“After”: Eight Questions for Christopher Kempf
I have always been fascinated by machines: cars, airplanes, trains… Every vehicle feels like it’s connecting the past where we have been with the future where we are going. Maybe that is why I’m drawn to art that deals with history and movement. When I first read Christopher Kemp’s poem “After,” I felt that same sense of motion, a poem traveling through time, across the American landscape, showing how the country’s past is always still with us.
Christopher Kempf is an award winning poet and essayist from Ohio whose work explores the intersections of American identity, history, and everyday life. He is the author of two poetry collections, Late in the Empire of Men and What Though the Field Be Lost. Kempf has received a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
In this interview, Kempf reflects on how his Midwestern background shaped his voice, why rhythms and research are central to his craft, and how poetry can challenge the way we think about language and belonging. He also offers a look at his upcoming literary nonfiction book, Local Color, which explores growing up in Ohio and finding meaning in place and movement in an ever changing America.
I read that you grew up in Ohio, how has your childhood in the Midwest influenced your approach to poetry, especially in terms of imagery, language, and themes? Is it related to your writing about American history?
Yes, my background as an Ohioan is so integral to whom I am both as a poet and person. I remember in a college writing workshop our professor, the poet George Bilgere, held up a copy of James Wright’s collected poems, Above the River. He read the poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” and I was astonished that a poem could be about something so seemingly banal and relatable as high-school football. That was the moment I began to understand that poetry lives in the everyday—it’s all around us, and it’s the job of the poet to recognize it.
In your poem “After,” the repetition of the word “after” at the beginning of each stanza gives the poem a kind of driving rhythm. What drove you to that specific structure?
For me, rhythm is incredibly important, and I always hope that my readers hear the same rhythm in a poem that I do. That’s why lineation is so important—it’s like a musical score for the language of the poem. With that poem specifically, though, I also wanted to suggest the idea that we’re not quite “after” anything as a nation, that we’re still living through and contesting many of the same struggles for which the Civil War was fought. We keep trying to say “after,” as if to close the parentheses or end the sentence, but we can’t. Instead, that “after” works like a kind of consoling mantra, like self-soothing.
I noticed that a lot of the poem talks about moments of violence and cultural tension in American history, like slavery, racism and war, but it also has everyday moments like a family at dinner or a dog coming home. Why did you decide to mix those images together?
That’s a perceptive observation. I wanted to show how all kinds of histories underlie the present, including histories of violence, as well as how those histories irrupt into present-day seemingly quiet moments. Many of the poems work by “ironic juxtaposition,” so that while something beautiful is happening at home something terrible might be happening elsewhere—in that way, the poems try to achieve a maximalist scope both in time and space.
Some parts of the poem feel like true stories and others feel more like they could be made up or imagined. Like the line about Lincoln reading Shakespeare. Did you do a lot of research for this poem or where did you use these lines to create a certain mood?
Lincoln actually did read Shakespeare at that exact moment in history! He was on a boat on the Potomac after the South had just surrendered, and he would be dead a few days later. To answer the question, though, yes, I always do a ton of research before I write anything. This usually involves a lot of reading, but it can also involve visiting places where the poems are set and talking to people, like battlefield guides at Gettysburg. I want the poems to move outward from personal experience to broader historical and cultural claims, to feel like densely woven textiles—so research is key to that.
Which poets have had the biggest impact on your style? Are there any non poetic influences, like filmmakers or musicians, that have shaped how you write?
As far as influential poets, I mentioned James Wright in terms of subject matter. But stylistically, I admire rhetorically-driven poets like Linda Gregerson, Angie Estes, and Jorie Graham, poets who use statement to make thoughtful intellectual claims in their work. The films of Terrence Malick are important to me in their slow stylization, their lavishness.
What is your perspective on the state of American poetry today? Do you think poets should have more responsibility in responding to social and political events? Or do you see poetry’s role as more reflective and personal?
This is an important question. I do think all poetry is political, since language itself is political—how we use words is shaped by and in turns shape our social life. I think the way poetry operates politically, though, is not by making strident, self-serving claims about the state of the nation but in how it holds together sometimes conflicting ideas and asks readers to think deeply about the use of language. The formal procedures of poetry, in other words, act like a kind of cognitive exercise, so that they train readers how to think—not what to think.
A lot of your poems seem very serious and reflective. And deal with heavy themes like war, racism, and history, but are there times when you write something just for fun? Have you ever written a funny and silly poem that no one would expect from you?
Ha, I just don’t think I’m funny enough! It’s hard for me to access my more humorous side in poetry, since I’m always in, like, “intellectual” mode. But that would be a fun challenge I should attempt sometime!
As someone who is still learning how to read poetry and how to understand it, I sometimes wonder: how do you know when a poem is finished? How do you decide when a poem is ready to be shared?
I think it’s important to let poems sit in a desk drawer for a long time after one writes them. If you come back to it in a few months, you’ll recognize all the ways that it’s not quite done, and all the room for improvement. In the short term, a poem seems “done” to me when it someone achieves a roundedness, circling back on itself and achieving a unified whole.