 Paul VanDerWerf CC Do poems ever come to us easily and without struggle? No. It's like rock climbing without safety gear, the wild heart lurching out towards the world to say "what happened was" and "here, here once stood all of my beloveds", and the ache of what was, measured out against what still remains. Us, still standing and telling the story. Always telling the story. In Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, Koss takes the reader into pain country, with both great courage and humor, because without laughter, pain and loss can utterly destroy a body. These are poems hard won from the blows of a hard and often unforgiving life, poems that stand like monuments on a hill to all those the poet loved and cared for. Poems too, that tackle all the useless noise of a world wrapped in contradiction and ill intent, that stagger clear into the night to speak truth to lies. These are battle cries, but also, sweet tastes of life's softer sides. Poems for outsiders and working class queers who, as Carson McCullers says "find it hard to live, and therefore have to live a little harder." Koss is a poet with all eyes on the unseen and the discarded, the lone shoe on the side of the highway, the stories that are hardest to tell, told straight through, and with a heart on fire. We need more voices like hers, and more spaces willing to give shelter to these important stories. We spoke with Koss recently about her book and its many complicated, powerful, interweaving threads. We hope what follows will move the reader not just to pick up a copy of Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, but to sit a while also with the deep and moving wisdom Koss shared with us, here, in the open valley where all strugglers are welcome. James Diaz: Your wonderful debut collection, "Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect" is lovingly dedicated to your Grandmother. Would you like to talk about her a bit? I think we both know the irreplaceable role Grandmother's play in our lives: their gentleness, their mercy, their tender tending (even to the roughest amongst the family tree) and their somehow always being the "cooler heads prevailing" in almost any situation. We learn so much from these Grand/Mothers, and we wonder how we will ever keep that sort of flame alive in us after their absence. What have been the enduring lessons that your Grandmother left you with? How have they revealed themselves in other ways? Creatively, interpersonally? Koss: James, you and I were both lucky to have amazing grandmothers. Where would we be now without them? I think my poem you published, “Mother, Superego, When You Died, the World…” says what she was better than I can. She was like the superego of the family for those who never properly maturated. She made people behave by her amazing example, but also, one wouldn’t want to disappoint her. She was gentle, strong, and kind, and tried to make up for everyone’s lack as well as soften the harshness of life for us (much of which was inflicted by birth parents). And the down side to her kindness was a. she gave and gave and sometimes received very little in return and b. both she and my grandfather were, at times, enablers to addiction. She was a good Christian with doubts, the kind who didn’t judge others and who believed in the power of good deeds. She was very altruistic, but I have to think, while her heart was very open, she had a lot of unmet need. She did have a lot of people who loved her, and several who considered her their best friend. Probably most of her emotional needs that were filled were met through friendship. I think anything decent in me came from her. And, as far as “lessons” go, there were lessons about devotion, giving, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and kindness—along with its limitations in the face of addiction. Also, I think there are lessons about giving and receiving/reciprocity, which can translate into boundary issues at times. I don’t mean this in any “blame mother” way, but as much as I am like her (she was way nicer than I am), I’m still harboring a hope to rid myself of some of these people-pleasing attributes. And lastly, I think being raised by her taught me the importance of gratitude. Most people, I think, to some degree take their parents and their support for granted. I felt like everything I got was a gift. I was keenly aware my grandparents were giving up a big chunk of their lives to take on my sister and I. It felt, at an early age, that no one really owes you anything… Whenever things were dark, she was like a beacon of hope, not to sound cliche, and we always had each other’s backs. Even now, years after she left this plane, I find ways to conjure her that are comforting, and I truly do believe love is enduring in this way, and as much time as I spend creatively on processing traumatic things, there is also attention to recreating (or “conjuring”) what is lost through daily activities, ritual, and art.  