Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is poet, translator, and educator Kent Leatham. Kent was born in 1984 to a single working mother and an anonymous sperm-donor father, and he is a Central Coast native. His writing has appeared in over 50 literary journals, zines, and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, and Poetry Quarterly. A Pushcart Prize nominee and two-time recipient of the Knudsen Family Endowed Scholarship for Creative Writing, he has been a featured reader at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Monterey Poetry Festival, the U35 and Breakwater reading series, Bird & Beckett Books, and more. He currently teaches at California State University Monterey Bay, where he is the faculty advisor for In the Ords, a student-run undergraduate literary-arts journal.


Kent Leatham, welcome to Story Behind the Story!

Kent Leatham (KL): Thank you so much! It's an honor to be here


(CSA): I'm really excited to talk to you; I heard you read at the Monterey Poetry Festival (as we mentioned in your introduction) and you read such a wide range of work, with so many different themes and so many different styles. It just really caught my eye. So as I was looking through, then, the work on your website and some of what you sent me, I was struck by the sheer volume of poetry that you've written. Talk to me about your experience of that creative impulse. What motivates you to write, and do you experience urgency as you're doing it? 


(KL): It's interesting that you bring up the idea of a range of topics and themes and styles in my work because I've continuously been trying to build a full-length manuscript — the eventual first book (over far too many years now, since grad school), and I've tried all sorts of different organizing principles for it: alphabetical by title, sequential from like a crown sequence where the last line of the first poem leads into the next line of the next poem in whatever ways they do. And finally, this last year, I’ve come to (hopefully permanently) believe that I do have some more singular common themes; that I have sequences and suites that can go together around more focused topics that seem to be persistent in my life. So fFor example, one of them is my mother; one of them is my father; one of them is my own embodiment; one of them is the idea of things we lose, people we lose, and elements of our lives that we lose. And then trying to deal with larger global/social/national issues as well anytime those pop up. But I definitely feel like I have increasingly tried to actually narrow my focus into these somewhat obsessive topics, but drawing out a singular theme more, rather than dabbling around in a dozen different themes.


(CSA): So as you move from that — pardon the term — but that more dilettante approach and looking broadly into that more focused approach, how has that changed the way that you write and the way that you approach the task of sitting down and putting words on a page? 


(KL): I've always been a ridiculously undisciplined writer in terms of sitting down and putting words on the page. (Clara laughs) I have absolutely no routine, no consistency, like: “I will write today,” or “I will write every third day,” or “I will write on days end in ‘Y’,” or whatever it might be. I've got nothing other than waiting for random inspiration, trying to get motivated by who I'm reading, what I'm thinking about. But! The good part that narrowing and focusing and condensing my themes has done for that is, it allows me to start trying to build more consistent formal scaffolds. So for example: 10 years ago I wrote A poem titled, “Dear Dad,” that was a letter-style addressed to my anonymous never-met father, and I thought that that was going to be just a one-off poem…. And now I've got (I think) six or seven poems with that title that are now this ongoing apostrophe to my father. And every time I think about some new idea that I want to talk about — hypothetically — to this character, to this persona, I'm able to plug in that form. I'm able to go back to that and just say, ‘Okay. I already know how this poem can start. I have no idea where it's going to end, but I know how to start writing it.’


(CSA): Right. So it gives you that starting point and that place to jump in.


(KL): Exactly, exactly. I never know what the question is going to be, where it ends, but I know what the answer's going to be, where it starts. 


(CSA): One other thing that I think is notable about you is that except for when you left for college and graduate school, you've spent most of your life right here in the Monterey peninsula. I was curious both about what attracts you to this region — cuz you came back. And also, how do you think growing up here shaped your writing?


(KL): I went to school in Pacific Grove from K through 12. I actually lived in Carmel Valley, but my mom taught in the Pacific Grove School district so I got to go to school there. And anyone who's been in PG knows that it is a tiny little town. It is famous for butterflies and tourists, and not much else on the cosmic sense. And so many of my classmates in high school, like, the most exciting thing in the world was to get away. As soon as I went to college up in Washington State, went to grad school in Boston, lived in Pennsylvania for a year, moved back to Boston, moved back to California. It was like, the whole time I was away, I knew I wanted to come back. There was something just deep in my blood that said the Central Coast was a magical place, and a beautiful, powerful place. I always knew I was going to want to come back here sooner than later. I think that… I mean, a lot of that was just familiarity and consistency; It's the place I know best, so therefore I have the vocabulary of it. I can write about our sagebrush and chaparral and local birds and fish and critters and things, and feel like I know that language in a way that I didn't ever feel comfortable writing about places in other geographies. 
I think the other part about how this place has shaped my language though, or shaped my writing, is: for such a small community, it's so just absurdly rich in art and culture and history, and the legacy of what's been here. Growing up steeped in Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck and Robert Lewis Stevenson when he passed through, and Jack London when he passed through. And all of these — Henry Miller — all of these giants on whose shoulders I got to perch growing up gave me a sense that anybody can invest in this legacy. Anybody can bring inspiration out of it. I'm not sure that it necessarily informs my writing now in an obvious way, but I think that it helped to get me where I am growing up for sure.


