Katy Didden earned her PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri, where she served as poetry editor for the Missouri Review. Her poems have appeared in many journals such as Crazyhorse, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Witness, and Poetry. You can read “The Soldier on Routine” in the Summer 2011 issue of The Kenyon Review here.
Is there a story behind your KR piece?
When I wrote “The Soldier on Routine” I was responding to a number of different things. The year before, I attended a lecture by Sr. Dianna Ortiz, author of The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, in which she recounted her experience of being tortured in Guatemala, and how she escaped her captors. At the same time, I was reading The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. In that book, Scarry analyzes the effects of torture and the relationship between torture and language (in fact, certain torture techniques are designed to destabilize the victim’s ability to communicate or to use language at all). The thing I found most terrifying in Scarry’s study was the way that a person can be coerced into performing torture–how this in itself is a kind of torture. I was thinking about war, and Abu Ghraib, and the bizarre ability of the soldiers who took the photographs to disassociate, and not see the prisoners as human. This made me think again of Sr. Ortiz, and her experience. One of the most tragic effects of her torture is that she lost all memory of her prior life. In the lecture, she discussed how her experience of torture changed her perception of God–as she said, whatever she had thought of as God before her torture was “incinerated”(that word makes it into the poem). Her torture also changed her relationship to Christ, since she now understood that he was a victim of torture, and she related to him as a torture victim. I have to confess that this poem also draws on a television show. I happened to watch an episode of Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D-List, where she went to Iraq to visit the soldiers, and they showed footage of the Green Zone, and a former palace of Saddam Hussein where Kathy Griffin was staying. Since I was still ruminating over Sr. Ortiz’s story, I began to think of her former life, the life she cannot remember, as a more archetypal “Green Zone,” a fortified place immured from the effects of war. Then I began to think that I have lived my whole life in a “Green Zone,” and wanted to see if it were possible to gain some understanding of the terrible cost of war for soldiers by way of imagining their situation. What would happen if I were ordered to torture someone? So, this strange confluence of ideas was running through my mind, and then the final piece fell into place–I was writing a paper on Gertrude Stein, and was immersed in the rhythms of “One: Carl van Vechten” and “Portrait of Picasso.” Stein’s disorienting syntax and staccato rhythm, her repetitions, her declarative tone, gave me the music I needed to confront the subject, a means of getting at the effects of torture on language. Well, this is a complicated poem and that’s the long history of how it began.
Talk about how the books you are reading influence your writing.
See above.
How do you anticipate what your reader’s imagination will bring to your work?
I anticipate what my reader’s imagination will bring to my work by testing
my poems on a few trusted friends before they reach the poetry-reading
masses. My first readers are incredibly talented poets, who devote many
hours to critiquing student poems. They wear letter-pressed badges that
say “clich?? police.” I have to write a poem that won’t get me arrested.
More importantly, I want to write a poem that will be worth their time and
attention.
It is true that writing is easier when I have a particular audience in mind. I
wrote this poem for a poetry workshop, and many of us in that class were
also enrolled in a seminar on literary portraiture. We discussed portraiture
and its relationship to persona; this poem grew from those conversations.
I was writing for people I knew would be skeptical of the attempt to write
in someone else’s voice about a place and a situation I know very little
about. There’s a lot of subconscious stuff in the poem, drawn out by the
strange music and the broken syntax, so I hope that readers at large will
also be skeptical of the experiment to adopt this perspective. Still, I hope
readers will trust that this poem was my attempt to understand the effects
of torture. I’m striving for honesty here.
What internal or external factors have the biggest influence on your
creative process?
The internal factor is my nerves of steel. Actually, my nerves are flimsy
moths that keep mistaking some old lady’s string of Christmas lights for
the sun. The external factor is a writing routine, though this depends on
the internal factor of commitment, which sometimes requires the external
factor of deadlines. One thing that works for me is to disguise solitary
writing hours as social engagements. I like to write with friends close by
(and coffee). “I found the sun! Is that the sun?” “No, it’s a porch light. I
like it.”
What exactly is (poetry/fiction/nonfiction) good for?
If you peer into a post-poem brain (after the top of the head has lifted off),
you might see synapses trailblazing faster routes to delight or compassion
(or occasionally to the brink of existential abyss). For me, great poems
are thrilling, and sometimes life changing. Even acquiring a new rhythm
can change your life; at some deep level of the thrumming blood this
must be true. Poetry is excellent for making connections–the process of
metaphorizing or juxtaposing keeps you tuned to how everything is linked.
This love of connections also translates to relationships–in my pursuit
of poetry I’ve been lucky to meet many brilliant writers and artists, and I
continue to learn from them, not just about poetry but about how to live
well in the world. It seems to me that these important friendships are not
just a side effect of poetry, but are essential to it.
In the spectrum of entertainment and media (music, movies, television, Internet, art, etc.) where does the literary pursuit fit?
In the red part of the spectrum–the fiery pit of Aetna.
If I had to assign it one place on a spectrum, I would put poetry closest
to music, but I guess I would prefer a net to a spectrum, because I think
poetry (and literature) benefits from a dialogue with other media. I’m really
interested in the intersection between poetry and movies, for example. I
saw a poem film recently–it was a montage of city scenes, and the poet
read her poem in voice-over. She read a line in which she compared
a road to a spine, but the image on the screen was a telephone wire–
this blew my mind, since it seemed to me that it suddenly added a new
dimension to metaphor, that there was a parallel visual poem harmonizing
with the main poem, and intensifying it somehow. I still can’t explain it
entirely, but I understood metaphor in a new way, and the old way seems
limited now.
What advice would you give yourself five years ago?
For the last five years, one of my running routes follows a creek that
branches off from the Missouri River. It is a wide dirt path through the
woods, with lots of bridges and rock formations and tall sycamores. Just
this week, somebody hung a hand-painted sign about fifty feet after the
parking lot that says “Keep going! You’re doing great!” I’ve run that path
a hundred times but this sign makes me extra-happy. I would buy my
younger self a coffee mug with that motto on it.