Interview// “On the Boundaries of the Self and the Saying of the Unknown”: A Conversation with Donika Kelly

In Donika Kelly’s newest collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press 2025), love becomes a way of attending to what is possible for, not only our relationships with lovers, animals, and the landscapes we find our bodies alongside, but also in the relationships we have with ourselves. To be careful is not an easy task, and this speaker is asked to care for herself as something less simile and more towards understood intimacy, finding pathways to a sense of self that is at once enclosed by the beloved, and able to expand what she knows about herself in being loved. I had the pleasure of asking Donika these questions via a Word Doc. 

*

Alexa Luborsky (AL): I wanted to start out by asking you about love and the potentials it opens for you in the collection and, if you’d like, outside that enclosed duration of writing. While reading, I was called back to a Roland Barthes quotation: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” There’s a respite, it feels like, under the gaze of the lover in these poems. In “Confronted with the Argument of Your Body,” the body, when seen by the lover “as proof, as theorem” is freed:

+++++,+I am talking, of course,
metaphysically, how every part of you
+++++,+feels against my tongue, how you close
around me, another way
+++++,+of saying that when I am inside you,
I am no longer tumbling but an animal
+++++,+base and humming, free
from the conceit of reason.

I wonder if there’s something to supplication (a word I’m using because of its appearance in “Self-Portrait as a Woman Who Kneels over Her Beloved’s Face”) of the self to the lover or relinquishing the conceit of the body, not to lose it but to attend to it relationally as Barthes maybe suggests of language. 

This moves the speaker into a space where knowledge might metamorphose into experience. In “Metamorphose” you write: “I no longer desire / dissolution the spilling / of my body into yours” and later “not the knowing but / the feeling of your skin.” I’m thinking of how, in The Renunciations, you write:

the closer I am
to my animal self the more human I am
the more I let myself break
like a wave.

But in The Natural Order of Things you go a bit further, give up the simile of being “like a wave,” and write:

and O what wave
I became,

a crashing
you rode and rode

toward a horizon,
which was

the curvature of me,

What does love make possible that the individual can’t? And, maybe more specifically, what does love make possible for language?

Donika Kelly (DK): There are so many delicious parts in this question. Before I dig in, I want to say that I love that you identify that shift from simile to metaphor across the books; my speaker is less anxious about her elemental self in this one, which feels right to me.

Because this collection captures both the early days of being in love and the later days of being in love, the speaker has had ample time to sort through a maze of feelings. I wasn’t so much thinking about Barthes as I was Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet. In “Confronted with the Argument of Your Body” and “Metamorphose,” my speaker is exploring the boundaries made visible by the erotic, the boundaries between bodies, which are not porous no matter the lover’s desire. There is comfort in the boundaries and a productive frustration. Carson goes on to talk about the way reading and writing create another kind of body, that these practices make visible to us an interior or private self. My private self is the primary crucible in which my speaker is forged, but being in love and with the beloved is where she learns her limits.

Romantic or erotic love is not the only way to come up against the boundary. I have felt the limits in friendship, in family, in seeing my favorite soprano perform at the Met. I have felt the limits as I have learned to love myself. Writing love poems gives me the opportunity to walk the line, to check what I feel against what is possible.

AL: To return to a word I used in the first question, “metamorphosis”: I loved the way these poems sort of self-sabotage and make metamorphosis an active volta. I’m of course thinking canonically of metamorphosis, of Ovid, and the ways in which female bodies were, involuntarily, turned into something else, be it due to the wrath of a god or because of a trauma that made their bodies uninhabitable to them. In “Home: A Primer” you write: “No place but, always, longing for what is fleeting, / what’s fled.” Maybe even more specifically, this mode of turn, the way that language itself is what transforms from the gerund to the actualization of a body, is also present in this collection as it is in The Metamorphoses. The distance between here and there is the shape of a body. 

I notice a lot of metamorphoses applied to gerunds. Like the ongoing-ness of the thing is what breaks the momentum of the logic. The body was this and now it was that. In this poem we end with “the bath, which I filled only this morning, drinking.” I love that rebound backwards, to fill via some form of drinking the reader doesn’t access. The first poem of the collection is most direct in its turn, where we start out with a speaker who is embodied as something inside a hole, until:

+++,+Y’all

I know I am not a nymph in exhumation

but would you please explain
++++,+this half-remembered light

First of all, it’s really funny. I laughed because it deflated my sense of tone, but it also generously situates the reader in the same position as the speaker, of having a memory of belief in the state of a body that is no longer true. 