(CSA): I can see that. It's really interesting to hear you talk about the legacy of Monterey Bay. It's, for me, as somebody who is a transplant (I came from L.A. originally, but have lived all over), it's just interesting to think beyond the really big names that we hear from the outside. I think I knew about Steinbeck, but I don't… I certainly didn't know about half the others. I was curious when you were talking before about trying to come up with an organizing system for your writing and for getting it into shape to be a book. I'm curious about some of the approaches that you rejected and why you rejected them. Could you talk about that a little? 


(KL): Yeah, my positive side of the response to that is — I don't know if this is an apocryphal story or if it's true, but someone told me once that Walt Whitman got the first edition of Leaves of Grass back from the printer (or the first one that he hadn’t himself self-printed at least) and got the first the first copy back, cracked the spine, tore out the pages, and started rearranging it and shuffling out poems and revising poems; He couldn't sit comfortably with the finished product. It just wasn’t ever done. And then there was the second edition, and then there was the third edition — and they were all completely different animals, based on how his poetry kept evolving, even if it was the same poem. So I use that as my inspiration to counter the utter frustration and despair of the fact that every 6 months, I take what I thought was a great manuscript and then realize that it was terrible and tear it apart. And get rid of half the poems and put in a new half, and it becomes this Frankenstein monster that just keeps getting stitched back together every time it explodes. I think that where I'm feeling more comfortable finding themes and finding organizing principles that I do value, that I do believe in more and more… I hate to say it's aged, but I'm 38 now; And I think where I'm at at 38, versus where I was at 28 or at 18, or what have you, has just given me a literally longer quantity of time to live with the themes and ideas and forms and shapes that are turning out to last, rather than the ones that are turning out to to have flitted away in the night. It's about creating myself just as much as it's about creating a book or a theme. I think that in college and grad school, I always thought that finding your voice as a writer meant finding the way you would sound on the page or in a breath. And I didn't really realize that finding your voice also meant finding the things you would be vocalizing, like, finding the content. 


(CSA): I think that's really interesting. I was curious (also cuz I saw that one of the courses that you have taught a few times at CSU is on the publishing industry, and prepping poetry and writing for submission.) And I'm curious how you balance those things with, like, ‘Here is the narrative that I want to tell about myself,’ versus, ‘Here is what I know are the expectations of the industry.’


(KL): I think that, for me at least, it has always been just stupidly easier to be able to edit other people's work: to see other people's themes, and other people's quirks, and other people's ideas that should go together ‘this way, not that way,’ and to offer suggestions. I am either blessed or cursed with a really quick workshop eye. You know, I can read someone’s poem and be like, ‘OH! I think you should do THIS.’ And maybe I will disagree with that idea 10 minutes later, but I see it quickly enough to be able to start a conversation. All of that in a way that I can't do with my own work. I absolutely don't have a strong enough capacity rapidly to turn that lens around on myself and say, ‘Oh I've written a poem. Wow! I can see exactly how this fits into my larger body of work or into my manuscript or whatever…’ I mean it needs to percolate and marinate for months, if not years, in my own drawers. Whereas being able to say… oh! Editing the student journal, or, not editing… Advising! As faculty advisor for the student journal at CSUMB, you know I can say, okay, here are the submissions we've got. It's up to the student editors to decide how they ought to go, but I can suggest, ‘Well, maybe this one seems like it's talking to that one’ or ‘These two seem like they bounce off each other. What do you think?’ In a way that I just have to get a lot more distance with for myself. I'm too... I'm sure this is true of most writers, but you're too close to the subject.


(CSA): Yeah, and I think that's interesting too, because while your poetry is fairly broad in terms of different styles and different themes, I would say the majority of it is fairly personal and interior.


(KL): Yeah, absolutely. It's probably partly just a way of knowing that I can't afford therapy, so I might as well write poems instead. I don’t know, I say that as a joke but at the same time, in school when I was studying poetry — and I mean this with no disrespect to any of my professors who were all wonderful, brilliant poets and great teachers — but there were frequently repeated claims that therapy poetry isn't legit. It has to move; like, if you're doing it for yourself, that's not a good enough reason. You ought to be doing it for all of humankind. All of the good of the Canon, all of literary legacy forever. I’m like…no, actually, if it keeps me alive for another 24 hours that's equally valid. If it helps me figure out what I'm struggling with, that's equally valid. 


