Michael Northen interviewed Kara Dorris for Wordgathering.
WG: Kara, I first encountered your poetry in 2011 when I was editing the anthology Beauty is a Verb. In an essay that accompanies your poems in that anthology you say, “For years I avoided writing about my disability. How did one avoid sounding dramatic and self-pitying? My own poetics lean towards erasing, running and eventually disassembling illusions.” Now well over a decade later, having had a number of poetry books published, would you say that this still characterizes your poetics?
KD: I think I am erasing and running less and less—and just heading towards dissembling illusions. The more I learn and engage with disability studies, the more I dismantle the shame and stigma I held around disability, especially my own. I like to think my poetry deals directly with misfitting, with breaking down ideas of what is so-called normal.
As for avoiding drama and self-pity—learning about disability has erased any self-pity I may once have felt; my fear regarding pity still stems from societal expectations of disability. By which I mean, I fear that when I write about difficulties, readers may assume any hardship stems from disability, or that my life is somehow lessened by my disability. Or that I’m trying to elicit pity. We all have good and bad days, disabled or not, and we should be able to write about the ups and downs. We should be able to expect sympathy, and hopefully empathy, rather than pity from our readers.
Finally in regards to drama, I can’t help but think of confessionalism—I just reread Plath for a class I’m teaching—and realize perhaps I want that drama. Maybe drama is the only way to enter into certain experiences fully and truthfully.
WG: Can you elaborate on what you mean by drama? Is there a poem in HitBox that might illustrate what you mean?
KD: When I think about drama, I think about welcoming strong emotions, big gestures, exaggeration, and blunt directness. For a long time, I hedged in poems; I think I was leery of direct statements, but I didn’t have the language or self-awareness to call myself out on it. Truthfully, it should have been rather obvious since in my first book I have a whole series of poems titled “For & Against” things like longing, wisdom, redemption, etc. Maybe my drama definition is a quieter, personal kind, linked to certainty and self-confidence that has come with getting older. Ultimately, I think it’s about demanding attention through vivid imagery and direct claims, and then standing one’s ground. In HitBox, I think of the poems geared towards female video game characters that directly calls out the sexism inherent in video game design—these poems use irony, and sometimes extremes, to make a point. Or the last poem, “Dear Bravery” that tries to reinvent words that signal female strength.
WG: When you sit down to write one of these dramatic poems, such as “Hitbox: What Princess Peach Says to Mario After He Rescues Her,” what is your process? Are you working with a kind of undefined emotion or image that you are hoping leads you to discover the poem as it moves along or do you have a predetermined idea of what you want to say and the audience that you imagine reading it?
KD: When writing poetry, rarely do I have a predetermined idea of what I want to say or convey to the audience. My process definitely hinges more on undefined emotions. My most dramatic poems are often persona poems. For example, the HitBox poem “What Princess Peach Says to Mario After He Rescues Her” (and several other poems in the collection) is steeped in anger regarding impossible standards of beauty and sexist depictions of women in video games, especially the so-called innocent ones like Super Mario Brothers that so many kids play. I have always been drawn to investigating pop culture and dismantling sexist, ableist stereotypes embedded within—within society and myself. And I can do that with poetry.
WG: In Elective Infinities, you pushed against some of the ways that fairy tales perpetuate cultural stereotypes of women, so it is interesting to see how in many of the poems in HitBox you refresh that theme in poems like “Damsel in Distress.” Feminist exploration of fairy tales has been around for quite some time now, of course, but I’m wondering how you came up with the idea of using the hitbox as a framing device.
KD: Arriving at the idea of hit box wasn’t easy—I’m not much of a gamer. For years as I was writing these poems I tried to think of a title or a unifying something, but couldn’t. I did notice an unusual amount of hitting and violence in my poems. Later, I read an essay by my writer friend, Gwendolyn Paradice, that is loosely themed around hit boxes in video games. In this essay, they ask the reader to imagine an “invisible box” around the body. They go on to say, “if you are not this imaginative, think of only boxes—no person—because maybe what’s inside does not matter.” And suddenly I knew I was writing about that space around us and what wounds us. A space others can’t see but wounds just the same.
WG: Several lines in your poem “Ars Poetica” read:
You can’t see your own hitbox, but neither can they. In video games, this is how you learn: you’re dead… Words are boxes too, you know, one will kill you – , little girl, mediocre, gimp.
As a disabled writer, do you feel that in interrogating cultural phenomena such as fairy tales and video game stereotypes you have a unique perspective to contribute?
KD: I don’t know if I have a unique perspective. I do know that our society at large doesn’t spend enough time interrogating how disability is represented or used as narrative prosthesis. I thought about the space that makes up my own hit box—but also what boxes us into impossible expectations and stereotypes. We can’t always see what hurts, or has the potential to hurt, until it is too late. But, for me, the metaphor of hit box provides a way to better understand that hurt and its myriad causes.
WG: For those who may not have much exposure to disability poetics, can you explain what you mean by narrative prosthesis.
KD: Sure, when I talk about narrative prosthesis I think of how disability is used to show a character’s internal nature; we too often see this when villains, say in James Bond films, are given a physical disability—facial scar, jagged teeth, amputee, limp, etc.—to show their evilness. Or disability is used as a metaphor for something other than the actual disability itself. Fight Club, for instance, (spoiler alert) is about a character who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but the film never really explains or gives any good representation of DID; DID is just used as a vehicle to get at larger criticism about our consumerist, capitalist society.
WG: I’m going to switch direction a bit now. After having four books of your own poetry published, in 2023, you edited Writing the Self-Elegy, an anthology where you gathered together poems and essays from a wide range of contemporary poets. What do you feel you learned from that experience–or perhaps more narrowly, do you think anything that you learned in the process of writing the anthology carried over into the writing of HitBox?
KD: Right now I have three full-length books (but my fourth manuscript is making the rounds). Writing the Self-Elegy was a long process, starting in 2018 when I started soliciting poets (although, I started turning the idea around in my head in 2016). I will be eternally grateful to the poets who trusted me with their work back then, especially because I didn’t have a publisher or a clue as to what I was doing. Overall, I learned from the contributors so many different ways of looking at the self-elegy that I think transferred over into HitBox and my writing in general. And I made so many poet-friends during the process, many who blurbed HitBox as well.
WG: Can you give an example of a poem in HitBox that might have been influenced by your work with other writers in Self-Elegy and talk a bit about how that influence worked in the poem?
KD: I’ll try to answer this question, but it might be a little convoluted.
While editing the self-elegy anthology, I realized that self-elegy deals with absence of the self as much as its presence. With this idea in mind, the first poem I think of is “Ghazal with Fruit & Absence.” This ghazal is an ars poetica—a poem about writing poetry—but it is also about what it means to be female and how I as a woman show up (or don’t show up) in my poems. One of the formal rules of a ghazal is that the poet is supposed to incorporate their name into the last stanza; however, in this ghazal I withhold my name, implying that that the female body is often put on display and garners more attention than the mind inside. My first two books felt more autobiographical than HitBox. I know it may seem strange that a book influenced by self-elegy would be less about the self than previous collections, but to me self-elegy is also about the body in the world—not just the experiences of self, if that makes sense.
WG: I’m glad you brought up the example of the ghazal because it touches upon a couple of related questions that I wanted to ask you. It is clear that from Elective Infinities onward that form is quite important to you. In Have Ruin, Will Travel, for example, you do quite a bit with prose poetry and various special arrangements. One of the most notable aspects of HitBox is how often you return to classical forms, not only ghazals but aubades, nocturnes, odes and ars poeticas. The more general question I want to ask is: as a contemporary poet who works to disrupt traditional boundaries, what is your relationship to conventional forms of poetry? The second, more specific question is: other than a device for withholding your name, what is it about the ghazal (which you make use of three times in the book) that appeals to you?
KD: I think traditional forms are wonderful ways to get poets writing—sometimes I need formal constraints as prompts but also as reminders to actively pay attention to musicality and prosody. Some poems come into being organically, others need more help. At the same time, I have no allegiance to form once a poem has been drafted. My resistance to tradition is to take the formal elements that are working and discard the ones that aren’t. And sometimes I just like to challenge myself, and I’ve been defeated by the villanelle many, many times.
I also like to write echoes in my poems—through forms, images, titles—that occur throughout the collection. I hope these echoes show a progression to the ideas within the poems. That’s why in HitBox, I do have several ghazals, which traditionally are often romantic love poems or poems of romantic loss. My ghazals don’t fall into either of these categories. My ghazals are about female objectification. As for why the ghazal—I love the couplets and rhyme scheme. I also love the idea that each stanza is meant to stand on its own (although I didn’t always adhere to this requirement in my own poems).
Sometimes I worry that I am appropriating forms—the ghazal was originally an Arab verse. What does it mean that I take the superficial aspects of the form, while disregarding its heritage? I always end up hearing Alice Notley in my head—in her book Poetics of Disobedience, she asks us to stay open to everything, to any and all possibilities. Or in other words, declares poetic obedience to no tradition except one that cannot exist: to celebrate one specific thought at one specific instant in one unique voice. Ultimately, I try to let the moment dictate the needs of the poem.
WG: Although poets often say they are writing for themselves, publication implies that you have some expectations of your poems. What do you hope that the poems in HitBox accomplish?
KD: I agree with poets who say they are writing for themselves because, for me, I can’t help but write. I need to write poems. And it’s neat to see a project come together in a final artifact. But I think I’ve also been indoctrinated to believe that without outside publication and validation my poems and effort are worthless, especially since my career depends partly on publication.
As for my expectations for the poems in HitBox, I hope they are fun to read and inspire others to write. I hope they make readers think about the ingrained sexism and ableism in our everyday lives. I hope the poems help readers build empathy for people who are different. Basically, I hope I am carrying on Audre Lorde’s belief that “poetry is not a luxury.”
Read Michael Northen’s review of Kara Dorris’s HitBox in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About Michael Northen
Michael Northen was the facilitator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop from 1997-2010 and the editor of Wordgathering from 2007-2019. He was also an editor of the anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press). He is currently working on an anthology of disability poetry to be published by Northwestern University Press in 2025.
About Kara Dorris
Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press, as well as HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, Nine Mile, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, and Crazyhorse, among others as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit her website at: karadorris.com