This week our poetry team is excited to feature two poems from American poet Kait Quinn, titled 'In the Garden of Girlhood' and 'On This Fresh Morning in the Broken World' (after Mary Oliver). Both those poems can be read at the poetry tab in our website above.
Kait Quinn (she/her) was born with salt in her wounds. She flushes the sting of living by writing poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Exposition Review, Reed Magazine, Watershed Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in the 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize. Kait is an Editorial Associate at Yellow Arrow Publishing and a poetry reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine. She enjoys cats,repetition, coffee shops, tattoos, and vegan breakfast. Kait lives in Minneapolis with her partner and their very polite Aussie mix.
Recently our editor-in-chief Julian Kanagy talked with Kait about her new work, her inspirations, and more. Here's a transcript of their conversation:
Julian Kanagy: I'd love to begin with "On This Fresh Morning in the Broken World," as I've also found Mary Oliver's poetry deeply inspiring for my own work. Could you share a bit of your connection with the line – or "Invitation" as a whole – that became the title of this piece, and perhaps a bit of how your allusion to her work helped create this piece? Our editorial team loved the Mary Oliver-esque enjambment and succinctness of the poem, the quick phrases and emotion-laden images of this poem.
Kait Quinn: I saw that single line somewhere before I read Mary Oliver’s full poem, “Invitation.” It was the perfect combination of heartbreaking and hopeful – no matter how broken I feel, or how broken the world feels, every morning is a chance to start fresh, to choose to notice and appreciate the smallest moments.
There’s a lot hidden in between the lines of this poem – the woes and precious moments of being in a long-term relationship, the pain we willingly put ourselves through to meet some made up standard – our own or someone else’s – and struggling with sexuality, low libido, and depression. All things I could have written a poem about, but having just read “Invitation,” I wanted to focus on the mundane and the little memorable moments that punctuate it like Oliver’s bird songs.
I feel numb in the initial kiss when my partner drops me off at the esthetician’s. I’m just going through the motions. Then I go through the sensation of getting a wax, then the unexpected delight of seeing my dog carrying the Winnifred toy in his mouth when he and my partner come to pick me up. I feel the second kiss more because of those small sparks that stirred the reminder that I’m alive and these everyday moments are enough. In the style of Oliver’s ending to “Invitation” and to quote Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in."
Kanagy: Do you find your work as an editor and reader influencing the way you write? Is it all part of the same process for you, or do you have different eyes, so to speak, for your own work?
Kait Quinn: Absolutely! In the act of writing, I try to turn off my inner editor and just write for myself. But I definitely feel a difference when I’m editing. I’m more honest with myself about what is ready to submit, what needs more editing, what needs a second set of eyes, and what should stay a piece of writing meant only for me. I also just think about the editing process differently. When reading and providing feedback, I often focus on what’s working and what’s not working, which weren’t really questions I asked regarding my own writing. So there’s definitely more intention in that aspect.
Kanagy: I'd love to segue this into the other piece of yours we're featuring, "In the Garden of Girlhood." How did this poem originate within your creative process, and could you share with us a bit about the structure? Was the creation process restricted or liberated by the challenge of writing a poem that can be read multiple ways?
Kait Quinn: This poem was actually inspired by a writing prompt set by poet Kristiana Reed – @kristiana.reed on IG – which was literally: “Write a contrapuntal about a childhood into adulthood.” This was my second contrapuntal and my first one written with the intention of it being a contrapuntal.
I wrote my first draft in free verse, which allowed me to lay out what I wanted the “childhood” and “adulthood” aspects of the poem to cover and where they connected. The connecting image was play or playground. I knew that I wanted the left side of the poem to be just about childhood and then the right side to be just about adulthood. So I split my free verse draft accordingly – phrases specific to childhood on the left, phrases specific to adulthood on the right – and just kind of filled in the blanks from there. There was also a lot of pausing to read through the poem, each way, to make sure it all worked.
I think the restriction of the form was actually a kind of liberation. I love that it allowed me to use language reserved more for the topic of childhood for adulthood and vice versa. I definitely felt a freedom in playing with images that could work in more ways than one.
Kanagy: These two pieces contrast nicely; "On This Fresh Morning" is concrete and mystifies the ordinary, while "Garden" blends the visceral descriptors with the abstract and allusive. Are either of these pieces part of a larger collection or project? How do they relate to your past work?
Kait Quinn: I plan to include both of these poems in a manuscript that is still in the “in my head” stage. The manuscript is inspired by the line “Heaven is a place on earth with you” from Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” It’s a very coming of age collection where the idea of “heaven” changes with age and between relationships. Heaven might be – or appear to be – like a movie or a fairy tale. What you once thought was heaven might have actually been pretty dingy and toxic. What heaven becomes might be your partner bringing you tea when you're collapsed and sweaty on the bathroom floor with the stomach flu. Heaven might be a mixed bag of mundane and little glimmers of light, like in “On This Fresh Morning.” I see both of these poems fitting into this concept, at least at the moment.
Other than the format, “In the Garden of Girlhood” is a very Kait Quinn-coded poem. I’m heavily nostalgic and love writing about past relationships, my teen years, and young adulthood. While I’m not religious, I was raised in a conservative, Christian household and went to a private Lutheran school for eight years, where we had chapel once a week and religion was the first class of the day. It was so laced throughout my childhood and teen years that it feels natural to use religious imagery in my writing, especially in coming of age poems. But I often romanticize and deconstruct it.
“On This Fresh Morning” fits more into the narrative, concrete style that I’ve started writing in over the past three years. I spent many years focusing mostly on lush images and romanticizing depression, heartbreak, etc. I don’t dislike that style or the poems that I wrote then, but they felt safe and more for me. Taking Megan Falley’s “Poems That Don’t Suck” course a couple of times really challenged that and brought me out of my comfort zone and introduced me to narrative style, the power of enjambment, the balance of concrete and figurative images, and the specificity of experience. It’s also one of my earlier attempts to “leap" in a poem and make unspoken connections. While it definitely relates to my more current work, which does tend to be about the ordinary, I think readers of my first couple of poetry collections would probably be surprised to learn that I wrote this poem.

Kait Quinn
Kait Quinn (she/her) was born with salt in her wounds. She flushes the sting of living by writing poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Exposition Review, Reed Magazine, Watershed Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in the 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize. Kait is an Editorial Associate at Yellow Arrow Publishing and a poetry reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine. She enjoys cats,repetition, coffee shops, tattoos, and vegan breakfast. Kait lives in Minneapolis with her partner and their very polite Aussie mix. Find her at kaitquinn.com.

Julian Kanagy
Julian Kanagy is a Chicago-based poet, editor, and aspiring novelist whose work sets out to explore questions he can't find other means of asking. As the Umbrella's Editor-in-Chief and poetry editor, and his own creative process, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and structural variety. Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.
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