(CSA): Well, and so many of the claims, right? Like, the poo-pooing of confessional poetry — those come from a place of sexism and from a place of privilege. And it's interesting how much those are still being replicated even as there's so much more knowledge about where that gatekeeping comes from.


(KL): Exactly. And I think that that's another thing that has that, as my life has evolved in parallel with my work, I didn't come out as queer until five years ago, give or take, I think? And so again that idea of like, well I wasn't writing queer identified or identifying poems, so I didn't have to worry about the gatekeeping that said “Don't write queer identifying poems.” I didn't… I wasn't thinking about some of these issues in the same ways; I wasn’t thinking about toxic masculinity as it affects men's bodies as an issue, and now that's something that's very much on my mind and so I'm writing a lot of poems about it that just weren't... I wasn't told I couldn't write them before because I wasn't trying to write them before. And so I was coming from that place of privilege now, finally, doing the reverse of a lot of my students — a lot of the students that I work with in the classroom are starting off asking if they can break these barriers at the beginning, before they develop their voice or their craft. They're already starting with their themes, and I've had to work backwards to find my themes after my craft which is very strange it is interesting though and I think it right I think that hits on some of the things that intuitively attracted me to your poetry at the reading right I think there's you are coming from a very different place and a lot of poets and he said it can almost be seen as a working backwards and I think that makes it interesting and it it sheds a new light on process but before we get too far into process stuff I think we actually should hear one of your poems so if you don't mind I think the first one that I'd for you to read for us is dear Dad and you mentioned earlier that there's now a series of dear Dad homes can you maybe situate this for us in that series yeah absolutely so again they're they're all called dear Dad they're all all starting with that that letter postcard style address this was the first one I wrote so this one had not intended to have a continuing sequence attached to it this was back in and I want to say 2010 somewhere around there 11:00 there is a bit of and I guess the artifice is the word I never actually had the job that I mentioned having in this poem but it was close enough to work I've done it was it's the it's the truth in fiction it's right it's not a literal autobiography but it's authentic to the life I'm living so I to think about that way which is partly why it will end the way it will end so.
 
[He reads]
Dear Dad,
Today is my birthday.
At work they sang to me, and Amanda and Pepe
brought donuts for everyone.


I realize this means nothing to you.
When is your birthday?
What do you do?


I work in the language resource center
at a small junior college.
I explain things to people


who don't understand.
Today I corrected an exchange student
who thought medical was miracle.


The difference was surprisingly
hard to explain.
What else have you given?


Bone marrow? Blood?
Does your driver's license have the little dot
meaning they'll bury you with the coffin closed?


Or will you be burned?
I don't want to be burned.
I've seen Lebowski.


Do you movies?
Last week I watched The Kids Are All Right,
which featured Mark Ruffalo as the sperm-donor dad


for Annette Bening and Julianne Moore's
two kids. It was odd,
thinking about getting


in touch with you.
Don't worry.
I won't.


Each man is an island,
and whatever we throw
into the sea belongs to the sea.


I hope you are well.
I hope the weather is good where you are.
Today is my birthday.


My name is
[He finishes reading]


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): As you were setting this up, one of the things that you mentioned was that truth in fiction, right? This was not an actual job you had, but it was close. That hit a light bulb in my head for what you were talking about earlier, about trying to find the organizing principle that allowed you to create this self-narrative and I'm curious how that plays through. You talked about this one particular job in this one, but how that plays through the rest of this poem, and how that plays through your poetry in general?


(KL): It's funny, I can give you a much clearer answer to this with some other poems about my mom, than I necessarily can about my father, in that the ones about my father are already so hypothetical. I know how tall the guy was, and what color eyes he had, and that's it. And so everything else that I know about this other character is imaginary basically — for me. I can create what I need to bounce off of in my work, and so I think that that has often allowed me in those particular poems to do the same backward to myself; Like, if I'm creating this other person, then they might be imagining who I am in the same way which then allows us both to play around in the realm of the hypothetical, the realm of, ‘We create ourselves for each other.’ I mean, there's also just the things that any poet will steal like a raccoon from the world around us. I mean, the exchange student who thought the word “medical” was the word “miracle” in the poem was actually some little kid that I heard on the Boston T going home one day. I was like, oh that's a fantastic word swap mistake/misunderstanding. I’ll steal that and put it in a poem for someone who would make a similar mistake!


(CSA): Right, and I think there is also a lot of pertinence to write what this poem is about, which is you talking about a father who you don't know, a biological father who you haven't really had as a familial father.


(KL): Right?


