Poet Katie Farris

One of my favorite poets at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was Katie Farris, who read from her works on Saturday, April 20, at the Poetry Stage. Her recently published collection—Standing in the Forest of Being Alive—brought together her experiences with third-stage breast cancer, the global Covid pandemic, and an America at the point of heading for a messy divorce. Here is her explanation of how it all came together:

What drew me to her poems was her debt to Emily Dickinson and William Blake, two of my all-time favorite poets. In fact, there is definitely something of Emily in her work—without the sometimes obscure wording that sends the reader back to the beginning to make sense of the poet “telling it slant.” Below is the first poem from her collection:

Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World

To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.

The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—

This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
o train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.