“tentatively eking their way towards hope”: An Interview with Kathryne David Gargano, Author of Pentimenti

Emma Hurst, one of BWR’s fabulous undergraduate interns, interviews the equally fabulous Kathryne David Gargano, author of Pentimenti, a poem featured in issue 50.1 of Black Warrior Review.

EMMA HURST: Could you tell me general details about the poem? What was the inspiration? How did you go about writing it?

KATHRYNE DAVID GARGANO: First, thank you so much for talking with me about this poem! Pentimenti is part of a longer ekphrastic collection I’m working on that is very speculative, very queer, and draws a lot on art objects and performance art, as well as art history and museum studies. I’ve been fortunate to be able to visit a lot of museums, both large institutions like The MET and smaller ones like the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison (which I highly recommend! It has a great mix of classical and contemporary art), and I’m fascinated by the ethics of curation—for example, Picasso is one of the most revered artists in the West, but he was a terrible misogynist and so much of his work is “inspired”—I say culturally appropriated—from African artists; I loved Degas as a kid, but he treated the dancers he painted terribly, called them “monkey girls,” made them hold painful poses for hours—so it’s that quintessential, do we separate art from artist? If so, how? When I visit museums I like to read the didactics, not just to learn about an artist but to see what’s being said, and more importantly what’s not being said about them and their work.

This poem was born of thinking about these establishments, where we put things behind glass and hold them up, put them up on a pedestal, so to speak, and say, “these are important cultural objects.” But we also—white people, I mean, via imperialism—have stolen art from around the globe, put it behind glass too and called it “primitive” or “tribal.” And so many of these pieces aren’t given—or weren’t given, there’s been some effort to change that—the same respect or authority as Western art. We don’t get as many names and locations. Some of that might be due to the nature of archaeology, lost documents, etc, but a lot of it is just careless—even today, if you read articles about Picasso and how African art influenced him, names aren’t provided, or you have to dig for them. Like Baya Mahieddine, a 16 year-old Algerian artist that “inspired” cubism, isn’t mentioned in a lot of popular sources. I love museums, I love being able to experience art from around the world in one place; but they are kind of inherently problematic. They profit from colonialism. And they’re still such a white, cis-het, male dominated environment, so the narrative around most objects in the museums comes from that perspective. It’s getting better, but there’s still a massive diversity problem, a repatriation problem, a narrative problem, and so on. But I just keep circling the drain with questions like, “How did we get these pieces? Who really made this? How do we decide what goes in an exhibition? Whose work is privileged and why?” And obviously there are literal answers—curators, archaeologists—and a lot of it has to do with power and who has it.

So, this poem, it opens talking about a house in a museum. There actually is a house in a museum, also in the Brooklyn Museum. It’s the house of this guy, Jan Martenese Schenck, and he had this house in what became Brooklyn eventually, but was Carnasie territory. So even just thinking about that one sort of object: why does this house get to have sort of a privileged place in this museum? It gets basically its own floor, but what did we erase in order to give that object its place of privilege? What might later replace it as we keep going?

I don’t have answers, by the way, and to be transparent, not all of these questions are considered in this particular poem, it sort of weaves through the manuscript along with my other “obsessions,” as Ilya Kaminsky calls them—fairy tales, religion, the body, gender, belonging and isolation—all that fun poet stuff.

But I’m also interested in this sort of idea of what we, collectively and individually, find “precious” enough to keep and protect. They’re all “just objects.” We have museums for everything—bobble heads, cat figurines, circus paraphernalia, neon signs, even mustard. The Brooklyn Museum has a huge collection of spoons! And at its core, that’s someone somewhere going, “These spoons tell us about ourselves. These spoons are precious. We need to remember these spoons.” And that just thrills me.

EMMA: Yeah, that’s super interesting. Did you say you said this poem is one in your manuscript and dissertation? Do you feel like this poem has a specific aspect of that theme that it focuses on?

KATHRYNE: Yeah, I would say so. The manuscript really draws from this collision of my own sort of personal identity, being a queer person, being a feminist, being a poet, and I’m also in the rather slow but steady process of converting to Judaism. So, there’s a lot of wrestling that goes on—wrestling with Gd, with the body, with art and love and heartbreak and guilt. The whole collection is set against this post-apocalyptic backdrop, where we’ve lugged all this stuff into one final, sort of magical museum, and the speaker is the only ones left (sort of), so they’re isolated and lonely and and just grappling with what it means to be persevering for something that they don’t even entirely know what they’re looking for. They hope they’re going to get to the top and get something out of it. They don’t actually entirely know what’s in the house. They just know it’s there.

EMMA: That’s super interesting. One of my questions was the message that you’re trying to get across to the reader—if there was one or if it’s just like as you said, an obsession that you were just writing about?

KATHRYNE: For me, personally, I usually don’t know what I’m writing about until I have written it. I have tried so many times to sit down with a topic in mind, or, you know, I really want to wrestle with this idea today, or I want to talk about XYZ. And I sit down, and I get nothing. I’ve found over time that different things—usually visual art, thus the ekphrasis—will grab my attention, and act as a gateway for me to enter the thing that I wanted to say, but in a very roundabout, backdoor kind of way. So, I don’t know that I can say I started with a particular idea in mind, or that I wanted someone to get this message or this feeling. But I will say, when I wrote Pentimenti I had just re-watched Angels in America, the mini-series of a play by Tony Kushner. And without going into it too much, there’s a scene that’s always stayed with me, where this struggling woman asks a mannequin at the Mormon Visitor’s Center in New York, “In your experience of the world, how do people change?” And the mannequin of the Mormon woman has come to life, and she says, “Well it’s something to do with Gd so it’s not very nice.” Then she goes into this sort of painful description of Gd reaching in this ugly hand and yanking out all your innards and twisting them around and putting them back in, so you’re just “mangled guts, pretending.” And then she says something like, “then it’s up to you to do the stitching.” That resonated with me the first time I read it, and still does, and I think the poem has echoes of that—wrestling too with the way we change and what we go through to do so, for better or worse—combined with the speaker’s perseverance, seeing a light in the dark, sort of tentatively eking their way towards hope. But that said, people will get all sorts of different things from a poem, and I’m good with that. Yes, I’d love for people to read into that hope, I’d love to know I did my job and made the reader feel something—but I’m not going to try to dictate to anyone what that is, or tell them they’re getting “the wrong message” from it, even if that wasn’t necessarily my intention.

