Cynthia Woodman Kerkham is the author of the poetry collection Good Holding Ground, the chapbook with feathers, and is the co-editor of the anthology Poems from Planet Earth. Water Quality is her most recent collection. Cynthia lives in Victoria, B.C., where she teaches and edits, and hasn’t found a body of water she doesn’t like.
The lush poems in Water Quality ponder ‘what does water want?’ Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here.
Interview by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): I love your use of the haibun, that harmony of prose and poetry. It seems fitting for your theme of harmony, or struggle to reach it. And I love the “triple haibun”—so effective to balance narrative and image. How do you decide on this form, and whether to use form poems at all?
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham (CWK): Knowing what forms are available is part of my toolkit. The option of inventing a form is also available, the way Jericho Brown did with the duplex. With “Fork and Spoon Lake,” I wrote the prose poem and then, in the editing process, felt that the piece needed more poetry, and I love the leap the haibun offers. Basho’s original haibun were travel poems, and this poem is a journey—a search for silence—so the medium fit the message.
As Jen Currin recently said in a workshop, “constraint breeds creativity,” and I think that’s true. Received forms offer constraint. I don’t often set out to write in a particular form; instead, the material suggests. For instance, if a line comes in iambic pentameter, and love is in the air, I might work into a sonnet, or if I find four gorgeous lines, I might play with a glosa. Each form has a feel to it. Free verse is also a form, so often that’s where the material takes me.
BP: Your book—the first part, for sure –is a lesson on stewarding a piece of land, and the battles between ‘guardian’ and ‘gardener’ thinking. What do you hope the reader will come to understand through reading your book?
CWK: In my research for this book, I learned that the water that is now on earth is all the water we’ll ever have: We’ve got this one hydrosphere and that’s it. You may know this, but I didn’t; I imagined, perhaps, that water was replenished from the atmosphere. But no. After reading this book, I hope the reader feels how water moves through everything, how gorgeous it is, how precious. And this felt understanding will give it all the respect and care it is due. The same old green song, I know, but I guess it’s necessary to keep singing it, to inspire us to live as much as we can in concert with the elements.
BP: There is a complicated thematic thread throughout the book, and I love how you interwove them all with water. How did you determine which poems in which order? Reading the section “Fragrant Harbour” for example, did you use a chronological or other order? It’s always a challenge to decide which poems fit before and after another. How did your process go?
CWK: Ordering is tough. I put all the poems on the floor and shuffle them around. I consider many links, including theme, and feel my way. Sometimes a word or image or colour links with the poem that comes after, sometimes mood, or length (short followed by long followed by short). Other times the order is chronological. In the section “Fragrant Harbour” I organized the poems from the sixties chronologically, splicing in poems from a trip back in 2017.
BP: My favorite two questions: first, how does your writing practise go? Is it an everyday thing? Do you set aside time just for editing, or do you have a system of new work/working on? Do you work to deadline or do you hate deadlines? Do you write when the Muse moves you or do you move the Muse? (This is a distinction in the Psalms: some say –translated—“to David, a song,” and some say “ a song from David,” pointing out that sometimes the psalms just arrive in King David’s hands, and sometimes he needs to be at the desk working to make the psalms come.
CWK: Great dual translation of “to David, a song,” and “a song from David,” because the process is both; however, I have to sit at my desk and practice writing for the inspiration to have a place to land. I can count on the fingers of a severely mutilated hand, as my dad used to say, the number of times a poem has come whole without need of editing. My best process is daily practice (for me in the mornings) and from that daily writing either freewriting, or from a prompt or with a task, seeds of a poem will come. I set myself a task, for instance, of walking in the mornings for 30 days (this was during the Covid lockdown) and finding an object to write a prose poem about. I write often by hand, or record into my phone while walking, then the first edit is when I transcribe to the computer.
BP: Second, what is your editing process? Do you ‘tweak’ your poems or do huge renovations? Or both? Do you put your poems aside for a time, or keep working on them until they are right?
CWK: I love editing, so I have to be careful not to over-edit! I keep editing even when the poems are in a book! This I do whenever I have time in the day. I read the poem aloud, asking myself: “Is that what I really mean?” or “What’s a better word here?” or “Can I add more music?” In the editing part of the process, I’ll do research, trying to go deeper with the metaphors.
BP: Sometimes you substitute spaces instead of punctuation, as in the poem “Pachina Bay” and others. What are your thoughts about punctuation? What do you advise new writers about the use of punctuation in their poems?
CWK: In “Pachina Bay” I wanted more time in the pauses, more hesitancy as I approached a tricky subject and emotion, and that’s why I used spaces between thoughts and images instead of a comma and very little punctuation. I wanted to convey the dreamy quality of the place, too. In “After Fifty Years” I also did not use any punctuation because I wanted to suggest the fragmentary nature of the experience of returning—the collision of what was and what is. Punctuation is often necessary for clarity, and I’m a big fan of both. It helps the line flow. For new writers I suggest they play with having conventional punctuation and not having it and see what suits the material. Best, too, to use it sparingly.
BP: That suggests another question, arising from your many years of teaching and writing: what kind of advice would you give emerging writers?
CWK: Don’t let fear stop you. I was shaking with it in my first workshop when asked to produce a poem overnight and perform it with a homemade mask the next morning. Thanks, Patrick! But I had the support of the instructor and of the community at the workshop and got past the jitters with their help. We started a writing group from the first workshop which goes to this day, so I suggest emerging writers do that. Find a supportive community. The encouragement, learning and inspiration are lifeblood.
BP: So much personal knowledge in these poems, so much research too. What a treat to read these poems, and to contemplate the important issues you have embedded in the poems. Guardians or gardeners? Destroyers or conservers? What will it be, eh? Thank you!.