Q and A with Kate Partridge about her poetry collection, THINE

English Department Assistant Professor Kate Partridge wrote her latest collection of poetry, THINE, between 2016 and 2020 as she worked on her Ph.D. Learn more about the inspirations and process behind this newly published work.

A: I wrote these poems between 2016 and 2020, when I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. At that point in my life, I was moving around frequently — I grew up in Virginia, but I lived in Alaska for three years before moving to LA, and then I came to Denver in 2018.

My writing is very rooted in place, and writing these poems is one of the ways I came to know about these different locations and landscapes in the West. In many ways, THINE is a book about getting your bearings in places that are radically different. For me, this meant a great deal of observation, as well as attempting to learn from the work of artists like Dorothea Lange and Agnes Martin. My first child was born, also, while I was writing these poems, and some of the later entries explore what it means to have children and make art in the context of uncertainty, particularly around climate change.

A: I discovered the themes in this book the way I think many poets do, which is that I wrote all the poems and then looked for patterns. All writers have ideas or problems that they come back to over and over again. For me, the recent questions have been related to ecological destruction ad parenthood, and I’m using different cultural and religious narratives, as well as the perspectives of women artists, to think through them. In short, I think this is a book that looks with clear eyes at the world around us, and still finds sustenance and joy in other people and our planet. 

A: To be honest, I don’t think of writing as being challenging, per se! I love every stage of the process, from finding the seeds of a poem to drafting and revision. So, when I have the time and space to write, it’s one of the things that makes me happiest. Getting into trouble with a phrase or line that isn’t quite right actually feels interesting and compelling to me, because solving the little precision puzzles of language is what I like to do. So, probably the most challenging thing for me is just protecting the time and space to write, and not being too precious about waiting for perfect conditions before I sit down at the page.

A: I didn’t start experimenting with order until I had a full-length draft—in large part because I wanted the poems to feel as though they were each organic, rather than having been written to fill a gap in the manuscript. This book isn’t a project book, in which there are clear parameters from the start—it was always my intention to see what emerged as I wrote.

I printed out the poems and taped them up on the wall in my garage so that I could experiment with different ordering schemes. I placed some poems up front that felt like they introduced the tensions in the collection succinctly—for example, the first poem has wildfire and hail, and an ominous tone. But there are also many poems that are funny in a subtle way, or that talk about my family, and I mixed in some of those early, as well, to show the world of this book. The book ended up having three sections, which are very loosely chronological. I tried to place poems with bedfellows that are different in form, tone, image, etc. so that the collection is driven by the energy of juxtaposition.

A: I think this description beautifully captures the collection’s energy. It’s a book that asks the reader to engage in inquiry and observation with the speaker, and to follow the range of thoughts and emotions that follow when one asks a truly open-ended question—what does this place mean? What does my work as a writer, as a teacher, as a parent offer to the world? I like the invocation of meditative practice, because I do feel as a poet that I have to release myself to the direction of the poem, and that’s one of the joys of writing—it can reveal thoughts about something that you didn’t even know you had until you began writing.

A: I think, especially with poetry, that some people are hesitant to write if they don’t feel they can sit down and crank out a gorgeous poem in one draft. That’s what you always see in the movies—the poet is blocked, and blocked, and blocked (throwing lots of paper in a wastebin), until suddenly the perfect poem arrives in their brain. If you were learning the piano, you wouldn’t just expect to play a complex piece perfectly on the first shot, especially if you hadn’t really spent any time learning to read music or the basic techniques of scales and so on. And you wouldn’t refuse to try practicing until you were hit with a bolt of inspiration. Writing feels much the same to me—it takes a lot of practice, and especially a lot of work to be a student of other writers. Great writers are always reading.

Also, people worry that they don’t have time to write—a problem I empathize with!—and to that, I think that being a writer is also a way of being in the world. It requires teaching oneself to observe and cherish beauty, to ask questions. Much of what I think of as “my writing” would not be recognizable to most people as such—it’s just me taking a walk in the neighborhood, or jotting down something strange a friend said, or going to a concert. I spend a while gathering material for most poems before I write anything down, and the writing process is me circling back to interrogate what I’ve noticed—why did I find (x thing) interesting? Anyone can do that wherever they are.  

A: I’ve been working for the last few years on a hybrid collection that uses a lot of historical material. I mentioned before that much of my work has been trying to learn about new places, and I’ve been reading a lot about the late 19th century in Colorado—mining, of course, but also sanitariums and tuberculosis became very interesting to me as we were living through the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m also often thinking about visual forms, and I’ve been reading about Denver during the City Beautiful period and Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks. I’m interested in cities as places of beauty and hardship and recovery, places where we try out big ideas and where those ideas sometimes remarkably fail.

You can find THINE, however, on the website of Tupelo Press, my wonderful publisher! I’m very grateful for their support of my work.