Kyrsten Bean

December 2011

Welcome to the brand new Railroad feature – Poet of the Month. The honour of the first Railroad POTM goes to Kyrsten Bean, who also featured in Issue 2 of the Railroad Poetry Project, with her poem ‘Still Affected.’ Railroad would like to thank Kyrsten for her continued support of the Railroad Poetry Project, and for sharing her poetry with the Railroaders and the rest of the World. Here’s your POTM!

About

“Writing is what I do”

Kyrsten Bean is a writer and musician raised by a pack of artists in the Bay Area. They instilled in her a need to create stuff, much to her chagrin, putting the roots so deep into her DNA and her core that she cannot possibly live any other life without precipitously self-destructing. Her work has been published here and there, you can find it on her website, kyrstenbean.com or on her blog thestifledartist.com, where she encourages other crazy wild peeps to pursue their creative stuff or die an ignominious death.

Poetry

Pleurisy

 

The day you chose to stare at the television
instead of engaging in simple conversation
I developed pleurisy.

 

My lungs burnt up as if hot pokers had outlined them
My shoulder blades grew metal wings that
shredded through my thin skin casings

 

I went to the doctor, each breath a searing ember

 

Maybe it’s viral, they said.

 

The x-rays revealed nothing

 

No one could validate the shape of the burn.

 

I coughed dryly as you watched reruns of old movies
engrossed in repeating worlds
on and on into infinity you watched as

 

The virus ate away at my chest,
the lower half of my ribs and
the gray spaces behind my heart.

 

Cureless

 

I wish I could be me
but then
I wouldn’t strive to capture
all the restless inner thrumming
being one in a disparate system creates
the works that the discontent
at not being me
escalates

 

No, my
indulgent plastic heartbeats
keep on coming

 

I wish I could be me, but
there is no me here
I am always
just out of reach

 

Wondering

 

I am thinking of all the ghosts I know
who are still alive
and I wonder if they are watching me or
if I’ve become a faint blip on their radar

 

I am another person inside this person inside this person
nested like Russian dolls
open one and you get another and another and another
and there are so many pieces of me smashed across the continent

 

we are missing smashed pieces our entire lives
and we can never recreate the whole glass bottle
because someone up there or out there has the pieces in their hands
is holding them. Is laughing.

 

But what do I have if not this: This attempt
what I had, what I did
so many pauses and starts
so many fits and gasps

 

Everything falls inevitably
cherry blossoming to the ground
And I spin through this bourgeois world wondering
And I spin through this bourgeois world wondering

 

My Hologram Life

 

 Let me touch you with my
inclement fingers

 

 Let me fracture you with
a moment of lucidity

 

to shatter your delusion

 

Let me tack you onto the wall
to live amongst frayed photographs
and postcards from
my hologram life

 

Let me take you
down.

 

My Girl friends

 

My girl friends, my mothers
are phantoms and ghosts
They fill in blank spaces
reflect only me

 

My girl friends, like flowers
plucked too soon from the ground
have layers of tight foliales
wound deep into their cores

 

They are silhouettes
without guardians

 

Tree houses
devoid of children

 

They are nesting inside
nests, waiting for me
to pull them out

 

But the mother (my mother)
splays her beak to nudge
(she pushes) them
out of their nests

 

They have fallen to the ground
prematurely

They have never learned
to fly.

 

Unmoored

 

Anchored once
to the idea

that we all fit

 

inside this cardboard box I’ve found

that each puzzle piece

is slightly off

the corners nubbed or torn

 

There are gaping holes in

the spaces we used to slide into

 

from a distance

we look like a bunch

of tatty scraps

someone threw together

on a whim

 

Epithet

 

I want to crash into you so hard
that you become the essence of me
and I you.

 

No one ever reads my poetry
No one ever hears the words.

 

I want to become the epithet
on your grave

 

I want to live in
spite of you

 

I want to breathe you out
and come up with

 

nothing.

