Exploring Poetry with Yana Knittel

Hello, everybody. This is Mei-Li Yang again with Intro to Creative Writing, and I'm really excited to be in conversation today with poet Yana Knittel. I'm going to read Yana's bio first, and then I will let Yana share some of her writing and talk a little bit about poetry. So Yana Knittel lives in Minnesota, but sometimes still calls the Pacific Northwest home. Yana earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Yana is the author of Real Work, which just got published through Noten Press, so check it out, and Fish and Wildlife, which is through Finishing Line Press. Yana has also published poetry in the journals Between These Shores, Literary and Art Annual, Blue Line, Capella, Constellations, Cottonwood, Pleiades, Up North Lit, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Tiny Seed, and Whale Road Review. as well as the anthologies The Experiment Will Not Be Bound, which came out in 2022, and Waters Deep, a Great Lakes anthology. Her awards and recognitions include three grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, being named a finalist for the new Women's Voices series from Finishing Line Press, the Up North Lit Poetry Prize, and the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Center for Women Writers, and two James Wright Awards from the American Academy of Poets. Yana has taught at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, University, I'm sorry, let me go. You've taught at a lot of places in Oregon. So Yana has taught at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Southern Oregon University, the University of Kansas, St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, as well as Crookston, St. Olaf College, and Banfield-Lock Center for the Arts. And Yana was also the curator for the 2018 Banfield Lock Reading Series. So thank you for joining us today. Yana, I'm so excited to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for having me. May have been really looking forward to this. So I'm going to pop off screen and then I think you're going to share some poems and talk and I'll come back in. Okay, great. See you soon. I am going to share my screen so that you can. see what I'm reading today. I brought some poems in to read to you and I'll talk a little bit about a couple of them, less about others, but I'll talk about the others when I get to the craft talk portion. The first poem I'll read to you today is Soliloquy. based on statements attributed to Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47 rifle. I was born to design machines to feed my homeland before home became the Eastern Front. I bestowed a blessing. Nazis were dragons. They flabbered over steps, devoured each crust and crumb, blackened fields families had worked for centuries. I still dream of threshers. leveling rows and rows of stocks, grain tall as soldiers, or see myself drawing plans to fuel the masses via efficient elimination of cattle, sheep, chickens, geese. Now the gun is my only legacy. It is out of my hands. Canis Solo is a poem I'll talk about in a little bit more detail later, but the title roughly means lone wolf in Latin. Canis Solo. I fly over tundra, my fur sunshot, gleaming obsidian. The last wolf killed in Scotland was black. I feel like the last wolf in Scotland. I've been misnamed. Some say my DNA is a common curse, that I am rare, so rare hunters cannot find me with their sights and rifles as long as it is night. I didn't always roam alone. I once owned the tundra with a mate until I drove my wolf to seek new territory. One day I will lay down my pelt in reconciliation. This is another poem I'll talk about a little bit more later. My father at 80. It makes him look like he's been beaten with a pipe. The Coumadin. Blooms of purple garland each arm, the backs of his hands. So he no longer looks invincible, the Teutonic Celtic hero in letterman sweater, army uniform, denim jacket, brush marked with paint and tree seal. I call him Rasputin behind his back because he keeps outsmarting death until I think he'll outlive me. But lately he stoops, has lost interest. in working at the lathe, mostly watches TV with his terrier on his lap. Someday, I will have to kill this illusion of immortality. To me, he is still casting his line into the Metolius and Siusla rivers, tending beehives, pruning trees, carving myrtlewood burls into bowls, swimming faster. than anyone. This next poem I'll talk a little bit more about in my craft talk too, but this is based on the last time that I saw my father's hospice. I'd rather tame a bison bull than ask. Is there anything you want to say before I leave? But I do. He stares ahead, eyes marbled, not particularly. I want to peel off my skin, turn to smoke, ascend. But I stay, massage his rusty hands, until I must chase a plane. Over the highway, rags and ashes, real, un- fold into a current of crows. A sign on the bridge over the Clackamas chastises undertow rocks, cold stock, swim at your own risk. Here's another poem I'll say a bit more about in my craft talk. Do you remember? sleeping in the truck on long drives home from camping, how rumble and rock swayed you into dreams, how adult voices murmuring from front seats were both blanket and pillow, how light, dark light fluttered just outside consciousness when you passed through towns, how you woke to crunch of gravel driveway, not knowing what time was, and staggered upstairs to bed. Your skin holds memories of sun, coldness of lake water. You hear the rubber rowboat squeak, rasp of sand on bare feet, chipmunks inviting themselves to meal. Each year, you relearn how mountain nights deliver chill, along with stars, campfire smoke soaks clothes, how you never would grow up to be someone who did not remember. And this is the last of the poems that I'll read for this portion. If you have grown up in Minnesota or Wisconsin, you might have heard of the Driftless area before. If you haven't, I'll just give a brief non-scientist description. So the flatness and the lakes of most of Minnesota were scoured by glaciers and the Driftless area. is a part of eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin that did not have glaciers drifting over them and therefore hills, mountains, crags, a lot more variety in the landscape was left. I was reading about this as someone who's not a Minnesota native and wanted to describe this landscape. And one of the things that was kind of fun about this poem is that, while it starts out as a description, by the end of the poem it becomes an ars poetica, which is a Latin term for a poem about the art of writing poetry. So maybe look at the metaphor at the at the end of the poem. Driftless. Rife with knife-edge ridges, meandering rivers, pools. You can't get from here to there without hairpin turns, contusions, bruises. Minnesota's Bermuda Triangle, Sargasso Sea or Trees of Mystery, where caves, sinkholes, and disappearing streams pock the landscape. Immersed in complexity, you could lose yourself in twists. and turns and never see horizons. Give up, the landscape cries. Give in. You can't drift over paths of least resistance. Beneath the surface lie sandstone, limestone, dolomite bedrock. Scrape past quartzite, rhyolite, monoduck. If you were a glacier, you'd dig down to gems. So those are my poems for this portion. I'm going to move to a craft talk, a little bit of advice about writing, and I'm going to share some slides with you now. Let's see if this works. All right. So as you listen to those poems, I would hope that you got a sense of different voices, different speakers, different types of people who would be saying those words. And the topic of my craft talk is speaker versus poet and persona poems. So the things I'll cover today are why we use the term speaker instead of poet when talking and writing about poetry. I'll give you a definition of persona poems and then some... examples that you can read. I will talk a bit about different speakers in my poems, and I'll give you some writing prompts that will hopefully spark your creativity. So when we're talking about poetry or writing about it in an analytical essay, it is customary to talk about the speaker rather than the poet. poet when talking about who is saying the words in the poem. So there are a couple of reasons that we do this. It's a very big stereotype that poetry is very personal. It's always autobiographical. It's always a very intimate look at the poet's life. And I want to counter that stereotype because while Many poets do draw on personal details and autobiography. There are really no limits to what you can write about in poetry. And some poets take many