Alice Kociemba is the director of the Calliope Poetry Series in Falmouth and the author of “Death of Teaticket Hardware.” Its title poem won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. She has led and participated in numerous poetry workshops across the state and is currently the guest editor for Common Threads, a collaborative project published annually by the Mass Poetry organization. Kociemba works as a psychotherapist and lives in Falmouth.
When did you start writing poems?
I first started reading and writing poetry in 1986. I was hit by a line drive at a baseball game and I had a serious head injury. I lost the ability to read and drive and work and what got me through the recovery was reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It has short lines and that was a way to re-teach myself how to read. As I recovered, I could read other poems, but they all tended to be shorter. It took me years to read a novel. I found that in reading poetry, I could experience a whole world condensed, so I would say Emily Dickinson saved my sanity.
What inspires you to write?
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My writing time is my morning time. I have a little ritual where I will read a published poem, sometimes the same poem for a week or two — it’s an immersion in language and imagination. [Then] I set it aside and do a free write, of whatever is coming to me.
I live in a house overlooking wetlands, [at] the end of the Coonamesset River — I lovingly call it my swamp. I have a little comfortable chair and I make a cup of coffee and I look outside. You feel like you’re in nature. I’ve been working on a book called “Bourne Bridge,” trying to capture the feeling of home in the title poem. This is the place you relax and unwind from the stress in the world.
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What is your favorite poem that you’ve written?
“Death at Teaticket Hardware” is probably the most popular poem I’ve written. [It] is a celebration of this little hardware store, and about this man who, I say at one point in the poem, was just the kindest man in town. [My] house was built in 2001. I’m not a handy person and I’d go in and ask questions or need certain things and they were just so kind to me. A few years later, one of the family members died, and Teaticket Hardware was sold. I wrote this poem as an exercise in gratitude.
What distinguishes your poetry from other poems?
There were times [in] my work as a therapist, that I’m called to celebrate or give praise to ordinary people. There are a lot of poems that come from my 30-plus years of being a psychotherapist. They don’t say anything that would reveal a client, but they tend to go to the universal experience of grief and loss and hardship.
When dealing with such difficult subject matter, how long do you spend writing a poem?
Certainly in the early days, it would take me 50 drafts. I would work a poem until I felt I had a good working draft and then I would take it to one of my poetry workshops and get feedback. In the early days, I could produce a new poem a month. Ted Kooser used to say that he would write seven poems a year. It takes a lot of time.
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What do you do when you get stuck?
If I hit a roadblock, I might put it down for a day or two. I hand write before it gets to the computer, so in the physical act of getting the words out, you can start to see where the road block is. I take a poem that I [am] struggling with and read it out loud at an open mike. You can hear a tiny “thud” when your listener falls out of your palm, and then you can feel it when it’s off.
How has the Cape Cod community reacted to your work, both in process and when it’s finished?
When you’re in a well-run workshop, it’s safe to take something very raw, that you don’t know is very good. What you find is people engage with you when you’re authentic and speaking a truth. We want to honor diversity of voice.
What are you working on now?
I think I’m going to spend some time at the beach, late in the afternoon, once most people leave. That’s where I take my notebook in the summer. You just take in the world, of beauty and nature, and the new writing that I’m going to do is going to be exciting.
Emeralde Jensen-Roberts can be reached at emeralde.roberts@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @emeraldejr.
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