(CSA): I was really interested in the way that the different themes of this poem unfold and interact, because — I mean, there were two things. One, it overtly explicitly is set up as a quest to know the other person, to know the father; But the way that each question is followed by a much longer diegesis on who you are,  so much of it is really about wanting to be known as well. But also the way that it’s split into these different themes about what you want to know and be known around. It starts with the birth and life, like, ‘when's your birthday?’ ‘What's your life like?’ — goes almost immediately into death, and then into this family realm before it moves into this recognition that all of this curiosity and this desire is going to be unfulfilled. The hope that's there at the end is present throughout; we get that all of this is Hoping. There's something really bittersweet to that, and I wanted to hear you talk about it yourself.


(KL): I love all of your comments and recognitions of how it moves because I think this is one of the “cheats” that that poets often get to enjoy, is hearing someone else or working with someone else who's like, “Oh I love what you did!” You’re like, “wow, you’re right, I did. I totally did. Yeah, that was intentional every single time.” No. I do think there’s a lot of intuitive metaphor making, though, that goes into…. the poems succeed. I won’t be as narcissistic as to call them ‘successful poems’ if I’ve written them, but the ones that at least have survived to get published and to get shared where I don’t necessarily always intend, or intend in advance, the structure, the skeleton, the ‘chapter 1,’ ‘chapter 2,’ ‘chapter 3,’ kind of scaffolding. I think that, especially with these father poems — these mystery father poems — the fundamental idea is: Do our parents create us? Not at a biological level: That's a given. But at a[n] individual, at a personality level. What do I owe to somebody I have literally never met and can never meet? And so this idea of, I can only have questions for that person, and I can only offer answers from myself — well, the only reason I'm asking the questions is because I must be questioning my own answers; Like, am I who I should have become? Am I who I would have become if this person had been present in my life? Am I also someone who would do this for someone else the way he did for me? — is the kind of questions. I hope that someone else out there is asking those questions back. Into the void, into the sea. 
I think that one of the other ways that I deal with that at a more craft level and more how the poem actually happened is by bringing in the choir of the rest of the world. Whether it's coworkers, or students, or the DMV, or pop culture. Movies! Big Lebowski, John Dunn (as pop culture as John Dunn could be I guess). If I can't actually have a conversation with a singular real person on the other side of this poem, then I can let everybody else in the world stand in for them as an illusion, as a reference, as a quote or a member of the chorus. You know like a Greek chorus: they're all like, ‘Oh well, he's not here to answer for you on stage, but WE can all say something.’ Okay, there we go. 


(CSA): Yeah I like that a lot. I like that idea — built into language too, right? — when there's no specificity, when there is no singular referent, then you do automatically open up to anyone possible. The scope of it shifts from one to everyone almost instantly. I wanted to ask you about the ending, both because you mentioned it and because I think it is just so striking. Tell me about that; You have this bookend of, “Today is my birthday,” but after that repetition at the en, there's “My name is,” and that's that's where it stops. So what's going on here? 


(KL): It's funny — in an earlier draft (and I'm slightly horrified to think that it might have been the published draft that came out in the journal SOFTBLOW), I had actually given my first name, and my family has this very just quirky eclectic tradition for at least two generations of going by our middle names, not our first names. So I am Kent — that's my middle name, but that's who I am. That's how I identify, that's how I introduce myself to my students, my friends, and whatever, and then I have this, ‘oh, only the government only the IRS and the DMV know about this mysterious first name,’ that no one else would ever recognize me. I mean, if someone calls and goes by my first name, I know it's a scam. (Clara guffaws) I'd actually used my first name in an early draft of this poem, and it said, “I hope you're well. I hope the weather is good where you are. Today is my birthday. My name is Nathaniel.” I liked that because I knew what it was doing, I knew what it meant, and I knew that someone would see that this is by Kent Leatham and they'd be all, ‘Who the hell is Nathaniel?’ Okay, maybe the reader would start to question what had just happened; It wouldn't make sense to them the way it would make sense to me. And so, the more I thought about it, that's way too insular. That's a poor — a good idea in a poor draft (or a poor idea in a good draft, whatever). And so finally I realized — of course! That the name has to go. The silence, the white space, the anything could be written in here like a mad lib, anybody could be written in — is the way the poem needs to end. It needs to be an open ending. “My name is…” My name is infinite. My name is anybody who's walking down the street next to you.


(CSA): And that goes back, too, to the, ‘what do you inherit from this person and how are you creating yourself?’


(KL):  Exactly


(CSA): Yeah, yeah. That's really interesting. So, obviously this is a pretty personal poem and one that is very strongly situated in your biographical details, and so I was curious what role identity in its many forms — not just in this one — plays in your writing.