different approaches. Some poets never really write about personal details in their own lives at all. So the speaker of a poem is roughly equivalent to the narrator of a novel or a short story. So if you think about when a novel or short story has a narrator who is not a character in the story, like we talk about the omniscient narrator who is kind of up above watching the action. So let's say you're reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, for example, where there is an omniscient narrator. You wouldn't say, you know. Poe says that the room is dark and creepy. It would always be the narrator says or the narrator shows or tells us. Even though Poe is writing that story, he's kind of constructing a voice through which he narrates it. Poetry is an art form and art has the same root as the words artifice and artificial. Most poetry is not written in a way that most people speak. You wouldn't go around speaking in poetry you might be looked at a bit strangely. So we think about the speaker of poems being a fiction. Even if a poem has autobiographical details, there is some element of fiction or constructedness to the figure of the speaker, the person that we imagine saying those words. And lastly, for creative purposes, many poets deliver right from points of view that are not their own. They... take on characters, almost like playing a role in a play, and write as if they were that person, for example. So persona poems are really fun to know about, and I'll give you a chance to try writing some later on. In a persona poem, the speaker of the poem is obviously different from the poet, and persona poems are also sometimes called... dramatic monologues because it's a single speaker saying all these words the same way that a character in a play might stand on stage and speak a monologue about something. How do you know that a poem is a persona poem? Often the titles will give you a clue. They'll tell you a story. The title might be, you know, the tree in the golf course across the street from me. And that can give you a clue that the poem is, you know, about the tree or maybe the tree is actually the speaker. So there might be a hint in the title. So look for that. Also, there will be clues in the poem, such as gendered pronouns. So, for instance, let's say that there's a poet. who you know identifies as male and they're using feminine pronouns to refer to the speaker, then you would know that that poet is taking on the character of a female speaker and the poet, or there might be other obvious differences. And I'll give you some examples in some published poems. There's a huge variety of what you can write about in a persona poem. You can represent a real person, an imagined person. You can write your poem from the point of view of an animal or even an inanimate object. So that can really spark your creativity if you are up to the challenge of trying to write in those different voices and identities. Some examples of persona poems that I think will be helpful to you. are listed here. And I'll have Mae post these slides so that you have the links to the text, and in one case, a video performance by the poet. Robert Browning is a 19th century English poet who wrote many, many, many persona poems or dramatic monologues. And one of the most famous is called My Last Duchess. I'll just give you a brief synopsis of this poem. that'll help you when you read it. So Robert Browning was not a duke and so would not be married to a duchess. So that's one clue that this is a character he's taking on. A duke would be not royalty, but a noble person. So in the social and economic hierarchy in England, pretty high up there. So someone wealthy. And in this poem, the duke, is showing a guest around his art gallery and pointing out all his expensive works of art. And he points out a painting of his late wife, My Last Duchess, the wife who has passed away, and talks a little bit about their relationship and ends up maybe revealing a little bit more than he intends to. Patricia Smith is an African-American poet and her poem Skinhead is a fantastic example of a persona poem too. As you might imagine from the title, she's taking on a huge challenge writing from the perspective of a white man who is a neo-Nazi and openly As with persona poems, not writing about that person, but using first person pronouns, speaking as the skinhead of the title in that poem. And it's mind blowing to me to imagine how difficult it would be to give a voice to this person that you know would hate you if they met you in real life. So I have a link in the slide to the text of the poem. so you can read it if you like. And then there's also a video of Patricia Smith performing this poem and it's really powerful. Tom Gunn is a more recent English poet and I have a link to the text of his poem, Yoko. This is not a reference to Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist. who was married to John Lennon. Yoko is actually the name of a dog and Yoko is the speaker of this poem. So you have an opportunity to read this, read what a dog might be thinking and feeling in this poem. So you might have listened to my poems and heard me mention autobiographical details. So you might be asking, well, isn't the speaker of all these poems Yannick Knittel? And so I wanted to clarify and point out some differences in the speakers. Now, soliloquy is a persona poem or dramatic monologue. I apologize for the misspelling there. A persona poem that I wrote, when you see the text of the poem, I have a footnote that has the... the inspiration for the poem. I heard on the radio that Mikhail Kalashnikov had said that he always intended to use his talents to create agricultural machinery and ended up instead being most famous for this gun, which has been used to fight wars. It's been used by terrorists. It's been used by drug smugglers. It has a pretty huge history. So in that poem, I take on Mikhail Kolashnikov as a character and speak as I imagine he would speak if I could get inside of his feelings. Now, my father at 80 is more autobiographical. I very much remember really noticing my father aging, you know, not for the first time, but maybe more. more dramatically than previously. So there's a lot of autobiographical details in this poem and a lot of factual information about the kind of person my father was and how I felt about him. However, keep in mind the title, My Father at 80. So the speaker of this poem is frozen in a time where that speaker is. still has a father and whose father is alive and 80 years old. So it's still kind of a fictionalized speaker. It's not, certainly not me in the present day. Hospice is also an autobiographical poem, and it also constructs a very specific moment. So that's one. area where we get that sense of a constructed speaker. So it's based on autobiographical details and a real conversation that I have the last time I saw my father. So again, in that poem, the father is still alive, the speaker still has a father. The other thing that's important about poetry that I would really like to impart to students is that it's really okay to fictionalize some details, make changes. Poetry is not journalism and creativity comes from the way you tell the story and you might add things or leave things out to make a poem more powerful. Now in this particular poem, I talk about seeing the sign. the warning sign over the river that says, you know, no swimming, it's dangerous. I actually saw that sign. much earlier, like a couple years earlier than I had that final conversation with my father. I had written down in a notebook the words on that sign thinking, wow, that just, I mean, literally that's a warning about the dangers of swimming in that river. But if you take it figuratively, it's about the dangers of swimming in relationships. in showing your feelings and how you can be hurt by that. And I literally saved those words thinking, I want to put those in a poem someday. So there's actually two different trips to the airport that are conflated or combined in that poem. And the time that I saw the sign, I was actually not driving on the freeway. I was on an Amtrak train. But I put those. different details together to make one scene of the speaker driving to the airport in order to create the emotional effect that I wanted. Then the last poem I wanted to talk about of mine in terms of the speaker is Do You Remember? This is the one with the recounting the childhood memories of camping. And there's, it's almost like a an omniscient narrator in a story. The speaker doesn't say I, so it's not speaking from the first person, but it's using the second person point of