The Poetry Magazine Podcast

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Kiki Petrosino and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Crestfallenness, Cookbooks, and More

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Kiki Petrosino:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor”)

What’s desire for poets? Well, I’ll speak for myself.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Cindy Juyoung Ok, poeting with Kiki Petrosino today, on the state of being crestfallen, though I’m feeling cheerful, maybe even nadir risen. That’s the kind of play that I hope one person will get. Thank you, listener. Kiki has published five elegant and remarkable books all with Sarabande, including most recently, the poetry collection White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, and the memoir Bright. She writes in that memoir, “Within poetry is a kind of divinity, one that requires me to listen. All divinity, John Donne wrote, is love or wonder, and maybe poetry and all its crestfallenness is both love and wonder, asking us to listen.” Today we get to do just that and hear a bit from Kiki’s essay in the October issue of Poetry: “On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor.” It’s from this series “Hard Feelings,” which is about exactly what it sounds like. We get to talk crestfallenness, in her poems, too, and in life. Kiki, welcome to the podcast.

Kiki Petrosino: Hi, thank you for having me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Kiki, you start this essay by sharing that you didn’t want to write it. What about that prompt, write an essay on crestfallenness was intimidating or difficult?

Kiki Petrosino: Well, it’s difficult to write about the sense that I have that I’m not measuring up, or that I think other people have things that I want, or that there’s another life out there of accomplishment and success, that for whatever reason, I’m not living. And I say that knowing full well, that my life is good, and that I have a lot of amazing things going on, not least of which is the opportunity to speak to you and to have written an essay for Poetry magazine. But yet it always seems to be with humans, that we look for validation from the outside world for the things that we do. And that we often feel disappointed for some reason when our grand ambition for something seems to fall short. And then, so it was scary to kind of write into that feeling or into that set of emotions.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So we have this segment, we have a segment called “Question into the Void” where poets on the podcast leave behind questions into the void to share with future guests. And we have a great question from Kimiko Hahn, who is thinking along the same lines, I think, and, you know, I think of it as a little gift and maybe related to this idea of crestfallenness, as related to that kind of disappointment. And she didn’t know at the time that it was for you. But here’s our question today.

Kimiko Hahn: My dear friend and colleague, poet Nicole Cooley, has a wonderful question she asks her grad students, and now I do too. The assignment is called Textual Envy. And the question is, what text do you wish you’d written, and why? My first would be Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light,” but she is so sui generis, that it is difficult to wish to have written one of her poems. Learn from, of course, but actually write—such a desire feels like hubris. So, to answer my own question, I envy Elizabeth Bishop’s “First Death in Nova Scotia.” The point of view is not only psychological, it is physical. I can feel myself in a child’s body being lifted to look inside the coffin.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Have texts ever made you feel a kind of crestfallenness? To know it exists already in the world?

Kiki Petrosino: What a wonderful question. So many texts, whether they are poetry or another genre, have filled me with exhilaration, and there, and then also the pinprick of envy, which then leads, I think, to that kind of collapsed soufflé of crestfallenness, which is what I was trying to write about in my in my essay.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Kiki Petrosino: I think that for me, I experience that when I read something like Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Iskandariya,” which is a mystical and ecstatic work that tells the story of the speaker’s relationship with a scorpion, and then connects that relationship and its perils, its danger, because the Scorpion has these like sharp parts of its body to a relationship to the divine.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Danielle Deulen:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Closing Time; Iskandariya” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought I said not “some sort of fish,” but a “scorpion fish,” a request he would surely have granted, being a goodly God, but then he forgot the “fish” attached to the “scorpion” (because God, too, forgets, everything forgets); so instead of an edible

(FADES OUT)

Kiki Petrosino: I would love to be able to move in the virtuosic way that Brigit did. I met her only one time when I was at Breadloaf, as a waiter at Breadloaf.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, when was that?

Kiki Petrosino: That would have been—

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What year was that?