(KL): I think it's very Central. It's funny. I was just reading… going backward through Robert Hass's essays. For some reason I've missed over many years his first big collection, 20th century Pleasures, and so I have been reading that, and had read this piece about Stanley Kunitz and how he compares Wallace Stevens poetry as this very outward-looking lyrical static vision with Kunitz who is very confessional and inward looking. Kunitz is always looking into his own pain, his own family, his own struggles and issues year after year after year. I don't know if we even still have schools in American poetry like the Confessionals or the Modernists or the Imagists or the what have you — the Black Mountain. But I think that I would probably tag myself as being most closely aligned with confessional poetry in that I tend to put myself at the heart of it. Whether I'm talking about myself explicitly in a poem or not, my relationships, at least — to people, to the world, to ideas, to what not — are always going to be at the center. I really want that to be not a narcissistic solipsistic like, ‘I am at the middle because I matter most,’ but almost in the opposite: I matter least. Therefore, the only thing I can know is looking through my own eyes outward, like everything else.


(CSA): It’s almost like there are discussions in journalism around this too, where the more you pretend at objectivity — like all these early attempts to remove the journalist from the article, it really just hides that. It obscures all of their biases and all the things that they're thinking, and it makes them — It is self-aggrandizing in a certain way because in obscuring those it's taking those and making those universal fact. So I buy that, at least.


(KL): Totally! I mean 2e just lost Joan Didion a couple weeks ago, and the new journalism style dovetails with what you're talking about where like: no, the author is not of central importance, but the author's recognition of their centrality is crucially important to being truthful rather than necessarily factual. 


(CSA): Yeah, and I think there are these interesting discussions going on in criticism right now about the role and placement of ‘Death of the Author’. Especially now when it's so easy to access living authors, it's almost like you're getting this pendulum swing way in the other direction where people not only expect authors… They expect to have some —(I'm going to say author way too much)— but authorial authority, right? There is this expectation of authority that the author has the final say on what they're doing, but also that authors are to be held to account to that to some extent. The interpretations that previously fell under ‘Death of the Author’ of like: here is somebody interpreting this and recognizing it as their own interpretation, are suddenly being attributed back to the author. So, I don't know, I just think this is a really interesting time to be alive and to be in a literary circle because these things that we thought of as so simple as like, ‘There's one point of view, and here's everybody else” — that they're getting really blended. 


(KL): Yeah absolutely. I feel I'm going to jump ahead here in your plan, your order of operations —


(CSA): Go for it!


(KL): — by mentioning translation as a concept and as a thing that I do. (We’re all leading here very carefully.) But I think that that idea of, ‘Where is the author in relation to the reader in relation to the text,’ is something that I probably consciously have to think about a lot more in my translation work because I am not the author, and yet, I still am. And yet I'm not. And I have no idea who my reader might be, or when my reader might be, or how their relationships to me and to the text that I'm translating are going to interfere or interact or complicate the whole dynamic.


(CSA): Well, so let’s do that! Let’s go skip ahead because I was so interested —I think you had a line in your email where you sent me the things that you were interested in reading, and where you talked about some of your… you referred to some of your translations as “legit,” and other ones as as presumably not legit. I just thought that was such a fascinating way to think about it. I wondered if you would talk first of all generally about the way that you approach translations and what your general philosophy is, and then when you're done with that, I'm going to ask you some questions about some specific poems you translated. 


(KL): Yeah absolutely. So I think my loose use of legitimacy as a self-applied label for some of my translations is… it's more about where I've done the work that can be most… can be perceived as being most correct to the original text, versus work that is simply inspired by the original text in a much looser — more of a rendition, more of a version. And really, going back to the previous comments that we were talking about with ‘Death of the Author’ and the generational changes through American poetry, and including how American translators have brought the world into American poetry and how that has then changed American poetry, because this is the only place I've lived and written from and therefore I won’t even begin to dare to talk about the rest of the worlds’ schools or styles. But we mentioned Joan Didion — Now that she's dead; We can talk about Robert Bligh now that he's dead. Finding out that Bly was hugely instrumental in bringing World poetry in translation to American readers in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s — every time he had a new journal title. And yet knowing that a lot of his translations are pretty suspect in retrospect in terms of their accuracy to the original source text. So for for my work, I don't necessarily love the translations I've done that are more accurate, are more “legitimate” as scholarly renditions.


(CSA): — fidelity to the original poem.


(KL):  Exactly! Even if it keeps the poetry, even if it keeps the music and the and the joie da vivre of the original text, they seem more like academic exercises; that I am merely the conduit bringing this poem to modern audiences. Okay, great. The ones that I really love messing with more are the ones where it's like, okay: I know the original text and I've tried to share it in some way for a modern audience, a contemporary audience, but I have also tried to make it representative of our current moment in time, where it's not just, “here is what they wrote in 1475,’ but, here is what we're talking about in 2022 with a nod to 1470. 


