KARAN

Kevin, your poems feel like transmissions from a mythic Appalachian limbo — where Donkey Kong has a 9-to-5, Bigfoot is asexual, and there’s talk of sex and dreams. But they’re never trying to be weird for weirdness’ sake. Instead, they feel like what Mark Fisher once called “the eerie”: the presence of absence, the silence that follows after something essential has disappeared. Do you feel your poems come from absence? Where do they begin for you — an image, a voice, a joke? What keeps you writing?

KEVIN

My process is always changing. I write whenever I find the time, wherever feels comfortable. I don’t have any one way of getting into a poem, and “getting into” is definitely the right phrase, since working on a poem so often feels like breaking and entering. Lately, I’ve been starting with a title. Titles are always popping into my head, nonsense phrases mostly. I also like to start with a character and a scene. Hard to go wrong with “once there was a __________ who __________.” It means that something has to happen. Generally, I just like to play with stuff — personas, characters, jokes, aphorisms, pop culture, weird sentence shapes. What keeps me writing is getting to dig into all that bric-a-brac, coming at it from different angles and just seeing what happens. In terms of absence, I guess I like to surround things with absence by removing them from their normal context.

KARAN

In “Donkey Kong,” you write, “No one envies him, running, punching the air, crying, why are you making me do this.” I laughed, then felt a deep pang. That’s how your humor works — not just as relief, but as an undercurrent of sorrow. Is humor a coping mechanism in your writing? Or a kind of defamiliarization — turning the mundane sacred through absurdity? And more generally, do you see humor having an important role in poetry at large?

KEVIN

I had Donkey Kong for Gameboy and Nintendo 64 and played them both to death. There are so many lonely characters out there, in books, movies, TV shows, but video game characters might be the loneliest of them all. How do we talk about that feeling, of seeing our own fears infinitely compounded in the things we create, even when it’s a gorilla throwing coconuts at alligators, something that’s meant for kids? Humor makes those overwhelming existential questions palatable. It’s everything for me, so of course I think humor is important for poetry at large. You’re driving coast to coast in a car with no radio. Would you rather ride with someone who has a sense of humor, or someone who doesn’t?

KARAN

Your poems seem to ask: what happens when nothing happens? I’m thinking of lines like: “I think of my life like a rope that I keep pulling out of the ground, foot after foot, wondering when it’s going to run out.” The voice often hovers between prayer and sleep-deprived monologue. What is your relationship to pacing and silence on the page? Are you trying to lull us into something?

KEVIN

The conscious use of silence, white space, emptiness, is to me what makes a poem a poem. It’s the resonating surface that makes our words audible. A lot of my favorite poems seem very serene or detached right until the end, when the empty space rolls over you like a truck. As the prose voice has crept into my work over the years, it’s made everything a little slower, a little quieter, a little more rooted in the page. I want each individual component of a poem to do as much work as possible, which is challenging, since most words are dead weight. If I can use silence to convey something instead of words, I’ll almost always choose silence.

KARAN

I keep returning to “Asexual Bigfoot” — which somehow manages to be comic, cosmic, and lonely all at once. “All Bigfoots are of one mind and have the same mother, which is not really a mother, but is like a mother in that it is beautiful and a point of origin.” It reminds me of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” but filtered through cable TV static. Do you think of your speakers as personas or aspects of self? What’s the appeal of cryptid or folkloric figures to you?

KEVIN

I like to think of all my characters as my friends. They’re not just meant to be totems, though they are also that. I have tender feelings toward them. I almost imagine them as an ensemble of characters in a comic strip, like Krazy Kat or Achewood or the Moomins. I’ve always loved that stuff. Michael Hurley wrote songs and painted paintings and drew comics about Boone & Jocko for decades and they never lost their magic, even though they’re just two wolves who wander around and get drunk. I like the idea of developing my own mythology, with its own pantheon of anti-gods. You see that all the time in fiction, why not poetry?

KARAN

There’s something about your poems that feels deeply American — and I mean that in the loaded, contradictory, haunted way that David Lynch means it. The small-town flattening of reality. The surreal made banal. You ask in “Local Digest”: “Who forgot to read even one American novel?” Do you think of your writing as American? And what does “West Virginia” mean in the psychic landscape of these poems?

KEVIN

I do and don’t think of my writing as American. My work was strongly influenced early on by people like James Tate and Russell Edson and John Ashbery, who were all in turn strongly influenced by the French. The myth of what’s American falls apart pretty quickly once you take a couple steps back in time. West Virginia’s relationship to the American idiom is interesting since it’s largely been denied entry to that idiom. It’s a curiosity, it’s a punchline, it’s Trump country, it’s a tourist destination, it’s anything but a real place where real people actually live. My surroundings do feed my creativity, but in a way that’s hard to quantify. I’ve lived here for a long time, and that rootedness steadies my thoughts, which is good for my work. There are some symbolic and occasionally literal representations of West Virginia in my poetry, but I don’t usually sit down intending to write about where I live.

KARAN

You often give us strange cosmologies or metaphysical frameworks. I wish to quote “Neighborly” in full here:

Get a weapon. Don’t give it a name. Its name is Unknowable. When you think you’ve decided what to do with it, keep deciding. A weapon is a shape you see in the clouds. A weapon is like the ocean. You are fortunate. Be friendly. Wave to your neighbors. Go home every night to your weapon.

There are moments like this throughout your work that gesture toward the philosophical, even spiritual, but with a deeply ironic twist. I’m also thinking of Leonard Cohen, as I often am: “I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Do you read philosophy or metaphysics? Is the spiritual impulse something you’re suspicious of — or working toward?

KEVIN

I’m a part time student of Eastern philosophy, mostly Taoism, but not an especially serious one. I read it because it’s beautiful and I take comfort in it, the parts I understand, at least. The Tao Te Ching has this quality of being crystal clear and totally opaque at the same time, which has definitely rubbed off on me, but if one of my poems seems to speak to a certain philosophy or metaphysics, it’s almost always a parlor trick, some kind of rhetorical device serving ambiguous ends. I enjoy the textural effect of things that sound like they’re full of pathos or insight, but are really just random thoughts all dressed up for the ball. I tend to agree with Tony Hoagland, who says that rhetoric is the gesture, that what it means is less important than how it alters the meaning of what’s around it.

KARAN

I’m thinking of “Local Digest” again — “Who forgot to say the death poems to the flowers?” That image stayed with me like a spell. It made me think of how poems themselves are often forgotten rituals — a way of speaking to what doesn’t respond. What are your thoughts on the purpose (or pointlessness) of poetry? Do you believe poems can do something in the world, or is that beside the point?

KEVIN

I think there’s something a little bit socially irresponsible about being a poet, and the more serious you are about it, the more irresponsible you are. Your observation about “Local Digest” is right on point. Writing a poem is about as practical of an activity as talking to a flower. But if someone told me they spent an hour every day talking to flowers, I’d think that person was crazy in the best way, crazy like surfers or buddhist monks are crazy. When you write a poem, you’re inviting a certain type of divine madness into your life. Sometimes that madness is transformative, and sometimes it’s just a pleasurable way to pass the time. In ancient Japan, poetry was a social activity and a component of parlor games. Out of that same tradition came some of the most influential poems ever written. I think human beings need purpose and diversion in roughly equal measure, and poetry speaks equally well to both of those needs.

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes poems can be categorized into one of four: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. I see elements of all four in your work, but I wonder if you see yourself landing more in one than another? Or resisting that categorization altogether?

KEVIN

My natural instinct is to resist those categorizations, but it’s still a useful exercise. Push comes to shove, what is this stuff about? It reminds me of Glyn Maxwell’s four orders of meaning in a poem: solar (what actually happens in the poem), lunar (the part of the poem that sticks with you after it’s done), musical (the sound of the words without meaning), and visual (the look of the words without meaning). Given those two frameworks, I’d say I write mostly poetry of the heart with strong lunar tendencies. Poems are my friends. They come from a warm place inside me, and I try not to overthink what they mean on the surface.

KARAN

I’m struck by the texture of your poems — their disjointed syntax, clipped phrasing, image-stacking. Your imagination reminds me of work by Russell Edson, Mary Ruefle, or even Sam Pink. Do you think about lineage? Who are the poets or thinkers who made your voice possible, your strongest influences?

KEVIN

Emphatically yes to Mary Ruefle and Russell Edson. Also, David Berman, John Ashbery, James Tate, Terrance Hayes, Joe Wenderoth, Noelle Kocot, Bernadette Mayer, Frank Stanford, Richard Brautigan, Franz Wright, Haruki Murakami, Fernando Pessoa, and Joy Williams. That’s the Mount Rushmore I imagine myself sitting under.

KARAN

Would you leave our readers with a poetry prompt — something strange or open-ended — to help them start a new poem?

KEVIN

Write a poem where each line begins with the same phrase, like “when I die . . .” or “you’re not going to believe this, but . . .”, and run with it as far as you can. If you get stuck, use an element from the last line you wrote to bounce you to the next. Put it away for a couple weeks, and when you come back to it, ask: is there any merit in retaining the structure of the prompt? Or is this the seed of something different altogether? For reference, see “Lighthead’s Guide to Addiction” by Terrance Hayes.

KARAN

And lastly, please recommend a piece of art — a song, film, sculpture, whatever — that has haunted you in the best way. Something you’d impose on everyone if you could.

KEVIN

I’m going to recommend one film, one record, and one book, because I literally can’t help myself.

Film: The Long Goodbye (1973)

Album: Back Home With Drifting Woods by Michael Hurley

Book: Crow With No Mouth by Ikkyū Sōjun, translated by Stephen Berg