FEATURED POET/WRITER
Kristen Lindquist
© Kristen Lindquist
Kristen Lindquist is an award-winning poet, freelance writer, and passionate nature advocate from Camden, Maine. Her writing places the reader directly into the natural beauty of her hometown and the surrounding area -- the mountains, the birds, the coastline, the people of her community. Believing that Maine's natural beauty and wildlife are one of its best resources, she has worked many years for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and has also served on the boards of Merryspring Nature Center and Friends of Maine Coastal Islands NWR. Her natural history column can be found in the Penobscot Bay Pilot.
An experienced bird-watcher and nature guide, her writing offers a keen-eyed perspective that insightfully communicates a sense of wonder to her audience — honest and immediate. We’re delighted to feature her talent and to share some of her thoughtful responses to our questions concerning poetry and her work.
Do you think it is important to read and write poetry? Why?
I think exposing yourself to some form, any form, of art is important, whether you’re enjoying or creating. Poetry speaks to some, but not everyone. But art—poetry, photography, music, fiction, memoir, painting, drama, origami, knitting, or whatever!—fills an intangible need within each of us, enriching our quotidian existence. We use art to connect ourselves to the rest of humanity, to reference our shared history and culture, to leave something beautiful on the planet, to surround ourselves with beauty...
Do you think poets have any insights to offer the world?
What poets have to offer the world is a potentially unique way of seeing things that might help the reader/listener understand something new about life/existence. For the haiku poet, the goal is to convey with simple language a moment that the reader can step into and make their own. In this way, a good haiku establishes empathy and connection, among humans and (often) with the natural world.
What accomplishments are you most proud of as a writer?
While it’s great validation to hear from fellow writers that they like my work, I find it especially gratifying when people who may know nothing about poetry are touched by my poems. When my poems were read on “The Writer’s Almanac,” I heard from people from all around the country, which was so amazing. “How Baseball Saved My Marriage” seemed to especially touch a lot of listeners. One woman told me she had it up on her refrigerator. I’ve also been very honored to have had several poems read by Maine’s current poet laureate Stu Kestenbaum on his weekly poetry program on Maine Public Radio; it’s so heartening to be included in that way as a part of the Maine poetry community.
I’ve won some prizes for my poetry, but I’m most proud that one of my haibun—a hybrid form of prose and haiku that originated in 17th-century Japan—was not only published by a quality mainstream journal (Split Rock Review) but was also nominated for Pushcart Prize. The haibun form has been, for me, the perfect combination of the two kinds of writing I like best: nature-writing and poetry. So this made me feel like my newfound passion for the form was on track.
Also, for years I’ve written a monthly natural history column for the local paper. This past year one of my pieces, about Monhegan Island, in fact, was awarded third place by the Maine Press Association for Outdoors Story.
Full Moon
From my window, one hand on the phone, I strain
to hear the argument playing out below in a parked car,
a loud fight punctuated by slammed doors, a revved engine,
the man pounding the dashboard, yelling, "I didn't do anything!"
while the woman shouts back, over and over, "Just shut up!"
A giggling troupe of girls emerges from the pool hall
that serves anyone. They toss a pack of cigarettes back and forth,
stray out of the dark alley toward the lights of Main Street,
while hurrying the other way, a lawyer who's been working late,
briefcase bulging around mounds of paperwork,
heads now for her car, the last one left in all-day parking.
A collection of elderly restaurant-goers strolls purposefully
down the sidewalk, well-dressed, inaudible, unflinching
as they pass the arguers' car. I should be asleep.
It must be after eleven; the movie marquee's lights
have just shut off. Something large crashes out back
behind the building. My bed is empty.
When I lean out at just the right angle, I can see the ocean
scarred by moonlight, the glowing zero of the moon's face
poised above the window, looking in.
© Kristen Lindquist, from Transportation. Published by Megunticook Press (2011)
Tourists in the Known World
New and Selected Poems by Kristen Lindquist
is available from:
“Kristen Lindquist’s poems are like a luminous field guide to the wildlife and mountain trails of Northern New England: she not only records vireo, blackpoll, tide shift and eon-layered rock face, but also shows us the fluidity between inner and outer worlds... Her attentiveness is indeed a kind of prayer.”
Tourists in the Known World by Kristen Lindquist
Published by Megunticook Press, 2017
© Kristen Lindquist
Transportation
Poems by Kristen Lindquist
Published by Megunticook Press (2011)
a finalist for a Maine Literary Award
“To really live in this world, you should love this world, celebrate it, sing about it, know the wind, the sky, the songs of the birds, know your own heart. Birds fly through these poems, poems by a woman who knows her world, knows her heart. She says, ‘I mark my life with birds,’ ‘This is life in motion’ — and we move with her, happy to follow wherever she wants to take us.”
Transportation by Kristen Lindquist
a finalist for a Maine Literary Award
Published by Megunticook Press, 2011
© Kristen Lindquist
Invocation to the Birds
by Kristen Lindquist
Published by Oyster River Press (2001)
part of Walking to Windward, a boxed set of chapbooks
“The lyric precision of her poetry is quietly breathtaking. Form and rhythm deftly evoke earth and sky and the human impulse to call attention, celebrate, and confront.”
Invocation to the Birds by Kristen Lindquist
Published by Oyster River Press, 2001
© Kristen Lindquist
Does inspiration come easily? Can you share with us a little bit about that?
