Kate Colby

Kate Colby's books of poetry and prose include I Mean, Reverse Engineer and Paradoxx. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Lana Turner, Literary Hub and The Nation. She grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown and UPenn, and performs with the ad hoc poets’ theater group, Spatulate Church Emergency Shift.

Why Did You Choose CCA?

In the early 2000s I was working as the public programs curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and dying to work with artists as an artist, rather than solely as an administrator. I’d collaborated on various projects with CCAC (as it was then called) in my administrative role, and was excited when they launched an MFA writing program, since I really wanted to explore interdisciplinary possibilities for poetry. Small Press Traffic was also housed at CCAC at the time and the whole school felt like a hothouse of experimental creativity.

What did you get from your MFA experience?

I got a lot of time to write, a few great friends (looking at you, Todd Shalom, Melanie Westerberg and Amber DiPietra) and wonderful teachers and mentors, including Gloria Frym, Joseph Lease, Denise Newman, Randall Potts, and Kathleen Fraser. I left with a solid idea of who I wanted to be as a writer and of my political investments in language. My thesis was published as my first poetry collection not long after I finished the program.

Advice for Current Students?

I think it’s a great time to think about not just what you want to say but what you want your work to do in the world. Language is a tool of misdirection and suppression and now that we are handing it over to the machines, I believe that deprogramming language—pointing at and messing with its foregone meanings and limiting narrative structures--is one way we stay human. When I was at CCA, Bay Area poetry was still very much influenced by the linguistic exposé and counter-narrative political commitments of the Language Poetry and New Narrative of the 70s and 80s. While you’re at CCA, why not explore those great Bay Area legacies and figure out your own way of resisting the manipulations of normative and institutional language?

What's Next for You?

I have a book called Paradoxx coming out with Essay Press in September. It is a 100-section essay that moves more like a poem and includes elements of literary criticism and memoir. Sounds like a hot mess, I’m sure! But I spend years boiling it down and fine-tuning it, so I think and hope it’s shaped like a pretty tight spring. It launches from a part of a poem about knowing by Robert Creeley called “Mazatlan: Sea.”

Such strangeness of mind I know

I cannot find there more

than what I know.

I am tired of purposes,

intent that leads itself

back to its own belief. I want

nothing more of such brilliance

but what makes the shadows darker

and that fire grow dimmer.

File this poem, too, under “Advise for Current Students” above.