14H: What kernel of the poem came to you first? Was it an image or a feeling or a moment or the form?

 

ALK: Every day, I would take, like, the teacher bus from our neighborhood to the neighborhood the school was in. And there was this anxiety that I had every day—the stress of sometimes letting down the students, and not feeling like I knew what I was doing. It was that moment of getting on the bus and feeling like I'm going into battle. And also, there was an active volcano that I passed on the bus every day. There's this idea of coming and going to school every day, being backdropped by this really beautiful, but violent landscape, and then being dropped into this environment that felt potentially dangerous at the same time. And I think that's the anxiety that built the poem.

 

14H: I also really enjoyed the form of the poem: how it slopes downward, perhaps like ash from a volcano erupting. I was curious if that was the form that you wrote it in first, or if it was something that came to you later.

 

ALK: I usually find form really difficult. This poem was in my journal for ages, and then I typed it onto my computer. When I'm typing, I usually write everything in a big prose block. Once it's in a prose block, I start looking at enjambments, and breaking lines where I think there’s a certain impact, an emotion, a sentiment, or an image that I want to linger on. And then after I break those lines, I think: do I want a poem to be more uniform, where maybe there's a straightforward story being told, or would it be beneficial to have the lines be broken in a way that enhances a tension in the poem? In this case, I wanted the form to compliment or at least to run parallel to that idea of anxiety—the choppiness of what the day entailed and this disjointed, fractured feeling. I knew the poem should have an inherent brokenness to it. After I made those enjambments, it fell into place from there.

 

14H: I also wanted to ask about a few of your other poems: “Aftermath,” “Escape Plans,” and “On Lockdown.” The speaker is describing surviving the mass shooting at Columbine High School and its aftermath, and perhaps also the rise of school shootings and how that shapes the working conditions of teachers. It struck me as almost a taboo thing to admit: the vulnerability of feeling in danger as a teacher, especially with the age and power dynamics where, in many ways, you're the one in charge. What were the challenges of writing about that, and how did it feel to put those feelings on the page?

 

ALK: Those three poems that you mentioned were part of my first manuscript, Conditions of the Wounded. The thematic structure of that book surrounds what happens to a person when violence becomes internalized. It's backdropped by a childhood that was impacted by the Columbine High School shooting. That was the town I grew up in. I was really interested in this idea of a collective PTSD for towns and communities that experience higher levels of violence, especially when it comes to school shootings. I was interested in writing toward the anxiety I had looking at how every year, school shootings kept happening. It hasn't stopped, and unfortunately, it probably won't stop. In that book, there are the pre-shooting poems, the shooting happens, and then what happens when it's internalized now in a community, but also into a single person.

 

A lot of people now, especially if you work in education, have a lot of meetings, drills, and personal preparatory plans in place in the event the worst happens.

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And something that I think about a lot is that rehearsing for tragedy doesn't dim or reduce the suffering of it, it just reduces the option for joy. Is it worth constantly rehearsing for tragedy if it means joy can't live there? It's really important that young people can feel joyful, amidst this national landscape where there's always the question in the back of their minds, Could this happen to us? I'm curious about that question. What does that do now to a person who's trying to learn? What does that do to a person who's in charge of the learning?

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 “On Lockdown” was about my own experience of being on lockdown for the first time when I was in elementary school during the Columbine High School shooting. And just kind of watching the teacher's reaction, how they're anxiously trying to keep us contained, while the parents are also trying to process and understand what's going on in schools when no one has control of what happens. And that one's interesting because it's from a kid's perspective.

 

14H: What are some of the poets or poetry collections that have influenced you, that made you want to become a poet, or that you stay in dialogue with in your work?

ALK: Natasha Trethewey is a big one. Her first collection, Native Guard, really changed me as a person. Anne Carson has a collection called Flying Out with the Wounded, which really informs how I write about trauma. Lynda Hull has always been hugely influential for me. She has a collection called Ghost Money. I turn to her whenever I need some more grounding, or to figure out how to be narratively clear. Caroline Forche’s book, This Country Between Us, has been helpful for me to jump back into recently to look at writing about work, and writing about a country that you're not from, but that you are participating in. I think she writes really beautiful poems about Salvador in a way that—I’m trying to also lean into this idea of what is mine to write about and what's not mine to write about. I think she offers some interesting insights into that, so that book has been helpful, too. Natalie Diaz, I love everything by Natalie Diaz. Those are just a few that come to mind and there's so many others.