JD: The book opens with one of my personal favorite pieces of yours, "My Therapist Sez", and showcases your incredible talent for interspersing moments of humor within otherwise tragic and traumatic contexts, and not only does that balance work, it is quite uncanny, in the same way, I think, that often in really dysfunction early environments, the ability of family members to harbor spaces for humor can be the difference between psychical life or death. There are humorless dysfunctional families after all, and we see every day what happens in the world when early trauma has no way to be transformed, weather through the ability to break tension with a moment of laughter, (having one single adult in your family who can do this can be nothing short of a life-line for a life) or the ability to hold space for sensitivity and creative expression. It is no accident after all that most comedians work from the place of their pain and trauma. Jokes and puns become a tool of transformation, of working through, and it's one of the reasons why we can laugh at really dark humor, because we can archaically remember those places within our own stories and families where the ability to laugh, even in the midst of pain, was possible. What are your thoughts on humor's place in poetry, and as a serious life-line in some ways? There is such a lack of it in most poetry that it is so refreshing to see someone embrace it, and do so well at balancing profoundly painful topics with touches of laughter. I'm tempted to say such moments are almost transcendent, however briefly. K: Firstly, I’m glad you appreciate the humor here. I’ve had some people not even get it! Yes, I think it is vital to survival, and I love your “transcendent moments.” I think with trauma things become pent up in your body. Everything is energy. And humor and art are ways to process and move that energy. So is expressed anger. My sister and I once shared an ability to access the absurdity of our family circumstances in ways most people probably couldn’t relate to because, as an example, what is funny about being married five or six times, or shooting yourself in the leg playing quickdraw, or cutting yourself out of a tree with a chainsaw while stoned? Some of us cultivated a sense of the absurd through the crazy escapades we witnessed. This shared humor is touched on in the Butthole Surfers poem. I think our humor came from the women in my family—on both sides. I remember my Aunt Judy talking about these horrible, traumatic childhood events (her father was schizophrenic and left them—their lives were very difficult), and she’d always put some weird spin on things and have everyone laughing. My birth mother, also, has a unique sense of humor, as did my maternal grandmother, the grandmother who appears in this book.  JD: "TV" is such an interesting poem. Especially in a moment where it seems our fates are hinged to what we see on it, news-wise especially. And if one has missed something that all else have seen, there is sometimes a fierce demand to "catch up on the latest news" in fact one's goodness or badness may even be assessed on what one has seen and what they have not. But is tele-visual storytelling the only way to receive the news of the world? I'm also thinking of a lovely distinction another poet makes between "the news of the world" and "the news of the heart". The former is diffuse and spread out everywhere, the latter is more local, near to hand, and I don't mean in the sense of only caring for the people in your family or town or country, but in the more humbling sense of taking-care by engaging with stories in their depth, their full-throated humanity, which we almost never receive tele-visually. What are your thoughts on this and also were some of these things on your mind in writing the poem "TV"? The opening line: "Watching the TV, it seems as though everything is about the same distance from me, and consequently, that everything has equal value," seems especially to speak to this flattening that tele-visual information induces in us. K: I can see how “TV” has a new relevance given what our lives are like and how social media has evolved or devolved our empathy and humanity. I wrote it a very long time ago during another war, and at the time I was doing monochromatic paintings of helicopters and existential landscapes with minimal figures engaging in barren, smoke-filled landscapes. Some of those were framed in screen-like or television shapes. I had, at that age, noticed what I thought was a shift, a generational shift, in the way people process information. I remember being at a party and there was something on MTV, like “the year in review,” and they assembled car crashes, skiing accidents, and other tragedies into a music video and people were laughing as cars rolled over rails and burst into flames. And I thought, “My God, what is happening to people? These are real people dying who have families and loved ones who have lost them?” And it just struck me as really obscene, the way media can distance and numb people. So now we have news via social media, and unmanaged blips of all varieties of information to scroll through, a further altering of our realities, not to mention the gaslighting by news media and how social media companies manipulate our reality through algorithms, hashtags, ranking, and shadow banning. It’s fucking crazy, all of it. The fragmentation, the shallowness of it. The addiction of it also. So yes to some kind of storytelling that has depth and no character limits, and that might exist outside of all of this, but that can probably only exist in smaller communities, and I do see that happening somewhat on social media, along with all of the dark stuff, which is why there is all the censorship and backlash. I find all of this really overwhelming. Truth telling and storytelling, as you say, really are essential to surviving the modern world. But the platforms for doing that are being dismantled. So big yes, to storytelling and in-depth discussion, but I don’t see a lot of that. Social media has dumbed everything down. And journalism in the U.S. is a joke.  