Kurt Cole Eidsvig‘s new poetry collection, The Simple Art of Murder, traces a journey through viral and drug pandemics, through the odes to other poets and the deaths of friends and, most painfully, his mother. ‘When life presents something I cannot begin to comprehend, I need to write,’ says the Key West-based poet. In this edition of Why I Write, Eidsvig digs into motivation, poetic strategies, and the mystery of where the arrows of our intentions land.
1. Why do you write?
I write because I have to. It is one of the tools I use to make sense of myself and the world around me. In my new book, The Simple Art of Murder, there are many poems that represent my attempt to make sense of impossible situations. Gun violence, addiction, personal tragedy, and loss are all featured prominently. When life presents something I cannot begin to comprehend, I need to write.
Of course, I also write to remember what’s on my grocery list.
2. How do you write?
One of my great poetic influences, Martha Collins, often implored her students to consider the strategy of a poem. This has helped me immensely in my writing. As such, one of my strategies is using a variety of ways to make a poem by experimenting with common forms of writing. William Carlos Williams does this famously through a kitchen note in the poem “This is Just to Say.”
By using different forms, the reader is invited to the poem in a different way. Examples in The Simple Art of Murder include news stories, art criticism, letters, movie reviews, postcards, and on and on. Horoscopes are mentioned, as are conversations.
3. How did your collection, The Simple Art of Murder, come about?
There are poems here born from a long series on the life of poet Jack Spicer; there are works that began as missives to my poet-friend Martin Cockroft; some comment on current pop culture events, and others were written in personal response to COVID, the deaths of close friends, and the OxyContin epidemic devastating my former neighborhood in South Boston. The poems seemed like separate entities until I realized they were not.
4. What are the fundamental themes of the collection?
There is a poem by Rumi that goes:
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer
and find myself chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious of what I want.
There are multiple targets that are aimed for and shot at in the title poem of The Simple Art of Murder.
We shoot an arrow. It lands someplace else. The Simple Art of Murder keeps wondering where it lands.
5. What aspects of your own life contributed to the poems in The Simple Art of Murder?
Just about everything in my life is up for grabs. That spans the first time I ever fired a pistol, almost getting run over by a Hemingway-lookalike driving a golf cart, watching a Quentin Tarantino movie, talking to a friend who was struggling while on probation, or losing close friends to their fatal encounters with addiction.
But my mother’s passing is the heaviest presence in The Simple Art of Murder. When I used to spend my summers in California and Montana with my father, my mother would call me on the telephone and go on about my cocker spaniel back home.
“He keeps pacing the house, looking for you,” she’d say. “He goes upstairs. You’re not there. He comes and looks at me. He paces more. You’re not there. He doesn’t know what to do.”
The Simple Art of Murder is me in the role of that cocker spaniel. Except in these poems, I am the one searching. I’m pacing around everywhere, looking for my mom.
6. Which themes do you find yourself coming back to?
One of the best experiences of my academic career was the opportunity to study with famed art historian Paul Hayes Tucker. He was the first to masterfully make art and artists accessible to me. I, and the other students who had the great benefit of studying with him, felt invited to the greater discussion of art history.
Unfortunately, in my case, he built a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster. In his hands, the artists didn’t only intrigue and inspire me from a cross-disciplinary academic investigation of them. The relationship went further. Continually, visual artists and creatives have become a sort of vocabulary for me and my poems. The connection between making art personal and how that serves as a reference point for life is omnipresent in my work.
In addition, I was fortunate enough to study with Debra Earling at The University of Montana, and she encouraged me to think about the connections I felt to place. This has continued as an enduring theme for physical, emotional, and mental landscapes in my poetry.
7. Who has inspired you?
They are too many to name. I already feel like a bit player somehow getting up on stage at The Oscars with the producers telling me to wrap it up. Maybe The Dewdrop is The Oscars for poets?
In just one example of artists inspiring my work, my next book, Drowning Girl, is a book-length poem inspired by the Roy Lichtenstein painting of the same name. Not only are people found everywhere in the book itself, but the book was also created using forms like surveys, emails, text messages, and letters from other people. There is inspiration in text messages. Who knew?
8. Do you share your work in progress with people who are close to you?
When it comes to the actual first draft of anything, I cannot share that at all. I’m making a bridge between two ideas. If I let other people on the bridge before the structure is ready, the bridge collapses.
Sometimes, the bridge collapses all on its own.
9. What is the most difficult thing to write about?
I’m not sure. But that’s all I want to write about.
10. If you could engrave one poem on your tombstone?
While I don’t plan on a tombstone, if I had to have one with a poem, I’d pick “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch. It would mean I’d have to order an immense tombstone. But what are poets if not extravagant?