Throughout the collection there’s a sense that the speaker can’t return. In “Every moment I have been alive, I have been at the height of my powers,” the speaker being unable to return South (which you capitalize in this poem) is repeated twice, and ends with “I wanted to take you there, / but how could I return if I’m always walking north?” with this “there” being described as home in the previous lines. This speaks to enslavement and forced migration, and I also wonder if it speaks to what love can offer as return? I’d love to hear about how you conceive of “return,” especially in a collection that seems to want to let itself go elsewhere, to turn, to metamorphose via language, and in that way, to continue the gerund of ongoing transformation and dispersion, but at the speaker’s own pace and with her own will.

DK: I really love the way you’ve picked out this thread. My speaker has competing desires. She cannot return home, where she is from, where her given family is, because she has changed too much. Yet she misses it, yearns to be known as she was when she was a child. Simultaneously, she understands that the way her family knew her was shallow. For them, she did not exist as a complete person but rather was only understood in terms of how she fulfilled her role as daughter, as child. She had to leave to live true to herself, to learn who she was, to move closer to her own sense of the natural order. What she gains, in romantic love, in friendship, in art is immense. What she gains is worth what she loses.

I appreciate too how you see these poems connected to Ovid, to his Metamorphosis, where women are often changed into an animal or tree or reeds to protect them from an angry or lustful god. Classical mythology was one of my key image systems for most of my writing life, in part because there is comfort in hierarchy and in knowing how power is divvied up. I realized somewhere in the writing of The Renunciations, that those gods were not mine and did not reflect how I wanted to live. In this collection, I’ve left the gods, those old ways of knowing, those old ways of ordering, behind. Still the gods, the knowing, the ordering, they haunt this book. Each poem that resists them, each poem that offers another way to be with or alongside, is a choice to try being another way. The poems also preserve the choice, make the choice something I can return to if those old ghosts get too loud.

AL: I admire the way that intimacy is complicated in these poems by story. In “Every moment I have been alive, I have been at the height of my powers,” you write: “My parents—neither / one of them themselves as I recall them—alive / in the South.” And, just to bring one more poem into our orbit, in the poem “Tell It Short,” you write: a comfort / to remember now, to make present, for a little while, / to bring her, as from a great distance, closer.” I’m so intrigued by this addition of “as” between the “bring her” and “from.” This to me is also different from “as if from” because the “if” allows us to clarify a conditional. So for me, this “as from” could be interpreted as either to distinguish that the person brought back via story is a likeness, or that the direction of where this person, the speaker’s grandmother in this case, is brought from is not categorically singular, but expansive and loosely directional. I say directional in a cardinal sense here just because the inability to return South is mentioned across multiple poems. Under what conditions do stories and/or poems for you, “bring from” and under what conditions do they “bring as”? Or, is there only one method: “to bring as from”?

DK: I think I read that “as from” a bit differently, but I wouldn’t have known it without your generous reading here. As in most love poems, the moment you point to reveals more about the speaker’s feelings than anything else. The “as from” refers not to the great grandmother’s location but rather means to describe the energy the speaker is expending to remember. Which is perhaps to say, I agree with the expansive looseness you describe, but I would say this moment reveals more about the speaker’s practice of memory than Juel Lee.

But to the heft of your question: when do poems “bring from” vs “bring as” vs “to bring, as from”—I would say I don’t know! I try to follow what the poem wants—I’m less interested in writing into a predetermined form or shape or subject. More, I’m curious about what comes easily in poems and what needs more concentrated excavation. If I can attend to where the first draft has brought me with curiosity, with some small humility, the poem often indicates when it needs to be direct or metaphorical or conditional.

AL: In the opening poem, “Brood,” we start with a reorientation—not error but ecstasy—a word standing just beside another word that feels akin to it in how it reflects or refracts the other into a more acute focus of what it isn’t: “My chest is earth / I meant to write my chest is warm / but earth will do” and “Breathe / I meant to write / beat.”  We don’t get another “mistake” until “Desire Path: Near Equinox” but this time it is really different. The words are sonically similar but opposite in meaning: “I misspoke, / earlier, said fire instead of fountain, / drought instead of deluge.” At the end of this poem, we have the beautiful line: “I become the shortest distance between two points.” And then, by the time we reach “What Is the Measure,” we’re allowed an “or” which feels like a loosening that the speaker has been longing for: “never mind I hear what scurries / or scatters, what burrows or bounds.” And later: “I submit: // I do not constitute the field / although I have harrowed its length, its width.” In other words, at the end of this poem and the third time we encounter “error,” the speaker has understood the duration of it to be entangled with their own sense of body and its measures; the speaker harrows the length of the field “with [her] long feet, [her] slow step.” 

