“I Sleep with Tigers,” “Latasha by Night,” and “Midnight” by Kristin Camitta Zimet appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
There is a Mother Goose rhyme I loved as a little girl, calling children to slip outdoors to play in the moonlight. Sometimes I did it! So last year when my friend Diane Dennis showed me her painting “Three Moons,” I recognized my old midnight playground right away. Her painting became the backdrop for “Latasha by Night.”
I do know a Latasha. Her theater company encourages young people, many of them black, to step into power. I didn’t set out to write about her (the name came last) but she was clearly present in my subconscious. The name also alludes to the French la tâche – “the task”. Many of us, especially artists and young people who are culturally repressed, face the task of bringing our dreamselves into daylight.
“Midnight” began with the same painting. This time it took me not to childhood but to old age. In the painting three phases of the moon glow in one sky; in the poem they are three life stages. The poem embodies some gifts I am discovering as I age – restfulness and full perspective.
I have moved 17 times since college, so it was natural to me in “Midnight” to imagine dying as one more move. The van parked overnight on the hilltop comes from my family’s first move; the horse was discovered behind the stove in my seventeenth home—so the poem, like a moving van, packs images that are a lifetime apart.
I was crying when I wrote “I Sleep with Tigers” and still cry when I read it. I do sleep with tigers nowadays, both in the metaphorical sense of the poem and literally. Soon after my husband died, I found myself buying three huge stuffed tigers (sewn, not shot), which now surround my bed. The poem comes as close as I can to explaining why.
What was the most difficult part in writing each of these poems?
“Latasha by Night” was an unruly mess until I gave up insisting that the action come in threes (because of the “Three Moons”) and writing three-line stanzas. Soon as I accepted that Latasha plays in two – nightself and dayself – the poem morphed at once into couplets and slipped into place.
“Midnight” was at first a prose poem, which felt flat and wrong. I wanted stillness but not stasis. I tried multiple forms and threw them all away until the hourglass showed up. Then the first stanza, which came last, reshaped everything, including the lineation of each stanza as dwindling sands – time running out, shape after shape releasing.
By far the hardest part of the tiger poem was acknowledging my fear. But the act of writing, of naming, is also a saving grace.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Oh, there are so many, but I’m going to choose The Ten Thousands Doors of January. I love fantasy because it dissolves limits, and because the wildest scenario can illuminate the daily world. In this book a girl is born with the the power to cross into an infinite number of worlds, including the elusive one that contains home and love. She uses words written in her own blood to open doors from world to world; and each world affects the others. I have found no better description of how it feels to me to be a poet, the possibility and the power.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Only one, really? OK, today it is Ross Gay, because I just read The Book of Delights. I share with him the sense that the world abounds in small wonders, that every single thing around me is a potential wellspring to learn from and write about. Rather than sit and drink, I think it would be grand to take a walk with him, sharing what we see and what it kindles in us.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I have two nearly ready books-to-be. One is a manuscript that tells Torah in 56 voices (including two trees and three animals), from the Tree of Knowledge to King David. I’ve tried not to write about them or for them but to get out of the way, so they speak directly through me. They come in pairs, loving, hating, contradicting one another.
The other manuscript explores life in three stages—childhood, middle age, and last years.
But so many new poems keep bubbling up, about how love deepens beyond death. It looks like those might take over the whole book for their own.
Meanwhile, I am also a visual artist, and I am exploring ways the visual and the verbal sides of my mind can play and create together. This is a delight!
Our thanks to Kristin for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “I Sleep with Tigers,” “Latasha by Night,” and “Midnight” here.
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Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take in My Arms the Dark, a book of poems, and the co-author of A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life. She was the long-time editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her poems are in a great many journals in eight countries and have been performed in venues from arboretum to concert hall. Also a surreal photographer, her work has appeared in galleries, museums, and city streets.