“Mystery”, “Fear”, “Riot”, and “The Worst Thing” by Jessica Kinnison appeared in Issue 29 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about these haiku.
In March 2020, I joined a writing group with friends to help us stay connected during the pandemic. We wrote one poem every day and sent it out via email. I was working wild hours at a facility that housed homeless folks living with HIV. I had to live separately from my partner for fear of spreading COVID to him. Haiku became a relief valve for me during those difficult days of physical and emotional exhaustion. The form served as both a word puzzle, which engaged the nerdy writer in me, and a manageable vessel for the huge, overwhelming, terrifying unknowns and trauma we were all collectively enduring.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
Capturing a feeling without wallowing in the pain of it. That’s one of the things I love about haiku: the form necessarily roots out the melodrama. A good haiku evokes a feeling that hits in the gut.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Ideal Suggestions Essays in Divinatory Poetics By Selah Saterstrom (Essay Press, 2017).
I was born and grew up in Mississippi until I left at age 18 for New Orleans. This book, in addition to its gorgeous language, gave me permission to be a poet, a woman, a thinker, and part of a truly powerful lineage of Mississippi ancestors. It helped me understand that life is not about trying to package and contain yourself so you might be easily explained. It is/can be about expansion.
Here’s a passage I love:
“Brother, the catacomb passageway is scented. Black amber, lavender, myrrh, dulcet vanilla, clary sage. You are saying something: his open eyes reminded you of the Aurora Borealis, his birthmark looked like three tornados. His caul was gunmetal gray.”
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’d love to have a drink with Patti Smith, black coffee for her and Pinhook Rye for me. I want to know how she was brave enough to sing in the streets of NYC, still, during COVID, at age 73. I want know how she found a spiritual practice she can live with.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am working on organizing and editing the 200 or so poems I wrote during quarantine into a book or two of poems that can hang together and still be timely when the world is changing by the minute. Next up, I have a novel project called Jubilee about a fisherman who has trouble separating the stories of his life from what really happened and how it felt. He’s waiting for a Jubilee, a phenomenon where the fish come up onto the shore, until he finds another way to understand himself and, ultimately, his environment and his relationship to grief.
Our thanks to Jessica for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Jessica’s poems “Mystery”, “Fear”, “Riot”, and “The Worst Thing” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/four-haiku-by-jessica-kinnison.
___________________________________
Jessica Kinnison’s work has appeared in Columbia Review, Phoebe, Entropy, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story ‘Star Party’ placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. She serves as Director of Programs at Project Lazarus, a housing facility for people living with HIV/ AIDS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans.