The Shore Interview #61: Stephanie Kartalopoulos

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Hi Stephanie, thank you for saying yes to this interview! My first question has to do with your poem, “Grief,” that appears in our current issue. I love its immediate tension, how it introduces what will be an instructional refrain of “If you find,” but its first instruction is to “leave it be,” allowing conscious inaction to be an act unto itself. It’s a compelling overture to a poem titled “Grief,” especially in how the second person “you” forces the reader, whether they’re the grief holder or not, to take part in an interaction between voices, to be a part of not letting grief be held alone. How did you find the right balance of specificity with a broad title like this one and its instructional concept? Are there other poems you’ve conceptualized this way or might be thinking about?

SK: A few years ago, I was on a work trip to Columbus and my team had a “team bonding” outing where we went to an artist’s collective inside a reclaimed warehouse space. We saw all of these metal pieces that were being made from scrap metal and we participated in a small workshop where we melted down scrap metal and made small, freeform pieces of metal art. There was something beautiful about that experience—and that work trip—stuck with me. I don’t know why, but it did. When I would sit down for a writing session and nothing would jolt me into writing, that memory is one of the things I tended to turn to. At the time I was working on this poem, I had been thinking about loss and how we deal with it—and the tension that exists between overwhelming awareness of everything that a person has lost and the wisdom that can come in letting go. I was thinking about how loss, sadness and fear can coexist with hope and love and connection and the way that all of these are true at the same time.

I didn’t know how to write about it without over-writing each sentence and line. So I turned to this memory and to metal, to the way we can find it in its various forms of use and destruction, and to the fact that while scrap metal or shrapnel itself may not be beautiful—it might trigger bad memories and feelings—but holding it in your hands and letting it be, acknowledging the sheer weight of it and then melting it down and transforming it into something else can be quite beautiful.

EF: Since your first book, “Amulet,” published in 2018, how has the approach to developing a manuscript changed for you in that time—whether in structure, research, or any other facet?

SK: That’s a good question. With Amulet, I had a definite starting point—a bunch of poems I had written about my grandmother that I knew just went together. Most of that book just came together organically after that, whether as an extension of my Greek American heritage, imagery relative to a very Greek landscape, poems that relate to the intimacies and intricacies of family, or the shifting understanding of identity that is somehow at the core of any poem where the “I” voice is relative to another, regardless of the relationship.

The manuscript I am working on now is different. I left academia in 2019, and I took some time away from my writing to figure out how life, my career path and the world around me would take shape—what was different, what remained and how I felt about all of it. I also needed to reclaim my writing as 100% my own and something that existed purely from my passion and talent—and for joy—instead of something that was a natural part of me and also had an ability to contribute to an academic CV or any other form of professionalization. A few years ago, I came back to my writing—and over time, I recognized that my voice as a writer hadn’t changed, but had evolved into something a bit more risky, a bit more raw, a bit more willing to juxtapose control and the act of letting go, something that found a different balance of music and quiet within the cadence of a line.

Over time, as I found confidence in my writing and a steadiness in my practice as a writer who wrote on my time while balancing a new career, a husband and everyday life, I recognized that many of the poems I had been writing all seemed to be glued together, all seemed to belong to each other. What I mean is that they asked big questions of the world around me and somehow seemed to build on top of each other. They began to interact with poems, paintings and songs I would reflect on when I felt “stuck” during my writing time. They began to echo each other, while not repeating each other. And I recognized that without a pre-determined structure or intent, I had a book in the making.

So as simplistic as it may seem, I told myself that I would write my way to at least 55 poems before I printed them out to see what I have. And right now, I have that printout. I’m editing, refining, shaping and beginning to recognize the poems that work together the most as a book. They’re poems that are held together by their musicality—and the emotional journey that comes when the volume turns up, lowers and turns up again. They’re also, in their own way, love poems. I’m pretty excited.

EF: I read one of your academic foci is poetry in translation. What translators, or works, have been influential on how you approach the craft of translating poetic works? And what advice or recommendation do you wish you’d had that you might be able to offer to writers considering beginning the journey of poetry translation?

SK: Translation is a tricky beast. On the one hand, you want to do everything you can to transliterate meaning, imagery and music from one language to the other. That’s the work of honoring what you’re translating. On the other hand, you have to reach an audience that speaks a different language and because of that, recognizes the music of language—and of the line—differently.

I think Aliki Barnstone’s translations of CP Cavafy’s work have straddled both concerns quite well. I think that Brian Henry’s translations of Tomaz Salamun’s work have also straddled these concerns quite well.

One piece of advice I have for writers who are interested in translation is to figure out your non-negotiables. First, start with the poet whose work you want to translate: what are the 2 or 3 fundamental hallmarks of the poet’s writing that need to be prioritized, or else the translation will not hold true to the original work? And then, consider your audience: what 2 or 3 concerns do you need to meet in order to reach your audience in the language you are translating to? (For instance—it could be musicality, a casualness or formality with language, a connection to nature, etc.) And once you have those in place, focus on a word-by-word translation so you understand the meaning that needs to be conveyed. Let musicality, imagery, metaphor and friction (however it exists in the original poem) layer on. Let your non-negotiables guide the shape. See where this takes you.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

SK: You know, I’m only recently returning to submitting my own work for publication in journals after many years of a break. But I haven’t stopped reading literary journals. I think that Radar Poetry—a great online journal—does something great to bring together newer and more established poets and I love their annual Coniston Prize that amplifies women’s voices. I also have always loved Red Rock Review, Comstock Review and 32 Poems.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

SK: One of the things I love the most is the many ways that breath and quiet and space are created in a poem. Sometimes it’s with spareness in lineation, sometimes with simplicity or starkness in the imagery and sometimes it’s with repetition of even one word (which, in some poems, can create so much speed and momentum!). I’m actually quite obsessed with quiet…and with speed…and how it’s created in poems!

Along these lines, I was really struck with how beautifully Barbara Duffey’s “Fishing” and Mary Simmons’ “Turtle Pond” do this exact same thing—create breath and quiet—in such different ways. The lineation in “Fishing” and the scenario of the poetic speaker encountering wet ground and “fresh-dead leaves” asks you to tread carefully, to be cautious and to let quiet and breath guide you. The invitation to the reader with the second person address in “Turtle Pond” invites the reader to pause long enough to visualize themselves in a moment, to be complicit in building the scene, to acknowledge the fresh life around them (the fresh, bright algae! The “impressionist panting” in the first line!), to search for turtles almost as if the search and the constant refocus on the turtles provides a centering point, or the pulse of a metronome for breath and quiet and focus—and the kind of meditation that can create—to come through.

These two poems create a beautiful, quiet conversation. I adore them.

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Stephanie Kartalopoulos’ first book of poems, Amulet, was published in 2018 with Saint Julian Press. Her work has appeared in journals that include 32 Poems, Comstock Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Laurel Review and Grist: A Journal for Writers. Stephanie lives in Atlanta with her husband and her cat, Dancer.

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