JD: In "The Fall of Toby and Lady you write": "Goats climbed on tractors and ate my laces and jean hems as they gazed with disinterest into my tanned kid face through widely spaced eyes. They destroyed things because, like men, the world belonged to them. And like men, people loved them anyway." What really struck me is the powerful image of disinterested animals, facing a kid whom they've damaged, literally ate up their things, and then staring blankly, like, "what's the big deal?" almost. And then we move into the similarity with men, but I think also of abusers in general, those who eat us up and stare back disinterestedly at the damage they've caused. I'm lingering on this piece of the poem because I think it showcases so well the powerful command you have of metaphor throughout this collection. And I'm thinking of this in the sense of what is meta/for, its function? They are everywhere in this book and I feel like they harbor the key, so to speak, to the mind-house (found in "11-Month Post-Suicide Vacation Poem") and offer a glimpse of what it might mean to "make it so" from things which are not necessarily what we'd want for them to be. Your metaphors put things into contact in ways that open up, to my mind at least, so many avenues for exploration of meaning, and how that meaning can shift over a lifetime. What do these metaphors mean for you, personally? In this book, but in all your work also? K: James, it is interesting to hear the connections you are making as you read. I think it started with a simile, but yes, was something I returned to at the end, comparing goats to Ms. Fuchs. Most of the time, I don’t use metaphor in a calculated way. It happens as a more natural process, although simile, which, for me is different, very different in an ontological sense, is, I think, more specific, but also, maybe dumbed down in comparison, although you made it sound very complex, so thank you. I think of metaphor as a sort of natural process of the human mind and part of how we understand things, are relational, etc. Probably the way I was educated informs the tendency, but also, I think being a visual artist is part of it. Metaphor for me can escape its linguistic trappings and be almost mystical. If one believes in akasha, or the book of life, or that our stories exist (and overlap) in our fields, or even that everything is somehow connected through prana, an oversoul, or some other binding force, then writing metaphor, like air, is part of the fabric of existence, just waiting for us to tap into it. And if one can’t go there, perhaps it’s possible to concede that our overlapping experiences and perceptions exist within a collective social and historical fabric, making metaphor also a natural phenomenon. When I’m writing or making art, these connections reemerge in extended metaphor. And images and themes repeat themselves, sometimes over and over (especially those associated with trauma). I am usually not aware of the process ‘til I’m able to come back to the work as an observer. Example, after I wrote “Toby and Lady,” I thought, “Oh, wow, there’s also a biblical reference here with the apple, temptation, and Toby and Lady are Adam and Eve, or maybe Ms. Fuch’s is Eve, but nothing is as “someone’s God” intended, because it’s being filtered through my queer mind/experience. Haha. But I may be the only one who thought of it this way. And the beauty of writing, I think, is that we all get to make our own unique associations with the finished poem, which is why I’m often reluctant to say a lot about my work. I always feel like it becomes too specific and I’m somehow killing something through that specificity.  JD: It is impossible to not talk about loss and grief in this book. After a death, practices of grieving are so important to cultivate and they do not come easily or right away or sometimes ever. What has been helpful for you in your grief journey? All the complexity of grief: the anger, the missing, the ache, the no-words. Yet words do come. And their coming can feel like a hand on a shoulder, though such poor substitute for what/who is missing. Can poetry be penultimate grief work? Can it still touch us in moments of frozen, as well as moments of thaw? Can it hold our dead, our beloved, in close contact with the midnight hour of our grief while opening up windows in the house of our loss? Windows through which so many magpies fly through? The intelligent bird- the head-bird, house-head? Again, the way your metaphors work throughout this landscape are so striking that their interconnecting threads are almost endless. Can the poem hold it all? Where must it fail, and what do we do with the parts that never take wing, that can never totally fit back right again, that are not the magpies we thought they were? Because grief can also make us dumb, such an undoing with so little visible path left back the way we came. Are their trails we can follow still in their washed-outness, and instinctively make our way back to who we knew and loved, within us, and the world? And the work. The work? K: Well, I think writing poetry is a good way to process grief, and I see some poets do this throughout their lives and bodies of work—Gregory Orr is one example. I feel my writing and visual art are often about loss, even when not directly. One thing that has happened here in recent years is that in Western funerals, family and friends might share anecdotes about the deceased person. I think we keep people alive through story, but not just writing, but sharing with each other. I’m sure some would disagree, and everyone has their own way of coping with and processing loss, but for me, communication and articulating feelings are a huge piece of healing, but also of honoring the dead. I don’t personally feel like our relationships end completely when a person departs, but that the conversation continues… But even without believing in an afterlife, there is a way love can continue through our memories and stories, a way we can keep people in our hearts, and carry them on in our actions. Can writing hold it all? No, because words often fail, and also, because grief can be a sprawling lifelong journey with a character that continually changes shape. When I was doing writing in my deepest grief, I called poems my “emotional containers.” But in reality, feelings run their own course, and there is no magic antidote to something that must be lived. What writing grief did for me in part was to give voice and a small bit of validation I wasn’t receiving from other people, and also, and this was really important, it allowed me to compartmentalize grief rather that having a full-on, overwhelming loss (and trauma) experience 24-7. But I will say, I spent a lot of fucking time writing for a couple of years. It was pretty crazy, actually. But it was writing that got me through. I was also comforting myself, which I see you do in a lot of your work, James.  