Kiki Petrosino: It was 2007.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, wow.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And she was teaching?

Kiki Petrosino: She was. She was. And so that was the first time that I had ever—it was the first and only time that I ever met her. And she read that poem, but I missed it because I was doing something related to the little work-study that we had to do, I think. Or I was just exhausted. And everyone came back and said that this amazing poem had been in the air. And so then I had to look it up. And so, you know, part of the crestfallenness also is to feel that I’m always a step behind the great work, if not more steps behind, and that I have to, there’s some missed stitch that I have to constantly try to pick up. And so that would be an example of one of those complicated, layered feelings that I have about a work. I wish I had authored it. But then I would never ever wish that Brigit had not authored it, you know? I’m happy that it’s in the world, even as I feel that it shows me a kind of poetic diction and a kind of tremendous intellectual and artistic action, and virtuosic movement that I wish that I could somehow have in my own poetry. And then as soon as I think that thought, I think, but my poetry moves in the way that my poetry moves, and there is something that I also must care for, and always nurture in my own practice.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Would you read for us from the beginning of your essay “On Crestfallenness”?

Kiki Petrosino: Sure, I’d be glad to.

(READS EXCERPT)

What’s desire, for poets? Well, I’ll speak for myself. I want to tell you everything, and I also want to keep silent. I want my poems to stitch magical knots in the air, to make an elaborate web leading back through time. I want my books to smell like a combination of fresh apples, coconut, and buttered popcorn, but I also want the poems to feel ancient in your hands, like wood covered in painted leather. I want my poetry to take you all over the world, and I want wildly unheard-of worlds to emerge with each poem. As I hand you these worlds, each a translucent fruit slice balanced on the edge of my paring knife, I want you to taste revelation on your tongue.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Starting a paragraph that way is so uncompromising. I really love “What’s desire for poets?” There’s all these desires that contain and invite, I guess, their opposites, or at least their resistances always. I don’t think I can put it so well. I always think of it as, you know, when I’m not completely humiliated by something I’ve written, if I don’t feel disgust, then what a great success. How perfect. You took an extracurricular poetry workshop in high school that sort of got you started in this whole world and got you thinking in ways that probably you couldn’t have imagined. Was that in Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania, or was that before you had moved?

Kiki Petrosino: This was in Baltimore, Maryland. So, I’m originally from Baltimore City. In childhood, my parents decided to move to southern Pennsylvania. So it was about 45 minutes north of Baltimore. And I went to elementary school in Pennsylvania. But then when it was time for high school, my sister and I went back to Baltimore for high school. So we were kind of—

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, you were commuting.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, we were like a commuting family. Because my parents continued to work in Baltimore City, as public school teachers, even though we lived in Pennsylvania. This was something that many people did in the ’80s and ’90s. There was like a big push to the suburbs at that time.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kiki Petrosino: People left Baltimore City. So I went to high school in Baltimore, and it was in ninth grade, was in my freshman year that I did take a poetry writing workshop on Monday afternoons with a wonderful teacher, Amy Gibson, who led a small group of us in a pretty intensive study of poetry that was unconnected to any of our classes. But it was really the first, one of the first places where I began to identify as a poet. And I also was undergoing that kind of discovery in community with other peers who were writing poetry as well that time.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, that’s great that you were reading and writing. And for it to be something separate, in a way, kind of keeps it unadulterated, because it’s something that you’re just doing for fun. And it’s not about grades. And it’s not about pleasing the teacher in that way. Then in college, at the University of Virginia, where, of course, you now teach and direct creative writing, were you also studying poetry?

Kiki Petrosino: Yes, I was. While I was an undergraduate student, I took wonderful poetry workshops. I also took courses with Charles Wright, and with Gregory Orr. They were my two main teachers. And I also got to know my now colleague, Lisa Russ Spaar, who was directing the creative writing program at that time. I also minored in Italian at the University of Virginia. I took music classes as well. It was like this magical laboratory where you could concoct

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Flit about?

