Poetry Blog Book Tour - Interview with Christine Klocek-Lim

I’m part of a poetry blog book tour called “Back to the Future” that started yesterday with an interview of Wendy Babiak at Joanne Merriam’s blog.

Today I’m interviewing Christine Klocek-Lim. Christine received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. She has two chapbooks: "How to Photograph the Heart" (The Lives You Touch Publications) and "The Book of Small Treasures" (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Diode, Poets and Artists (O&S), Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory and elsewhere. She edits Autumn Sky Poetry, and her website is http://www.novembersky.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter: @chrissiemkl
Here are two samples of her work, one poem from each of her chapbooks:

From "The book of small treasures" (Seven Kitchens Press):

Zachary learns to swim

The ant, black as licorice, insists
the chair is his, roams up the legs
and arms as if the pool with its cool
blue depths wasn’t a foot away,
where the boy learns how water
can cup the torso, slide past hair
like a mini-ocean, not quite welcome,
not quite unfamiliar, but still
terrifying:
the absence of air,
how necessary it is to blow bubbles
through the nose, become a dolphin,
free with clicks and the fresh
jump into the deep
where water opens its mouth
and speaks.

From "How to photograph the heart" (The Lives You Touch Publications):

How to photograph the heart

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn-dead leaves,
your grandfather’s last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

JHG: What was the inspiration for "The Book of Small Treasures?" How did it differ from your first chapbook, "How to Photograph the Heart?"

Christine: I began writing "The book of small treasures" in April 2007, as part of NaPoWriMo. April is National Poetry Month in the US and across the web, many poets get together online and try to write a poem each day: that's NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). That was the first year I tried to write so consistently, and I knew that if I was going to write a poem every day, I needed a theme so I wouldn't be searching for ideas. I also knew that the theme needed to be something I understood very well and the difficulty and joy of parenthood was the most natural expression of my heart at the time. I'd been a stay-at-home mom for years, and though I'd been writing sporadically since 1999, I wanted my work to improve, my voice to grow into something that was truly my own. Those poems are the result. In contrast, my first chapbook is more of a collection on relationships between friends and lovers as well as those between parents and children. Those poems include a few I wrote over ten years ago as well as those I wrote in-between working on "The book of small treasures."

JHG: How did you decide how to organize the chapbooks?

Christine: My first chapbook, "How to photograph the heart," was originally just a collection of poems loosely based on the concept of relationships. My publisher and his assistant editor, O.P.W. Fredericks and Daniel Milbo at The Lives You Touch Publications helped me group them into themes and whittle the poems down until I had twenty, divided into three sections titled respectively: i — rain, ii — fragile, and iii — beloved. These divisions work because the poems begin with the most sorrowful (either emotionally or in imagery), work their way through poems that deal with the fragility of relationships, and finally end with poems that highlight love.

My second chapbook, "The book of small treasures," is arranged in the order in which I wrote the poems. Oddly, this organization seems to work, beginning with my children at a very young age and moving up through the pre-teen years. It has a loose narrative based on the narrator's journey from the beginning of parenthood and into the realization of what being a parent is truly like, with all its joys and heartbreak mixed up together. The editor at Seven Kitchens Press, Ron Mohring, liked the chapbook enough to rescue it from his recycle pile of those manuscripts that didn't win the Keystone Prize. That's how it got published.

JHG: I notice that many of your poems are inspired by the natural or scientific world, like "Zachary Learns to Swim."

That's true. I think I just write about what I see around me. When I was younger, I used to write only about the surface of things: pretty clouds, the trees, sidewalks. As I grew in my poetry, I began to realize that merely talking about the stuff I found beautiful in the world wasn't enough. I needed to connect it to emotion. I began to try and write about people: my children, myself, and now characters I create, using their stories and the power of what I see to construct a kind of narrative whole where the world is a metaphor for the emotions that we struggle with every day. My poem, "Zachary learns to swim," was one of the first poems where I feel I accomplished that goal.

JHG: How does your work as an editor (of "Autumn Sky Poetry") affect your work?

In terms of the creative part of my writing, it doesn't really affect me aside from the time it takes away from my own work. In terms of understanding the poetry community, it's been an enormous blessing for me. I know how hard it is for editors to choose their selections, so I'm a lot less devastated when I get rejections and a lot more patient about the whole process. I've also made a lot of friends in the community and that is incredibly gratifying. I love being part of the world of poets and publishing my journal opened that door for me.

JHG: Thanks so much Christine!

And stay tuned for an interview with me by Mary Agner up on Thursday...

See the rest of the week:
28 July: Wendy hosts Mary
29 July: Mary hosts Jeannine
30 July: Christine hosts Joanne