Abbie Kiefer is the author of the poetry collection Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024). She has twice been a semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize. Originally from Maine, Kiefer now lives in New Hampshire, where she works as a copywriter and is on the staff of The Adroit Journal.
Poets.org: Reading about grief in Certain Shelter brought to mind the Emily Dickinson poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —.” Many of the poems in this collection explore the speaker’s loss but do so by discussing other topics—thus, “telling it slant.” What are your methods for discovering what a poem might be—that is, how you enter and exit the work, and what changes in between?
Abbie Kiefer: A poem about sorting junk mail can also be a poem about grief because grief finds us in everything. At the dentist. Watching M*A*S*H. We channel loss continually, and I wanted to create that sense of inescapability for the reader. The book’s slant-told poems exist, in part, to testify to the suffusive nature of grief.
In one of them, “When My Mom Has Been Dead Eight Months, They Tear Down Lucky Candlepin,” only the title references loss. The poem itself is about kids bowling—how the pins keep resetting, how no one bothers keeping score—and the first draft came from rough notes I was making about meaningful spaces from my childhood. The bowling alley was maybe the first place my friends and I were allowed to hang out on our own. That bit of independence was thrilling. Recalling it led me to consider other milestones of getting older and other ways in which we will separate from our parents and how one kind of leaving might foreshadow another. This, often, is how I discover a poem—through shaggy, plodding prose that, if I’m lucky, launches me toward interesting associations. Those surprising connections, when they arrive, are one way I know the poem is onto something, and I usually can’t find them without forcing myself through plenty of bad drafts.
Poets.org: What is the role of history in your poetic practice? With several of the poems in this collection being “brief histories,” what responsibility, if any, do you believe a poet has to contextualize and be in communication with historical memory?
AK: I’m fascinated by how personal and shared pasts shape the way we move through our lives. This interest extends to historical memory, particularly as it relates to collective identity. I think that poets who engage with either of these concepts should offer context as they can—something I hope I’ve done in this book. Re-perceiving old ideas is perhaps a poet’s most important job. But just as historical memory carries bias, the poet’s contextualization is also fallible, and while I strive to be emotionally truthful in my poems, I recognize the limitations of my own perception. So if I have a responsibility to provide context regarding historical memory, I’m also obligated to work with humility, knowing that such context is always incomplete.
Poets.org: How essential was the prose form in illustrating these histories, especially in “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine,” your homage to a fellow Maine poet and chronicler?
AK: Not all the “Brief Histories” began as prose poems, but as I continued the series, the form became essential, lending a certain visual authority to the work. Think encyclopedias, newspapers: dense copy that’s confident in itself. And yet all history is interpretation, so these poems can never be definitive. They have incomplete context, as I mentioned earlier. By putting them into prose containers and giving them weighty titles, I wanted to call attention to that fact, creating tension through juxtaposition.
I think the prose form was particularly useful when writing about Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose work deeply interests me—not only because of our shared geography but also because Robinson embraced the quotidian and the unremarkable, which were not, in his time, considered worthy poetic material. Robinson’s best-known poems take place in an imagined village, Tilbury Town. In describing how Robinson wrote about it, the critic Irving Howe called him a “secret sharer taking snapshots.” I love that. Snapshots—very brief histories—can’t tell a complete story, but they can be insightful and revealing. They can stand alone and invite a closer look. To do my own secret sharing, I structured my Robinson piece as six very short prose sections—a little flipbook of snapshots. I hope Robinson would have liked it.
Poets.org: Throughout Certain Shelter, we encounter fixtures from television, such as Gladys Kravitz, Bob Ross, and Mister Rogers, as well as references to TV shows, particularly in the poem “On The Wonder Years, Wayne Punches Kevin Again,” which becomes a lens through which you explore family dysfunction. What inspired you to return to these figures from popular culture, and how integral were they in your exploration of the book’s themes?
AK: When my grief was thickest after I lost my mom, I had trouble sleeping, and so I’d put on comfort TV in the dark early hours—Bob Ross whispering to me about his clouds and his trees. That’s how pop culture first found its way into my book. But writing about television—something often seen as a time-waster—became a way for me to think about idleness and productivity, two themes the book addresses. What does it mean to do good work? Is it productive to spend weeks writing one poem about Antiques Roadshow? I think so. Others might not.
The TV poems also gave me an avenue for considering nostalgia, which is part of personal history and closely related to grief. What I remember about The Wonder Years is that the show made me wistful for a childhood I was still in the midst of. Like grown-up Kevin, would I always be voiceover-ing about the pivotal moments of my younger life? This book, in some ways, feels like my voiceover, so maybe the answer is yes.
Poets.org: What are you currently reading?
I’m flying through Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, which is delightful, and relistening to the audio version of A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib. He offers conversational commentary on many of the poems, and the whole recording is fantastic. I recommend it to people all the time.
Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?
AK: A very incomplete list, in alphabetical order:
“Consider the Hands that Write This Letter” by Aracelis Girmay
“Dear Friends” by Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Elegy” by Jill Osier
“Looking for The Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco
“The School of Night & Hyphens” by Chen Chen
“To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” by Ross Gay
“Traveling Light” by Linda Pastan
“The Truth the Dead Know” by Anne Sexton