EMMA: That was definitely the vibe that I got from it. Not that every poem covering those broad topics is like this, but sometimes they can feel overwhelming. And so that hope, I think, is a really nice thing to focus on in a poem.

KATHRYNE: Yeah, absolutely. Believe me, there’s a lot of very brutal, very real poems that I love, poems that force you to confront the wolf at the door, so to speak. But it is also nice to find the ones that have that little spark, or even though they’re extremely intense and overwhelming, like you said, there’s still sort of something you latch on to.

EMMA: Yeah, I love that kind of poem. I want to move into your experiences as a writer. Could you tell me about how you started?

KATHRYNE: Yeah, for sure. So, like many writers, I was the sort of the kid that always had their nose in a book. I was always making up my own stories. I actually remember one of the first stories I ever wrote. I must have been in elementary school at the time, and I was so proud of it. It was this silly little ditty about a girl who finds a flying unicorn Pegasus, and they become best friends, and they save the world and other wonderful things. Then I remember writing an epilogue where the flying unicorn Pegasus crashes into a tree and dies. It was just utterly ridiculous, right? But it was that really dark place that kids can go, thinking about things or processing things that you’ve heard or seen. Writing was really my way of expressing something about how I was feeling or how I was interpreting the world. Because I have always been very bad at doing that. My last therapist always asked me, “Can you sit and feel your feelings?” And I’m like, “No, I don’t want to! Don’t make me do that, it’s horrible!” So writing was a way that I could just put it out there in a way that felt both real and safe. And, obviously, as I’ve gotten a little bit older—what is real? What is safe? I was also in the mindset of, “Oh, I can’t make a career out of this. I can’t do this for real. This is just a hobby.” I don’t think it was any external pressure that was telling me that, I think it was literally just my own head going, “This isn’t going to be real, like this isn’t a real job,” despite tons of evidence to the contrary, right? But my undergrad experience trying to do something else wasn’t the best, so after that I started taking creative writing classes at my local community college, and I had some incredible instructors—Emily Kendal Frey, Megan Savage, Vandoren Wheeler, to name a few—and that set me on the path to thinking, “I want to do this. Can I do this? I’m going to try to do this.” So that led to an MFA and PhD and now here we are!

EMMA: I definitely relate to having that feeling about writing as not something you can do as a job or make something out of it. As for your writing, how do you generally go about writing your poetry? Do you sit down with an idea, do you wait for inspiration, etc.?

KATHRYNE: That’s a great question since everyone’s answer will be different. For me, if I try to sit down with an idea in mind, it’s not going to happen. Most of my inspiration comes from reading or from visual art. It actually quite helps that I have ADHD—I’ll read a line or see something in a work of art and it will just spiral into something that feels a little outside of my control. But it works for me. I think if I waited for inspiration I’d never write again, so I have to consciously seek out things I know will grab me. I also tend to look into things that either frighten me or piss me off—so, I’ve gotten a lot of poems out of Picasso, or representations of women by men. Like, how many skinny white Ophelias can you paint, Waterhouse? (I actually quite like his work though, aesthetically speaking—so there’s that wrestling again.) But also things like spiders and butterflies—I’m terrified of both. I’ll read about them and sometimes make myself look at pictures to examine what it is that makes me so uneasy about them.

EMMA: Just one more question—what advice would you give to new writers, or people that are exploring that idea?

KATHRYNE: Read everything. Not very original, I know, but truly—read everything. You never know what’s going to pick your brain. If you’re thinking of going the MFA/PhD route—don’t pay for it unless you can afford it (there are tons of funded programs). If you can’t afford it or don’t want to do it, don’t worry about it. You don’t need it to be a successful writer. Find a few writing friends that “get you” and exchange work. Having a community is invaluable, and it doesn’t matter where you find it—open mics, classes, Twitter, whatever. Give as much as you can—build others up, support other writers.  I’d also say—find a healthy balance of optimism/determination and understanding of the literary scene. Jobs are hard to find and don’t pay that well. Competitions are expensive. Conferences are expensive. All the traditional places you’re supposed to network or get your foot in the door, internships, publishing houses, things like that, aren’t always accessible to everyone. There are opportunities and places to build relationships, but it’s not always easy. That’s not to discourage anyone at all, but I think with the lack of arts funding in the US and the rising costs of everything, it just helps to keep “writing is a necessary and valuable art” and “I need to pay rent” on the table at the same time. And lastly—just keep writing. Even if it’s on the bus between jobs or notes in your phone, a little or a lot, just keep going. Eek your way.

Pentimenti, a poem by Kathryne David Gargano, was published in issue 50.1 of BWR in January 2024. To learn more about Kathryne and their work, you can find their website here. If you’d like to read Pentimenti yourself (and you should!), you can access this brilliant poem at the link in the description above, or you can read it by snagging yourself a copy of 50.1 from our online store.