An Interview with Caroline King

On Gifts for a Strange Lion

IL: You are the author of the recently self-published chapbook, Gifts For a Strange Lion, a short book, but highly complex, colorful, and rich in language and detail. I guess to start off very broad, and sort of narrow focus as we go along, I want to ask you: around what unifying element would you say you organized this chapbook?

CK: Before beginning the chapbook process, I noticed a recurrent theme of intimacy through many of my poems. Through compounding life experiences and even a personality psychology course I took as a senior, I came to understand my draw towards intimacy as central to my nature, a driving motivation. However, my earlier poems tended to focus on intimacy in the romantic and physical senses, which is why I often qualify my theme as intimacy most specifically in its relation to femininity. But I’ve seen, and even more so towards the end of the chapbook process which rendered several edits and sudden inclusions/exclusions, that much of my personal growth has come from recognizing and channeling other forms of intimacy. Therefore, I wanted my chapbook to reflect upon and explore this growth, asking not only where can intimacy be found but why is it needed? And, to poke a bit deeper, to what degree is that even a justifiable source of self-image, or of the happiness I connect it to? The sonnet “ Stoicism,” for example, ends with the couplet, “letting unsung minds revise their letter / to praise the women that heal together.” The specification of “women” here is important: for me, it was a call to look outside one individual for support, instead facing pain collectively rather than disregarding its presence and consequently the need to heal.

As for the ordering in general, I tried to structure the chapbook along the overall growth in a pseudo-chronological sense. “Early Eyes” is a sweeping view of a strange and unfamiliar world followed by “Storage Shelf Sage” which ends with a vague warning from a third-party, an ugly doll. Right after comes the section of poems I consider as representing life learned the hard way. “Prayer for Teotl” is an appeal to end the hurt, then finally, after several other poems involving deeper analyses and small steps to find grounding, there is a sense of love and happiness. However, the last poem, “The Isolated Island of Mary,” is a subtle nod to the fact that this state might be only transitory, as change is unlikely (or rather, impossible) to have ceased.

IL: How do you see form working within the text? You certainly work consistently in free verse, but even those poems that aren’t technically ‘formal’ seem to have elements of meter and rhyme.

CK: While I seldom follow certain forms at least at a poem’s outset (though forms are something I’d like to start revisiting), I am very cognizant of sound play and rhythm if not a fixed meter. Reading and writing poems has changed how I hear things. I often catch myself narrating thoughts in pentameter, littering research papers with alliterations, or sounding a bit Dr. Seuss-y in birthday cards when falling into rhyme – always rushing to jot down whatever words might have potential. For me, writing poetry is a sonic puzzle, the musical devices themselves lending to the meaning of the words and phrases. In “Summer Picnic,” for example, the rhythm speeds up in the penultimate stanza (“confetti whorls explode and furl, applause / for the down-to millennial girl as she”) to further emphasize the significance of the following spondee at the stanza break: “falls hard,” the curt stress matching the feeling itself of a rude awakening.

IL: So should the reader more strictly analyze the formal poems, like “A Conjugal Visit” and “Stoicism”? I guess what I mean is: is there a specific reason the poems that are in form are in form and those that aren’t are not?

CK: I chose to write “Stoicism” as a sonnet because it began as an academic analysis after learning about the concept in a moral philosophy course. To write about it in a form therefore seemed to match the function: as an expository essay on the subject would have been well-organized, I felt that my poem should follow suit given that it was a criticism of that philosophical mindset. “A Conjugal Visit” on the other hand began as closer to free-verse. However, upon recognizing that much of it was in pentameter, I edited the poem to stick to that meter – I felt too that there was something eerie about contrasting a strict metrical scheme against its darker subject, a romantic girl visiting her antisocial ex-lover in jail.

IL: I really admire the artwork you included throughout. Those are your own personal drawings, right?

CK: Thank you, and they are! Done primarily in black pen which I had hoped would come out best when reprinted (digital experimentation was definitely one of the more fun but challenging parts of the chapbook process, as I had very little previous experience in that area), shortly before scanning them onto the computer I decided to try adding color-pops with some colored pencil to fit the overall feeling of whimsy, as well as render if more so an embellished “gift,” so to speak.

IL: How did you decide what to draw and where?

CK: I knew that I didn’t want any of the drawings to be obvious representations of the poems but rather draw out small scenes or motifs. The front cover image is of a mystical flower blooming open, with the hands of an unseen woman reaching out from inside. To me, this image represented the idea of both entrapment and growth, the growth following the incubation period that I consider coming-of-age to be. There is a recognition of societal expectations and gender norms, the pressure that comes from that recognition, then the realization that this pressure need not define you or your relationships. That’s where the growth comes. The abstract, almost haloed silhouette of the woman in the front matter was an echo of those perceived expectations, the halo harkening to religious imagery that crops up throughout the chapbook (i.e. “Prayer to Teotl,” the general linkage of violence to religion, and “The Isolated Island of Mary”).

