April 2023

Caesura Presents…Katie Manning

Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She’s the author of Tasty Other, which won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and her most recent collections are How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press, 2022) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books, 2020). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on season 3 of the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in American Journal of Nursing, december, The Lascaux Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and many other venues. 

Website: https://www.katiemanningpoet.com/

Twitter: @iamkatmann

Instagram: @katiemanningpoet

Recontextualizing the Contemporary Divine

John:
Congratulations on the publication of Hereverent! In it, I see many similarities to your previous collection, The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, in how you use Biblical themes and terminology to explore contemporary and historical struggles, cultural issues, and inequal societal expectations. However, Hereverent lays these inherent connections even more bare. Can you speak to how Hereverent acts as both a natural complement and natural progression from your earlier work?

Katie:

Thanks, John! I hadn’t stepped back and thought about this project specifically in connection with The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, so I love this invitation to compare these two collections. I started the project that became Hereverent in 2012, the year before The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman was published and about 5 years after I wrote the bulk of TGotBW. Since I’m always writing as me, both collections reveal my interests in exploring faith and doubt, women’s lives, and language itself.

Both collections also began with something that troubled me. The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman grew out of my fascination with the bleeding woman who appears in three of the gospel narratives. From a young age, I was disturbed that we didn’t learn her name or anything else about her, so I wrote, researched, and wrote some more to imagine a life for her. By the end, she had jumped out of her time and place into a more present-day setting. I tried to resist writing those poems for a while, but the ideas kept coming, so I had to write. With TGotBW, I was fascinated by the sometimes blurry boundary between faith and doubt, and also with the question of what counts as having faith.

With Hereverent, I started from a place of anger about something more current (although it’s been going on for a long time): the way some people take language from the Bible out of context and use it as a weapon against others. I used the last chapter of each book of the Bible as a word bank to create each poem, which I thought of as a form of protest art. Along the way, I realized that this process also resembled the devotional practice of lectio divina, divine reading, which involves reading the text several times and paying attention to what stands out. I became fascinated by this blurring of angry protest and devotional practice.

 John:

What a fascinating and painstaking process! I’d love to ask you a question that I’m asked all the time, as I feel much of my work is, in a way, “protest art.” How do you write in a way that ensures your themes and intent are clear while avoiding preachiness and didacticism? It’s so easy to fall into the habit of leaning too far toward the latter, which, to me, seems like the poet is trying to dictate the reader’s response, limiting our unique engagement with the work. Instead, your poetry, though it has what one might call a “point,” feels more like exploration that lesson. How do you navigate that thin balance beam?

Katie:

I love this question. First, I’m relieved to know that my work is giving off a sense of exploration rather than preachiness, so thank you! For my poems or projects that are rooted in protest or that have an argument to make, I do hope to invite readers into a process of exploration with me. In this new collection, I sometimes resist straightforward meaning with playful fragmentation that can work like a Rorschach test and letting the text reveal something about the reader feels like a good way to resist didacticism and invite curiosity instead.

John:

This sounds similar to my own process with such poems. I tend to fragment, to leap, to draw various connections instead of beelining it toward one specific interpretation. Allowing readers to make up their own minds on a poem’s exploration, by its nature, avoids preachiness or overt, forced meaning.

This conversation reminds me of a few lines from your poem “The Book of Class,” in which you say:

the dust returns to
meaning

find
the word
like firmly embedded nails
in
every hidden thing

There is meaning in dust, and there are words in everything, especially the less obvious things. How do you go about imbuing the minutia with depth while remaining pretty broad, ambiguous, and accessible with your language? In other words, how do you make the complex seem so simple, the small so large, the large so small?

Katie:

I was actually thinking of “The Book of Class” when I mentioned that I resist straightforward meaning. The diction in this poem is simple, and the language feels straightforward at first, but then these lines invite different associations and have so many possibilities for interpretation. For instance, do the embedded nails conjure hammered hardware or fingernails? Both options are there in the text.

John:

Practically speaking, be it this poem or others, how do you “resist straightforward meaning.” Let’s say you’re speaking to a group of emerging poets who are having a hard time being both clear and ambiguous with their more socio-political poems. What advice would you have for them? How do you use language to express what language cannot fully express? How do you use imagery and metaphor to say without saying?

Katie:

Oh, John. I wish I had an easy answer for this—but no, maybe I don’t really wish that at all. I think the drive to say what language can’t fully express is one of the questions that keeps me writing. I might never have an answer. What I try to teach my students, and what I’d want to advise emerging poets, is that you have to play. Even when the subject matter is heavy and the purpose is serious, the process of creating poetry can be playful, and that’s when clarity and ambiguity will dance.

John:

I love the phrase “when clarity and ambiguity will dance”! I feel that’s a perfect encapsulation of my own poetic goals…to be clear in my themes but ambiguous in how those themes might resonate with each reader. And the juxtaposition of heaviness and pure linguistic play plays a big role in that. This reminds me of the following lines from your poem “The Book of What”:

heaven
came down from heaven
and become like dead men

The themes are so deeply serious yet the language sparks and is spirited, almost mischievous in its unexpectedness.

These lines also speak to your larger ideas on heaven not quite being what we traditionally consider heaven to be…and what role humans have played in that fantasy/regression. Can you tell me about the role you feel humans have played in the “fall of heaven,” if any, and how that reflects the heart of this entire collection?

