How did you choose the title Human / Nature for this book?

The title is a play on words representing my conviction that the human world and the natural world are deeply interconnected. Everything we are is dependent on our relationship to the earth.

Why do you write poetry?

I started reading and writing poetry when I was young. My mother read poetry aloud to me – especially a lovely anthology by Blanche Jennings Thompson called Silver Pennies, published in 1926, but a favorite of mine even today. Like all good poetry, the selections in this book do not go out of date.

Writing a poem is a mysterious process. I usually start with an experience, often an experience in nature, that has moved me in some way. But once a poem is begun, it takes on a life of its own, and often goes places I had not imagined or expected. At its best, the experience of writing a poem becomes a revelation. It can feel like I have taken a journey whose destination was unknown at the start, a journey that ends somewhere I have never been before. So fundamentally I write poetry in order to discover something about myself and my relationship to the natural world and to the people I love.

When did you start writing poems?

I began writing poems in high school, and have continued to write poetry on and off throughout my adult life. In 2013, after my partner Albert and I had left our year-round life on the island to spend the winters in Massachusetts near our family, I joined a writers group. I began to write poetry in earnest. Albert was diagnosed with cancer in 2014 and died in 2015. In the year of his illness, and after his death, poetry was my lifeline, and my way through grief. In the years since then, I have continued to write poetry. Human / Nature is a selection of poems written in the last ten years.

Whom do you imagine as the audience for your poems? 

One of the reasons that I am glad to have Penobscot Books publish Human / Nature is precisely that it is not a press dedicated primarily to publishing poetry. I want my poems to speak to ordinary people. I am not interested in writing for a literary or academic audience. Many of my favorite poets, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, and Yeats are often plain-spoken. I want my poems to be accessible to anyone willing to take the time and space to read them. I hope that in sharing my experiences in the human and natural worlds, I can help my readers to look more deeply into their own hearts, and into the heart of nature. I am particularly happy to have an audience of Mainers, since many of these poems originated in my experiences on Isle au Haut.

In many of your poems you use poetic forms, rhyme, and meter. Your book contains seven sonnets, for instance. What is it about writing formal poems that appeals to you?

I enjoy the discipline of form. It makes me hone in on meaning in a particularly satisfying and beautiful way. Writing a formal poem requires me to go slowly, to choose my words with great care. Rhyme and meter often make a poem sound better to me. The poem becomes like a song, with a particular and pleasing rhythm and lyricism. And I like the way formal poems look on the page.

Is there anything you would like to say to your readers?

I would like to say thank you for reading my poems! I hope that you find something of yourself in them.

Find out more about Kathie Fiveash’s book, Human / Nature, by clicking here.