 

Still Affected

 

How are you
you might ask
if you met me now
and I would stand
on the other side of duplicity
cast out
into the black-lit region
of better chance
remembering the twin pistons pumping
in your revved engine
the flipped screen of my alternate experience
driving the knife
that jagged little red line
up the vein in
one last effort
to make our meaning not dry.
When you subject yourself to something
you knew you should have walked away from
when it changes your life forever
beyond the event
And the people who were privy to it
move on
slip out
creep away
how do you hold the past
in your own hands
remembering those little cracked lines
on your palms
how they revealed to you a future
you could not comprehend at the time
how are you. For years
I swallowed concoctions in order
to not know that answer
perhaps you knew it, just bruised me
you loved to bruise me
and you would bruise me again
you would most certainly bruise me again
so I keep it in here
keep it in this tiny locked box
to pull out when I feel safe
when life is going alright
when it’s OK to fall apart

 

Credits for first publication:

 ’Pleurisy’ – Amphibi.us March 2011

‘Wondering’ – The Camel Saloon 2011

‘My Hologram Life’ – Children, Churches & Daddies October 2011

‘Epithet’ – Children, Churches & Daddies September 2011

 

 

 

I really hope that this first Poet of the Month feature speaks for itself, and, as lovers of words and poetry yourselves, you are all under no illusion as to why I have chosen Kyrsten Bean as the first Railroad POTM. As followers, fans and Railroaders, you are all on the #talenttrain – and POTM is one of the ways that I hope to get this new Railroad hashtag trending. POTM will be one of the ways we can use #talenttrain – utilising Twitter to spread the beat of poets and their work. As well as this, Poet of the Month is a way for me to reach out to individuals, and to get the wider literary community engaging with writing by a poet you may not have come across so soon without Railroad. The Railroad mission has always been to spread the beat of contemporary poetry and the best way to achieve this is to heighten communication throughout the online literary community. This is the first step of many, and I hope that Kyrsten’s poetry speaks to you all as it spoke to me. So here’s my thoughts on Kyrsten’s work – why not add your own in the comment box at the bottom of this page?

The Editor’s Article – ‘Still Affected’ by Kyrsten Bean’s poetry

From submission Kyrsten’s poetry stayed with me. Right through the creation of the second issue of the Railroad e-mag I was continually drawn to ‘Still Affected’, her poem of pain, emotion and ‘falling apart’ – it did for me what all poetry should: it spoke of something I know, as a human being, but in a new way. As soon as I saw her work, she went straight to the back of my notebook – where I list the poets that really touch me.

What drew me to her work were the complicated webs of thematic interrelation that string themselves across her work. A first read of the poems listed above makes plain that Kyrsten has a penchant for the fractured and broken; scattered parts lay across her work as a whole – parts of the self (‘Wondering’ ‘My Hologram Life’ and ‘Unmoored’), whilst the ‘broken’ and ‘scattered’ is also considered through Kyrsten’s poems on identity and emotion (‘Cureless’, ’Pleurisy’, ‘Epithet’). For how ‘broken’ her poems seem to be, there is an overriding sense of unity and control: largely, I feel, through Kyrsten’s remarkable control of the writing process, as well as through the way in which the poems, as a collected works, pull together the fractious nature of the poem’s content through the criss-cross of theme that runs through all the poems.

A good example of this overlap of fragments, the ‘self’ and the sense of unity through writing that this disparity creates, is evident when one reads ‘Cureless’ and ‘Wondering’ together. ‘Cureless’, about being a ‘part’ in a “disparate society” and the “restless inner thrumming” that this creates, seems to level the sense of frustration with the unattainable self that is “always / just out of reach” through the realisation that it is the disparity that “creates / the works that the discontent / at not being me / escalates.” Similarly, ‘Wondering’ – concerned with the unattainable self and fractured identity – announces the unreachable self as a result of the ‘I’ being embodied in each and every interaction with others, as “I am another person inside this person inside this person”. This broken ‘I’ is, for Kyrsten, an inevitable consequence of circumstance “But what do I have if not this: This attempt / what I had, what I did / so many pauses and starts / so many fits and gasps”. Fragmentation is symptomatic of living; of being “smashed across the continent” – just like the unreachable ‘me’ is the precursor to creating “the works that the discontent / at not being me / escalates” in ‘Cureless’.

What really impresses me about Kyrsten’s writing, though, is her acute sense of feeling. For all the control in her poetry, this never stifles the delivery of the ‘new reality’ enlivening emotion for the reader.