view, talking about you, this other person, and asking, you know, do you remember all these things? And do you remember this vow to never forget kind of where you came from and all these formative experiences? So that again is kind of a fictionalized, almost disembodied or omniscient speaker. So this can be a difficult concept to get your mind around. But I would say that in talking about these poems, at the very least, the speaker of the poems is not me, Yana Knittel, right now. And at the farthest extent, you know, this speaker of one poem is actually a completely different person. I have some writing prompts for you that I would like you to try. And I've assigned these to students before, and they seem to really spark creativity. And they challenge you to get away from that stereotype of poetry always being very personal and very autobiographical. So here's three things that you can try. write a poem in which the speaker is someone very different from you in some way. If you identify as female, you could have a male speaker. If you identify as politically liberal, you could have a very conservative speaker, and that would be kind of like Patricia Smith's poem. If you are If you are coming to the University of Minnesota from another country besides the United States, you could try having an American speaker and portraying what it's like when Americans talk to you. Another prompt is to write a poem from the point of view of a pet or another animal. What would this animal think or say if they could use English? And lastly, write a poem in which the... speaker is an inanimate object, what would it think or say if it could? And I've had students write persona poems about inanimate objects, such as a hiking boot, a light switch, anything goes. And I encourage you to try something that would be a really interesting challenge. In the second and third prompt, I also think it can be creative to think about, well, what if these thoughts... of a dog or a light switch are being portrayed in English, but maybe this speaker doesn't have all the right words for things. You know, how would, how would a light switch describe electricity? Because they probably don't understand the science of it. How would a dog speak about their language? owner going to work every day when they don't know what work and money and taxes are. They would come up with a different way of describing it. And sometimes people come up with very funny persona poems. They can also sometimes be very... very touching. I actually ended up feeling a bit sad for the light switch after reading a student's poem about a light switch. So I challenge you to try something like that and hope you come up with something really new in your work. So that's the end of my slideshow. I am going to stop sharing. And I thank you very much for listening. And I'd like to invite May back and we'll talk a little bit more. Hi, Yana. Thank you so much for that really thoughtful craft talk. And thank you. I was just thinking, I mean, this is such a good reminder to students that poetry is not autobiographical. It can be, but we really should approach it as that. It's not right. That like, I know a lot of writers might borrow parts of their lives for fiction and they might borrow parts of their lives for poetry. But I just really like the reminder that in poetry, the narrator is the speaker and that we, yeah. And the persona, yeah. And so I love all the prompts around the persona poems and how to approach that. So yes, you all watching this should do, actually, I suggest doing all three exercises. So I'm excited to be in conversation with you. I like to kick off conversations by asking all the writers to talk about, you know, what is your journey to becoming a writer? I might have a somewhat unusual story because I grew up with, you know, fairly educated parents who were great readers. who read to me from a very young age. So I grew up, just from a very young age, I had an appreciation for the written word and for creative writing. And my mother read poetry to me, nothing too challenging. But there's an old but famous book called The Child's Garden of Verses by, I want to say it's Robert Lewis. Stevenson and she would read me the poems from there. The original Winnie the Pooh books or many of the books by A.A. Milner who wrote the Winnie the Pooh books have poems in them. And so I kind of early on enjoyed wordplay and sound and rhyme and rhythm and started understanding figurative language at a fairly early age, I think. And so I actually still have this piece of paper. I wrote some little poems when I was six or seven, and my mother typed them up on her typewriter. Were they good poems? They probably couldn't be published today. One poem was about string and how much I loved string. So I was... you know, just being very playful with language. But I kind of kept writing often, off and on and, you know, was a sort of typical moody teenager who wrote, you know, sad, unrequited love poems and things like that. I also wrote a lot of songs. I play guitar and, and wrote and recorded some songs I wrote when I was in, in high school. and really love that process too. I'd love to get to get back into that. And it was a very on and off thing. And I did publish just a few poems in journals in the early 2000s. And then a lot of things happened kind of, you know, to use a cliche, kind of a perfect storm of life. circumstances happened where I really needed a change. And that's when I applied to and was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the U. And I was actually 46 when I started that program. And while there were a couple of students close to my age, I was the oldest. And so I was in that program with some students who had just graduated from their undergraduate program. undergraduate. So it was very strange sometimes. But the program gave me the opportunity to really focus on my writing for three years. And the thesis that I wrote eventually was expanded and turned into my first. book. Yeah. I mean, I think your journey is sort of a reminder that it's never too late to start the writing journey. I mean, it sounds like you never stopped, but you made the decision to go to graduate school later in life and it's perfectly fine. Becoming a writer is not like becoming, you know, a gymnast. You can't decide in your 40s that you're going to become a competitive gymnast. but as long as you can write somehow in some capacity even if you're using voice technology you can you can write right right no that's actually a really good reminder um can you talk a little bit about how you move an idea into a finished poem it it varies um quite a bit because um some poems you come together fairly rapidly and some poems I work on almost line by line over a longer period of time and it's kind of agonizing. So it sort of depends. I usually start with an image because remember that poetry relies on imagery. descriptions of things that the reader can imagine seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, experiencing with their senses, rather than, you know, straightforward explanation or direct statements. So I often start with an image. One recent draft of a poem I can remember is I had been down by Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. And Just the way that the lake looked when we first had some snow on the ground. And so there's like a white ring around the lake. And the lake was, the lake water was kind of a steel gray, like a shield or something like that. And I started working with a description of that. And I didn't really know what the poem was going to be about yet. But it was important to write down that image. play around with it. And then there's usually a feeling that I want to convey, you know, maybe I'm writing about the changing seasons. Maybe I'm writing about something that's going on in the larger world that that image relates to. Maybe I'm writing about a an important relationship or decision or upcoming change that that can relate to and I start adding adding to that but I do usually start with an image sometimes a line will come to me where I just you know like the like a whole sentence that I could put into a poem and that's really great when that happens that's that's not you super common that's kind of like a gift from the gods when that happens um i i love the idea of just i mean just to make it a practice to collect images even if you don't know where it may go and that you as you're starting the journey of writing this poem or um uh trying to discover why why this is important to you right yeah you And I made a commitment this year to write every day. Now, before you think I must