MRB Chelko is the recipient of a 2013 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Manhattations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including: AGNI Online; Forklift, Ohio; Indiana Review; PANK; and Poetry International. Her chapbooks are The World After Czeslaw Milosz (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and What To Tell The Sleeping Babies (sunnyoutside, 2010). Chelko holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of New Hampshire. She lives in Central Harlem.
Radar:
Your poem “Prayer” is evocative of childhood and has powerful childhood imagery in it. What memory sparked this poem, if any? What story did it come out of?
Chelko:
This is an interesting poem because, for a long time, I didn't think it was one, or I didn't think it had succeeded. I felt that there wasn't tension between [the images], that something had fallen flat. But then I sent a group of poems out ...and this was the poem that seemed to connect with people more than the others, which I thought had been more successful. That happens sometimes: I don't know which poems are actually interesting… I have earned a respect for “Prayer” through other people's experience of it, and I think over time that I've become more comfortable with the leaps the poem makes.
In terms of the imagery of the poem… Writing about this funny thing that I used to do with my friends all the time—holding a fake cup at the bottom of the pool for as long as you could and having a tea party down there—for some reason, that reminded me of this aquarium that I had for a garter snake that I caught with my father in the garden of our church when I was, maybe, in second grade. I loved the snake very, very much until we killed him by super-gluing a crack in the tank. We didn't know that it would poison the snake. The tank doesn't end up making it into the poem, even though the snake does and the super-glue does—but there was a connection in my imagination between that [snake] tank and the swimming pool with the children inside of it… so I have to trust that, that tension and that connection remain implicit in the language.
Radar:
Your chapbook Manhattations was chosen by Mary Ruefle as a PSA Chapbook Fellowship winner for 2013. Congratulations! How long did the manuscript take you to write? How did the manuscript evolve for you?
Chelko:
You know, I love this manuscript because it's the first thing I wrote outside of grad school. We moved into the city [New York], and I just started writing poems so that I could break out of the self-consciousness of the workshop setting. I woke up every day and I wrote poems, whatever I wanted to write, and I wasn't concerned about who was going to look at them at the end of the week. I'd had that workshop structure in my life in some way for about seven years previous to that, so it just felt incredible to write totally on my own. I think all the poems ended up being about that moment of being overwhelmed in the city, loving the city, being scared of the city, being lonely here.
I wrote tons [of these poems]—over 100, maybe closer to 200, and a lot of them were unsuccessful. I wasn't really concerned that I wasn't revising them; I was just moving forward. I tend to write into a voice for as long as it lasts, without committing too much time to revision, and when that moment ends, I spend a lot of time going back over it and deciding what I can keep.
So, after maybe 6 months of writing these “manhattations”—these little, untitled poems, meditations, lamentations on Manhattan—I thought I had my first book… I revised the poems and I cut many. I left about 60, and I packaged them together, and I sent them out to book contests and journals. Many of the poems were picked up in journals, but the book was never picked up as a manuscript. So I moved on with different projects, and I set the manuscript aside.
Then, a couple of years later, I went back to it, and I had to figure out what it was about the poems that hadn't gotten published in journals. Were they as good as I thought they were? Did they really belong in the series? And ultimately I decided that, really, about 50-percent of the book wasn't to the standard of the rest of the poems… So I bundled those [remaining] poems in a chapbook, and I submitted it to one place, which I thought was appropriate for it: the New York Chapbook Fellowship. And it won!
This was a 3-year process of continuing to be more and more honest with myself about what the series actually was and how successful it had been. I think it's a good lesson in general that again, like “Prayer,” we don't know ourselves what our best work is, and our best work isn't meant for ourselves, it's meant for others anyway. I like to let the world choose—it's kind of liberating, I think, and it keeps you humble when the world doesn't choose anything you expected it to.
Radar:
So, what is your writing schedule? How and when do you write?
Chelko:
It used to be really sporadic; I would write a whole bunch for a couple of days, then not for awhile. I always travel with a notebook—I have for years—so a lot of my writing happens initially in a moment of transit, on the subway, or waiting in a line somewhere.