The imagery in ‘Pleurisy’ haunted me for many days after the first reading: to appropriate the detachment and emotional distance that can be felt when one feels devalued, with a disease so physical as that of pleurisy, gives a new dimension of meaning to the relationship explored in this poem. As the disease spreads through the lungs, the pain of being discarded for the television, instead of “simple conversation”, spreads with it, and takes on a far more empirical angle. Even though the “x-rays reveal nothing” – a clever addition that keeps this poem on the boundary between reality (the heartbreak)  and poetic licence (pleurisy) – we watch as the virus takes over the body, eating away at the chest, and the “gray spaces behind my heart.”

A triumph in the balance of form and emotion, where one does not surpass the other, Kyrsten’s poetry touches me on the levels of feeling and formality – a precise blending of control and emotional release. On her website, Kyrsten proclaims that “Writing is what I do” – not only does she ‘write’, she does it justice, too.

Railroad Interview with Kyrsten

“Jagged, raw, incredible”

ACE: Kyrsten, thank you for becoming the first Railroad POTM –it’s a real privilege to be showcasing your work to the Railroad fan base, and beyond. What is your personal take on the Railroad Mission, and what do you think you can gain from being the first POTM?

KB: When I first heard about the Railroad Poetry Project – through Joe Clifford’s blog, which I also recently discovered, so thanks Joe – I was intrigued. The project felt right, and close to my own feelings about how undervalued many of us are today as writers. I don’t tend to submit my poems to the highfalutin publications; I sometimes got such empty, awful replies, if any at all. I mean, “Sorry, but we won’t be using this.” Such conviction: It’s like being spit on. But when I sent my work to other poets, like myself, they asked for more, even if the first few batches didn’t fit, they still had a kindness and sincerity about them, that human touch.

I support the small, the indie, as you can see from my poems; I support the broken and the disenchanted. It’s been my lot in life to understand the darker underbellies, to reach out to those who are a little “off.” I’m probably too gritty, and I also hate poetry that is obtuse and hard to connect with. If you throw in a bunch of obscure imagery that I can’t relate to, I’m going to space out. I want real life: jagged, raw, incredible.

The Railroad Poetry Project is a beautiful concept born out of frustration and hope, and I feel that many great things are born this way. Instead of trying to join an overcrowded bandwagon, I’d like to push along with something fresh, something with endless potential. Poetry, to me, is song. It is expression. It is open to anyone, not a select few. Yes, there needs to be some objectivity, and I feel the Railroad Poetry Project has that objectivity, but I don’t want people out there to lose the very form of expression that might be saving their lives, because of endless rejection from snotty venues too obsessed with being cool to really hear what the poets submitting are trying to say. Everyone has to start somewhere. The history of poetry seems to be that many great poets are not heard in their lifetime, at least not to big accolades.

ACE: Communication is the heart of the Railroad ethos and Railroad hopes to become an online resource for poets wanting to access the literary community – are there any tips you can give our readers for spreading the beat of their work and getting their name out there?

KB: Tell all of your friends. Post links on facebook. Submit your poems, even though you’re scared and don’t think they’re good enough (if they say exactly what you intended to say and you like reading them without cringing, they are probably good enough). Post to twitter. Join a local writing group, or start one. You don’t have to be alone. Ask if you can help in any way.

ACE: For me, your poetry displays carefully controlled disparity through carefully sculpted poems. Where do you think this focus on fragmentation comes from – is there a particular time, image or occurrence you can pinpoint as the genesis of your acute awareness of the disunity in the self?

KB: I started writing poems and songs at a very young age. Like many artists, I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere. There was always something I didn’t do or say right, some part that was different. When I was a teenager, I started travelling across the United States without my parents blessing, to see the world, and I saw the divide between wanderers, like myself, and structured society. When I was sent to a reform school in Jamaica, I started writing poetry again with a vengeance. In class, I would look up words and copy them down in my dictionary. I tried to use all these big words I found in my poems. They were weird and crazy poems. But they explained the intensity of what I felt in a way I could never convey through simply talking to people. I felt like an old soul trapped in a young body.