have tons of time on my hands, I just, it's like free writing. I just write whatever comes to mind for a little while every single day. And, you know, 90% of this is... crappy. But the thing is, a lot of writers talk about this, it's kind of like, you get the crappy stuff out, and then the good ideas start coming. The other way to think of it is that just having a regular practice of writing is like exercising a muscle, and so it gets stronger, and so your writing practice gets stronger. But I just have a practice where I'm actually every night I do some writing. I try not to think about it too much. I try to just. write about whatever comes to mind. I try to get at least 10 lines. Um, but if I don't, I don't, because, you know, I have to sleep sometimes. And then, um, about once a week, roughly, I will, um, type up cause I handwrite all my rough drafts. It's just the way I am. Um, about once a week, I will type up the ones that, um, that I think might be workable. I put a star or a question mark in the margin if I think, that might work. Type them up. I make revisions, save them. And then usually when I do that, I also look back at some of the poems I've typed up previously and look at them for possible revisions too. And so when you do your daily writing to have like parameters, like some people say 20 minutes, one hour, five. five handwritten pages, a thousand words. Like, do you give yourself parameters when you say I'm done? Um, I try for 10 lines and other than that, it's kind of a sense of like, you know, I stop when I feel like that's all I got for now, you know, it's okay to stop, you know, when you're stuck sometimes. Um, but I have, um, And I think this is why it's helpful for me. I have very low standards about what I'm writing when I do that daily writing, because it's just about generating new work. Right. It's just about generating new work. And like I said, it's like, I don't know, probably no one here has ever cooked soup stock or something like that. But you have to skim off this icky stuff that comes to the top to get to that nice, concentrated thing. tasty pure broth and so writing the the stuff that's not very good just get that out of the way you know yeah very low standard no that's actually one of the best advice I've gotten from writer you know from other writers is uh if if at first you don't succeed lower your standards just yes lower your standards generate work edit yourself later yeah and I I do work with a writing group that started believe it or not, March of 2020. And a poet that I know invited me and a few other people to do a Zoom writing group. And when we're on a roll, we meet every other week. But, you know, like with the holidays upcoming and things like that, we might have gaps. But the person who initiated it leads our meetings as a workshop. gives us a prompt, like I gave students the prompts for writing persona poems. She usually has published poems that she uses as an example, like here's an interesting poem I read recently, puts it on the screen, reads it to us, and then says, take this line and riff off of that somehow, or some other idea. And so that's something else. that I do to generate new writing. And again, all of us in the group, we talk about how, you know, it doesn't have to be great, though we do read each other what we write and we'll tell each other, you know, what stood out, what seemed strong, what seemed worth working on. Can you talk a little bit about revision and how you approach revising your work? Revision is so important and it's much more than just maybe changing some punctuation or a word. And I really want to encourage students to try not to think of their writing as, you know, sacred and like this came from my soul and so I can't change it because most writers revise and revise a lot. With poetry, honestly, one of the best things you can do is cut things out. Poetry is often what we call fairly compressed, where you have, you try to say as much as you can in as few words as possible. You try to make a central image resonate with a lot of different meaning and not have a whole lot of words explaining the image. So one thing you can do is cut out any words that just aren't really adding that much to the meaning of the poem. You know, things like nouns and descriptive verbs do the heavy lifting. And if there is an and and a that that you can take out, you can do that. You can make little cuts line by line and just get it down to the really important words. Cutting lines from the beginning is often really helpful because when we start writing, there's kind of a metaphor that writers use that sometimes maybe the first three lines of a poem you wrote are really just throat clearing. where you're kind of not quite getting to the point yet. You're just warming up. And so I've had, actually with that poem Hospice, I axed a whole stanza at the beginning. And then sometimes the last couple of lines can be cut because sometimes we feel like we need to sort of explain things, you know, and end that way. And you want the poem strength. to come from the imagery and not a lot of explanation and direct statements. So ending lines are a place to look for where you can cut. You know, I've moved things around. I've taken a poem that was completely written in open form, and I've ended up counting syllables and making each line a certain length and kind of have a certain rhythm because I like the sound of it. I've replaced words that are not very descriptive with more descriptive words. And then if you have the opportunity to share your work with anybody, they can tell you what in the poem are they not following? You know, are they not sure what this is really about? And you can fix that. You know, what images are striking to them? Which ones don't make sense? sense and getting another set of eyes on your work is really important. Reading your work out loud will help you find things to change that you won't notice just looking at the words on the page, because you'll hear that, oh, that one line is kind of clunky. You know, it's like I've got this kind of musical rhythm and then suddenly there's a line that's just eh. Or maybe the Maybe that word has a really negative connotation and I want something that's more positive. You'll just kind of hear things that you won't necessarily see on the page. Yeah. As you talk about, I mean, your revision process and the idea of not all the time, but usually your first three lines can probably be cut and your last couple of months be cut. It made me think about a conversation I had with a screenwriter recently. Where she said that, you know, when you're writing a screenplay, you want to be like you want to be a good guess. You want to show up late and leave early. We don't need to know once upon a time. We don't need to know the conclusion. Just get us right in. Yeah. Get people interested and then leave. Yeah. Yeah. It's like get get to the story. Yeah. I know we're almost out of time, so I'd love to ask, just ask about like, what kind of advice do you wish you had gotten when you started writing? Hmm. I think to be honest, I think it would have been helpful to have got gotten some encouragement to write things that were. less autobiographical and really work on trying different poetic voices and different personas because that really that really takes a lot of creativity because you have to think what would this other person be thinking and feeling instead of thinking about what I am thinking and feeling I think it would have been great to have gotten advice early on about not explaining things too much, really letting imagery, figurative language do more work and not, I think some of my, some of my poetry when I first started the MFA program was very prosy sounding. Now there is such a genre as narrative poetry that, that tells a story in poetic form, but, but I had some poems that just sounded. you know, too much like ordinary language and not poetic language. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we head out? Just write, keep writing, lower your standards for when you first start out. There's actually a book about writing called Shitty First Draft. And if you free yourself up to put anything down and not, this does not have to be perfect. This does not even end up having to be a poem that you keep. But the practice of writing is what is really important and will over time really improve your writing. So just keep it up. Well, Yana, thank you so much for today. This was amazing. Well, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this so much. So I'm really glad to have had this opportunity today. All right. Bye, everyone.

Yana earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Yana is the author of Real Work, which just got published through Noten Press, so check it out, and Fish and Wildlife, which is through Finishing Line Press. Yana has also published poetry in the journals Between These Shores, Literary and Art Annual, Blue Line, Capella, Constellations, Cottonwood, Pleiades, Up North Lit, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Tiny Seed, and Whale Road Review.

as well as the anthologies The Experiment Will Not Be Bound, which came out in 2022, and Waters Deep, a Great Lakes anthology. Her awards and recognitions include three grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, being named a finalist for the new Women's Voices series from Finishing Line Press, the Up North Lit Poetry Prize, and the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Center for Women Writers, and two James Wright Awards from the American Academy of Poets. Yana has taught at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, University, I'm sorry, let me go. You've taught at a lot of places in Oregon. So Yana has taught at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Southern Oregon University, the University of Kansas, St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, as well as Crookston, St. Olaf College, and Banfield-Lock Center for the Arts.

And Yana was also the curator for the 2018 Banfield Lock Reading Series. So thank you for joining us today. Yana, I'm so excited to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for having me.

May have been really looking forward to this. So I'm going to pop off screen and then I think you're going to share some poems and talk and I'll come back in. Okay, great.

See you soon. I am going to share my screen so that you can. see what I'm reading today.

I brought some poems in to read to you and I'll talk a little bit about a couple of them, less about others, but I'll talk about the others when I get to the craft talk portion. The first poem I'll read to you today is Soliloquy. based on statements attributed to Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47 rifle. I was born to design machines to feed my homeland before home became the Eastern Front.

I bestowed a blessing. Nazis were dragons. They flabbered over steps, devoured each crust and crumb, blackened fields families had worked for centuries.

I still dream of threshers. leveling rows and rows of stocks, grain tall as soldiers, or see myself drawing plans to fuel the masses via efficient elimination of cattle, sheep, chickens, geese. Now the gun is my only legacy. It is out of my hands.

Canis Solo is a poem I'll talk about in a little bit more detail later, but the title roughly means lone wolf in Latin. Canis Solo. I fly over tundra, my fur sunshot, gleaming obsidian.

The last wolf killed in Scotland was black. I feel like the last wolf in Scotland. I've been misnamed. Some say my DNA is a common curse, that I am rare, so rare hunters cannot find me with their sights and rifles as long as it is night.

I didn't always roam alone. I once owned the tundra with a mate until I drove my wolf to seek new territory. One day I will lay down my pelt in reconciliation. This is another poem I'll talk about a little bit more later. My father at 80. It makes him look like he's been beaten with a pipe.

The Coumadin. Blooms of purple garland each arm, the backs of his hands. So he no longer looks invincible, the Teutonic Celtic hero in letterman sweater, army uniform, denim jacket, brush marked with paint and tree seal.

I call him Rasputin behind his back because he keeps outsmarting death until I think he'll outlive me. But lately he stoops, has lost interest. in working at the lathe, mostly watches TV with his terrier on his lap. Someday, I will have to kill this illusion of immortality.

To me, he is still casting his line into the Metolius and Siusla rivers, tending beehives, pruning trees, carving myrtlewood burls into bowls, swimming faster. than anyone. This next poem I'll talk a little bit more about in my craft talk too, but this is based on the last time that I saw my father's hospice.

I'd rather tame a bison bull than ask. Is there anything you want to say before I leave? But I do.

He stares ahead, eyes marbled, not particularly. I want to peel off my skin, turn to smoke, ascend. But I stay, massage his rusty hands, until I must chase a plane.

Over the highway, rags and ashes, real, un- fold into a current of crows. A sign on the bridge over the Clackamas chastises undertow rocks, cold stock, swim at your own risk. Here's another poem I'll say a bit more about in my craft talk.

Do you remember? sleeping in the truck on long drives home from camping, how rumble and rock swayed you into dreams, how adult voices murmuring from front seats were both blanket and pillow, how light, dark light fluttered just outside consciousness when you passed through towns, how you woke to crunch of gravel driveway, not knowing what time was, and staggered upstairs to bed. Your skin holds memories of sun, coldness of lake water. You hear the rubber rowboat squeak, rasp of sand on bare feet, chipmunks inviting themselves to meal. Each year, you relearn how mountain nights deliver chill, along with stars, campfire smoke soaks clothes, how you never would grow up to be someone who did not remember.

And this is the last of the poems that I'll read for this portion. If you have grown up in Minnesota or Wisconsin, you might have heard of the Driftless area before. If you haven't, I'll just give a brief non-scientist description.

So the flatness and the lakes of most of Minnesota were scoured by glaciers and the Driftless area. is a part of eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin that did not have glaciers drifting over them and therefore hills, mountains, crags, a lot more variety in the landscape was left. I was reading about this as someone who's not a Minnesota native and wanted to describe this landscape. And one of the things that was kind of fun about this poem is that, while it starts out as a description, by the end of the poem it becomes an ars poetica, which is a Latin term for a poem about the art of writing poetry. So maybe look at the metaphor at the at the end of the poem.

Driftless. Rife with knife-edge ridges, meandering rivers, pools. You can't get from here to there without hairpin turns, contusions, bruises. Minnesota's Bermuda Triangle, Sargasso Sea or Trees of Mystery, where caves, sinkholes, and disappearing streams pock the landscape. Immersed in complexity, you could lose yourself in twists.

and turns and never see horizons. Give up, the landscape cries. Give in. You can't drift over paths of least resistance. Beneath the surface lie sandstone, limestone, dolomite bedrock.

Scrape past quartzite, rhyolite, monoduck. If you were a glacier, you'd dig down to gems. So those are my poems for this portion.

I'm going to move to a craft talk, a little bit of advice about writing, and I'm going to share some slides with you now. Let's see if this works. All right.

So as you listen to those poems, I would hope that you got a sense of different voices, different speakers, different types of people who would be saying those words. And the topic of my craft talk is speaker versus poet and persona poems. So the things I'll cover today are why we use the term speaker instead of poet when talking and writing about poetry.

I'll give you a definition of persona poems and then some... examples that you can read. I will talk a bit about different speakers in my poems, and I'll give you some writing prompts that will hopefully spark your creativity. So when we're talking about poetry or writing about it in an analytical essay, it is customary to talk about the speaker rather than the poet.

poet when talking about who is saying the words in the poem. So there are a couple of reasons that we do this. It's a very big stereotype that poetry is very personal. It's always autobiographical. It's always a very intimate look at the poet's life.

