incorporates beauty and use—something that readers can connect with, that gives voice to something that they needed to hear or feel. (Occasionally I have heard from readers who say that something I wrote meant so much to them and/or was a big help.)

The most difficult part can sometimes befinding the time and space to write, to navigate those silences that sometime become obstacles in the path, and of course, the technical/mechanical work of sending things out and keeping track.

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

SK-DW: I’m reading—and rereading—lots of different things right now—both poetry and prose. First time reads like Ada Limon’s Startlement, Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation, New and Selected Poems, Clarence Major’s Glint of Light, Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, to name a few.

As for what I’m working on—looking at oldies and sending a few out—revising some too, and putting together another book of poems—haven’t settled on a title yet!

Author Bio:

Sacramento’s Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the inaugural poet in the California Poets Series with her book Gatherer’s Alphabet (February 2022). In 2024, Gunpowder Press also published Frangible Operas. Susan is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008), and a number of previous small press and online collections. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, and in print and online journals at home and abroad. Her past professional and writing life includes having been a reviewer for Library Journal, the editor-in-chief of the online journal Perihelion, the Program Director of the Sacramento Poetry Center and the Women’s Wisdom Arts Program, a Poet in the Schools and a Poet in the Prisons, a blogger for Coal Hill Review, and a longtime instructor for the UC Davis Division of Continuing Education. She is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Northern California Book Reviewers Association and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. She is also an exhibiting visual artist. For more information, please visit her website at www.susankelly-dewitt.com.