I grew up with an outcast family of sorts. We weren’t like other families for a number of reasons; you can fill in the blanks with your imagination. I would say it was a sense of loss at 14, when I sat down and decided that the world was a strange place and maybe no one was on my side or was reliable, but I would try to love it anyway. And I would try to talk about it in a way that was accessible to others. I also had this group of girls, former friends and some of their older sisters, who were trying to beat up on me almost every day, I ended up transferring schools because though I fought back, there was one of me and so many of them. It toughened me up, but made it hard to trust for a long time. I found solace in my music and writing and I still do, 16 years later. It’s the most important part of my life. And I decided I wanted other teenagers, other little “me’s” to have someone on their side. I also write for them. I’ve always known I would write a book for teenagers, about those experiences, because I know that many of them are going through it and feel that they have absolutely no one.

And lastly, I started writing poems for friends who I felt were going through it. I always had an innate sense of perception for struggle in others, and a poem was my way of saying, “Hey, I get it. But I’m not going to pressure you to talk about it. Here’s a poem.”  Recently, a friend sent me a book of poems I’d made for her when I was 19. I’d forgotten about them. They were horrible poems, mostly made as school class assignments, and the structure broke my poetry. I cringed, reading back through them, but I had used what tools I had available at the time.

ACE:  Could you tell me a bit about ‘Epithet’? For me it shows tension between wanting to be a part of someone, whilst still being free and an individual: again, another example of your way of writing about identity, the ‘self’ and fragmentation. How do you feel about this poem- what does it communicate for you?

KB: This poem was one of those that almost came out exactly right on first try. There was a person in my life a number of years ago who I loved very much, but in a naïve way. I didn’t really know who this person was at all. The conflict of loving a person who I didn’t trust or know — who did things on purpose to tear me down, but also showed such a deep, loving side at times – I can’t explain it, it’s like loving a phantom. And in the end, this comes down to loving a part of yourself that you made up and projected on the other person maybe, not the other person at all. And it’s that sense of wanting to become a person completely, wanting to lose yourself in them, wanting to make as much of an impact on their lives as they did on yours, but wanting to be free of them, too, and how you can never know whether either will happen. But more than anything, it’s about a feeling, and it’s about resolution, about finally breaking free from the insanity of being dependant on a person who meant everything to you, but doesn’t care that they broke you, or maybe broke you on purpose.

ACE: What inspires you as a poet and writer? Do you take inspiration from your own personal experiences, or do you write as an exercise, developing a written piece from a single image?

KB: I’m always observing. I have a cabinet full of ghosts, people I’ve met, stories, things I’ve seen, that I put in my poems. Poetry is similar to songwriting for me, the creations need to stand up for themselves. They have a life of their own. My defining factor is I spew something – an idea, a subconscious struggle, an observation, an emotion – onto the page and I leave it there for quite some time. Then I come back and tweak it until it makes me feel something. If I’m bored, if I can’t read through it, if I get stuck at certain words that don’t seem to make sense, other people will, too. If I love it, someone else is going to get it. It seems this is the truth. And the power of poetry is that even though mine are of me, someone reading them is going to put themselves in it, and relate to parts of their own life.

What inspires me is life: the duality of existence. I think that everyone has a darker side, though they pretend not to. Incongruence intrigues me. For whatever reason we all do things that are messed up, but for some reason, something amazingly perfect comes from all the disparity, all of the broken chaotic beauty, and for some reason, I need to write poetry and music about it, it’s something I absolutely have to do in order to survive, whether it’s a coping mechanism I came up with at a young age or because it’s my calling, I don’t know, but it feels right. And I think when you feel that clear stream of Zen while doing something, when it feels true, or like the universe has come full circle, you should just do it, otherwise you’re like that old bible myth of Jonah and the whale, where you have a calling, but you’re hiding from it, and there’s going to be hell to pay. You might as well face up to it or you’re going to be miserable. Ask me how I know.

ACE: What are your final words for the Railroaders out there?

KB: Please, give your poems a chance. I believe that many people I know are talented, but keep their talents hidden under a bucket because they are afraid. Your truth will help other people, somehow, in some simple, imperfect way. If anything, creation helps you cope with this crazy, crazy world that often doesn’t make any sense at all. It needs your creativity.

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