Living & Arts

Alum sheds light on poetry, creative process

In print | April 15, 2010

Poet and alumna Keetje Kuipers ’02 returned to Swarthmore on Monday to read from her first published volume of poetry, “Beautiful in the Mouth,” which was released by BOA Editions, Ltd. last month. The book deals heavily with themes of love, loss, place and the body. It won Kuipers the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the reward for which is publication. Kuipers also judged the 2010 student poetry prize winners, whom she announced directly following the reading.

Elizabeth Dickey ’10, who was selected as winner of the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize, was present both at the reading and for a classroom discussion in Professor Nathalie Anderson’s “Contemporary Women’s Poetry” course on Tuesday. Dickey, who bought and began to read “Beautiful in the Mouth” only after attending the reading, commented on the differences in reading and listening to Kuipers’ poetry.

“[S]he feels to me like a really solid presence, like she herself she has just a gorgeous voice and she presents herself in a way that’s very solid, and she’s very clear on who she is,” Dickey said of Kuipers’ reading.

“I think it was interesting to see or to get a sense of that first before reading the book because the book, as she mentioned in class [Tuesday], is so much about her inhabiting these different personas of herself,” Dickey said. “So it was sort of like cognitive dissonance to see her so kind of be at one with herself and then be able to throw on all these different things.”

As judge of the Lois Morrell and John Russell Hayes Poetry Prizes, Kuipers noted that “[for] such a small school and small program, it’s just ridiculous that there are that many talented writers on campus.” In addition to Dickey, Kuipers selected Nina Pelaez ’11 and Jessica Holler ’10, respectively, for the first and second place John Russell Hayes Poetry Prizes.

In selecting poems for Monday’s reading, Kuipers said that Swarthmore was on her mind. “I came here from California when I was an undergrad and so I always felt a lot of sort of push-pull between my identities as an East Coast person and a West Coast person,” Kuipers said. “I wanted to read the poems that I thought best illustrated the dialogue between these two important parts of the country in my mind and in my heart.”

These selections resonated with Brendan Work ’10, who learned before the reading that Kuipers lives near his hometown of Missoula, Montana. “[S]he read one poem … called ‘Blackfoot River,’ which is a river just where I live, and I think that [the poem] powerfully kind of captured living in wildfire conditions, and I think it powerfully captured the feeling of stress when you’re living in a lot of smoke,” he said.

Professor and chair of the theater department Allen Kuharski, who taught Kuipers as a theater major at Swarthmore, found that Kuipers has her own distinct voice. “The language is totally accessible and unpretentious, but very eloquent, very powerful,” he said. “She has a very simple, untheatrical delivery, but [it’s] really strong.” Kuharski said he enjoyed the combination of sensuality, loneliness and the “constant awareness of death and ultimate things” in much of Kuipers’ poetry.

While this was the second reading Kuipers has given from “Beautiful in the Mouth,” the first occurring several days ago at a poetry conference in Denver, she said it was the first reading she has given unaccompanied.

“[Monday] night was really unique for me because unless you have a book, it’s really quite rare that you actually get to read by yourself. So I’m always reading with other writers as part of a series, as part of a group event,” she said.

The experience has also been a new one for Kuipers in terms of thinking about her own work. According to Kuipers, it has been both surreal and exciting to watch the process of her work being converted into a book.

“It’s interesting in some ways to see my work separated from myself. That’s what having a book is,” she said. “It’s like having a child you know—it’s you, but it’s not you.”

Kuipers began writing and compiling “Beautiful in the Mouth” during her residency as a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness writer in 2007. In 2009, Kuipers was also named a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, an award that according to Anderson “is probably the most prestigious award to be given to a young writer in America.”

When Kuipers was at Swarthmore, she took many classes with Anderson, including the poetry workshop. “You can, as a teacher, see the ways in which the reading that a student did here or the assignments that a person did here have bounced around in their heads, reshaped themselves and become something else in their practice. But you can still see how what they did when they were here has evolved into where they are now,” Anderson said.

Kuipers talked about how her time at Swarthmore influenced her creative process and finished work. She mentioned that she has met many other writers whose only focus was English language and literature. “Coming out of Swarthmore, I realized how valuable it is to have all sorts of different types of knowledge to draw from and pull from as a writer and to utilize in my writing,” Kuipers said.
Another influence on her poetry was her experience with Nathalie Anderson. Kuipers took a few classes with Anderson during her time at Swarthmore and learned the importance of poetry as a “craft.” “[Anderson] places such a great deal of emphasis on the hard work of craft and the importance of formal elements in creative writing,” Kuipers said. “I think that really laid a foundation for me in terms of my own poetics and what I believe about how poetry should work and how poetry should be practiced.” According to Kuipers, this aspect distinguished her education from any other she could have had.

While she was an undergraduate, though, Kuipers said she never garnered the same level of recognition that she has now. “I was not the star poet when I was here,” she said. “I really want to be, but I was second-tier and had to work very hard to be a part of the workshops and get published in the literary magazines and so on.” This struggle was something she spoke about at the reading and that resonated with students and faculty alike.

“She didn’t win prizes when she was here and … discovering her own voice as a writer was a process,” Anderson said. “A lot of students … assume that if they do good work, they’ll be recognized for it and of course they are recognized but there are only a few prizes.”

Kuipers learned that writing is a process that takes time and the best work cannot be churned out all the time. Both Work and Dickey found this insight encouraging from the perspective of student writers.

“[Kuipers] was trying to find her voice in fiction and art, and it’s helpful to know that someone makes it [as a professional writer],” Work said.

“[Writing] is something that you work on and as [Kuipers] would say, something that you craft. It feels more liberating that way,” Dickey said. “I don’t always have to sit down and write a perfect poem, just like try to find something that is interesting to me and work with it.”

“It wasn’t until after Swarthmore that I came more into my own as a writer,” Kuipers said. “So to come back here as someone who is successful in something that I really struggled to be good at at Swarthmore kind of blows me away. … I can’t imagine a more meaningful experience of reading my work anywhere.”

Disclosure Note: Nina Pelaez is a Living & Arts staff writer for The Phoenix but had no role in the production of this article.