(CSA): One of my favorite works of modern translation (which is a weird category to have in your brain, but whatever) is the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey, and there's a 90-page translator's note in that which is so insightful and fascinating. I think one of the things that she does that I find so interesting is the way that she thinks about Fidelity in translation is so different from that stodgy, traditionalist way of thinking about Fidelity. She talks about how, for example, in choosing a particular translation for the female house slaves — that the Greek word for that that were part of Odysseus's household — so much of the traditional translations allied the fact that they were slaves, or if they don't ally the fact that they were slaves, they allied a lot of what that meant. They allied the hierarchy of different servants and slaves in the time period. I think she does a lot of that stuff; She also has a long conversation on the color of the sea. The color of the (presumably) the Mediterranean that I think is really interesting. But reading that note and reading her translation in general, it really flips a switch in your brain about what it means to be accurate in a translation, and I think some of it goes back to that conversation we were having about journalism and people like Didion, where so much of that attempt to get to this place of fidelity and accuracy really just elides all of the baggage that you're bringing with you into that translation.


(KL): Right, exactly. I mean I can't assume that I can use white American male English because that's what comes out of my mouth to translate anything else. Whether it's someone who is also of the same race and ethnicity or time period or gender or class or what have you, much less a whole different country, continent, century, etc. I do translations for myself almost in that way. I'm talking to myself. I'm writing the poem that I would want to be able to read fluently in a language and a voice that makes sense to me, that feels tangible to me. And so hoping that it's contemporary and comprehensive and accessible enough that enough other people today will be able to find what I'm finding from it. But also knowing that I'm not Scottish, I'm not any of a million other things. (I mean, ethnically, ancestrally Scottish, but not for a number of family generations.) The word choices I use — even without making larger, more artistic license or, taking those liberties, even without really changing a poem — just the fact of the translation is already so radically subjective and you're not not selfish, but self-infused.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): Let’s talk about some specifics, then. I picked the two shorter poems because one of those was the loose translation, one of them wasn't, and, they're shorter. So I think we can talk about them together without getting too lost in the weeds. The one that you sent me that you said was more interpretive was “Sappho 16,” and I wondered if you could walk me through what you were doing with that. Feel free to read all of it or to bring in lines as relevant; and then maybe compare it with the Gavin Douglas’ poem, “in which the ghost of Anchises explains the nature of the Anima Mundi to Aeneas.”


(KL): Yeah! For the Sappho, I have absolutely no background in Greek — modern or classical. I am not a translator of Greek, or of Sappho in that, again, “legitimate” (I’m going to go default to that word) [Clara chuckles] in that “legitimate” sense. I think that I justified approaching this poem in the way that I did, not calling it a translation — I didn't submit it as a translator, I submitted it as a poem. The title is “Sappho 16,” not “Sappho the 16th fragment” or, “a translation of the 16th fragment of Sappho.” No. This is a cover version of that song by the famous artist that you all know. And specifically picking the poem that I think of the hundred and seventy-what-have-you fragments of Sappho that are still in existence, this is probably one of if not the most famous, I think, still to us: an audience. The idea that some say military force is the most beautiful thing in the world but Sappho says, ‘No! It's love!’ and she goes on to explain why and who and how in what's left of the poem. I wrote this… whatever we want to call it — poem, translation, rendition — probably around…in the aughts, still. It was after 2000 and before 2010. It was that time of: We are absolutely at war in all the places and all the ways in America now, looking out at the rest of the world. This idea of: How should Americans think about American military power and involvement? And, what does a global community even mean anymore? Is therefore a question of ‘what does global literature mean?’ If we’re not part of a global community, if we're imperial, or still colonizing other countries in as much as we do (and did), what does that mean for reading literature from those other countries? Even if it's thousands of years old? In this Sappho translation, I wanted to bring in the recognition that like, ‘Oh yeah, turns out humans have always questioned military involvement and its legitimacy or veracity or importance, and also looking, then, at drone strikes — the thing that Sappho could never could have imagined, and yet… here we are. Still blowing the hell out of innocent people at weddings and at schools and at hospitals that may often have looked like they did 3,000 years ago in certain parts of the world.


(CSA): So I think I will ask you to read it—


(KL): Yeah, absolutely,


.(CSA): ...briefly because otherwise I think I will get murdered by my audience.
 
(KL): [Kent laughs] It's all good. So. 


