Denise Low: Kim I ran across your Rabbit Stories (Poetic Matrix Press) and bought it immediately. It had some influence on my own writing of Jackalope (Red Mountain Press). Tsisdu is an energy I have to reckon with in my writing life and elsewhere. How about you?
Kim Shuck: Those
iconic cultural symbols are absolutely there to speak to inner
truths. For many reasons I find trickster energy, and particularly the gentler,
sillier trickster energy, something that has led me. Sometimes right into a
bramble patch, but it has led me.
DL: What I love
about your work is how there are these nuggets placed throughout each work, no
matter what the genre, turns of phrase like “Thumbprints of the sacred / Human
measures / Thumb, forearm, heel to toe.” How do you strategize such moments,
and/or how do you edit to emphasize them?
KS: Thank you. I
used to write from those notes. I'd find a phrase that rang and then I'd write
around
DL: In Whose
Water I admire the rhythm of the mostly short lines and the momentum of the
poem. Repeated motifs like waterways and rural sightings of silos, cornfields
and churches (boxes), as well as geography, tie the work together. How did
themes arise? Did you write in the car, as the movement of the words suggest?
KS: When we left
San Francisco to take that trip I had just organized a reading by Pacific
Island people about Mauna Loa and I was thinking about sacred space and how
some people need there to be a building for something to be sacred and
wondering why that was. At the same time I was thinking about the readings I
was going to do and in two cases working out the land acknowledgements, which
led me to prayers and going to water and what constitutes belonging to a place.
I think that I came to some conclusions on the way. I write about water all of
the time anyhow. Then there's the way I travel, which is in a car with a partner
to whom all of this Indigenous reality is fairly new. I do write down a few
words in the car sometimes. Sometimes I just remember the images and write them
later it depends upon the urgency of the image. Most of that poem was written
in the car.
DL: What did you
leave out of the long poem Whose Water? Why?
KS: Oooh, I left
a few things out. I read at Haskell on that trip, read from Murdered
Missing (FootHills Publishing) and that day was a separate place for
me. So what is in there of that moment is heavily redacted. There were also
moments in the trip that were seriously alienating: signs, flags, comments. If
I am tempted to adjust the reality of a moment I leave it out. I want to be as
clean in my images as I can be.
DL: Do you see
any influence of your beadwork and other textile arts on your creative
writing?
KS: Story, textiles and
beads are my first languages so they are probably in there if I see them or
not. I think that they all influence one another. I will notice things I like
to bead and those things make it into my writing. I suppose my taste in nouns
shows up one way or another.
DL: Would you
share a poem and then describe what success you feel you had with it?
KS:
Then night splits the
Husk of day and emerges
Slick with the damp of
New things and
Spangled with the prickles of
Human need an
Incidental loveliness that
Burns like the
Gems my grandmother
Imagined and maybe
Thinks of still somewhere and we
Look at the dark and reference
Heat or cold depending upon our
Experiences our frames our
Lenses which
Magnify the varicolored
Lights it's difficult not to
Smile so I do because with all of the
Smudge and creak of
Person led creation with all of our
Silly and greedy and
Ill-considered there is also
Beautiful and some days that is what I
Want to say about us
Slick with the damp of
New things and
Spangled with the prickles of
Human need an
Incidental loveliness that
Burns like the
Gems my grandmother
Imagined and maybe
Thinks of still somewhere and we
Look at the dark and reference
Heat or cold depending upon our
Experiences our frames our
Lenses which
Magnify the varicolored
Lights it's difficult not to
Smile so I do because with all of the
Smudge and creak of
Person led creation with all of our
Silly and greedy and
Ill-considered there is also
Beautiful and some days that is what I
Want to say about us
I like the forgiveness
in this poem. Both for myself and others. The rhythm is good. I like the way
some of the lines slide from one to the next. It feels familiar and not too
familiar.
DL: Thanks for
that ending paradox here about how we want both repetition (the familiar) and
the surprise (not too familiar) in poetry. This is your magic trick. And thank
you for this discussion.
Kim Shuck is a Tsalagi (Cherokee)/Euro-American poet, author,
weaver, and beadwork artist born in San Francisco, California. She belongs
to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora and is a member of the Cherokee
Nation of Oklahoma. In 2017, Mayor Ed Lee named Shuck as the
7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
Other awards include a PEN Oakland Censorship Award, National Laureate
Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, KQED Local Hero Award, American Indian
Heritage Month, Mentor of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native
Writers and Storytellers, Native Writers of the Americas First Book, Diane
Decorah Award, and a Mary Tallmountain Award. Previous books of poetry are Deer
Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7, (City Lights Publishers),
Murdered Missing (Foothills Publishing), Sidewalk Ndn, chapbook
(FootHills Publishing), Clouds Running In, (Taurean Horn Press ), Smuggling
Cherokee (Greenfield Review Press, Poetry Foundation bestseller list, SPD
Books bestseller list. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles
(1998) from San Francisco State University. She has taught American Indian
Studies at San Francisco State University and was an artist-in-residence at
the de Young Museum in June 2010 with Michael Horse.
Copyright 2020 by Denise Low, interview text.
Contact mammothpubs[at] gmail for permissions.
