“Language is always collaborative.” A Conversation with Poet Katherine Gibbel, author of “Little Sound”
As we continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series, we’re thrilled to get to know Katherine Gibbel, whose poetry collection Little Sound publishes with the Phoenix Poets series in October. She shares how her poetry practice ties into her work in letterpress printmaking, how she finds community with fellow poets, and how lines of poetry weave through her days.
Tell us a little about yourself and your relationship to poetry.
I grew up in New York City and started writing poetry when the advisor for my high school literary magazine, Dr. Lori Ween, told everyone they needed to write as well as read. I remember getting some used poetry anthologies and really falling in love with certain poems—“What My Child Learns of the Sea” by Audre Lorde and “between green/ mountains” by e e cummings. Certain lines would repeat in my head as I was going about my day. They were little incantations.
I still like it when the lines of a poem repeat in your head. It’s what I love about typesetting poems, which I do for my letterpress poetry periodical Send Me Press. Typesetting makes me consider words slowly because I’m physically selecting the letters for each word from a drawer of metal type. I think about the words’ sounds, the music they make when strung together. It’s also the best part about writing a poem—hearing those first sounds echo until they settle into their form.
What makes you excited to be a poet working today?
My work in letterpress printing excites me. I run a small monthly poetry journal called Send Me Press that publishes contemporary poems as 4×6” postcard broadsides. Working with poets to make a physical object with their poem is a special and affirming process. I also love following the work of other poets and writers who are working in book arts, like MC Hyland, Juniper Kim, Cameron Lovejoy, Ben Blount, and Brian Teare, to name a few. Our digital world involves a lot of infrastructure (data centers, telephone poles, access ports, rare earth mining) that tries to elide itself to make users feel like the digital is in the ether. I love work that offers a tactile reading experience. Letterpress and book arts do that.
Another recent excitement has been advising and working with the students of Meetinghouse Magazine for the past couple of years at Dartmouth College. The student editors’ excitement about championing literary work has made me feel more excited about the possibilities of literary publishing. We live in a very distracting time; it’s hard to sit and read! But these students care so much about reading and editing—their passion brings me a lot of joy!
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?
I wish I had a more regular practice. When I wrote “The Organ,” I was waking up every morning at 6 to read and write, which was wonderful but ultimately, I couldn’t keep it up. I have a full-time job, which can hamper ‘the life of the mind.’ Lines come to me when I walk or read, so usually I’m dashing things off in notebooks or emails and then trying to make sense of them later when there’s emotional space to think about the poem.
Do you consider your writing process to be primarily solitary or collaborative?
Like a lot of things in life, the answer is both. Although I usually write alone, I believe language is always collaborative. My work often responds to what I’m reading, seeing, hearing. Vievee Francis calls poetry “The Great Conversation,” and I subscribe to that belief—that poems are always in conversation with past and future poems.
Do you see your work in a conversation with a community/communities of other writers?
Alyssa Moore—whose book Come Again? will be published by Phoenix Poets at the same time as my collection—was my first friend in graduate school. Our work feels both different and like two parts of a long conversation we’ve been having about poetics for the past decade. Alyssa and I are in an informal workshop that meets on Zoom every once every few months with the poets Micky Bayonne, Kelly Clare, Nora Claire Miller, Patty Nash, and Kristen Steenbeeke. I feel the fingerprints of those poets’ vast intellects on my own work. Alyssa and I shared the manuscripts that became Little Sound and Come Again? with that group. I’m excited we get to celebrate both those manuscripts, borne of our community, in their new forms this fall.
Katherine Gibbel edits and prints the monthly letterpress poetry series Send Me Press. She lives in Vermont. Little Sound is her first book.
Little Sound is available through our website and from your favorite booksellers.