Ziad Mahmoud / The Mossy Log
Joanna Klink, an award winning poet, joined the English department’s Visiting Writers Series in the Armstrong Lounge in Frank Manor on Oct. 1, where she shared excerpts from her latest poetry collection, “Days & Chances.” The event commenced with an intimate introduction presented by professor Mary Szybist, in which she recalled her first time meeting Klink and how they became friends through exchanging poetry over mail.
Following Szybist’s graceful and deeply personal introduction, Klink proceeded to the podium where she started talking about what poetry means to her and how it connects with her life experience. She described poetry as different from normal speech as it opens up deeply human emotions and lets us sit in them.
“I love poems because they are these deep acts of attention that picture past moments over and over, and that’s what I mean by chances,” Klink said, clarifying what she meant by the title of her book.
“You have these chances and they remind you that you’re a part of things, but you are not central.”
She launched the reading with her poem “Two Trees,” a poem she wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when she felt especially defeated by how much time she was spending in front of screens and the excessive time she spent indoors, away from nature and trees.
“I felt far from anything that mattered,” Klink read, “The routine of a day loses force — you work, clean up and eat, plunging to sleep — what happened to those hours. Those hours were yours and they still pulse with heat and dream”
Klink uses her words to weave intricate images in her poems, placing different moments and feelings next to each other in association. “Carmine clouds” and “Women by the road gathering trash” next to “Bells of heat on skin early in the day” and “The smell of eucalyptus.” She lingers in those personal moments that, together, convey the experience of living through the pandemic and lockdown.
She went on to read a shorter poem titled “Thoughts on Joy,” a poem that reflects on the concept of joy through many lenses in just under 10 lines: the mundane, the consistent, the fleeting and the endless as sources of joy. She moved seamlessly from images of cleaning the sink and the air from trees to the hour after it rains and the sky that never leaves.
The next poem she read, “Tallying,” shifted the tone toward a more emotional, grievous one. A poem about the overwhelm of constant death during COVID-19, and as a result of a deadly snowstorm that happened in Austin, Texas where she was living that killed over 200 people. It is a poem that pulls no punches in its ability to signify human death.
When Klink was asked about how she came to write that poem she further expanded on its meaning.
“It was born out of complete helplessness of that thing we all did of just trying to track how many people were dying,” she said. “As if that would help us, as if tracking the numbers would help.”
Next, she read “Upon Receiving the Gift of a Handmade Box,” which she prefaced with the story that inspired the poem. She recalled her friend Forrest, a woodworker who makes beautiful boxes out of different types of wood, inlaid with turquoise or other stones. He made her a handmade box as a gift upon moving to Austin, and asked for a poem in return.
“This is the poem. And it tries to imagine a different kind of world, but also, it’s thinking about what boxes could shut in, what they could hold open,” Klink said. “So this is for Forrest Novi, who made the box.”
As she conjured a world with different scenes on the podium, I started placing myself in that world. It is not a beautiful world but it is a complex world beyond value, containing life with its little things, almost like a box.
“These Are My Hands” is the last poem she read. It is a devastating poem about her father — about having to slowly watch him lose his will to live as he grows in sickness and age.
During the Q&A, an audience member asked Klink about how she sustains her attention towards poetry, especially at a time where many people struggle to stay focused, let alone be creative.
Klink said, “It’s this vital practice of reading poems, and feeling like sounds and words can be moved around — a vision can be reconceived, endlessly reconceived, and then pictured for me,” Klink said. “I think that’s part of the crucial act of reading and writing poems.”
I recall a verse from her poem “Upon Receiving the Gift of a Handmade Box.”
“When I am still, I can feel the labor inside the wood, and hummingbirds, and the years to come.”
Klink reconceives and pictures these images, feelings, sounds and concepts in association with one another, breathing a separate life in a distinctive world through her poems by using a comprehensive form of attention.
As questions came to an end, she concluded the event with reading a vulnerable poem titled “Processional” that she wrote to her mother who had recently passed away:
“I would sit with you awhile, or walk next to you,” Klink read. “And when we take leave of each other after so many years, the oaks will toss their branches in wheels of wind above us — as if it had mattered, all of it, every second. If there is a world.”
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