As the chapbook proceeds, the narrator is hit by the effects of promiscuity, a clear clash against these religious/societal expectations regarding what makes a good woman. Here, between “A Prayer to Teotl” (Teotl being one of the primary Aztec gods therefore representing a non-western religion with a different, and still not fully realized, definition of morality thus becoming a somehow less-intimidating god for the narrator to petition to) and “Gifts for a Strange Lion” is the picture titled “Cloisters, Stars.” A cloister is an inner patio of a convent, a personal call to a certain one in which I spent a lot of time thinking when in Spain. This woman is a much more fully formed religious figure than that in the front matter, again representing the fact that after the heartbreaks, certain societal values once broken come to be reconsidered, maybe even reconsidered as correct in some senses – what if this figure, suggestively pious, is right? “Gifts for a Strange Lion” reflects this shift, still subtle at this point, since it represents at least a slightly more positive relationship than those preceding. My favorite picture, however, is “Did you know I love you?” towards the chapbook’s end. It is a drawing of an ocelot, a subtle link to the “Prayer to Teotl” given that an ocelot was an animal revered in Aztec culture for its subtlety and prowess. I liked the idea that this animal, a feline like the lion though a slightly lesser recognized one, shows vulnerability in the image through its unabashed confession, denoting that strength and vulnerability need not be mutually exclusive.

IL: You say in “Summer Picnic,” “Teach a man to fish: we learn / that violence and heaven somehow go / together…” And then in “Prayer to Teotl,” “When at last / the baby cries, her weary sacrum / sighs; how new life smiles through / violence in religion.” This connects (in my mind anyway) to, in “Gifts for a strange lion,” “did you know that, for every cub / who might survive, the lioness makes love / at least three thousand times? Success // calls for a perennial appetite.” What do you see as the relationship between violence and beauty? Violence and religion? Violence and sexuality?

CK: Sadism can be fascinating to even the most pacifistic people, and while much of this might be biological, the idea of humans as animals too, I’ve been wondering if and in what ways this attraction might go deeper. A simple example is a serial killer documentary – what is it about the most pathological, barbaric minds that draw us to know more, see more? I don’t have a solid answer to that question yet, but it is something I hope to continue exploring. In terms of violence and beauty, I would classify this relationship as a juxtaposition: up against horror, any light seems all the brighter. Violence has two meanings when paired with religion, one in its more psychological form i.e. when laws of morality are pitted against natural sin, the other taking a more literal sense, physical violence to punish those that don’t agree. Violence with sexuality reflects aspects of both its relationship to beauty and religion, however reemphasizes the notion of animalism in humans. This innate drive, spun largely from biology rather than immorality, is a reminder of darker wants that humans might have too, but that in our world are often a difficult, very precarious, rope to wander on.

IL: Do you think it is the duty of the poet to rake over the themes that most intrigue them personally, trying to get at them from all angles, or is it important for the poet to try to write about as diverse a panoply of subjects as possible? Or does the poet have no duty other than to write and write well?

CK: I don’t see a poet as having any “duty” – not even to “write well,” especially given that that term has many different meanings to many different people. While that is of course something to strive for, I find that the poems that I not only love best from a personal standpoint but that also became my most well-written were those that drew from moments of raw feeling. However, if in those moments I felt a pressure to “write well,” it likely would have taken away from the use of poetry as an outlet, a way to both release, organize, and reform my thoughts into something worthwhile to others too as any artist hopes to do. This being said, while my chapbook centers around a theme that at this point in my life has been the most potent to me, as I continue my writing career I want to branch out into a wider range of subjects – not only as an exercise for my own work, but as a means of exploring and learning more about life as a whole, finding other things I can question.

IL: Your personal lexicon is certainly on display in this book. How did you learn all of those words and how do you keep track of them?

CK: For about three years now I’ve kept a list on my phone titled “Res ipsa loquitor,” a phrase that shows up in “Poem for a man-boy dragon” and means “the thing speaks for itself.” Whenever I stumble across a scene on the street or a word in reading or conversation, I’m quick to add it to the list – “Dasein,” meaning being in the world, came from a psychology lecture, whereas the other day I wrote down “godbobbers” after hearing it from my British cab driver. Whenever I’m stuck or looking for a fresher image, I look back at my list.

IL: Who would you consider to be your major influences?

CK: Though not primarily a poet, my first inspiration to the possibilities in language came from reading Faulkner. Through portmanteaus and long but lovely winds, I saw words wriggle out of rules to make art – strong senses created even when the narratives themselves seemed a swirl of fuzzy circles. Now, I look especially to poets such as Derek Walcott and Tracie K. Smith: Walcott for his melodic perception, painting metaphors so exact they slither, laugh, and ache, and Smith for her willingness to risk saying what could be unattractive to maintain honesty. As for chapbooks, since I have not read more than one by the same author, I was instead inspired by bits and pieces found throughout a variety. “Elegies” by Muriel Rukeyser was particularly striking to me as it identified everyday magic cracking through worldly constrains, concluding with an optimism that is often criticized as naïveté. Like Rukeyser, while I believe in realism and acknowledging pain, I also believe that hope should be cultivated when it can be. While I do address darker themes throughout the collection, I wanted it to end with a lean towards hope, similarly to Rukeyser’s ultimate “Elegy in Joy.”

Caroline King is a soon-to-be graduate of Johns Hopkins University majoring in Writing Seminars, Psychology, and Spanish. Her first chapbook, handmade and titled Gifts for a Strange Lion, focuses on intimacy, how it can both fulfill and fail, as well as its relation to femininity. She will be beginning a master’s program in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge this fall.

Isaac Lunt is a graduating senior studying Writing Seminars and Theatre at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the recently self-published Mistakes for Stars in which he explores (in the words of Caroline King) “love, un-love, and impermanence.” After graduation, he will be studying acting at the National Theater Institute’s “Theater makers” program.