Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). New poems appear or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Believer, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Witness, and elsewhere. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives and works in Maryland. His poem “Ownership of Time” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Ownership of Time”?
“Ownership of Time” is one of three poems I wrote in succession that attempt to depict the ways in which even the most elemental aspects of our lives are owned by capitalistic forces, which, by design, commodify, deceive, and exploit us for the sole purpose of growth and return. “Ownership of Sight” and “Ownership of Words” are the other two poems and were published in the Massachusetts Review and the Antioch Review, respectively. With “Ownership of Time,” I wanted to evoke the corrosiveness of political fanaticism as a kind of capitalistic force, but I was also considering how the time one spends on this earth is actually defined and modified by how other people spend their time. I kept feeling like I was at one of Trump’s vile and hateful rallies even though the thought of attending one is repulsive to me. I kept thinking that we’re all at one of his rallies whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, simply because we’re aware that they’re occurring.
Can you tell us more about the “life sentence” in this poem? What do you think has been the theme of your work in your lifetime so far?
In We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch writes that “power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality,” and I kept thinking of this while describing the dynamic in the poem, of how the insidiousness of entitlement, privilege, and narcissism entraps those who are subjected to it within “your story of their reality.”
Regarding my own work, all I can say is that I write to push back on the presumption that I know anything with certainty. A poem is where certainty should be unraveled. Certainty is the end of consideration. And I don’t want to live or write like that.
Are there other poems directed to “you” you’d especially recommend to our readers?
I highly recommend, in its entirety, Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death (translated by Don Mee Choi), in which the you—a spirit roaming between death and reincarnation—figures prominently. It is a brilliant, devastating, thrilling book. There’s two less recent poems that I want to mention. Jorie Graham’s astonishing “The Taken-Down God” gives the you a presence that is embodied by temporality: “these words will say ‘you’—but, no: there is nothing: these / words will say you meaning by that dear nothing: now.” And, John Ashbery’s “A Blessing in Disguise,” the final stanza of which surfaces in my mind on a regular basis: “I prefer ‘you’ in the plural, I want ‘you’ / You must come to me, all golden and pale / Like the dew and the air. / And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I remember Marie Howe instructing a workshop I was in to put the kitchen sink in every poem. My memory may have revised this piece of advice over time, but I believe she was encouraging us not to hold back, not to reserve an image or metaphor for a future poem. I’ve taken this to heart—perhaps too much so—and it has informed how I often attempt to push poems past my own comfort and familiarity to see if it can contain more, or contain more effectively. I’m not saying that I think poems should be busy or overwrought, but I do think there might be something useful or intriguing beyond where a poem first indicates it wants to end, so why not at least check?
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’ve been writing a book-length sequence called Tread Upon. It begins with a short poem in which walking is equated with the execution of the grass. Eight sections follow, each titled with a word or phrase extracted from the short poem. I see this short prefatory poem as a kind of rock kicked up from the road against a windshield. From where the rock strikes the windshield, cracks zigzag outward in all directions. That’s what I envision the eight sections doing.
I hope Tread Upon uncovers—as much as I am possibly able—the myriad ways in which my life is predicated on the death of the natural world. It is imperative that I try to understand. I’m not interested in looking away. This is not a time for humanity as a geologic force to look away.