Interview: Katie Berger, poet of Time Travel: Theory and Practice, Part 1: The Past

This is the first-part of a two-part interview with poet Katie Berger, who recently graduated from the MFA program in Alabama and published the chapbook, Time Travel: Theory and Practice--reviewed here. The second part, "Present", appeared here.

How did you start writing? 

I began pretty early, in elementary school when "free writing" was my favorite part of the school day. My little brother served as (oft-unwilling) audience for my rough drafts, as did my various friends. In junior high and high school, I grew really interested in science fiction, and, as strange as I feel admitting this, I wrote a lot of Star Wars fan fiction, too.

And poetry? 

I honestly don't remember, although my earliest memory of writing poems as opposed to stories starts in about 5th grade when our teacher would assign a subject for us to write a poem about. I stuck pretty consistently with both fiction and poetry through junior high and high school for both classes and writing on my own.

Who were the first poets that turned you on to poetry?

When I was very young, a battered copy of a book called The Boy's Book of Verse, complete with a painting of a ship on it, always sat in the bookcase. Poe's "Annabelle Lee," Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," and Whitman's "O Captain My Captain" were all in there, and the rhythms and words lodged themselves quite comfortably in my brain. I think a love for these poems made me pursue poetry later. In graduate school, I really enjoyed Harryette Mullen's and Karen Volkman's poetry. And in undergraduate, we read T.R. Hummer's "Where You Go When She Sleeps" for an intro to creative writing class, and that poem still haunts me--I've taught it to my own students, even.

Of these early influences, I do not recognize the conscious rhythms and sounds. Rather, I sense more conversational sounds and subtler rhythms.

Yes, good observation. The rather overt stresses and rhythms I read as a kid might have made me particularly sensitive to the rhythm of a sentence, be that iambic pentameter or everyday conversation. Also, I work as a product copywriter, and I'm fascinated with how a product description for a bedframe feels nothing like a description for a rain barrel in terms of tone, texture, rhythm of commas and periods.

When did you feel like you'd come into your voice or vision?

And I'm often skeptical of that feeling of "coming into" a voice or vision. Whenever I feel myself settling into one, I get a bit antsy. So every time I start a new writing project, if I'm not completely re-inventing my tone/style/structure/genre, I feel like I'm not even writing. I'm not sure if this is a good thing (despite constant re-birth, the same problems often plague all my projects), but it's certainly an adventurous thing. And that's pretty cool, at least.

Which are more valuable: workshops or mentoring (or is that a false dichotomy)? That is, what do you find most valuable is shaping your work?

Hmmm...I've never thought of workshop and mentoring as opposites of each other, but it's certainly an interesting contrast. And if I consider that contrast, I'd have to go pretty strongly with mentoring. I'm quite the connoisseur of one-on-one conversations, for starters, be that email or face-to-face. I also find that my mentors, and I've had some truly great ones, are a bit more sensitive to my background and crippling lack of self-confidence that comes with said background. I grew up working class in a mostly rural area, so I've always felt like an impostor in college, especially graduate school. That "impostor" syndrome can be downright overwhelming in a workshop, but I've never really encountered that with a mentor. I think mentoring allows for an easier acceptance of the self, if that makes sense.

You can sense that "impostor" syndrome in the self-deprecating approach to Nebraska--the plains being plain--yet it attempts to rise above, a stepping stone to other places. Is this something you have been exploiting or plan to exploit further?

I always think of that line from My Antonia when the narrator first encounters Nebraska: "The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska." And when you grow up in a place like that, so open and flat and defined by a geography of visual sparseness, you're not going to forget it or shed it completely from your consciousness. A lot of my characters have moved from a rural area into a city (the narrators in Time Travel and in my latest project Swans) and are often grappling with that shift in awareness, that move from an empty space into a livelier, noisier one. I imagine some element of that plainness, as it were, will always be present in my work in some form or other.

Interview: Katie Berger, poet of Time Travel: Theory and Practice, Part 2: The Present

This is the second-part of a two-part interview with poet Katie Berger, who recently graduated from the MFA program in Alabama and published the chapbook, Time Travel: Theory and Practice--reviewed here. The first part, "Past", will appear here tomorrow on 9/12/2014.

How has your poetry changed since you started? 

Right now, I'm really interested in how consciousness renders itself on the page, how the "I," however unreliable, is shaping and being shaped by his/her world, and how this shaping/shaped dynamic appears in words, how it drives a narrative forward, how it destroys a narrative or renders it inert, how it questions narrative. Before, I felt pretty set in my "I"-ness, as if that was a fixed point in all my poetry that couldn't change.

I suspect your Time Travel chapbook is, in essence, a long poem. Would you agree? What inspired or prompted the work and how did you shape it as (or after) you created it?

Interesting you should ask that. I'm really not sure if "long poem" or simply "chapbook" or "piece of writing" or even "story" is more apt. Call it what you like--I'm not picky. The initial idea actually came to me in my undergraduate years, when I had a recurring dream about a time machine and was also reading and writing a lot of memoir--using words to unearth memory. It was tough work, and I often felt physically exhausted at the end of a writing session, so I began to wonder: what if I was building a time machine to go back and explore memory, not just sitting around trying to do the same thing with Microsoft Word? So the Time Travel chapbook spun off from there.


Structurally, I wrote it as a prose-only science fiction story first for a fiction writing class. The next semester, I was taking a class on hybrid forms, so I began to wonder how this story might work as a blend of fiction and  poetry (and maybe even memoir, as that was the milieu of its birth). Looking at the text, I knew I had a tendency to "list" to build a reality, so that's where I began breaking up the lines, creating literal lists on the page as the narrator, who remembers things best in a list as many of us do, narrates the situation. From there, I added full-blown poems full of lists of objects and ideas, and it just sort of morphed and warped from there.

There certainly seems more to explore here in the time-traveling vein. Any thoughts on revisiting this and mining it further?

At one point, I was considering expanding Time Travel into a full-length manuscript. I've certainly made notes toward that, but they're only notes at this point. I think I've largely moved beyond using a time machine as a concept in my new projects, although I still work very much with disrupting time, memory, things like that.

What poets trip your trigger now? magazines (online or off)?

I can't think of any one journal--so many are so good. I do like practically anything Dancing Girl Press publishes (and not just because they published my chapbook). The writing's gutsy, often strange, and the poems are often linked together in fresh ways.

What are you cooking up now? Any forthcoming works or links to stuff online so people can look up more of your work?

I recently finished a chapbook called Swans, in which I use the rhetoric and trappings of a detective novel to write some prose poems and verse. It's not been published yet, but it was a quarter-finalist in two separate contests. One of the poems is forthcoming from Rufous City Review, and another is currently at Dressing Room Poetry here.

Where do you see poetry heading in the near future? 

Well, in the fiction realm, there's been an explosion of genre--science fiction, fantasy, mystery are now, in some circles at least, being viewed as possible lenses or mechanisms to explore and shape a narrative. I'd love to see a similar explosion in poetry, but perhaps more an explosion of form. Poetry, for me, has always been more fluid and diverse than fiction in general, but I'd love to see more hybridization of fiction and poetry, nonfiction and poetry, verse and prose of all kinds. I work often in the gray area between forms, and I find it so productive for my creativity.

So you see yourself experimenting in these borderlands? 

Yeah, I love the idea of inventing a form along with a product--it almost feels like trying to build a house without blueprints. Messy, yes, but certainly fertile ground for stretching each little language tool we as writers use to its limit. What if I made a fiction of repeated imagery? A narrative out of product descriptions? Stuff like that.

Time Travel: Theory and Practice by Katie Berger -- a review

I recently devoured and re-devoured Katie Berger's Time Travel: Theory and Practice.  Berger is a Nebraska native who just finished her poetry MFA at Alabama.  The dry, academic title is accompanied by graphs and figures (see image to the right).

But the poetry itself is anything but dry. The poems read as if Kelly Link had written a book of slipstream poetry regarding time travel. Link, though, tends to treat life in service of the tropes whereas Berger does the tropes in service of life. It is a somewhat intimate look at the poet persona as a young woman looking back at her roots. How does one look at or accept memory (i.e. time travel) of one's past?

The dramatis personæ: Berger writes of her poet persona, "I possess a distinct memory of flying." Paul, her time-traveling conscience (and friend), corrects her, "You try to remember." And the grandfather, who seems a muse, a being who has traveled through much time (an almost mystical being whose car can be seen four miles away), and perhaps a system (or the old system) of orderliness in the chaos of the everyday.

Berger's persona attempts to construct a time machine out of such everyday items. These lists of items represent an ordering of life, an randomness to forge a way to penetrate the past. Even the geography shapes the persona from...

"the Great Plains

"Plain, yes.

"Great, no, never!" 

"Open landscape lead to... an acceptance that no geography can conceal anything."

The humor is subdued, which in part reminded of Link:

You had to memorize the law of gravity for it to have any effect whatsoever.... 

I once memorized the blueprint for a time machine.... 

I found the blueprint to the time machine when my mind was filled with
Siberian tigers
ptarmigans
Indian elephants.... 

It was an air purifier, ok?... 

I have either memorized the blueprint for a time machine or an air purifier.

Below is a sample from the collection although it is actually the fifth part, not the first:

Some perceived flaws may be that certain sections could be omitted. Also, there is no travel to the future. On the one hand, this could not treat memory; on the other, it would encompass the idea of time travel and life itself (we are forward-looking people). This might have given a less linear feel as well.














Nonetheless, it's collection well worth getting your hands on, for those who like Kelly Link, poetry, interstitial speculation, mixed with the everyday.