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, intellectual playground for yourself across disciplines. And that’s kind of how I became, I think, the artist and the thinker that I am. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thomas Jefferson is someone who comes up a lot in your books. It’s a very kind of complicated, but really close knowledge of him, and also his writing, his life. Was that an education that came up in Baltimore? Or was that something that you were looking more into once you were in Virginia? When did that kind of first spark of research or interests come about?

Kiki Petrosino: I would say that, as soon as I found out as a school-age student about Jefferson’s role in the founding generation, I became curious and interested in him. Certainly, when I started at the University of Virginia as an undergraduate student and understood that this was the university that Jefferson had founded, my interest in him then renewed. But I couldn’t, I can’t say that I did a whole ton of research into Jefferson. At the time that I was a student at UVA, there was a lot of talk about, about Sally Hemings and the idea that Jefferson could have had another family with an enslaved woman there at Monticello. And the DNA proof of that emerged, I believe, during my undergraduate time. And so, that was in the air and lots of people had different opinions about it. As a Black American myself of interracial ancestry, it seemed super salient to me, you know, that Sally existed, and that her children existed. One can appreciate the ambition that somebody like Jefferson had, but then also think critically about who that vision included and excluded at the time, you know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm-hmm. And, yeah, it sounds like there was just a lot going on as well. Like, we all remember those kind of moments of news, and I think it can kind of shape things because you’re processing it as a community,

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: in a way that’s maybe different. And you were also studying Italian, you said, you were a minor at UVA. And you’ve since written sonnets and villanelles, and sestinas and forms that have an Italian history, a long Italian history. Do you read poems, or were you reading poems in Italian in college? Do you find those forms mainly in English? Or was there a connection through the language that got you so interested in these forms?

Kiki Petrosino: Well, my initial connection to the language was just the fact that I’m, I guess I would be considered a heritage learner of Italian since half of, you know, my father’s family is Italian American, and my grandfather was born in Italy, so I didn’t grow up speaking the language, but I grew up hearing it and not understanding it, but being very curious about it and wanting to know what my, like, family was saying, in this language that I couldn’t understand. And so, my first time to be able to take a course in Italian was when I got to the University of Virginia. And there were these times when my studies in Italian and my studies in English would overlap in things like learning about the sonnet as a form, for example. Some of the same sonnets would come up in my English courses, and then also an Italian course. So someone like Petrarch kind of like crosses both disciplines.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Classic, yeah.

Kiki Petrosino: That just helped, like, underline and emphasize for me the great joy that I have in being a cross disciplinary thinker and artist. I liked that feeling of like, I saw this poem in, you know, one class and now here it is in another class, to look at in a different and new way.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Context.

Kiki Petrosino: So I also then as an undergraduate studied abroad, I did go to Florence and studied at NYU, in Florence. They had a beautiful campus, I think it’s, they still have that. But as much as I want to talk about how important that part of my identity is, there’s also the other part of my identity, which is no less important.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your mom.

Kiki Petrosino: I always end up wanting to talk about, like, all of the aspects of my identity. And my African American ancestors were part of the free and enslaved communities in central Virginia, which is where I find myself now at the university. My ancestors lived in counties that are right next door to Albemarle County, and my ancestors have been in, we’re in Virginia for a very, very long time. So even in thinking about Jefferson, and, you know, as he’s at Monticello writing, or even when he embarks on the presidency, my ancestors were in Virginia at that time, very, very close by. So when I think about identity, I think about proximities, I think about intimacies, I think about historical intersections, I think about intertextuality.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And your mom came with you on some visits when you were writing about Virginia, is that right?

Kiki Petrosino: She did. Yeah, she was, you know, supervising my research. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: My fourth book of poetry, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, takes, as its beginning point, some of the genealogical investigations I was doing, to find out who my ancestors were who lived in Virginia. And that relates to my mother’s family. And she became really curious as well. She remembered stories she had been told. And she also has personal memories of like her own grandparents, whom I never really met or got to know. And so, being able to talk with her about those ancestors, and to be able to go to Virginia with her to conduct research. And by research, I just mean like, going.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Going.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, standing on the actual soil of Virginia. Sometimes we would find ourselves in libraries and archives, too. But more often, it was like, we would be in a place and we would have conversations, and we would talk to one another about the things that we were experiencing in that place.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I like to think of research as pretty expansive a definition, especially for poets. I just think of it as, like, re-search. So if you search something more than once, it’s research. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Kiki Petrosino: Mm-hmm. Yeah, okay. Yes. I’m gonna jump on that definition as well.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Would you read for us one of your beautiful villanelles from Witch Wife, “Purgatorio”?

Kiki Petrosino: Sure.

(READS POEM)

“Purgatorio”

I only want what I can’t have
when my old terror stabs me in the neck.
The Lord teaches me to love without fear.

But I wake up in battledress, picking lice
off my collar. Hardtack. Heat lightning.
I only want what I can’t have.

When will I get my great morning of wrath?
When my white deer self comes down from the woods?
The Lord teaches me to love without fear

but I drop my rifle & quickstep away
from all the dead between us. Tell me again how
I only want what I can’t have?

Things must change. I must pray.
If rivers crested & forts collapsed, maybe then.
The Lord teaches me to love without fear.

When I dream of the future, I’m always alone.
But something drags me with fear teeth.
I don’t know what I want. I only love
what I’m Lord of. Teach me, or else.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Such generative terms like the figure of the Lord becomes relational at the end, “what I’m Lord of” and the line, “If rivers crested & forts collapsed” is so related to crestfallen.

Kiki Petrosino: Oh my gosh, yeah,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: I wrote that years ago. But yeah, you are completely right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I love the word “purgatorio,” I, that’s one of the few Italian words I know because of the Italian version of shakshuka is called uova in Purgatorio. Have you had that?

Kiki Petrosino: I’ve had Shakshuka. But that’s an incredible—yeah, eggs in Purgatory. Totally makes sense.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, yes. It’s in red, it’s Dante, it’s a sweet one. So you—food and cooking does come up in some of your poems over the years. So there’s the “Eater” series, and there’s poems in Witch Wife that are critical about food and the way it gets associated with thinness or femininity. Are you into cooking yourself?

Kiki Petrosino: I am. I’m really into cooking, although I’m probably, I don’t know how I can be graded. You know, I don’t know,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: I’m enthusiastic about trying different things.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, you like it.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah. And again, because that, my life with cooking and exploring is separate from my work, I feel like it’s a place where I can put a lot of my joy. A different kind of joy than the joy that I experience as a teacher, you know? And I really love reading cookbooks. I love how they’re structured. I love the fact that there are pictures, and that my brain can engage with something on a different level.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kiki Petrosino: And just the diction itself. I also love when a cookbook can be read cover to cover like a novel, almost. Like if something says “recipes and stories,” then I’m definitely buying it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kiki Petrosino: I want to know like the blurb at the top of the recipe that says why it’s good and what the what the author was doing when they discovered this recipe. If there’s a, if there’s a cookbook that’s about a certain culture or country, and it says “recipes and stories,” like, I want to read all of the stories and understand how the recipes fit together, you know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But when you—say you read a cookbook cover to cover, do you find that there is an arc that is book-length? Like, is it that there are stories scattered throughout the recipes? I mean, because what you’re talking about, I’ve never done anything like that.

Kiki Petrosino: Oh, well, you know, it’s not necessarily that there’s an arc the way that we expect to see in a work of literature. There’s a structure to a cookbook. Some of them are organized by the seasons. Some of them are organized by the courses of like, how a meal or a banquet would go, depending on the culture. Desserts often show up at the end. I really like those, but I also like a cookbook that’s organized by ingredient. A vegetable cookbook that has like a carrots chapter or something. What I find in reading them from beginning to end or even dipping into them here and there is that it’s somehow soothing. It soothes my mind for there to be a structure for any recipe to hang on.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kiki Petrosino: The idea that this recipe is there to be experienced in an intentional way. And that I can look at it and bring it into my own practice of something. I’m really kind of describing it as the way that I would describe reading a really inspiring poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Totally.

Kiki Petrosino: But that is what I find when I open up a cookbook, you know? And if there’s any kind of like, information about the author, the stories part of it on top of that, that’s just extra for me and I love it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you have any favorite cookbooks that you like to read cover to cover?

Kiki Petrosino: Right now I’m working through a stack of cookbooks and I can recommend a few. There’s Bryant Terry’s Black Food, Emiko Davies’s, Florentine, Nicole Taylor’s Watermelon and Red Birds, and Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal books are current faves.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s incredible. Do you make everything in a book when you’re reading the whole thing? Or is it more just admiring the kind of stories and information you’re getting along the way?

Kiki Petrosino: I don’t, I haven’t, let’s just say, until now, I haven’t, like, cooked through an entire cookbook, for example. However, I read the cookbooks to see what recipes I can try. But I also want to see what ingredients. Like what other ingredients I could try or what other techniques. So for example, right now I’m really interested in risotto. And I’m trying to figure out what kinds of different risottos I could possibly make. And trying to perfect the technique of that, because there are many steps. And you can’t be distracted when you are making risotto.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, so that the result and the result that you get is amazing when it works out well.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Have you ever made a saffron risotto?

Kiki Petrosino: Not yet, but I have saffron in my pantry right now that I really want to try.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes!

Kiki Petrosino: Have you ever made it?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: OK, because that’s the hardest one to make.

Kiki Petrosino: Oh.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Or saffron is the hardest ingredient to get for it. But it’s pretty easy to make once you have the saffron. I mean, if you have the risotto system down.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah. Okay, well, that just inspired me. Maybe I will try to do it as my next, my next adventure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, you have options. But speaking of risotto, you taught Italian and English in Switzerland, which comes up in your essay. So how did you make that decision to move to Europe? You had been already to Italy for study abroad. What was it like when you first arrived and teaching students for the first time in a new context?

Kiki Petrosino: Right. Okay, so, I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2001. And our class was the last class to graduate before 9/11. So of course, nobody knew that then. But the world that I—the United States, the country that I left as a young holder of a Bachelor of Arts degree, very quickly, like, changed. The whole world seemed to have changed in just those few weeks. And so, I found myself overseas, basically teaching and living in a dorm in a boarding school in Switzerland, where the language of the locality was Italian. It was the Italian speaking canton of Ticino, which is not far from the Swiss-Italian border. So, I was teaching 12th grade British literature and also Introduction to Italian, because all the students wanted to learn Italian since they were in school in this region. But the reason why I wanted to go is because I had had a good experience learning Italian. And my time in Florence had been great. And I really wanted to have another experience in Europe, where I, in a place where I could speak Italian. And this opportunity came up. And it turned out to be really, a really good opportunity for those couple of years. But I found myself late, late, late at night, after finishing my lesson plans, writing poems in the teachers’ lounge. And realizing that if I wanted to do anything more with my poetry, that I would probably need to go to graduate school at some point and continue my education as a poet. And so, after two years at the school in Switzerland, I then applied for a one year graduate program at the University of Chicago. From there, I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop for my Master of Fine Arts degree.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You love school. (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: Basically, yes. I mean, as the child and grandchild of teachers, like, yeah, school was a place of, has been a place of success for me, a place of connection for me. I am always happy to be in spaces of learning.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And it sounds like even when you were so busy, and literally, you know, I’m sure, very early in the morning until very late at night, thinking about students, somehow the poetry was finding its way to you. Like it was still coming.

