Get to Know a Local Poet: Kim-An Lieberman

Kim-An Lieberman’s poems are like grandma’s best recipes. Her finely sliced imagery bastes in the everyday with a pinch of the mythic for good measure, yet sealed tightly by the foil of narrative—translating medical terminology for a foreign grandmother; rescuing tomatoes from the stranglehold of morning glory; or lamenting the loss of a winged-lover who flew the coop for another woman.

Lieberman, a writer of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, published her debut collection, “Breaking the Map,” in 2008 on Blue Begonia Press. As part of the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2009, she used poetry to explore how journalism and media shape the American experience, penning a poem-turned-obituary for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called “Post-Post-Intelligencer.” When she’s not writing poetry, Lieberman is teaching it at Lakeside School, where she is a faculty member in the English department.

Brian McGuigan: Your debut collection, “Breaking the Map,” was published by Blue Begonia press in 2008. What have you been working on recently?

Kim-An Lieberman: I've given a number of readings, both to help promote “Breaking the Map” as well as to connect with audiences on a level beyond the page. I'll be at the San Francisco Vietnamese Poetry Festival this April and at the Skagit River Poetry Festival in May. Last year, I participated in the Jack Straw Writers Program, which allowed me to create some audio recordings of my work alongside a phenomenal group of local authors. I'm also a teacher, so I've tried to incorporate that element by leading workshops and developing poetry curricula. Meanwhile, I'm making gradual inroads with new stuff. I have a few pieces forthcoming in journals and anthologies, and I recently did some writing inspired by the Alexander Calder exhibit for SAM Word. My eventual goal is another book. But since the first one was years in the making, I'm willing to give it some time.

BM: What about journalistic media drew you to it as a subject for poetry?

KL: My daily routine typically includes NPR, the New York Times and assorted blog-browsing. I'm guessing that most people take a moment in their day to somehow check in with the world's goings-on. I'm interested in why we draw lines between news readership and literary readership, why we tend to perceive information and art as divergent modes of knowledge. Journalism and poetry, in particular, both share a language of ear-catching "sound bites" as well as an urge to make a permanent record of fleeting events and observations. If you're researching a historical era, you can learn just as much from period poetry as you can from archival newspapers. Our own moment in contemporary America is powerfully shaped by popular media and a nonstop flow of information, both in print and on screen, so this strikes me as a natural topic for poems about my experience as a contemporary American.

BM: Some poems in “Breaking the Map” tend toward the mythic, are there particular mythologies that have inspired your poetry?

KL: I was (still am) a nerdy bookworm. I spent much of my childhood in the corner of a library. Early on, I was fascinated with classic fairy tales and myths—I loved Andrew Lang's color-book collection, Edith Hamilton's golden-age Greece, illustrated Hans Christian Andersen stories, American-frontier tall tales. Later I graduated to the fantasy/sci-fi section, where I read a lot about dragons, robots and interplanetary travel. But I was equally enchanted by more realistic books whose authors still managed to spin out a whole universe of self-contained mythologies—from “Encyclopedia Brown” and Nancy Drew to “Sweet Valley High” and “Flowers in the Attic.” Those narratives often seemed otherworldly and exotic to me anyway, far removed from my reality as an Asian American kid in the Pacific Northwest. I think of myth as the larger-than-life dimension that makes any story thread compelling, whether that story is Shakespeare or Star Trek or a daytime soap opera. It drives the human impulse to see our individual experiences reflected in broader cultural narratives, or to keep returning to a certain author or character who captures our attention. It's a staple ingredient of literature.

BM: Latina-American writer Gloria Anzaldua dubbed the term “new mestiza,” which she describes as someone of more than one culture or ethnicity that is aware of his or her conflicting and meshing identities and uses these "new angles of vision" to challenge binary thinking about culture and identity. As a writer of both Vietnamese and Jewish descent, do you see yourself as a “new mestiza”? Are there challenges to navigating the boundaries of both cultures in your writing?

KL: Growing up, I often got asked "what are you?"—at best, a klutzy way to express curiosity about a person's ethnic background—and I always felt obligated to explain. I appreciate thinkers like Anzaldua who have voiced, with force and eloquence, why the need to account for one's components is flawed from the start. I've never personally claimed the term “mestiza,” if only because Anzaldua's concept arises from her lived experience on a literal border. Both geographically and historically, my family origins are more far-flung; my mixed-ness usually feels like a function of distance and separation rather than interchange or conflict. I also respect the term's power as a postcolonial reclamation of Latin American identity, specifically. What I do share with Anzaldua is a firm conviction in thinking beyond either/or. I value multiplicity. I love discovering new perspectives that challenge my own assumptions—one reason why I gravitated towards teaching, as this happens in the classroom every day. Though I recognize the very real obstacles that mainstream culture can present to those of us positioned somewhere outside, perhaps heightening our awareness of how boundaries work, I don't believe that my own challenges of navigation loom any larger than usual. Surely we've all spent some time struggling to belong, relating (or not) to family and society, trying to be authentically self-defined. We're all something more than the sum of our parts. I just do my best to start from what I know, to remember that there is way more that I don't know, and to bring that awareness with me as I sit down to write.

BM: What's the best thing about Seattle's poetry community? And the worst?

KL: Seattle is home to an awe-inspiring spectrum of gifted poets, many of whom fly under the radar or avoid calling attention to themselves. The poetry world is notoriously landmined with egos, but I think we maintain a fairly egalitarian and supportive atmosphere here. Seattle is a great place to be a curious student or a new voice at an open mic. If I had one wish, I'd double the size of the active audience. Supportive as we are, with live venues for poetry throughout the city almost every day of the week, we still tend to make in-person readership a lower priority. It's been sad to watch so many neighborhood bookstores struggle and several local reading series disappear.

Read more about Kim-An Lieberman and sample her poetry at www.kalieberman.com.

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