Katie: 

Ultimately, I think humans try to shrink heaven, or to create God in our image (to flip that biblical language around), because it’s so difficult to get our imaginations around something larger.

One of the things I hope for this collection is that by shaking up language, it might also shake up what we think we understand about God and ourselves, both the things that actively harm people and the things that might not be as directly harmful but are still limiting, which I suppose might really be another kind of harm.

John:

And shake up language you do! I’m wondering about the consistent structure you employ across the collection also. Each poem feels almost like a thin balloon string winding down the left margin. What was your larger intent behind the short-lined structure? How do you feel that changes a reader’s experience of each piece? And why did you decide to format the entire collection in the same way? It’s interesting but rare to see a single structure used on every page.

Katie:

I love that you describe the poems’ structure like a balloon string! I experimented with a lot of different lineation and visual presentations for these poems, and the simple short lines on the left margin looked and felt right and did what I wanted them to do sonically when I read them aloud. (I’m constantly reading aloud when I revise.) Doing anything more spread out on the page felt melodramatic and distracting to me, but I won’t presume to say how the short lines affect readers. I’m sure that varies wildly.  

John:

I’d love to pivot a bit from structure to the words you often return to across this collection. From “hand” to “eye,” “body” to “mouth,” so many poems keep coming back to the intimacy of human touch, that tangible anchoring. As your themes are so wide ranging and timeless, questioning so many belief structures and social norms, why do you feel you keep returning so consistently to the tender minutia of human body imagery?

Katie:

I could blame this on the limited word bank and say that I was simply using the language I had to work with from the last chapters of the biblical books, but another interviewer—my colleague, Dean Nelson—pointed out to me last year that bodies are a common thread across all of my collections. This seems like something that should’ve been obvious to me, but since bodies were never my main focus, I didn’t realize I was writing about them so much. I’m not sure I can say exactly why I return to the minutia of body imagery. Bodies are fascinating. As one of my professors once said when she was making a case for the importance of imagery in poetry, “We can never experience the world outside of our bodies.” I’ve been talking with some dear friends lately about how we grew up with 90s purity culture, which really villainized the body; we internalized messages about our bodies being sinful and the need to deny our bodies, maybe even to forget that we had bodies. It’s possible that some of my writing about bodies is still a rebellion or a correction of that formative time in my life.

John:

I wholly understand that poets often fail to recognize our own repeated language and imagery. It’s happened to me many times, where someone will point out how often I return to something specific, usually tangible, be it folded hands or reading lullabies to my children, ghosts or dried out riverbeds. Often, we’re too close to our own poems to recognize larger repeated themes and visuals. But that’s okay; inherently we write about what haunts us. It’s inescapable.

Now that we’re investigating these things, what other small details did you find repeating throughout this collection? Be they words/phrases or specific visuals, what are you now surprised to find weaving throughout the book?

Katie:

The way fish pop in this book amuses and delights me. I find the fish darkly humorous. I didn’t necessarily set out to make them that way on a first draft, but I certainly intended to keep them that way as I revised. Dark humor keeps me going.

I think I was most surprised upon completing the manuscript to find that the word “word” appears so frequently and that language itself is so often under the microscope in these poems. This makes sense given the project’s purpose, but I didn’t realize while I was in the thick of writing how much the language I was working with—which I’d tried to keep as grounded and sensory as possible—had actually allowed me to examine language so directly.

John:

Interesting…I can see why “word” would often show up, especially given the religiously structured “book” focus of the manuscript. And for the same reason, perhaps “fish” also makes perfect sense. Fittingly, I noticed both “God” and “good” show up a lot, though only once in the same line, and in that line the context isn’t complimentary: “be afraid of God for good.”

Apart from language use and imagery, what has surprised you most about Hereverent? This could be about the composition process, the reaction of early readers, finding a publisher, or really anything. I just love how you were amused and delighted to find “fish” so often. I’m sure there were many other surprises, too, perhaps some our readers here can learn from.

Katie:

Every step of this process has surprised me. I didn’t expect these poems to take as much time to compose as they did. Using a limited word bank does not save time! I was shocked when I took what I thought were angry protest poems to my writing group and my writing friends found some of them funny. Then I was surprised again when I realized mid-project that my process of composition resembled lectio divina, as I mentioned before.

I was nervous that these poems wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, so finding a publisher who really “gets” what I’m doing with this project has been one of the best surprises. I’m so thankful for Fox Henry Frazier and Agape Editions, and I’m grateful for all the journal editors and readers who have encouraged me with these poems along the way.

John:

So much to be grateful for, and a sweet way to end our conversation. Finally, would you mind letting us all know what you’re working on now? What does the creative world have to look forward to from Katie Manning?

Katie:

Thanks for asking! I’ve been writing poems for the last few years that turn to science as a comfort and as a way to process trauma. This began after we lost my spouse’s parents suddenly because of a car accident. When we went through their house, I found an old copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on my father-in-law’s bookshelf alongside his Bibles and theology books, and the combination of Darwin with sacred texts made me laugh out loud. This sparked a poem, and I’ve just let myself write wildly from there.

I’ve also written a handful of dinosaur poems in the last couple of years… I think that’s likely a different project, and I hope I’ll write more of those.

I’ve enjoyed talking with you, John! Thanks so much for including me at Caesura Presents.

Read the Poems Katie is Presenting Here!