Kiki Petrosino: Yes, yeah. And it was kind of in a way that would not be denied. I could have continued teaching for another several years at that place, and just continued writing poems. But I also felt like that maybe I might want to be a college professor someday, that maybe I would want to teach poetry. And so these very, like, little nascent ideas kind of were, you know, guiding me onto a certain path.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. So you recently returned to that school to give a lecture. How did it feel speaking in Italian in that setting, again, and just being back in the space?

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, that was last September. So in the time that I had left the school, they actually received a wonderful endowment gift to bring, like, a visiting writer. So I was able to come back, you know, basically 20 years later, and speak with students. And they asked me to give a talk about poetry or to talk and also to answer questions from students. And all this stuff had to happen in Italian. And so, before I left, and even on my way, I was drafting paragraphs and, and trying to translate them as best I could, and trying to see what kind of go-to phrases I could, like, memorize and think of and articulate in both languages.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Rely on.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah. But, you know, after a few days, I was surprised and really happy and exhilarated by the extent to which I was able to step back in to Italian be able to use it on a daily basis. And to make myself understood in another language. I’ll never be, you know, this, I’m not the same person

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Person, mm-hmm.

Kiki Petrosino: or speaker in Italian as I am in, like, American English, you know. I’m interested in who that other Kiki is in the other language, and what I can do in another language. And so, for me, it was just endlessly fascinating. But I also experienced crestfallenness, too, because I had just when I was felt that I was speaking really well, there would be a moment when I couldn’t find the words. And it was usually in some kind of weird situation where I needed to, for example, figure out what floor I should get off on an elevator. For whatever reason, my mind just refused to figure this problem out in Italian, you know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kiki Petrosino: There’s a point at which maybe through exhaustion, because you’re using so much energy to speak another language when it isn’t your native language or your first language, that your brain is just like, we don’t know, we don’t know what we’re gonna, how we’re gonna get out of this parking garage with an elevator.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Kiki Petrosino: And you feel crestfallen, even as you’re struggling, and exhausted because you’re like, I had this vision of myself as being a speaker

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kiki Petrosino: who could flow in multiple languages, and I’m not meeting that vision. And so there’s that feeling of deflation, because you’ve just pointed back to your own desire, you know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And that’s why it’s the collapsed soufflé that you’ve mentioned earlier because you felt nervous, but then it was better than you expected, so you went to the crest and then you fell from that crest.

Kiki Petrosino: For sure. That is exactly it. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And fluency is so strange, because there’s that self-consciousness that kind of is trying to ruin everything, you know, and then you have to kind of get comfortable to get fluent but then there’s always you’re, you’re brought back to the pride or the, you know, you’re kind of like, oh, but not everything or like, not emotions, or, you know, there’s whatever gaps.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I guess, in this case, the floors. But I think you’re so right that you’re kind of a different person. Like I, people tell me all the time, “Oh, you’re so funny in Korean.”

Kiki Petrosino: Ohh.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I’m like, okay, so not in English, you know, like, people have maybe slightly different ways of expressing themselves or traits that people can pick up on when speaking another language.

Kiki Petrosino: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you think that you know your Italian self or would describe the Italian speech differently?

Kiki Petrosino: That’s like a really good question. I think that my Italian speaking self is maybe more willing to reach out to someone else to help the work of communication along, whereas in English, because I have this, like, readier access to the language, I can probably hold forth by myself. And it’s more about like my individual expression. But when I’m speaking Italian, it’s about me and you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Collaboration.

Kiki Petrosino: And if I need to find a word, I will ask you to help me find it so that we can find the word together. And it’s just a really different way of existing, because I feel that my Italian self, it has to exist in relationship to others. The experience that I have had as an Italian learner and trying to speak Italian is that if you try, usually the reaction is good. The other speaker will be helpful. And that’s also how I am in English if I’m speaking to someone who’s speaking English as a learner. Like, I also want to reach back out to that person if I sense that they’re reaching out to me.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let’s go back to the essay and hear the ending of “On Crestfallenness.”