[He reads]
Sappho 16
Some say the Army 
and some the Marines 
and some say the Air Force 
is the greatest sight 
sweeping over this crippled earth 
but I say love 


for example 
a wedding 
the bride's face hidden. as though no longer hers to share 
and the sound of wailing 


oh, Anaktoria 
what have they done 
the soldiers 
on your wedding day
[He finishes reading]


(CSA): Thank you. You just talked a bit about what you were doing with that: the ways that you changed it. You can hear some of it in there, like Marines and Air Force would not have been things that were part of Sappho's worldview at that particular point in time, at least not in not in those precise ways. So yeah, compare that with this other poem that that you sent me, the Gavin Douglas poem.


(KL): So Gavin Douglaslas is one of the three primary authors that I've translated the most from the northern Renaissance, kind of the late medieval/early Renaissance Scotland. And again, I got into this particular realm of literature by doing a lot of family genealogy and just being interested in in my Scottish heritage, and discovered that many Americans aren't aware — many English-speaking Americans aren't aware that the British isles aren't divided between English and Gaelic and Welsh; That there's also Scots. And it's this shaggy, in-between language where it branched off from early English around 1350, kind of around Chaucer's time, that English stayed south and Scots stayed North. So they share the same grammar, the same syntactical roots, and a lot of similar etymologies, but then the specific vocabulary of Scots has always been very different, very unique. What ended up happening was that a lot of people today will look at a Scots language text — whether it's historic or contemporary — and it feels like you should understand it, but you don't quite get it and don't know the vocabulary if you don't have the diction; And so it just falls through the cracks. It's not foreign enough to merit translation most of the time, but it's not native enough to be understood to a non Scots-speaking audience. I was like, ‘Wow!’ I haven't discovered this, but I've stumbled upon this thing where it's like: Here's a whole treasure trove of literature that just isn't getting translated, isn't getting recognized for what it is. The beautiful thing about Gavin Douglas (who lived from 1474 to 1522 in Scotland) was that he was the first Anglo based translator to create a poetic translation of Ovid’s Aeneid, but he did it in to Scots. And so it blossomed, and then it vanished again from people who don't recognize that language for its contributions to Western literature. And not only did he translate the Aeneid, he expanded upon it. He took ridiculous liberties with it, which actually goes counter to what I'm doing to his text, versus what I did to Sappho. He was the one who was like, ‘Oh! I'll add extra chapters! I’ll add prologues to the prologue!’ I mean, if he found an image that he liked from Ovid, he was like, let's go to town on this. Let's just wax poetic and rhapsodic for as long as possible. And so, Gavin Douglas was this just brilliant, masterful translator with his own artistic liberties, and so I feel much less of a need to bring more of myself to him to Ovid, thrice removed; Whereas he's already got an English rhythm that I can work with. It already sounds in Scots like it does in English to me, musically. So all I really felt I needed to do was update the vocabulary and some of some of the lines here and there a little bit so that it made more sense in English — in modern, contemporary, American English.
This next piece is a tiny little excerpt from book six of the Aeneid (what Douglas called the Eneados), in which Aeneas’ father is explaining the nature — his dead father is explaining the nature of the spirit that binds the world together — in a slightly more lyrical way than Ovid did in the original Latin.


[He reads]
From the beginning, each thing in its place— 
The fires below, the earth, icy space, 
The vast, windswept plains of the sea, 
The moon’s white flame in the lantern of sky, 
The stars salt, and the sun’s hot yolk— 
In each dwells a spirit, a drop from the lake
Of divine sustenance, grease for the gears 
Of this world’s great engine, spread over the years 
And leagues, commingled, infused into each 
Living thing—man, woman, child, and beast, 
And birds that swim fish through the air, 
And all the sea-serpents and monsters that share 
The uncarved depths below the salt: 
From the cores of their cells, each one is called 
To life by these dewdrops, this unguent, this oil, 
Quickened within by the weight of a soul. 
[He finishes reading]


(CSA): I really liked what you were saying about Douglas already having taken all these liberties with it, making it feel in some ways less like you need to insert yourself. That's such an interesting idea to me, that to some extent it's because there's already a strong personality here and a strong mediating personality between the original and what we have now.


(KL): Exactly. I doubt that we'll get (at least within a generation) a more definitive title to the Sapphic Fragments than Ann Carson's translations, but of course she was responding to all the previous previous previous previous. Like, I'm not going to do the definitive Sappho; There’s no way I can bring an authority to that, to those texts. So I will just riff on Sappho; I will just do the cover song version of how I think of Sappho in America in the 2000s. Whereas Gavin Douglas, it's like, yeah: he's already done the cover song, and I'm just it's keeping the file from pixelating too far. Yeah? Or fragmenting. I am  just trying to blow the dust off.


(CSA): Your remastering it


(KL): Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's very strange to even think of translating a translation, translating a translator.


(CSA): — but so much of that is exactly that: these poems that come from this great oral history, that's exactly what they were — they were passed from person to person before they were ever written down. Every new telling was a translation to some extent.
 
