Today I am introducing poet and writer Judy Kronenfeld. Although we didn’t know each other at the time, Judy and I were at the University of California, Riverside, at the same time–Judy taught there when I was a grad student.
Here is a beautiful poem Judy published in Sheila-Na-Gig, “Blue Corduroy Baseball Cap.”
Judy has recently published a wonderful memoir comprised of prose and poetry called Apartness. Here is the book description:
Through a collection of honest yet often humorous essays and complementary poems, Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems grapples with the feeling of unbelonging as a first-generation Jewish-American woman from an immigrant family in a primarily Protestant nation. Kronenfeld illuminates a sense of divide between herself and the world around her with graceful vulnerability and truthful ambivalence as she reckons with religion, social class, and aging.
Apartness is for anyone who has ever felt left out or struggled to find home.
My addition to the above description is that I think it’s a book for everyone.
My interview of Judy is in two parts. Today I am posting part 1 and next Monday I will post part 2 and will link back to this post. My questions are in italics; Judy’s responses are in Roman type. Here is part 1, which consists of two questions and answers:
1: Judy, you are a scholar and a poet/writer, two identities that have often warred with each other. When I was graduating with my PhD a fellow graduate student who knew I wanted to return to poetry told me that Sharon Olds said she was going to forget everything she learned (in grad school) so she could write poetry. The reference I found to a similar quote by Olds is from the Writers Almanac: “So what I said was something like: ‘Give me my own poems and I’ll give up everything that I’ve learned.’” https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2011%252F11%252F19.html Her point was that she had learned the impersonal New Critical way of reading poetry (aka literature) and wanted to write intimate poetry fresh from personal experience, in other words autobiographical. As you know and write about in your book, New Criticism doesn’t allow the reader to take the writer’s own life into consideration. And this mentality permeated the landscape throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s when poets like Sylvia Plath began to take it apart. You were steeped in New Criticism, yet you wanted to write poems based on your own emotions and experience. How did you weave those two aspects of yourself—creative and scholar–into one? Or did you have to keep them separate and if so do you feel as if you have two minds?
JK: For much, but far from all of my adult life, I have been involved with producing either scholarship or creative work—most often poetry, but also creative nonfiction and some short fiction. But I have also taught literature and criticism while trying to write creatively, or done scholarly research and writing, while teaching creative writing! Talk about liminality! And yes, it certainly can feel as if one is participating in divided and distinguished worlds. Yet that liminality may also foster “a disinclination to work within institutionalized frameworks of thought,” as I say in the preface to my critical and historical book on King Lear.
I’ve tended to be something of a muckraker in response to the limitations of various academic approaches to literature. I was shocked at the almost religious “New Critical” shunning of historical and social context in my first English seminar (on the English novel) as an undergraduate, for example, and hoped to correct it in my own critical work. And I was skeptical (in a way that ultimately led to some of the understandings that underpin my book King Lear and the Naked Truth) of the simplistic “old historical” paradigm used as a heuristic for examining 17th century literature by one of my English professors in graduate school. He put “Anglicans” in one box labeled something like “appropriately or decently dressed” and “Puritans” in another labeled “the naked truth.” And this governing polarity was expected to illuminate content and form in a great deal of literature. My lucky New Critically close reading of Saussure in a seminar on Structuralism (taught by my anthropologist husband in 1972) gave me an understanding of contrast and reference in language that illuminated such matters as Reformation controversy on the appropriate “clothing” or “dress” in church services. “In short,” to quote my book, “the Reformation controversialists . . . all claim . . . to be as clothed and naked as they ought to be. . . . [S]hared contrasts and abstractions concerning appropriate and inappropriate uses of clothing permit controversialists to ‘talk the same language,’ even though they may not mean the same things at all” (p.67). Their specific referents for their abstract terms are what one needs to look at. What is an example of “comely” or “decent” clothing in the church? What is not?
To try to summarize a crucial point of my very long and rather complex book of criticism here is a bit insane. But it serves to illustrate, perhaps, that my desire to deeply understand the history, culture, and language in and surrounding literature I love has been important for me, even if I have not written on early modern literature since my book on Lear was published in 1998 (with the exception of a handful of book reviews from 1998 to 2001). So much of my self was deeply invested in criticism; I had to “say goodbye” to it in an emotionally and intellectually meaningful and public way by pushing myself to complete this very comprehensive critical book which makes use of everything I knew and learned about language and the religious culture of Shakespeare’s time. And I must say, to read any part of it again, after many years teaching creative writing until my retirement, and even more years writing poetry, is to acquaint myself with a mind reclaimable but somewhat foreign.
New Criticism, especially when I was an undergraduate, seemed to enshrine a view of creative writing as accomplished quite coolly and impersonally, perhaps best by a social elite, and not by ethnic minorities, or, indeed, very much by women. Yet the secular and religious poetry of John Donne and the religious poetry of George Herbert, for example, were passionate! And New Critical pedagogy also encouraged the student to give herself to such poetry, to live with its sounds and rhythms, to take such poems into herself. At the same time, this Jewish girl had to process such poems intellectually, which meant understanding enough of Christian theology to grasp the speaker’s emotions in a way fully related to his words. I was moved (even if not converted), perhaps because the course I took in the Metaphysicals as an undergraduate allowed me to concentrate fully and thoroughly on lyric poetry of a particular historical moment, for the first time. I was in love with lyric poetry and also with the leap across time involved in understanding it.
This experience of slow emotional processing of poems, combined with analytical and intellectual understanding, deposited the poems in my mind and heart in a lasting way, I found. Something I had deeply felt and analytically absorbed, for example, the sound of a line like “Oh! of thine only worthy blood”—in Donne’s sonnet “If poisonous minerals, and if that tree”—whose rhythm and wailing long o’s contrast with the sound of immediately preceding lines, could subliminally affect something unrelated I was writing years later. I think it’s important for those who want to write poetry to have this combined experience of emotional and intellectual understanding of poems when they begin to study. It was an experience that affected my own teaching of creative writing. I think analysis deposits the words read along with the emotional reaction one has to them in the writer’s mind in a more lasting way than emotional reaction alone.
2: Your essays—and I hate to call them essays because that word has always conjured up the boring genre of literature I didn’t want to read in grad school. Give me poetry, give me novels, or for teaching even give me drama so the class can read aloud. At the time, there was nothing called creative nonfiction, so everything else was called an essay. And I notice you call your pieces essays, but they are exciting and filled with fascinating cultural and historical details, emotional resonance, and an ability to straddle both a perceived mainstream American culture and your own ethnic upbringing that creates a tone of loving humor. Each essay on its own is a wonderful “article” that feels so satisfying to this reader. Taken together, they create an autobiographical feel as they are the archival creation of a life. Have you been writing essays as long as you have poetry? How do you know when a particular image or memory will work best in a poem or an essay? Did writing scholarly essays help you in writing creative essays such as those in the book?
JK: I haven’t been writing personal essays/creative nonfiction as long, or as frequently as I’ve written poetry. But I have kept private diaries or journals intermittently since adolescence and have quite a collection of these. In the last decade or so, I have slacked off. There were never obligatory daily entries (even weekly or monthly ones). I wrote when I needed to describe a new environment, or record a complex, disturbing or confusing experience, or indulge in a fantasy, or release anger or distress—really for any reason involving some sort of burden of emotion and/or thought relieved by the loops and glide of a pen in the hand. It wasn’t until the complex experience recounted in “Death and Belief” that I tried to deal in a public voice with a multi-layered experience that, as it turned out, shined a light on some central conundrums of my life. Once I had done this, it became possible to do it again. Writing scholarly essays was really different from writing these personal memoir essays. One has many sources to organize and credit, an argument to construct that relates to current critical paradigms, i.e. speaks in the current critical language of the academic institution of “English,” so it can be understood by academicians, yet provides something new as well. The task of organizing is definitely labor-intensive. In contrast, writing the essays that comprise Apartness (which I did not originally write with the idea of combining them into a book) was in many ways more spontaneous, indeed, easier (although that definitely does not mean that I did not revise!). I had written stories and published a number of them before I began writing these memoir essays which can share narrative arcs, characters, and dialogue, with fiction. However, the experience of learning to organize a lot of material is always a useful one, whether for the critical or the personal essay, though the materials are different.
Memory has long been an essential aspect of my poetry, perhaps because I returned to writing poetry, and first dedicated myself to the process in early middle age, when I was already able to look back on so much life. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic to a particular image or memory that makes it work better in a poem or an essay. But essays are, of course, usually more discursive, so there has to be enough meat to the memory and the experience to sustain longer, perhaps more multi-faceted consideration. Both essays and poems have elements of showing, rather than telling, but a poem’s approach to a memory may be more glancing—even if only because it contains fewer words. A few of the shorter pieces included in Apartness, like “Blue Bowl of Sky,” are probably more like what has sometimes been called “lyric essay.” And the line between that and “prose poem” (“Resident Dead,” for example, was originally published in a collection of prose poems) might be pretty fuzzy.
Watch for part 2 on Monday!
Author bio:
Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Her poems have been published by such journals as Cider Press Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad, and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems, was published by Inlandia Books in February, 2025.