Kiki Petrosino:

(READS EXCERPT)

I’d like to abandon my crestfallenness for a spirit of “welcome expectation.” I’d like to read signals, entering the field of language dressed as a pilgrim, not a tractor. How would it feel to step back from intention, to refrain from marking a set path through the field? In that Otherwise, my poems emerge with their great horns and shining eyes. They already are complete. They already are real. My job is to witness, to encounter, to love those poems onto the page. Love; this is the work.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: For those at home, there is a semicolon between “Love” and “this is the work.” I feel like that’s important to imagine. Don’t you just love, like, a tiny piece of punctuation that changes everything?

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So this, there’s this beautiful state where poems come out complete, and the real is sort of ideal. Is that something that happens to you regularly, or something that’s more of a struggle that goes back and forth?

Kiki Petrosino: I think that’s the vision, you know? That in some way, the poem will approach being able to encompass the reality or the surreality of what the poet has in mind or what I, I’ll just speak for myself, what I have in mind as a poet. Sometimes I’ll have dreams where I am reading poems that I have written and the poems are already complete, and I just read line after line after line of finished poetry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kiki Petrosino: And it’s like, amazing because it’s already there.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Amazing.

Kiki Petrosino: But of course, then when I wake up, I don’t remember those poems. Or if I remember a line or two, it no longer sounds as good as it did and that ecstatic vision, my dream self had. In some ways, like, I can only hope that my poetry will approach that vision

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. It’s asymptotic.

Kiki Petrosino: Yeah, because I think if poems did fully, fully, fully emerge that way, done, then there would be no need for me to write the next poem. I mean, what is it that spurs the next poem into existence? It is desire. It is desire to say again and again and again, something that feels real, that feels true, that you want to articulate to someone else, you know? And that work is really never done as long as we’re here and writing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It is nice, it is a relief. I think a lot of times the poems are like, you’re cobbling and you’re working and you’re bringing things together and you’re trying things on. But when it just sort of comes, that does feel and, you know, you feel like the vessel, and it’s just like happening, that is kind of nice. I think your metaphor is very beautiful, that they’re already complete and they have all these characteristics. I always say it’s like, well, I don’t know if I should say, but I always say it’s like pooping. And it’s just like a perfect poop, it comes out, it’s ready. You wipe, there’s nothing there. It’s like, you don’t have to force it. It’s contained. And that’s kind of the best kind of poem. You know, just,

Kiki Petrosino: I mean, I don’t want to leave you all alone in that metaphor, you know? (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kiki Petrosino: But I see, yes, I see what you mean.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. So I hope that many living and shining poems come to you very whole and very tenderly in the work that you’re working on now. Is there anything you want to share about that project?

Kiki Petrosino: I’m going to keep it a little bit close since it’s still in process. But much like my last few books, this new project is going to be an extension and an expansion of some of the questions of identity that I’ve been asking in my earlier work, with deliberate attention to the historical and cultural legacies of race and ethnicity that are connected to Virginia as a cultural crossroads.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, thanks for sharing so much on Virginia and on so many other things that have come up in your writing over the years, and how these different experiences in places have affected that. And thank you for writing the essay that, as you say, you didn’t want to write.

Kiki Petrosino: Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful experience.

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Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thanks, in many languages, multilingua, to Kiki Petrosino. Kiki is the author of five books, including Bright and White Blood, both recently published by Sarabande. She teaches in and directs the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. You can read her essay “On Crestsfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor” in the October 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. Thank you also to Danielle Deulen for her reading of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Closing Time; Iskandariya” and to Jay Maxton, her cohost on the Lit from the Basement podcast. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music and this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. With recipes and stories for the press we all fall from, thanks so much for listening.