Karen Skolfield’s book, Battle Dress (W.W. Norton), won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and will be published in fall 2019. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from Missouri Review. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Like most poets, I imagine, I’m a word-nerd and as a result immediately turned to your pieces “Discharge: Origin < Latin, to run away” and “War: Origin < Old German, to confuse” as soon as I received the issue of 32 Poems in which they appeared. Though they examine common words, these origin poems hold eerie resonance throughout your forthcoming collection, Battle Dress. Here I think of “Grenade: Origin < OFr. pomme-grenate” which begins describing a grenade but immediately compares it to a pomegranate, detailing “how a seed case splits and reveals / such tenderness but also its power…a seed makes itself known, / prepares the earth for its own good work, / changes the landscape…” The poem blurs the two and finishes with “the names of the dead ripening. / How the arm extends, the palm opens,/the red pulp within, the perfect arc. / What is sown cannot be called back. / We say bearing fruit and it is borne.”

I have chills at the end of this one as the poem explodes into significance. How did these definition poems come to be, and how do you see etymology enriching your pieces, either explicitly or implicitly? What does it allow to happen throughout this new collection?

KS: I’m a word nerd too—I’ve used that exact phrase to describe myself—and I’ve both enjoyed and been horrified digging into the etymology of military-related words. I knew that many military words were from French, but I didn’t know why that was so or how the origin words had transformed.

The series started with me looking up the word “rifle,” as I was curious how “rifling” as in “ransacking” was related to the weapon. I then read up on both the evolution and physics of firearms.

One dictionary entry led to another—I love research. From that first poem, every etymologically related poem has been a surprise: “grenade” from “pomegranate,” “war” from “confusion,” “infantry” from “children,” “soldier” from “shilling’s worth,” “private” from “individual” but also related to “deprivation,” “sergeant” from “servant.”

And I’d love to say this series is finished, but I can’t kid myself. After the manuscript was accepted for publication, I found myself wondering about the word “boots” and thinking about that old insult about mothers wearing combat boots. So, yeah, I wrote that poem. Not long after, I looked up the word “gun”—not a military word, but certainly a related word. Comes from a woman’s name: Gunhilda. Still thinking about that one, the relationship of the feminine to weaponry.

CL: That relationship, and not only weaponry but to war itself, is a primary concern of Battle Dress. I’m embarrassed to admit that when I hear Battle Dress, although I know it refers to fatigues, I have this image of an actual dress with some armored bodice or impregnable flounce. Which I mention here because it seems to highlight how many assumptions we bring to words themselves. Your work is in the business of up-turning assumptions, sometimes comically like in the piece titled “On Veteran’s Day, My Daughter Wishes Me a Happy Veterinarian’s Day” which describes the effects of war on animals, on innocents, and eventually troubles the speaker’s role as both veteran and mother or caregiver. We must hold both identities at once in the end with a scene “Early in the morning, / my daughter’s hair an irregular nest. / The peeping of fledglings. / In my hands a bowl, the silverware serrated. / What springs from those hands is a bludgeon of doves.” How do you think about reconciling the feminine with the violent? Or do you?

KS: I think I’ve always wanted to muddle what counts as feminine, what does not—that was true from my childhood on and was one of the primary reasons I enlisted, along with wanting the physical challenge of the military and the social status that comes with doing something outside the ordinary.

For much of this collection, being a female soldier is front and center in the poems, in part because it’s not an angle that’s told often in poetry, but mostly because it’s my story. So lots of the poems start with the premise: I AM A GIRL. And then something disturbing comes along: I AM A GIRL AND I AM HOLDING A MACHINE GUN. That sort of thing. I don’t think the poems ever reconcile the feminine with the violent, though in a way those seemingly opposing forces do fuel each other in the poems.

Regarding the title, Battle Dress, you’re not alone in envisioning some Mad Max outfit. My friend, the poet Kristin Bock, came up with the title, and my daughter quipped something about skirts made of bullets. Which gave me the terrible moment: I have given my daughter an image she did not have before, and it is one of war.

CL: Yes, but it’s a complex image. Of which you have so many. In “Last of a Species,” I think of the description of a compassionless father who displays some compassion nonetheless: And I have to consider that this man’s heart / was big enough to hold that bird, / not just for a moment but the time it took / to get the scissors, to fold the newspaper just so, / to clip a rectangle, flatten the clipping, / read it again, think of a place to keep it.” Or the actual image in Battle Dress where the speaker describes a group of soldiers posing for a “fun” photo with a flag draped coffin. The lines “but weren’t they human? Don’t others get to smile at their work?” force us to re-examine the easy. How do you think about images? What sort of lens does writing about something as morally complex as the military require one to have?