Now that my life is much more domestic [since the birth of my daughter in 2012], my writing happens primarily in the morning. I wake up before my daughter does, and I try to do my writing then. Sometimes I wake up at 5AM so that I can work for 3, 4, 5 hours on my own before her day starts. And then on the weekends or in the evenings I try to escape to the coffee shop.
I've heard musicians say that if they don't practice for one day, they feel like they haven't practiced for two days, and people can hear it. And I feel that as a writer, too. If I don't write at least a little bit every day, I can hear it. I try to write something down every day to stay in touch with... whatever voice it is I'm in at that time.
Radar:
For you, which subjects do you tend to write about? Which subjects do you find difficult to address? Or do you feel that subject matter is more secondary in your process?
Chelko:
Subject matter is not something I think about consciously. I think a lot about language and voice and tone and craft. I tend to write in a series, so I'll write a bunch of poems until I find a voice that I think is interesting and then I'll write into that voice for several poems—dozens or hundreds. I don't tend to think about subject in the direct sense in that process. However, subjects tend to arise from whatever voice [I inhabit]... and once that happens, I try to pay attention to it and keep it going as long as it seems natural. I'm most interested in how language surprises me, the difficulties of language, sound, rhythm—and making something that's exciting not only on the page, but to listen to out loud.
Radar:
With all of that in mind, at what point did you really begin to feel that you had something to say, or you knew what you wanted to say, as a poet—when did you know you wanted to make your work public?
Chelko:
I had this belief really early on in graduate work that if I didn't treat my graduate writing like it was “real world writing”—whatever that means—if I didn't think of it in the context of the public—that I was going to struggle a lot outside of school. I believed that I always needed to think about myself as a writer in the world, not a writer in [an MFA] program. So I started to submit my work really, really early—before it was ready—to journals, which is something I partially regret. But I'm partially grateful that I did, because it gave me really good habits in terms of submission, and it gave me a good understanding that my writing was always a public act, and I was accountable for it in a larger sense.
Radar:
It's interesting because so many poets have such a private or an introverted worldview, but ultimately the poem is a public utterance, and if you don't frame it that way, or think about it that way, it's not really a poem.
Chelko:
Yes. And I think the poem suffers. It suffers when you're not held accountable for what's there in terms of your craft and in terms of meaning. The poem has to get outside of the writer or whatever the impetus for writing it was. It has to move beyond that and become a surprise. I think it helps me to arrive there if I think about making it for someone else, not for myself.
Radar:
What writers do you admire? What writers have influenced you or had a major impact on your work?
Chelko:
Two really important poets in my life have been Charles Simic and David Rivard. Charles Simic was my favorite poet in undergrad and went on to become my teacher, and David Rivard is a poet whose work I wasn't familiar with until he became my teacher. But those two human beings and poets have been extremely important to me.
The fiction and poetry of Paul Auster; Anne Sexton, particularly her book Transformations; all of Ben Lerner's books; Szymborska's book View with a Grain of Sand; Matt Rohrer; Louise Glück; Vasko Popa; Gerald Stern; Beckian Fritz Goldberg—her book Reliquary Fever is amazing; Czeslaw Milosz; Wallace Stevens...
More recently, I've been returning to e.e. cummings and John Berryman. I am reading Aase Berg's book With Deer, which has been very influential. Mary Ruefle; Matt Rasmussen—his book Black Aperture is gorgeous; Lyn Higenian's book My Life; Major Jackson's book Holding Company.
I just ordered Anthony Madrid's book I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say. I heard him read at a Best American Poetry anthology launch party and his poems were super playful. Also on deck is Kenneth Koch's New Addresses, which I've already read, but it keeps popping into my head, and I don't own it.
So there's my short list of both canonized and brand-new writers.
Radar:
Finally: Do you have anything you want to share with Radar readers about your New Year's resolutions or your writing goals in 2014?
Chelko:
In 2014, for me, the big question is going to be how to balance professional life with private life, with motherhood. I've had a year [2013] where I've had the luxury of a lot of writing time. Now that I need to work more on things that aren't poetry, I guess my challenge for this year is to reorganize my life in such a way that poetry doesn't have to take a backseat. The biggest challenge of being a writer is that life doesn't make room for the writing to happen; you have to make room for the writing to happen.