Q & A: Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy presents her third anthology of poetry with the April publication of She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems (reviewed on p. 80). She feels, as she explains in her introduction, that the verses she has gathered, by both men and women, “encompass the milestones in a woman’s life.” Kennedy and I, once classmates, had an email conversation about her latest book and about poetry that she feels will speak to others as it has spoken to her.

The poems you’ve picked for She Walks in Beauty cover a wonderful range—humorous, poignant, heartbreaking—even within the thematic categories you’ve divided them into. How have your own tastes in poetry evolved?
I don’t think my tastes in poetry have changed that much over the years—I’ve just read more poems that I like. I was lucky to be exposed to poetry at an early age, so I wasn’t intimidated by it. I’ve never really studied poetry, but I have always felt I could read it and try to understand it. It helped that we had a lot of poetry books around our house, so if I knew that someone else in my family had read or liked them, I was curious about why. I always looked to see if someone had made any marks in the margins and then I would try to figure out who made them and when. So reading poems became like solving a mystery for me on a few levels, the mystery of what the poet was trying to say and the mystery of what others had understood—as well as what I thought myself.

Yes, I love finding those marks in a volume that has come down to me in my family.
I still love the first poems I was introduced to by my mother, as well as those I read in school. Some of them are in this book as well as in my other anthologies—poems like W.B. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” which I memorized for the eighth grade Poetry Recitation Contest at school, the love poetry of John Donne, and Cavafy’s “Ithaka.”

As the last poem in your book, “Ithaka” is a lovely coda, since it refers to setting out on a journey rather than arrival, so it ties into your theme. The poems you’ve selected extend from the classical and the biblical up to poems written almost as you were pulling the collection together.
Yes. Over the past couple of years I’ve been volunteering in a weekly after-school poetry class in the Bronx, and I’ve gotten a better feel for more contemporary poets and their work. In fact, the woman who leads the class—Ellen Hagan—is one of the poets whose work I included. I was already familiar with Elizabeth Alexander’s work, but after she read at President Obama’s inauguration, I read all her poems, and it was hard to choose among them for this book because she writes so beautifully of so many aspects of a woman’s life.

You may not want to name your particular favorites in the book, but I love the two different “red dress” poems, Kim Addonizio’s “What Do Women Want?” and Lucille Clifton’s “to my last period.” Do you sense that there’s much recitation of poetry going on these days as part of K–12 English, the way there used to be decades ago?
One of the most terrifying experiences of my school years was that Poetry Recitation Contest in eighth grade. Truly traumatizing at the time for those of us who were shy and did not enjoy public speaking—but worth it in the long run because I picked an amazing poem, and I still know it by heart, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Margaret—what did you pick?

I’m drawing a blank for 8th grade, but I remember reciting Millay’s “Recuerdo” for 6th grade and Kipling’s “Gunga Din” for 11th. Now I have other poems that I love to recite to myself.
That school was a very (and I do mean very) traditional school—and it no longer has the contest. So if memorizing isn’t happening there, I can’t imagine where it would be happening. When I travel around and talk about poetry, people often tell me how grateful they are that they had to memorize poetry, and that they wish their children or grandchildren had to do it, too. So I think it will make a small and slow comeback—even if it happens at home more than in schools. It’s a wonderful activity for grandparents and grandchildren to do together. I know I remember so well the recitations of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” that my grandmother used to lead. I find that more students are writing and performing spoken-word poetry and participating in poetry slams. These works require extensive memorization as well as performance skills, so the oral tradition is very much alive today and constantly being renewed by each generation.

Do you ever write poetry, albeit just for yourself and not to be shared?
Not much—but I have been writing with the kids in the after-school poetry class. In the last exercise I participated in we had to write down ten adjectives that described something in the classroom. After that we found out that we had to use those adjectives in a poem about a family member. It wasn’t easy because the object I had picked was a large, shiny papier-mâché bunch of broccoli, but I wrote a poem about my son leaving for college, and it turned out much better than I expected.

Speaking of sons, in your introduction to the anthology’s section of poems about “Love Itself,” you question how many men like to read poetry. Do you think that anthologies like yours can help change that situation?
It makes no sense that women buy all the poetry books and that, until recently, men wrote most of the poems that we all love. In my next anthology, Poems To Learn by Heart (2012) I’ve tried to include more poems for boys—lots of battle poems and sports and adventure poems that I hope will appeal to them. The poems in She Walks in Beauty speak more to a woman’s sensibility and experience, but they’ll help some men who still just don’t “get it.”

So, all in all, what do you hope readers will take from your anthology?
I hope they’ll look at the ordinary moments in their own lives and see the extraordinary in them. Poetry has a way of sharpening our focus and allowing us to see the same old experiences with new insight—to look more closely at the things, the people, and experiences that we take for granted. So depending on what’s happening in a person’s life—or the life of a friend—maybe the reader will find a poem that speaks to what that person is going through, and it will bring comfort—or make a friend smile.—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal