Poetry as a Means of Survival: A Conversation with Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

Variant Lit Team

3 weeks ago

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle is the author of the chapbook Black Wick: Selected Elegies (Variant Literature, 2021), which was a semifinalist for the 2018 Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Contest and a 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press. Her full-length manuscript, Not Waving, was a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award, a 2021 and 2022 semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, and a 2022 semifinalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize and the Brick Road Poetry Contest.

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa, as well as MAs from New York University and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Kennedy-Nolle served as Poet Laureate of Sullivan County from 2022 to 2024. In 2023, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She lives and teaches in upstate New York.

We checked in with Sharon to talk about her work since the publication of Black Wick, her time as Poet Laureate of Sullivan County, and the questions shaping her current writing.

Photo credit: Frances F. Denny

Megan Nichols: You won Variant’s Chapbook Contest Editors’ Pick in 2020, nearly six years ago now. What stands out to you about that time in your writing life?

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle: Throughout that dark time, what stands out is the incredible tether that poetry provided me; the poems that went into Black Wick came quickly and furiously.

As a parent of a young adult whom I have lost to mental illness and substance abuse, I know first-hand the powerful value of poetry to heal those afflicted by trauma. Far more than creative outlet, poetry can be the means of survival; it can be a way to “shift crises to a bearable distance and actively make a model of our situation rather than passively endure it as lived experience” as poet Gregory Orr puts it. I know it saved my life.

MN: Tell us what you’ve been up to in the time since.

SKN: Beginning in 2022 I was appointed Poet Laureate of Sullivan County, New York, a beautiful, bucolic area in the Catskills, where I served for two years. In addition to readings, craft talks, and workshops, I focused on creating a Youth Ambassadorship program comprised of high schoolers and middle schoolers dedicated to poetry and community activism. Together, we organized an annual Youth Poetry Festival, celebrating student poetry, artwork, and music, which was hosted by my Youth Ambassadors. It’s been an honor to hold the Youth Poetry Festival at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a performing space and museum which is the old Woodstock Festival site.

Sullivan County, a rural, poverty-stricken area, has the highest death rate from drug use in all of New York state. My Laureate mandate was to encourage the appreciation of poetry; however, in the face of the county’s public health crisis, I felt strongly that work must be expanded to utilize poetry as a tool of healing. Urgencies such as the opioid epidemic debilitate both the individual and the community as they undermine and prevent the development of healthy local identity and strong local pride. I aimed to address this pressing issue by using poetry as a means for self-empowerment for those disconnected youth whose creative voices remain unheard. Struggling with substance abuse and mental illness, they and their families necessarily rely on institutional voices who prescribe their day – a situation with which my family was all too familiar. Overwhelmed, underserved, and burdened by trauma as well as by the stigma of mental illness, they see neither a time nor place for poetry in their daily lives. And I wanted to change that.

So I submitted a 4-part proposal to work with those in recovery, especially young people, through a 6-month series of workshops, culminating in the permanent installation of their poems on brass plaques throughout the county. For this project I was awarded a Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets in 2023.

My project also involved building extensive community ties, and in May 2024 I organized and hosted a one-day symposium on the value of creative arts for healing trauma, one that’s well established by research. I came to appreciate their value, one that’s well-established by research. I brought together poets, mental health professionals, civic leaders, academics, and individuals struggling with the effects of mental health and substance abuse challenges. I was privileged to have two keynotes, the distinguished poet Greg Orr and the brilliant writer Andrew Solomon. The goal of this event was to bridge art, science, and policy and to discuss how poetry can lead to healing while helping to strengthen the existing county mental health service infrastructure.

Now residing in Bedford, NY, I am pleased to say that I am continuing this community work. Under the auspices of a federal DFC grant, I chair the Youth Programming and Outreach Committee of THRIVE, a tri-community effort dedicated to primary prevention of drug and alcohol abuse as well as to mental health advocacy. I’ve again developed a Youth Ambassadorship program, and these students work with me in various student-driven outreach efforts including Open Mics, collective Art projects, poetry slams, and sports competitions as we try to get THRIVE’s message out to all different student populations.

MN: Has your relationship to Black Wick changed since its publication?

SKN: My connection to the chapbook’s material has only deepened. One’s ongoing relationship to trauma and complicated grief changes over time; it takes myriad shape-shifting forms and is, of course, always recursive. Informed by these changes and by my work with young people in recovery, my new manuscript, “Not Waving” has broadened the immediate personal narrative to look at the institutional roles of law, medicine, psychiatry, religion, and social work play in structuring the narratives of all impacted.I’ll probably always write about the loss of my son. As he often reminded me, pain demands to be heard.As scholars as varied as Dominick LaCapra, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have theorized that because traumatic events never have closure for the survivor, the only way to “work through” trauma is by trying to shape the course of its repetition –especially through creative endeavor.

MN: What advice might you offer to poets attempting to approach difficult personal material?

SKN: I invoke Martin Luther’s dictum, “Sin Boldly.” Dive into your torment. The closeup lens on this kind of material is always re-focusing, and so there’s never really a safe distance from which to pine or ponder emotions recollected in tranquility.That said, take Ezra Pound’s advice: “make it new.” However fixed in your mind the traumatic experience is, you can’t tell the same trauma story repeatedly. You must engage it in original, insightful ways whether that be through changes in topic, POV, tone, or form. And don’t be afraid of deviating from the biographical or factual in your poetry. Give yourself the permission to recast and invent.

MN: Your work is accessible while remaining lyrically masterful. What relationship, if any, do you have to the word “accessible” when it’s applied to poetry?