And I want to counter that stereotype because while Many poets do draw on personal details and autobiography. There are really no limits to what you can write about in poetry. And some poets take many different approaches.

Some poets never really write about personal details in their own lives at all. So the speaker of a poem is roughly equivalent to the narrator of a novel or a short story. So if you think about when a novel or short story has a narrator who is not a character in the story, like we talk about the omniscient narrator who is kind of up above watching the action. So let's say you're reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, for example, where there is an omniscient narrator. You wouldn't say, you know.

Poe says that the room is dark and creepy. It would always be the narrator says or the narrator shows or tells us. Even though Poe is writing that story, he's kind of constructing a voice through which he narrates it.

Poetry is an art form and art has the same root as the words artifice and artificial. Most poetry is not written in a way that most people speak. You wouldn't go around speaking in poetry you might be looked at a bit strangely.

So we think about the speaker of poems being a fiction. Even if a poem has autobiographical details, there is some element of fiction or constructedness to the figure of the speaker, the person that we imagine saying those words. And lastly, for creative purposes, many poets deliver right from points of view that are not their own.

They... take on characters, almost like playing a role in a play, and write as if they were that person, for example. So persona poems are really fun to know about, and I'll give you a chance to try writing some later on.

In a persona poem, the speaker of the poem is obviously different from the poet, and persona poems are also sometimes called... dramatic monologues because it's a single speaker saying all these words the same way that a character in a play might stand on stage and speak a monologue about something. How do you know that a poem is a persona poem?

Often the titles will give you a clue. They'll tell you a story. The title might be, you know, the tree in the golf course across the street from me. And that can give you a clue that the poem is, you know, about the tree or maybe the tree is actually the speaker.

So there might be a hint in the title. So look for that. Also, there will be clues in the poem, such as gendered pronouns. So, for instance, let's say that there's a poet. who you know identifies as male and they're using feminine pronouns to refer to the speaker, then you would know that that poet is taking on the character of a female speaker and the poet, or there might be other obvious differences.

And I'll give you some examples in some published poems. There's a huge variety of what you can write about in a persona poem. You can represent a real person, an imagined person. You can write your poem from the point of view of an animal or even an inanimate object. So that can really spark your creativity if you are up to the challenge of trying to write in those different voices and identities.

Some examples of persona poems that I think will be helpful to you. are listed here. And I'll have Mae post these slides so that you have the links to the text, and in one case, a video performance by the poet. Robert Browning is a 19th century English poet who wrote many, many, many persona poems or dramatic monologues.

And one of the most famous is called My Last Duchess. I'll just give you a brief synopsis of this poem. that'll help you when you read it.

So Robert Browning was not a duke and so would not be married to a duchess. So that's one clue that this is a character he's taking on. A duke would be not royalty, but a noble person.

So in the social and economic hierarchy in England, pretty high up there. So someone wealthy. And in this poem, the duke, is showing a guest around his art gallery and pointing out all his expensive works of art. And he points out a painting of his late wife, My Last Duchess, the wife who has passed away, and talks a little bit about their relationship and ends up maybe revealing a little bit more than he intends to.

Patricia Smith is an African-American poet and her poem Skinhead is a fantastic example of a persona poem too. As you might imagine from the title, she's taking on a huge challenge writing from the perspective of a white man who is a neo-Nazi and openly As with persona poems, not writing about that person, but using first person pronouns, speaking as the skinhead of the title in that poem. And it's mind blowing to me to imagine how difficult it would be to give a voice to this person that you know would hate you if they met you in real life. So I have a link in the slide to the text of the poem. so you can read it if you like.

And then there's also a video of Patricia Smith performing this poem and it's really powerful. Tom Gunn is a more recent English poet and I have a link to the text of his poem, Yoko. This is not a reference to Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist.

who was married to John Lennon. Yoko is actually the name of a dog and Yoko is the speaker of this poem. So you have an opportunity to read this, read what a dog might be thinking and feeling in this poem. So you might have listened to my poems and heard me mention autobiographical details. So you might be asking, well, isn't the speaker of all these poems Yannick Knittel?

And so I wanted to clarify and point out some differences in the speakers. Now, soliloquy is a persona poem or dramatic monologue. I apologize for the misspelling there.

A persona poem that I wrote, when you see the text of the poem, I have a footnote that has the... the inspiration for the poem. I heard on the radio that Mikhail Kalashnikov had said that he always intended to use his talents to create agricultural machinery and ended up instead being most famous for this gun, which has been used to fight wars.

It's been used by terrorists. It's been used by drug smugglers. It has a pretty huge history.

So in that poem, I take on Mikhail Kolashnikov as a character and speak as I imagine he would speak if I could get inside of his feelings. Now, my father at 80 is more autobiographical. I very much remember really noticing my father aging, you know, not for the first time, but maybe more.

more dramatically than previously. So there's a lot of autobiographical details in this poem and a lot of factual information about the kind of person my father was and how I felt about him. However, keep in mind the title, My Father at 80. So the speaker of this poem is frozen in a time where that speaker is. still has a father and whose father is alive and 80 years old. So it's still kind of a fictionalized speaker.

It's not, certainly not me in the present day. Hospice is also an autobiographical poem, and it also constructs a very specific moment. So that's one. area where we get that sense of a constructed speaker. So it's based on autobiographical details and a real conversation that I have the last time I saw my father.

So again, in that poem, the father is still alive, the speaker still has a father. The other thing that's important about poetry that I would really like to impart to students is that it's really okay to fictionalize some details, make changes. Poetry is not journalism and creativity comes from the way you tell the story and you might add things or leave things out to make a poem more powerful.

Now in this particular poem, I talk about seeing the sign. the warning sign over the river that says, you know, no swimming, it's dangerous. I actually saw that sign. much earlier, like a couple years earlier than I had that final conversation with my father. I had written down in a notebook the words on that sign thinking, wow, that just, I mean, literally that's a warning about the dangers of swimming in that river.

But if you take it figuratively, it's about the dangers of swimming in relationships. in showing your feelings and how you can be hurt by that. And I literally saved those words thinking, I want to put those in a poem someday.

So there's actually two different trips to the airport that are conflated or combined in that poem. And the time that I saw the sign, I was actually not driving on the freeway. I was on an Amtrak train. But I put those.

different details together to make one scene of the speaker driving to the airport in order to create the emotional effect that I wanted. Then the last poem I wanted to talk about of mine in terms of the speaker is Do You Remember? This is the one with the recounting the childhood memories of camping.

And there's, it's almost like a an omniscient narrator in a story. The speaker doesn't say I, so it's not speaking from the first person, but it's using the second person point of view, talking about you, this other person, and asking, you know, do you remember all these things? And do you remember this vow to never forget kind of where you came from and all these formative experiences? So that again is kind of a fictionalized, almost disembodied or omniscient speaker.

So this can be a difficult concept to get your mind around. But I would say that in talking about these poems, at the very least, the speaker of the poems is not me, Yana Knittel, right now. And at the farthest extent, you know, this speaker of one poem is actually a completely different person. I have some writing prompts for you that I would like you to try. And I've assigned these to students before, and they seem to really spark creativity.

And they challenge you to get away from that stereotype of poetry always being very personal and very autobiographical. So here's three things that you can try. write a poem in which the speaker is someone very different from you in some way.

If you identify as female, you could have a male speaker. If you identify as politically liberal, you could have a very conservative speaker, and that would be kind of like Patricia Smith's poem. If you are If you are coming to the University of Minnesota from another country besides the United States, you could try having an American speaker and portraying what it's like when Americans talk to you.

Another prompt is to write a poem from the point of view of a pet or another animal. What would this animal think or say if they could use English? And lastly, write a poem in which the...

speaker is an inanimate object, what would it think or say if it could? And I've had students write persona poems about inanimate objects, such as a hiking boot, a light switch, anything goes. And I encourage you to try something that would be a really interesting challenge. In the second and third prompt, I also think it can be creative to think about, well, what if these thoughts... of a dog or a light switch are being portrayed in English, but maybe this speaker doesn't have all the right words for things.

You know, how would, how would a light switch describe electricity? Because they probably don't understand the science of it. How would a dog speak about their language?

owner going to work every day when they don't know what work and money and taxes are. They would come up with a different way of describing it. And sometimes people come up with very funny persona poems.

They can also sometimes be very... very touching. I actually ended up feeling a bit sad for the light switch after reading a student's poem about a light switch. So I challenge you to try something like that and hope you come up with something really new in your work. So that's the end of my slideshow.

I am going to stop sharing. And I thank you very much for listening. And I'd like to invite May back and we'll talk a little bit more.

Hi, Yana. Thank you so much for that really thoughtful craft talk. And thank you.

I was just thinking, I mean, this is such a good reminder to students that poetry is not autobiographical. It can be, but we really should approach it as that. It's not right. That like, I know a lot of writers might borrow parts of their lives for fiction and they might borrow parts of their lives for poetry.

But I just really like the reminder that in poetry, the narrator is the speaker and that we, yeah. And the persona, yeah. And so I love all the prompts around the persona poems and how to approach that. So yes, you all watching this should do, actually, I suggest doing all three exercises.

So I'm excited to be in conversation with you. I like to kick off conversations by asking all the writers to talk about, you know, what is your journey to becoming a writer? I might have a somewhat unusual story because I grew up with, you know, fairly educated parents who were great readers. who read to me from a very young age.

So I grew up, just from a very young age, I had an appreciation for the written word and for creative writing. And my mother read poetry to me, nothing too challenging. But there's an old but famous book called The Child's Garden of Verses by, I want to say it's Robert Lewis. Stevenson and she would read me the poems from there. The original Winnie the Pooh books or many of the books by A.A.

Milner who wrote the Winnie the Pooh books have poems in them. And so I kind of early on enjoyed wordplay and sound and rhyme and rhythm and started understanding figurative language at a fairly early age, I think. And so I actually still have this piece of paper.

I wrote some little poems when I was six or seven, and my mother typed them up on her typewriter. Were they good poems? They probably couldn't be published today. One poem was about string and how much I loved string. So I was...

you know, just being very playful with language. But I kind of kept writing often, off and on and, you know, was a sort of typical moody teenager who wrote, you know, sad, unrequited love poems and things like that. I also wrote a lot of songs. I play guitar and, and wrote and recorded some songs I wrote when I was in, in high school. and really love that process too.

I'd love to get to get back into that. And it was a very on and off thing. And I did publish just a few poems in journals in the early 2000s. And then a lot of things happened kind of, you know, to use a cliche, kind of a perfect storm of life.

circumstances happened where I really needed a change. And that's when I applied to and was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the U. And I was actually 46 when I started that program.

And while there were a couple of students close to my age, I was the oldest. And so I was in that program with some students who had just graduated from their undergraduate program. undergraduate.

So it was very strange sometimes. But the program gave me the opportunity to really focus on my writing for three years. And the thesis that I wrote eventually was expanded and turned into my first. book.

Yeah. I mean, I think your journey is sort of a reminder that it's never too late to start the writing journey. I mean, it sounds like you never stopped, but you made the decision to go to graduate school later in life and it's perfectly fine. Becoming a writer is not like becoming, you know, a gymnast.

You can't decide in your 40s that you're going to become a competitive gymnast. but as long as you can write somehow in some capacity even if you're using voice technology you can you can write right right no that's actually a really good reminder um can you talk a little bit about how you move an idea into a finished poem it it varies um quite a bit because um some poems you come together fairly rapidly and some poems I work on almost line by line over a longer period of time and it's kind of agonizing. So it sort of depends. I usually start with an image because remember that poetry relies on imagery. descriptions of things that the reader can imagine seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, experiencing with their senses, rather than, you know, straightforward explanation or direct statements.

So I often start with an image. One recent draft of a poem I can remember is I had been down by Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. And Just the way that the lake looked when we first had some snow on the ground. And so there's like a white ring around the lake. And the lake was, the lake water was kind of a steel gray, like a shield or something like that.

And I started working with a description of that. And I didn't really know what the poem was going to be about yet. But it was important to write down that image.

play around with it. And then there's usually a feeling that I want to convey, you know, maybe I'm writing about the changing seasons. Maybe I'm writing about something that's going on in the larger world that that image relates to.

Maybe I'm writing about a an important relationship or decision or upcoming change that that can relate to and I start adding adding to that but I do usually start with an image sometimes a line will come to me where I just you know like the like a whole sentence that I could put into a poem and that's really great when that happens that's that's not you super common that's kind of like a gift from the gods when that happens um i i love the idea of just i mean just to make it a practice to collect images even if you don't know where it may go and that you as you're starting the journey of writing this poem or um uh trying to discover why why this is important to you right yeah you And I made a commitment this year to write every day. Now, before you think I must have tons of time on my hands, I just, it's like free writing. I just write whatever comes to mind for a little while every single day. And, you know, 90% of this is...

crappy. But the thing is, a lot of writers talk about this, it's kind of like, you get the crappy stuff out, and then the good ideas start coming. The other way to think of it is that just having a regular practice of writing is like exercising a muscle, and so it gets stronger, and so your writing practice gets stronger.

