Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Kristin Dykstra
As we get ready to celebrate Poetry Month 2025, we also continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series. Here, we spoke with poet and translator Kristin Dykstra, whose new book of original poems, Dissonance, considers life at the US’s northern border in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains. In this interview, Dykstra shares insights into her multifaceted relationship to poetry, poetic language as error, finding community, and the tensions embedded in working with landscape.
Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.
I’ve been in and around poetry for a long time, as a literary translator, editor, and commentator. So the best way to summarize that relationship is: kaleidoscopic.
Moving from one writing self to another writing self, through the prism of poetry, is a process. As a poet, I take ideas from all sides but use them differently than I would for other kinds of writing. When I’m deep into translating a work, I develop a temporary, ruthless allergy to crafting commentary, needing that process to be about listening for music and image more than building explanations. Yet the commentator self, who links languages and moves back and forth using what philosophers might recognize as more conventional prose and logic, travels up and down through the work, and she eventually prompts the poet and translator to reflect on their own actions. So I produce some arguably odd essays, which draw on these multiple selves rather than one.
Each me eventually benefits from the others, and from the frictions and tensions among us. Call it an effort at keeping each self honest, maybe. I don’t mean that this process achieves a total honesty, so much as that it’s one method for pushing back at time. Time, defined as this era—when honesty is devalued by a critical mass of dominant voices and mechanisms in public life, a cynicism that has brought us up to a tipping point.
What’s something you’re particularly excited about with your new book? (Are you working in any experimental forms, does it depart from your previous work, etc?)
Writing Dissonance, I began with a kind of landscape/anti-landscape contradiction. That battle with myself—a battle about how to produce something other than the equivalent of a plein air painting or a work playing to a formula for tourism—became a portrait of a road through foothills. I got interested in this one locality and also in how Vermont has been thought and written into its current existence by different people and industries. It’s also energizing to tap into bigger conversations about ecologies. I’m both gratified and frustrated that Dissonance speaks so directly to historical events taking shape now, after the finished manuscript has been out of my hands for many months.
Dissonance includes visual dimensions related to another one of the tensions I felt in the years when I wrote most of the book. I made daily efforts to focus, while dealing with constant interruptions. Walking was a way to gain perspective, as well as to recover from major medical events. The daily effort often felt like a physical metaphor for survival, a theme that had long been on my mind from conversations with Reina María Rodríguez (a poet with whom I’ve worked for decades). Dissonance includes photographs that I took during regular walks along the dirt road that forms the backbone of the whole book. I developed pagework specific to this project, including white spaces with isolated baselines running along the bottom of some pages, featuring my children.
Regarding your question about experimentation: Completing final revisions with editorial staff reminded me of how experimentally oriented poems may be received as not only unconventional, but “erroneous” at first glance. As an editor, this was a topic I had to discuss with our production unit many times when we were publishing Mandorla magazine—poetic language as error. What’s most compelling to me is how this first impression on an uninitiated reader initially looks like an endpoint shutting down conversations, but if you have the chance to talk about it, suddenly the same page becomes a foundation for new insights. Rethinking error will draw certain people into poetry, if they too have felt how limiting “orderly” language conventions can be. Here I think of translating Ángel Escobar, as well as Marcelo Morales. Marcelo and I have worked together on several manuscripts. He has started channeling voices that characterize his work as error (keep in mind that overall, his writing style is quite accessible). Definitions of “experimental” are affected by the expectations and habits of different readers. Having conversations about our own expectations and habits, when prompted by their interruption, can open doors.
Looking more specifically at Dissonance, this book might be a set of serial, drifting poems. Or, it might be just one long poem. It’s full of lines that break with grammar. As a reader, what I like about that kind of writing is the experience when individual moments start to form part of a larger whole, something that you experience as you read back and forth, up and down, and over time. So I love that contrast, between a first apparent meaninglessness or at least visible disruption, in relation to the unfolding of poetic thought over the course of a whole work.
William Watkin, an amazing reader of contemporary experimental poetry, links that unfolding to poetry’s “tabularity.” Poetry is such a great space for human intelligence to run in all directions. This is why university presses should continue to work with poets and other people across the arts: the arts perform and the arts also think.
Tell us a little about your process—is there something or someone you draw inspiration from, a particular routine or practice you work with, or any rules you set for yourself?
Being part of multidirectional exchanges with other writers, thinkers, people, and presences in the world around oneself. Right now, for example, I have some new work rebounding off words that gave me pause, from Cal Bedient, José Martí, Renee Gladman, and many others past and present. This work also encodes patterns from conversations I have with people around our community, imagery from what I see as I go about everyday life, and more. I especially enjoyed pulling an idea from Srikanth Reddy’s The Unsignificant and making it a lynchpin for a more or less scholarly article in an upcoming Latin American Studies Association publication, The Forum. LASA has lit people but a higher concentration of social scientists, in my long experience. Skepticism abounds. Logically speaking, this is absolutely “the wrong audience” for a discussion of poetic wonder. Sometimes you have to try to make wrongness happen in the right ways.
A separate process note: At times I return to an image or strategy from one of the many works I’ve translated, because your brain keeps on generating extra interpretations or applications, long after one version is stabilized in print. Fragments from a published translation have a way of still evolving in your head over time. This is the creative excess from translation, its wastage. It is not in fact waste but extra material. I used a couple of evolved translation fragments in Dissonance. Whatever the point of reference is, in those examples, it transforms as I consider how to write and rewrite that moment into the larger work.
Do you see your work in a conversation with a community / communities of other writers?
The acceptance of this book for the Phoenix Poets series came as a sudden convergence. Dissonance has arrived at the perfect unforeseen home. Aaron Coleman and I have known each other for years, and a long time ago we talked about presses where he might publish his translation of Nicolás Guillén, but I had no foresight that The Great Zoo would appear from Phoenix Poets or be followed by Dissonance so soon after. That thread of translation extends into Dong Li’s book, The Orange Tree: in that case, his original poems emerge out of a matrix deeply influenced by translation, which echoes with my way of viewing one place through reflections on another. Another affinity with recent books involves exploring locations around the U.S., like C.S. Giscombe and Lindsay Turner. All of these books train a poet’s perspective on history.
As translators do, I participate in literary communities while also moving across lines people draw in the sand—connecting dots. Poetic community includes people who may not be close by, or even still alive; people defined alternately as insiders and outsiders. Aesthetically, I appreciate being tossed outside my own mind at regular intervals. The challenge is important, and it helps your vision of a meaningful community to evolve and grow.
These threads go back for years. They were embodied in the entire project of Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Américas, which I co-edited for many years, and that’s probably why writers involved in that project remain touchstones for me. More recently, I’ve been fascinated by what it feels like to start reading issues of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, edited by Cal Bedient and David Lau. I feel immediate, unexpected affinities with multiple pieces they’ve chosen. A little shocking, actually. Turning in another geographical direction, Erín Moure writes in the closest major city to where I live: Montreal. She’s brilliant, like a stone revolving inside its own energy field. The result is her radiation of new poetry, new translation, and my favorite, new creative writing from experiments with her own slant takes on translation. See her Secession / Incession, with Chus Pato, for an illustration of how effectively Moure can move your mind around. She has published with Wesleyan, along with a number of other poets whom I respect very much.
Long-distance connections are essential when you’re a writer in a situation where you have less everyday interaction with colleagues. It’s like working in a lab of one. You need someone to challenge you, awe you, provoke you into doing better work, model something you can’t do, remind you of the value of what you’re already doing, and so on. This is what I hope to find with “community” and “conversation.”
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar living in Hinesburg, VT. Dykstra has translated numerous books, including works by Cuban writers Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, and Omar Pérez. Among her honors are the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation. Her writing has been published in the Chicago Review, Guernica, Hopkins Review, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, Rumpus, Astra, and elsewhere. Dissonance is her first original poetry collection.
Dissonance is available through our website. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order directly from us.