KS: I’m grateful that objects, by their nature, become images without me doing much besides including them. I don’t think I’m a very visual person—I was a photojournalist in the military but I didn’t have an artist’s eye for photo composition. When I’m writing, my images sometimes feel accidental, or incidental: a narration of an event, and if a group of soldiers smiling and leaning on a coffin seems like an image, great, so be it. Other times I stay with the image and let it lead me: in the poem with pomegranate as the origin for the word grenade, I followed not just what grenades do but the horticultural language and habits of pomegranates and their appearance in mythology.

My own relationship to the military could also be described as morally complex. I joined for what I still think were good reasons. I left for equally good reasons. The military exists and trains not just for war but for peace. Not just for peace but for war. Consider how wartime has transformed economies and the social status of many, brought about technological and scientific and medical leaps.

CL: It’s so interesting that you say this because I’m not a visual person either, but in reading I honed in on so many images: hair of a different shade growing on the double transplanted arms, or “yoga joe” figurines in their bikram triangles, saltpeter on eggs, cammo gunking up one’s pores, an officer who gets a hard-on watching female recruits throw grenades, mosquitoes big enough to carry off one’s soul—and that’s off the top of my head! Even the single-stanza block of many pieces suggests a snapshot and so I wonder if not images, what is the leading force of your poems? How do they come to be? And by the end, are there accidents?

KS: At heart, I think I’m a very narrative person. I love stories, and though poems don’t always have to tell stories, a lot of times mine do. I’m still stunned that I’m not a fiction writer. I guess I do use plenty of imagery—hard to refute when you give me a list!—and much of it’s visual, in the way of bringing a scene and a character to life.

When I’m writing and there is a distinct character being built, I hear that person’s voice as I write, their intonation. In the poem with the mosquitoes that you mention above, it’s a male soldier’s voice, though no one would know that. “Saltpeter” is another male soldier complaining that he’s not getting erections in basic training. Most of the others are female soldiers I’ve known or a take on soldiers I’ve known or are brand-new characters.

I love your question about accidents. I think a lot of writing is accidental, or at least unintentional. I’m writing and imagining and there’s a new line with an image I hadn’t known would be there, or some little twist and I misspell a word and suddenly it’s a new phrase I wouldn’t have arrived at if my hands on the keyboard hadn’t been so cold. Gifts from the muse, I guess.

CL: Yes, I think those slippages can occur because the material of language is so rich and then, for better or worse, constantly being adapted, used, stretched, transposed. It starts to take on disturbing resonances, which we see on the micro level with some of the etymology poems mentioned earlier, but on a more macro level with the “Army SMART Book” poems that use quotes from the Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks given to all recruits. One piece, “Army SMART Book: Inspirational Quotes (II)” begins with the advice “When your shot is exhausted, knock down the enemy with the stock of your rifle. If the rifle stock be broken, bite with your teeth.” This seems straightforward enough, but the poem continues:

Two stoppered rifles.
You hadn’t guessed

she’d look like you.
Even the enjambment in

her eyes. Tiny breasts.
Jawcurve, waistsmall.

Fists that once were hands.
Perfect, exceptional teeth.

The line “fists that once were hands” seems to highlight the way language can come to define the way we relate to others. How do you see conceptual rhymes as making things strange? Or more familiar? Which is the goal, in your work?

KS: A trauma—any trauma—transforms what it touches. In war, that includes locations: cornfields, towns and cities, houses, barns, ditches. Trees take on new meaning. At Gettysburg there’s a map to “witness trees,” trees that were alive during the battle and still stand. That word, “witness,” is huge, the memories of war passing into and stored in everything. There’s a preserved tree on display that took so many slugs it killed the tree. That’s a lot of bullets that did not go into a man’s body. The battle, the museum to follow, my children saying “whoa” as they read the placard, me writing about it—it’s all transformative, history passing through us but also an augur of the future.

When I found that quote from The Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks, I was struck by how animalistic it was. It was an easy jump to consider a woman fighting for the other side as well. Would one of us hesitate, recognizing she was across from another woman? No matter how that theoretical moment resolves, it’s chilling and awful, because I do not doubt that one woman would take the advantage.

I want my poems to add to discussions of war and protest, and the images often hinge on the familiar turning strange. I think of hand-to-hand combat training, how the body distorts to weapon, how the throat deforms to vulnerable. The aggression that was there all along.

