Christine Kitano is the author of Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press, 2011) and the forthcoming collection Sky Country (BOA Editions, 2017). Recent poetry and prose appears in The Asian American Literary Review, Connotation Press: An Artifact, Crab Orchard Review, Miramar, Smartish Pace, and Tar River Poetry. As assistant professor of Writing and English at Ithaca College, she teaches courses in creative writing, American poetry, and Asian American literature. (Q1) Your first collection, Birds of Paradise, shows a family in a car on the cover. How do you see the cover art as representing any of the key themes in the collection?
The cover photo features my aunt Sadako, her husband, and their two daughters. It was taken sometime in the mid-1950s, just ten or so years after the closing of the Japanese American internment camps. When I see this photo, I think of the last half of Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man" -- "the darkness sur- / rounds us, what // can we do against / it, or else, shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car, // drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look /out where yr going." I'd like to think that the poems in Birds of Paradise speak in some way to Creeley's poem, that they balance chaos and hope. The poems are about family -- a family impacted by the Korean War and immigration experience one side, the Japanese American internment on the other -- and the difficult process of emerging from this family as an individual. I see the young girl on the cover who leans out the car window as representative of this. (Q2) One reviewer of Birds of Paradise connects your use of sources to a reference from W.B. Yeats, who considered even unlikely muses for poetic inspiration. How would you describe the materials that inspire your work?
I don't know if I have many "unlikely muses," but when I was finishing up the manuscript that would become Birds of Paradise, I remember having the Irving Berlin song “Blue Skies” stuck in my head (this almost became the title). My father was a jazz trombonist, something I touch on in the poems, and his favorite trombonist was Tommy Dorsey. So I listened to a lot of Dorsey when I was writing and I was struck by the shift from the minor to major chord at the beginning of each phrase in "Blue Skies." I wanted to create the same shift in the book’s larger structure. The poems begin in a more somber tone but shift toward optimism as the collection progresses.
(Q3) Which literary or historical sources (textual, visual, or auditory) were you first influenced by? Have you found any to be as compelling now as they were in your early development as a poet?
The first contemporary poet I remember reading is Gary Soto. Because he's so widely anthologized, he was the first contemporary poet whose name I knew. I read his collection Junior College under my desk in high school. It was my first exposure to free verse poetry, and it made me want to try writing poetry myself. I still find Soto's work compelling, and often use his poems as models when teaching creative writing. His poems are clear, inventive, and emotionally resonant, which is still what I strive for in my own writing. (Q4) What works of poetry or other writing do you find most enjoyable to teach?
I love teaching contemporary poetry, but my favorite period to teach is Modernism. It's a fascinating period that sets the stage for the 20th and 21st centuries. It's a period that is far enough removed from the contemporary moment, but still clearly holds influence. It's sometimes a challenge to get students excited about "The Waste Land" or Wallace Stevens so I'm always experimenting with different ways to approach these poems.
I'll be teaching a course on Asian American literature in the fall, and I'm revising my syllabus to focus more on contemporary fiction. In addition to classics like John Okada's No-No Boy, I'm looking forward to teaching a few new additions, including Catherine Chung's Forgotten Country and Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.
(Q5) What can you share with us about your forthcoming work?
My second collection, Sky Country, is forthcoming in 2017 from BOA Editions. It continues to expand on the themes in Birds of Paradise, with poems about the Japanese American internment, the Korean war and immigration experience, and other poems that continue to work with the archetype of the lost father. In Birds of Paradise, I was still working primarily from autobiography. In Sky Country I work with persona, which allows me to experiment more with form, as I am not as wedded to telling a single truth. I have also begun work on a few creative nonfiction pieces which further allows me to experiment with different ways of using language.