In college a poet friend explained to me what it meant to him to be a poet, to go through his everyday life with a certain attention to detail, mood, and landscape, and I’ve always remembered that conversation, because I realized then that I too went through life with a similar interior approach to what was going on around me. Everything is subject matter for a poem, and that is especially true with a form like haiku, in which you celebrate the ordinary moment. What especially inspires me is the landscape around me, the physical and the psychological landscapes, and how they play off one another. I often find new ideas churning in my head when I’m driving or walking. Also, when I’m reading something I really enjoy. Good writing is inspiring.
Monarch
Next to the budding stubs of milkweed pods, a monarch caterpillar—striking with its stripes
of black and yellow—chews away on the noxious
leaves, making itself poisonous, while a dozen butterflies
flit around my head, casting some kind of spell
on me as their tiger orange wings slowly beat
against the summer heat, those wings also toxic,
so when they’re migrating hundreds of miles south
and a falcon grabs one in midair, the bug will taste
so bitter the bird will spit it out and let it flap
a little farther down the coast to visit another field
like this one and revive on nectar, its bold wings
a bit tattered now—and you’ll be walking past it
paused on an aster and see that it’s a male,
two tiny glands visible on its upper hind wings,
and then ponder for a moment toxicity and death,
metamorphosis and pheromones, those small, great
mysteries, before continuing along with your net.
© Kristen Lindquist
Monarch
© Kristen Lindquist
Monhegan Sky
© Kristen Lindquist
Nature and Bird Watching Are In Mind With Your Haiku Poetry.
When did you begin writing in this style? when did you start book of days?
Since I was a child my attention has been attuned to nature, thanks to my organic farming, nature-loving grandparents. I amassed a big collection of field guides and spent a lot of time outside, learning what things were in the woods. When I was in college, I got involved with environmental activism and focused my creative energies on nature-writing. And, even then, my poetry incorporated the landscape. I chose what MFA programs to apply to by the landscapes they were in (and loved living near the Cascades of Oregon). I began my haiku blog in 2009, and this form of nature poetry seemed a great way to combine my love of poetry with my birding/naturalist interests. As I’ve learned more recently what haiku are really all about—and how to write them well—I’ve become even more focused on representing the poetry inherent in the natural world around me in three short, simple lines.
Do you have any plans for a book to accompany the blog? Collaboration with a painter or other artists?
My next book, still an amorphous cloud in my mind, will undoubtedly be haiku and haibun, as that’s been my big passion of late. I’ve already got a cover picked out. But I’d also love to do a chapbook of my Dutch art poem series, too, which I’m still working on. I love having a tangible book, an attractive object, to share with people. What I would really like is the time to review the first five or six years of my blog in an effort to pull out/revise some of those early not-really-haiku that could be shaped into good “real” haiku.
This year I will be collaborating as a haiku poet with photographer Anna Strickland for the 2020 Belfast Poetry Festival. We’ll be creating haiga: photographs accompanied/complemented by haiku. I also participated in this same festival several years ago, paired with encaustic artist Beth Henderson. My work has also been included in several other art/poetry exhibits.
In 2018, my husband Paul Doiron, a crime novelist, and I gave a reading together at the University of Maine. Part of the program included music by two Maine musicians, violinist Susan Ramsey and cellist Ruth Fogg. After the program, they approached me about joining them and another Maine poet, Paul Corrigan, with whom they had previously performed, in putting together a poetry/music program. I agreed, and the four of us came up with a thematically arranged program we call Poetry with Strings Attached. We have performed it twice already and are scheduled to perform together again in late August at the Camden Opera House, if all goes well. I think poetry and music work beautifully together, as do poetry and art. I love mixed media creations!
Book of Days
Poems by Kristen Lindquist
© Kristen Lindquist — Book of Days
Daily Haiku Blog
recent haiku and haibun poems from Book of Days
Do you have any advice for new readers (and writers) of poetry?
Would you point them towards certain writers and avoid others?
My advice for new readers of poetry would be to start by reading contemporary anthologies that catch their eye—even if it’s “Favorite Cat Poems” or whatever, and then note the poems/poets they like best and try to find individual books by those poets. Go with what you like! Who cares if it’s sentimental sop or silly or “bad.” If you enjoy it, read more of it.
For writers, read, read, read! No writer can write successfully in a vacuum. And, write, write, write! Read things that you wish you’d written. Imitate styles of writers you like. Practice different styles until you find your own way. Learn things from different people. Keep reading. Keep writing. And never ever stop editing. Even when something has been published, you can keep editing. I’ve rewritten entire poems from my books, taped the revised poem over the one in the book for readings. Writing is a fluid activity. Also, the sound of a poem is as important as how it looks on the page. Always read your poems out loud to yourself, working to understand the role of music in poetry.
As you learn how to become a writer and find your voice, you learn most of all how to take things from writers whose work you admire and make them your own—a particular cadence when telling a story or writing in long two-line stanzas or twisting a metaphor into a killer final line, for example. You move from imitation to incorporation. I’m sure I’ve been influenced by all my teachers and all the poets whose work I love most in some way or another. At Oregon, Garrett Hongo gave us a strong grounding in formalism, for instance. Terry Tempest Williams taught me to write my passions. From Richard Hugo, I learned how to alter reality in the service of good writing: “You owe reality nothing and the truth of your emotions everything.” Sharon Olds and many other women poets have influenced honest female subject matter. And so on.