CL: Wow, the witness trees definitely rock me; especially as someone who adores trees, and especially given all we now know about their sentience. But I’m curious about the transformation of trauma. This might reflect our current moment, but in a time when trauma and abuse are questioned depending on how a victim presents the memory, how might a poem serve as a way in? What does the art form allow for, both in terms of truth telling and healing? What poems of yours have revealed, and then continued to transform trauma?

KS: Famously, General George S. Patton slapped men on at least two occasions for “battle fatigue,” what we now call PTSD. He thought it disgraceful that physically uninjured men weren’t on the front lines. About those slaps: were they meant to humiliate, to bring the soldiers to their senses, to hurt them? Some dark part of me thinks it was to treat them like women, to interrupt what he saw as hysteria (here I fall into the even darker pit of hysteria’s etymology). Although Patton’s acts hampered his career, his impulse to physically harm and humiliate fellow soldiers points to the lack of understanding around wartime trauma.

Similarly, we had Presidential candidate Donald Trump belittling POWs in 2015: “I like people who weren’t captured,” he said of statesman John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. That’s stunning. That Trump’s approval ratings went up after that, and that he was elected, shows that we haven’t come very far in terms of empathy. Ah, and I remember thinking Trump wouldn’t survive the “Grab her” comment. I was so naïve.

I began answering this question sure that the difference between how traumas and abuse are understood would be very different for, say, women who have been abused and soldiers who suffer PTSD. And now I see there’s still a condemnation of most trauma survivors, perceived as weak in some way, or wallowing.

Most obviously, art and writing, story telling and songs, are a way of speaking up. Individual stories are much harder to dismiss than collective summaries of traumatic events. Although I won’t say I write for a purpose other than to tell a story, if a poem gives me or someone else some measure of relief or a gut punch or even peace, then that’s awesome.

In my first book I have a poem, “Ode to the Fan,” in which the speaker hints at abuse and a disjointed, strained relationship with her father. But the speaker is downright joyful—she steals a big box fan from her parents and then spends years taunting her father with the missing fan. I’ve been asked about that poem a bunch, always by women, most in their early 20s. One, memorably, told me “I didn’t know a poem could do that.” She connected with that poem and it gave her some joy, too, even though it included references to trauma.

CL: Perception as weak or objectified is a sort of pre-condition for abuse. Which the speaker in “Ode to a Fan” so much as says since her father “hated [her] life, maybe because / [she] never slept with him.” I’ve included a link to the full poem here because it was one of those that made me put down your book for a bit to get some air. (What a terrible pun!) The speaker insists the poem is about the fan that she cherishes not only because it’s a fabulous fan, but also because she stole it and her father wants it back, even as she has made it her own; she enjoys it because he wants her not to. The fan becomes the way we learn about this relationship, and yet I hesitate to call it ‘symbol’ for any number of things, which would make it seem like the poet set out to create some puzzle we need to decode; and it is, after all, a fan. How do you balance the weight of the symbolic and the real? Does this play into your revision process?

KS: “Ode to the Fan” is one of the rare poems that I wrote in a single go, a thing I hate to admit, or maybe it just makes me a little sad that more of my poems don’t unscroll themselves this way. I remember the feeling, sitting in the coffee shop, hunched over my computer, and trying to stifle my laughter. To me, it’s a glorious revenge poem, not in a whack-the-guy-in-the-kneecaps type of way, but more insidious than that, a long-game plan of revenge. The fan sits at the center and is allowed to occupy that space in part because it’s sort of ridiculous, a $20 box fan. The father could have bought another one—I’ve never believed the speaker’s insistence that it’s the last of a kind. But I do believe that she knows her father won’t buy another one, that he’s too stubborn or cheap, or even that he thinks he’s punishing her by not buying another one for himself. Buying another one would be his tacit approval of her having the first one. He won’t do that.

The fan, in the world of the poem, is absolutely real. It embodies, and then lifts itself from, their complicated, embittered relationship. Without the poem, the fan is just a fan. If it showed up in the local Goodwill, no one would even buy it. But in the world of the poem the fan is meaningful, desired, jealously guarded, and celebrated.

CL: Isn’t that the wonder of poetry though? That it can take our goodwill trips, the detritus and mess of our lives and make them noticeable, significant, worthy even, of sharing with others. If you encountered someone who had never read a poem before, what one (of yours, or someone else’s) would you share with him or her?

KS: I’d share Dianne Seuss’s little gem of a poem, “Song in My Heart”. The poem’s short (and thus, easier to stick with for someone new to poetry), startling, zany, touching, and surprisingly musical. It breaks every “rule” a lot of people think poetry should follow, from allowable subject matter to line breaks. I come back to this poem all the time: “You can write like this!” I think. And I can’t. But it inspires me, and I can write something else.