Caki Wilkinson: The Weird and Wonderful in The Survival Expo
Caki Wilkinson’s third poetry collection––The Survival Expo––is a weird family of poems. Beautiful, complex, breathtaking, but beautifully weird. Contained in the collection are a series of oddities like the date who wore a Titans jersey and a coonskin cap, the juxtaposition (in one line) of swamp tours and sexy gun range selfies, and a good ol’ boy selling apocalypse-prep specifically geared toward cats. We see these weird images every day in the modern world, most of us accept it or ignore it and continue along with our ill-conceived plans, but not Wilkinson.
Over the course of our conversation, weird made fifteen cameos. For wordsmiths who fawn over every syllable, this might be seen as a vague adjective, fine for a first draft, but replaced with the specific in later drafts. However, when talking about craft and the writings we adore, weird often is the word that best applied.
When we say weird, it’s not the vague insult of grade school, or even something out of the ordinary (e.g. “Weird, I coulda sworn I left my keys here”); for this conversation, perhaps weird means something like: a transfiguration of the mundane, often in an unsettling, amusing manner. Think Pinchy. See if you can find the weird in this stunner excerpt from the eponymous poem:
We’re sorely unprepared
for even minor hazards, acts of god
and whatnot, living as we do along
a semi-dormant fault in Tennessee,
our billboards lit with shot theology
and ads that flash YES, SILENCERS ARE LEGAL,
so I can understand why there’s a line
for 20-minute background checks,
this being a thoroughly American
response to background checks and fear
It’s Flannery O’Connor, William Gay or Cormac McCarthy. It’s Zadie Smith. It’s (good) Thomas Pynchon.
The weird in Wilkinson’s poetry, might come from her childhood Poetry Giants––Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl––whose magnetic draw was simply “how weird and funny and sometimes dark they were.” When it comes to her recent fiction-reading habits, Caki prefers odd, poetic pieces that don’t necessarily fit the mold of long narrative realist fiction that’s enjoying its spotlight in modern American writing. “I tend to like the weirdest stuff,” Caki says while grinning. “A lot of the fiction that I read is compressed in a way, there’s something kind of poetic or strange in the way it reflects the world back to us.”
When I ask Wilkinson about her relationship to fiction (and the potential of a novel or collection of short stories), she says “what’s fun for me about fiction is that you can put everything in. And you can’t do that with poems, you have to really work for a poem to earn a random detail. But the things that make me the happiest are random little details like weird names or funny little things that happen, and you can’t always find room for them in poems.”
All this is to say: life is weird. Wilkinson knows this better than most, but instead of mocking or satirizing the oddities of American culture, she finds newness and invites the reader along for the ride. The best writers can take the quotidian and transform it. Wilkinson is a poet who does that with Southern ideas and imagery, symbols, and signs.
“I didn’t set out to write a book of poems that’s set in the south,” says Wilkinson via videochat from her office at Rhodes College. “As I started working on it, I realized that this ‘Tennessee stuff’ and the South was coming in and became part of the focus of this book.” Through the writing process, Wilkinson wanted to “present the unexpected but also just ‘depict it’––trying to show different kinds of people, different takes on this weird place that we live.”
Wilkinson grew up in Tennessee, eventually leaving to continue her post-undergrad education at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cincinnati. With time and distance, the poet’s eyes gained clarity––“I’d been away for six years, and I was seeing the South again in new ways, particularly Memphis.” Especially here is the following excerpt from her poem “Hope Comes to Elvis Week:”
Memphis
in August, 99 at dusk, the dew point making people’s hair deranged
This fresh vision of the South is beautiful and subtle throughout the entirety of the collection.
“For some readers,” Wilkinson says, “there will be moments of recognition on a social or cultural level.”
She’s not referring to Tennesseans or even Southerners. It is a universal modern human experience, life taking one form for a moment before being swept away by something brand new––a state of being that the 21st century reader knows well.
Regardless a reader’s familiarity with the setting of her poems, Wilkinson’s impressive repertoire of forms will surprise in the best of ways. Her anagram poems are impressive enough before the reader notices the tight, mathematical re-working of one sentence in so many ways. Her reverse abecedarian is jealousy-inducing in both form and lyric, and “14 Dubious U-Turns” (a whiplash-sonnet [a new word I’ve invented after reading this poem]) will inspire more than a few people to attempt such intense movement compacted into a short, fourteen-line stanza.
Regarding form, Wilkinson says, “I like the idea of forms that dissolve or break down as the poem moves along.”
We can see this love of formal innovation in Wilkinson’s childhood favorites and in her current Poetry Giants, writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Heather McHugh, and Terrance Hayes. In reference to Hayes’ work, Wilkinson says “His poems are incredible, and his books are somehow both intricate and wild. He’ll do all sorts of things in a single book. I’ve been trying to think about that with my own poems, to find where the wildness is.”
In addition to her artful form, readers will notice Wilkinson’s narrative abilities, weaving together people, places, and random moments of time and space into one seamless poem.
“I’ve always been split in my sensibilities; I do a lot of things that fiction writers do. I love characters and I love voices, and it’s not like my poems are always in a singular poetic voice. There’s a part of me that’s always wanting to write fiction,” Wilkinson says. “What happens a lot of the time is that I try, and it ends up becoming a poem. Poetry is where I started with my interest in writing and it’s something I always go back to.”
Not everyone likes poetry, and Wilkinson has been thinking about this horrible truth for a while, asking herself “why aren’t people reading poetry?” Because of this, the poet often finds herself making choices “in terms of subject matter or tone” with the ultimate goal of “trying to hook somebody into listening and paying attention.”
Writing is difficult enough, but Wilkinson also teaches undergraduates. She is open about how the demand of teaching effects her creative work.
“I don’t write as much during the school year. I do write, and I find that it’s easy to slowly put off writing and then you do it less and less ... every semester has the same arc: everything’s in balance, and then certain things start to fall by the wayside. And it’s not really a time issue, and that’s what I didn’t understand when I started teaching. Even when you have time, your brain isn’t always ready to work in those moments. I sometimes get frustrated and wish I had more head room, but I really enjoy the teaching part of it. I feel lucky that I get to look at poems and talk about poems when I’m not writing my own. I just think that balance is really hard, and I always get both super excited and nervous when the summer comes around, cuz I’m like “Alright, go time.”
Artists too, must dive into their own metaphorical river of creativity and invention, as terrifying as it might be.