But I just have a practice where I'm actually every night I do some writing. I try not to think about it too much. I try to just.

write about whatever comes to mind. I try to get at least 10 lines. Um, but if I don't, I don't, because, you know, I have to sleep sometimes. And then, um, about once a week, roughly, I will, um, type up cause I handwrite all my rough drafts.

It's just the way I am. Um, about once a week, I will type up the ones that, um, that I think might be workable. I put a star or a question mark in the margin if I think, that might work.

Type them up. I make revisions, save them. And then usually when I do that, I also look back at some of the poems I've typed up previously and look at them for possible revisions too. And so when you do your daily writing to have like parameters, like some people say 20 minutes, one hour, five. five handwritten pages, a thousand words.

Like, do you give yourself parameters when you say I'm done? Um, I try for 10 lines and other than that, it's kind of a sense of like, you know, I stop when I feel like that's all I got for now, you know, it's okay to stop, you know, when you're stuck sometimes. Um, but I have, um, And I think this is why it's helpful for me.

I have very low standards about what I'm writing when I do that daily writing, because it's just about generating new work. Right. It's just about generating new work. And like I said, it's like, I don't know, probably no one here has ever cooked soup stock or something like that.

But you have to skim off this icky stuff that comes to the top to get to that nice, concentrated thing. tasty pure broth and so writing the the stuff that's not very good just get that out of the way you know yeah very low standard no that's actually one of the best advice I've gotten from writer you know from other writers is uh if if at first you don't succeed lower your standards just yes lower your standards generate work edit yourself later yeah and I I do work with a writing group that started believe it or not, March of 2020. And a poet that I know invited me and a few other people to do a Zoom writing group. And when we're on a roll, we meet every other week.

But, you know, like with the holidays upcoming and things like that, we might have gaps. But the person who initiated it leads our meetings as a workshop. gives us a prompt, like I gave students the prompts for writing persona poems. She usually has published poems that she uses as an example, like here's an interesting poem I read recently, puts it on the screen, reads it to us, and then says, take this line and riff off of that somehow, or some other idea. And so that's something else.

that I do to generate new writing. And again, all of us in the group, we talk about how, you know, it doesn't have to be great, though we do read each other what we write and we'll tell each other, you know, what stood out, what seemed strong, what seemed worth working on. Can you talk a little bit about revision and how you approach revising your work?

Revision is so important and it's much more than just maybe changing some punctuation or a word. And I really want to encourage students to try not to think of their writing as, you know, sacred and like this came from my soul and so I can't change it because most writers revise and revise a lot. With poetry, honestly, one of the best things you can do is cut things out. Poetry is often what we call fairly compressed, where you have, you try to say as much as you can in as few words as possible.

You try to make a central image resonate with a lot of different meaning and not have a whole lot of words explaining the image. So one thing you can do is cut out any words that just aren't really adding that much to the meaning of the poem. You know, things like nouns and descriptive verbs do the heavy lifting. And if there is an and and a that that you can take out, you can do that.

You can make little cuts line by line and just get it down to the really important words. Cutting lines from the beginning is often really helpful because when we start writing, there's kind of a metaphor that writers use that sometimes maybe the first three lines of a poem you wrote are really just throat clearing. where you're kind of not quite getting to the point yet.

You're just warming up. And so I've had, actually with that poem Hospice, I axed a whole stanza at the beginning. And then sometimes the last couple of lines can be cut because sometimes we feel like we need to sort of explain things, you know, and end that way.

And you want the poem strength. to come from the imagery and not a lot of explanation and direct statements. So ending lines are a place to look for where you can cut.

You know, I've moved things around. I've taken a poem that was completely written in open form, and I've ended up counting syllables and making each line a certain length and kind of have a certain rhythm because I like the sound of it. I've replaced words that are not very descriptive with more descriptive words.

And then if you have the opportunity to share your work with anybody, they can tell you what in the poem are they not following? You know, are they not sure what this is really about? And you can fix that. You know, what images are striking to them?

Which ones don't make sense? sense and getting another set of eyes on your work is really important. Reading your work out loud will help you find things to change that you won't notice just looking at the words on the page, because you'll hear that, oh, that one line is kind of clunky. You know, it's like I've got this kind of musical rhythm and then suddenly there's a line that's just eh.

Or maybe the Maybe that word has a really negative connotation and I want something that's more positive. You'll just kind of hear things that you won't necessarily see on the page. Yeah. As you talk about, I mean, your revision process and the idea of not all the time, but usually your first three lines can probably be cut and your last couple of months be cut. It made me think about a conversation I had with a screenwriter recently.

Where she said that, you know, when you're writing a screenplay, you want to be like you want to be a good guess. You want to show up late and leave early. We don't need to know once upon a time.

We don't need to know the conclusion. Just get us right in. Yeah. Get people interested and then leave.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like get get to the story.

Yeah. I know we're almost out of time, so I'd love to ask, just ask about like, what kind of advice do you wish you had gotten when you started writing? Hmm. I think to be honest, I think it would have been helpful to have got gotten some encouragement to write things that were.

less autobiographical and really work on trying different poetic voices and different personas because that really that really takes a lot of creativity because you have to think what would this other person be thinking and feeling instead of thinking about what I am thinking and feeling I think it would have been great to have gotten advice early on about not explaining things too much, really letting imagery, figurative language do more work and not, I think some of my, some of my poetry when I first started the MFA program was very prosy sounding. Now there is such a genre as narrative poetry that, that tells a story in poetic form, but, but I had some poems that just sounded. you know, too much like ordinary language and not poetic language. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we head out? Just write, keep writing, lower your standards for when you first start out.

There's actually a book about writing called Shitty First Draft. And if you free yourself up to put anything down and not, this does not have to be perfect. This does not even end up having to be a poem that you keep.

But the practice of writing is what is really important and will over time really improve your writing. So just keep it up. Well, Yana, thank you so much for today. This was amazing. Well, thank you so much.

I've been looking forward to this so much. So I'm really glad to have had this opportunity today. All right.

Bye, everyone.

Transcript for:Exploring Poetry with Yana Knittel

Transcript for:
Exploring Poetry with Yana Knittel