(KL): Yes, exactly. Exactly.


(CSA): I want to make sure we have time for at least one more of your poems. So would you mind reading “Swarm”?


(KL): This is one of those long breath, kind of big, big, deep breath because it doesn't stop.


(CSA): [with a chuckle] Go from the diaphragm
 
(KL): Indeed.


[He reads]
Swarm
the first time I got stung by a swarm of I was going to say hornets but they’re not I know what a
hornet is compared to a bee but I’m not entirely sure if a hornet is the same as a wasp I suppose I
could look it up but anyway these were yellowjackets built more like a bee but they nest in the
ground and don’t die the first time they sting you they just keep stinging and stinging there are so
many kinds of bees honey and humble and sweat and meat though I think meat bees are the same
as yellowjackets maybe anyway I was six a week before the first day of school they got caught in
my hair and under my shirt and wouldn’t stop stinging I’d ridden over their nest or hive in the
woods with my bike it seems silly now not to know the difference between a hornet and a wasp
my mother has started calling the whole lot of them things she knows the difference but the
words are slipping away no one talks about how the mass bee deaths which is called colony
collapse disorder are affecting the yellowjacket population I suppose people actually are talking
about it but I haven’t heard or seen it in the news when a regular bee stings you it rips out part of
its abdomen and digestive tract and muscles and nerves and it hurts you to be stung but it kills
the bee I haven’t been stung in twenty or thirty years I never asked if my mother has been stung
sometimes the things we fear most never go away and sometimes you wonder suddenly if maybe
they might already be gone
[He finishes reading]


(CSA): So for listeners who can't see the poem on the page, I just want to share a little bit about the way that it appears; It's written as a single paragraph with no line breaks, no periods, no commas, which is fitting for the subject matter, right? A swarm is powerful and it's big, but it's undifferentiated. You can't really distinguish between individuals. It's hard to know what to focus on, or what matters or really even in it. I was curious to hear you talk about what is the metaphor of the swarm doing for you here? What are you hoping to evoke with it?


(KL): It's funny — I didn't actually select this poem as representative of the sequence I'm working on about my mother, or the poem about my father, specifically because they were the first ones I'd written in those sequences; But this was one of the very first poems, as it happens, is that I wrote about thinking about my mother slowly developing aphasia or dementia or any kind of loss of self, loss of ability to articulate the self as she ages. And, disclaimer for any listeners who may know my mother, she's not there yet but she's getting there, and so a lot of the poems I'm writing — not this one specifically or uniquely, but a lot of the poems I'm writing about that theme are preemptive. I'm, again, creating a persona of someone who is further gone than they actually are in real life, so that I can work through those ideas and those relationships and those thoughts so I’ll be ready for it when the actual reality comes around. And so in this case, the idea of like, oh! In the poem I get to a point of realizing that I've never asked my mom if she was stung by a bee. By writing that in a poem first, by getting to that thought in the poem first, by letting this swarm slowly reveal itself to that point, it helped me realize that I should go have a conversation with my mom about, you know, insects. And I think that the idea of the swarm is — formally and thematically — is this idea of… You know, it's the Robert Frost “No surprise for the writer, No surprise for the reader.” If I know what shape an ambiguous amorphous cloud of ideas is going to take by the end, then it won't really get me there. If I know the answer to the question, then there's no point writing a poem about it. Starting with the concept of a swarm, both visually on the page and thematically, and using that to slowly suss out the one specific insect that that represents my mom, or our relationship, or a memory, or the question of what memory means — was something that I don't think I could have got to without that form. I couldn't have talked to my father without writing a letter because he's not here. I couldn't have questioned my mother without thinking about experiences she may or may not have had prior to asking the question.


(CSA): Right, to some extent it's not exactly an empathetic exercise, but it is the… It's circling around what that thought process must look like. It's circling around getting from the broad strokes, the maybe general picture of a particular topic, into what it means to that individual person.


(KL):  Exactly. And I think that probably was more obvious to readers than I even realized when I started writing. But the idea… the queen bee. Why use bees? Why use a swarm of swarming insects for this poem? Well it ends up being about my mom, and my mom is the queen at the core of the hive here.
(CSA): The one individual.


(KL): Yeah, exactly. The one that matters to the existence of the poem.


(CSA): Kent, it's been great talking to you. I think we are definitely closing in on the end of our time, but I just want to thank you so much for joining me today. 


(KL): Thank you, Clara, it has been a joy, and thank you for bringing all of the insight to the works that I'm glad, hopefully merited those lovely readings.


(CSA): To learn more about Kent and his writing, visit kentleatham.weebly.com.


You can catch Story Behind the Story the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@KSQD.org.


The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons; He also wrote our theme.