Our poetry team recently featured new work by KB Ballentine – a new poem called "Outline of a Soul", which is available for reading here.
KB Ballentine’s latest collection, Spirit of Wild, launched in 2023. Published in Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022) and The Strategic Poet (2021). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.
Claire Beaver, one of our poetry editors, talked with the poet about her work, what it's like teaching writing to younger students, and why she writes by hand before her poems make it to the computer.
Claire Beaver: We're so excited to publish your work. I'm curious when you started to write poetry and when you started to call yourself a poet?
KB Ballentine: The very long answer is that when I started teaching high school, I went around and asked all my mentor teachers how they taught each section, and when I got to the poetry section, every one of them said they didn’t teach poetry. And I thought, "Why don't you teach poetry?" And I was so young, I was 21 when I started teaching…they said it's so subjective it's tough to teach, and I understand that, but I wanted to teach poetry. I had been writing through school, I went to college with my writing degree, but I really hadn't ever tried poetry. And when I bought textbooks about how to write with teenagers, I always tried the subject first. If I couldn't do it I wasn't going to ask them to do it. And I started writing and it was really exciting to me. Everybody seems to be reluctant when we start poetry, and by the end they're very excited about it because we're talking about precision of language and song lyrics and things like that. I just fell in love with poetry and all my other writing went by the wayside, and I realized I really like finding exactly the word I want, and trying to say a part of a story in a small space. And I like that more than having to add fillers to something I'm trying to make up.
I'm not sure I called myself a poet until maybe my first or second book came out, and then I thought, "Well I guess I can call myself a poet since I have a book of poetry out."
Claire Beaver: It's a bit of imposter syndrome, isn't it? When did your first book come out?
KB Ballentine: I have eight books out now, and my ninth manuscript was just accepted by Sheila-Na-Gig. My first book came out in 2007. I was finishing up my MFA and I had done my dissertation and all that, and I thought I'd put together a collection for my MFA, but they said that it was all distinctly Irish and had one tone to it, and so I put that aside and brought in a bunch of different writings. But I had all this Irish stuff I had been working on, and I found a publisher who was in fact himself from Ireland. And he liked my stuff, and that's how it happened.
Claire Beaver: We're featuring your poem 'Outline of a Soul', which we loved. And I noticed lots of color in it, which made it such a visual piece for me. The plum at the end really stuck with me, the visual of the day-old plum, not rotting but perfectly ripe. What inspires this? Do you often find yourself returning to the same topics?
KB Ballentine: I think my topics are always love, positive or negative, or nature. I try to wrap everything I do in nature, because when you look at nature you have this cyclical happening, seasonal, there are highs and lows, there are blossomings, there is death, so I think nature just really speaks to my work. I really like color and I think I was playing around with lots of different poems at the time where I try to take one color and different shades and try to weave that throughout. And it just naturally picks up other colors, and I was just trying to stick to the purple tone in this one.
Claire Beaver: That came through, for sure. What's your process like? Are you hit with ideas? Do you just sit down and bang out some poems?
KB Ballentine: I wish. I find the more time I have the less I write, which is really bizarre. So the busier I am, if I can fit it in to my lunch hour, when my students are working in my writing class, I write as well. I try to model that. It's also an opportunity for me to write in time. I have to schedule myself. I do discipline myself during the summertime, but I don't typically do that during the school year because I just take little opportunities to nail things down.
Claire Beaver: Do you ever find yourself returning to those first prompts you gave your students?
KB Ballentine: It's really interesting. I find that the early writing you have, you grow out of that style, so even if I were to revisit those prompts, it would be a completely different poem. There's just so much to write about in the world. So many of the early prompts I give students are things like, "Think about this, what about this?" Because lots of them haven't really experienced life yet. Some of them have, but understanding the consequences of what happens…they're in it for right now, right this minute, and it's really difficult for them to think about the future. They do dwell on the past, but they have a hard time thinking about the future and even the present sometimes. So I find those prompts and poems are completely different.
Claire Beaver: Do you find yourself inspired by your students' writing?
KB Ballentine: Always. Even when it's not poetry. When I read about their stories they write in non-fiction, that inspires my teacher-voice writing, which sometimes is sad, because lots of these kids deal with topics they shouldn't have to. I have a couple students right now who are just amazing writers, and I'm part of this [literature] board in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we just had the Young Writers Awards, and over three thousand people entered those awards, students from K-12, and we gave out so many awards, it was just fantastic. I'm very inspired by student writing.
Claire Beaver: Are you a big editor? Do you self-edit?
KB Ballentine: Yes. Yes. Yes. I go back and read my old stuff and go, "Did I write that? Did I really write that?" And then I'm looking at it thinking I should have changed something here and here…
Claire Beaver: That's the danger zone.
KB Ballentine: Yeah, and I know it's already passed, move onto the next thing. I write everything by hand first. But I'm a big self-editor, and then I type, and make corrections on the typed copy. It looks so good when it's typed, so lots of people think it's finished when it's not finished, because it looks finished. So I like looking at my messy handwriting and wondering, "What word did I write there?" I have messy handwriting, and my brain moves faster than my hand. So sometimes I come up with great words I probably didn't intend, and because I can't figure it out, my brain is kicked into something else.
Claire Beaver: What are your inspirations? Are you reading anything great right now?
KB Ballentine: I love reading poets. I love Sharon Hammonds Miller, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Danusha Laméris. There's the classics Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon. There are so many, it's like asking who's your favorite child. There are so many good poets on the scene now. I find when I teach my college students, we go back to Whitman and Dickinson and I'm just like, "I forgot Whitman wrote this, I like Whitman again." It's fun to relearn some of this stuff when you go back, teaching others is just a real inspiration.
KB Ballentine
KB Ballentine’s latest collection, Spirit of Wild, launched in 2023. Published in Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022) and The Strategic Poet (2021). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.
Claire Beaver
Claire Beaver is a multidisciplinary writer living and working in New York. Her work has been featured in Last Leaves Magazine, Outspoken, Victory Lapped, and more. Her first chapbook, bones, ashes, fire, was recently released from Bottlecap Press. She is passionate about the power of art and how we interact with it in our daily lives, whether that be conscious or not. She has an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin.
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