SKN: I don’t see accessibility at odds with lyricism. Rather, I think the intense emotional insight that the lyric form offers in compressed language is the essence of accessibility. There’s the “aha” moment when the reader gets it. At the level of the poetic line, my mentor Martha Rhodes always insists that foremost in the writer’s mind in crafting a poem must be the question “where is my reader now?”I think of the poet and mystery writer Stephen Dobyns who wrote: “The reader doesn’t go to the poem because of an interest in the writer’s life—that would give the poem little more than anecdotal value—but to find evidence of his or her own life.” That idealistic insight, whether I achieve it or not, inspires my own work. I can’t think of better testimony to the necessity of poetry and its accessibility.

MN: Can you tell us a bit about your revision process? How do you know when a poem is finished?

SKN: Well, it’s mainly an intuitive process. I do have a list of about twenty questions, forged from workshops I’ve attended over the years that focus on various aspects of craft. Interrogating key aspects of form and content, these questions are tattooed to my brain, and they haunt each draft.

I also belong to an ongoing workshop which helps provide feedback and the courage to radically revise. Finally, I also am of the school that values just shoving something in a drawer and letting it sit for a while. In the end, to paraphrase Baudelaire, a poem is never finished, it’s just abandoned. And certain subjects are never finished until you’re dead – there is no last word.

MN: What kinds of projects or themes are you currently exploring in your writing?

SKN: In this charged political time, I find myself interested in docupoetics, i.e. poems that engage both historical and personal truths approached from different narrative vantage points. We are living in a highly melodramatic moment, one saturating in its hyperbolic extremes. It’s exhausting just to read the paper, let alone carve the time to really reflect and connect with others.

As a literary historian, I still very much believe in the power of literature to change people’s hearts and minds; it far outstrips the editor’s page, the substack, the post, or the podcast in the ways it can resonate in people’s lives. And poetry most definitely beckons a life of literary activism.

I am also drawn to a poetry of what I’d call ghosted witnessing, i.e. the challenge of writing about events or people that one doesn’t know firsthand but whose story needs to be told. Since firsthand narrative isn’t always entirely available, the story can be approached in layered formalistic choices. In this regard, I’ve been working on a few projects – a series of persona poems. I’ve also been exploring ways to dramatize the narrative of a close, deceased family member’s memoir with a range of forms that interact on the page, including dialogue, lyric asides, and foregrounded narrative snippets. Powerful models for me here have been Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas and Yerra Sugarman’s Aunt Bird.

MN: Tell us about your experience as the poet laureate of Sullivan County. What surprised or challenged you most about serving as a laureate?

SKN: Working with young people in recovery was immensely gratifying. When I shared the loss of my son with them, there was an instant lightning connection, and a door of trust flew open. A major part of my ongoing work is to help those whose creative voices remain unheard to express those voices and realize that they are already skilled by virtue of their experiences.

That said, I was surprised by the stigma and degree of resistance I encountered about mental illness and substance use within the greater community. While many were vocal supporters of my Academy project to display the work of young people struggling, they were resistant to having a plaque on their turf – a classic NIMBY attitude. In all, we had a total of 14 plaques permanently installed in civic spaces, including theatres, an opera house, libraries, and a community college as well as green spaces throughout the county.

MN: You’ve studied and taught in highly respected literary environments. How has that academic background informed your creative work?

SKN: Academia has both fed and stymied my creative work. Academic research and publishing stimulate me to explore new subjects and new ways to tackle them. It has fortified my sense of the manifold value of poetry both for individuals and for creating readership. However, the desiccating discourse of academic writing can be withering, encouraging an intensely self-critical voice, a measured, bland one trained to invoke and defer to others — a core tenet of building scholarly arguments. The experience often made me try to be too clever, too allusive, (witness the allusions peppering this interview!) and altogether too smart for my own good.

MN: Are there particular poets, artists, or thinkers you find yourself returning to for inspiration lately?

SKN: These days I’ve been spending time with the work of Natalia Diaz, John Murillo, Diane Seuss, Bryant Voigt. I find myself interested in just about anything from Four Way books. I also often return to the Old Masters mainly of the twentieth century: Yeats, Rilke, Lorca, Mandelstam, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, O’Hara.

MN: What advice would you offer to poets who are just beginning to send their work out into the world?

SKN: There are remarkable opportunities to share and publish in so many media. Take advantage of them. Write every odd moment, even for a few minutes to keep catching the music and typing it into your phone, which keeps it low stakes and less pressured. I encourage you to find a group of others who are willing to provide helpful critique, whether it’s in a formal workshop, an MFA program, or just in cultivating casual contacts to run work by. The point is, as E.M. Foster reminds us: Only Connect.

MN: After several years of publication, teaching, and service, how has your relationship to art changed, if at all?

SKN: A very broad question. My commitment to the importance of the arts has only been strengthened and quickened. More than teaching and publishing, the experience of trauma cultivates compassion and a desire for connection through service. This summer I was in Poland, and I had a chance to visit Auschwitz again. I’ll end on a comment by a “camp liberator” that I think suggests artistic necessity — both within and beyond the literature of shock value. It was recast as a poem by Barbara Helfgott Hyatt in her collection, In Evidence. He saw “above the ovens/ a poem by Goethe,/in German, a poem/ about the beauty of death by fire.”

You can learn more about Sharon here.

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Megan Nichols is the author of Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Plume, The Baltimore Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and other journals, and have been featured on Poetry Daily. She lives in the Arkansas Ozarks.

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