This made me think about how, mathematically speaking, we can never touch another person or object, but we can measure, infinitely, the small space between us. This work makes that feel kinetic to me. Like the duration, or to become or embody “the smallest distance between two points” is really, I don’t know, full of potential? There were a lot of bones, physical, on display, historicized away, at the beginning of the collection, and later on in the collection the focus to me seems more so on time between the shapes of things here and gone. Does that feel true for you? Or maybe I’ll ask: what are you interested in doing in with duration and shape in these poems as the collection moves along? 

DK: The distinction you’re making here between the earlier movements in the book and the later movements, marks a progression I experienced as I was writing the book. In the first movement of the collection, my speaker is in a recounting mode, not narrative exactly but a record keeping nonetheless. “Here is what we say,” she says, again and again. There is more certainty here, more acceptance of what is not there, which the speaker can access because of the temporal and geographical distance between her and her given family.

It’s another pickle entirely when the relationship is more immediate or is in the process of changing?

I wrote “What Is the Measure” for Melissa’s birthday a few years ago. The poem was prompted by my asking her what she thought of all the love poems I’d written about her over the years. She replied that the poems were not about her but were about me, which I knew! Of course I knew, but I don’t think I’d expected to be quite so seen. The poem then became a way to reassure her that I recognized her recognition. Well, that’s a bit of a fib. I was admitting to myself that she and I were alongside each other, knowable in some ways, but also as complex and unknowable as a field or the origin of a mountain; that we were, in each of us, the sublime.

“Desire Path: Equinox” emerges out of a slightly different set of circumstances. I wrote it when she was away on fellowship a few years ago now. She was working on The Dry Season, and I was struggling to navigate what it meant to be alone in our home in Iowa, while she was over 1,500 miles away. How did I tend to myself? How could I talk to her without talking to her? And did I need to talk with her or to myself? 

I really put my speaker through it that season. I asked my speaker to help me conceptualize what I don’t understand but must accept, which is that there is so much I don’t know and still I love, and what do I do with all these feelings?  Hence, I think, the errors, the corrections. The poems became a space where I could practice saying I didn’t know something, even when I thought I did.

AL: I’ve been thinking often these days of how Hannah Arendt called thoughtlessness a genocidal impulse. That the lack of imagination to consider the future, of what could happen given an action, is what allows perpetrators to orchestrate mass death. To me this form of “thoughtlessness” is equivalent to “carelessness” but maybe this word is more socially charged. By that I mean, who is called “careless” and who is called “careful,” oftentimes lends itself falsely to “rational,” when managed by the white supremacist logics. I was so drawn to the first sonnet of the collection, “I found myself careless in the crossing,” for a lot of reasons (it is baffling and gorgeous!!!) but namely for the following lines:

I was careless with my saplings,
my seeds carried on the wind or in the gut
of some ruminant bound to bank and the water’s
wandering.

What does it mean to be careful? Or who gets to be careful? What does it mean to transgress what that means, or put in another way: what do you do when you find yourself careless? As a person, as a poet?

DK: This is another rich question with lots of possibilities and opportunities to dig in. But the basic answer to your question is that I found myself more careless with myself and others when I was younger. I cared less for myself, and so many of my decisions were rooted in that lack of care. I wasn’t taught to care for myself, or rather about myself. I wasn’t taught to be curious. I was sometimes tender, but not intentionally. I rarely thought of myself when I was a child—I was encouraged to care more for the adults around me.

I learned to care more, to be more care-full, in loving my friends. The women with whom I first practiced being vulnerable, who checked on me, who showed me what love could look like, how it could be practiced, brought me into caring. At some point, not too long ago, I realized I loved myself as I loved my friends as I loved Melissa. Which is perhaps to say that being careful can be a product of being in community. 

When am I careless in poetry? In my first drafts, which can be and do any old thing they want. I used to be overbearing in my first drafts, but learning to chill out, to lower the stakes became one way of feeding a sustainable practice. I am sometimes cruel, which differs from carelessness, when writing about my parents. I am careful in subsequent drafts, and I am perhaps the most careful with the poems that end up in a collection.