JD: The book ends with a really powerful, hauntingly provocative line: "My house is a head". I am reminded how, in many ways, the only refuge we have as travellers from the country of trauma, is in our own heads. And what follows from the painful disconnect of our heads from our hearts, from our bodies, from the rest of our story. We say a house is haunted, but we might also mean our own heads, our heads are haunted. You also write that "there were other possible endings to our story." "What remains" the final section, reminds me palpably of Paul Celan's "what remained after all else", I'm loosely paraphrasing, but he suggests it is the words, the darklight of words, which is perhaps what remains of us who have been irreparably transformed by trauma, by losses, such daunting losses. There is a back and forth of despair in the closing poem, (this is a real and profound loss we are traveling through) but also something else, "you people won't break me" a steadfast determination of going-on-being, " A magpie sits on the lampshade / Even if it isn’t a magpie, I make it so", a small inner transformation of something that is not quite what we want the thing to be, but we are able to alter a thing ever so slightly as to hold a specific memory form, or a moment of memories mad rush to the surface of us. There is power here, in slight transformation, in the "head of a house" from which we live, finding small ways to "make things just so," to fit, to speak to us in a familiar voice. To make them what we need them to be, even if only for a moment. All this is just to say, in a resonant way, that "11-Month Post-Suicide Vacation Poem" is an astounding, deeply moving piece. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this piece, what led you to close with it, and, because there is so much contrast held in tension here, much as our grief demands, what has slightly altered for you since the writing of this poem, of this book? What other moments of "making it so" have emerged and have you found yourself becoming a "somewhere-thing" in the world? Even if in such brief and bewildering moments? What has your "inner house" become since the daunting unravellings in this book? K: I’m glad you like this piece as it’s one of my favorites. It was the end of another manuscript, but strangely, feels like it should be the end of any book I write. I think that while you point out despair in it, there is also some kind of openness and hope, and some of that is in the humor of it, and the very last line. I think the poem itself is headlike, and as I wrote it, I was asking the question, can a poem just be a list of innerworkings and observations. This poem is zuihitsu in this way, but different as I think it falls between list and zuihitsu. And I am sure, for some, I didn’t get away with it, but it passed my own standard. I was also thinking about, in my loss, what a home is, is it a person, or it is something we carry inside. A poem is also a home, or as I said before, a container. But I don’t want to make it more specific in sharing this, because it served as the end piece because I think it is an opening, which is how all things should end in a kind world. I think that there are not enough moments of “making it so” although one might argue the whole process of creating is about “making it so.” I think because of abandonment, queerness, and early childhood stuff (along with adult trauma) the “somewhere thing” has also always been a bit problematic. Also, being an artist or writer, for me, has always been a liminal space between lived experience and the re-sorting/transformation of it. Writing, especially, has an out-of-life quality, or we’re always living it twice, or multiple times, especially when there has been trauma. And in the case of loss, it can feel like a part of us is gone that can’t be retrieved. Also, being queer and not welcome in the world isn’t conducive to being “a somewhere thing” as you are always cast out… But I think somehow the act of writing, of creating, is also a huge pronouncement: “I am here or was here. This happened. It mattered. I matter.” It goes beyond ego. It’s about psychic survival.  JD: I am admittedly a long-winded interviewer, so I want to open the floor to you to talk a bit about any of the threads of this book I might have missed, or what your hopes are for its reception, and also what is next for you, Koss? What do you see coming into focus on the horizon? K: First off, I want to thank you for publishing so many of my difficult pieces and also, for your selflessness in providing a platform for others’ difficult work, addiction work, loss and trauma work—and also, for providing a space for working-class writers and people discriminated against by much of the lit world. You are giving voice to important, human experience and assisting them in being “somewhere things.” What I’m doing right now is working on a hybrid, memoirish project which is happening, in part, due to a generous bursary from Granta. It is an expansion of recent work and includes more about childhood and trauma, and it also includes personal essays. Other than that, I’m doing web design and trying to shift my focus to practical life things, preparing for a garden for ’25, and working on web projects for income. Writing has been the number one priority for me in recent years, and I’ve tended not to conduct life in a balanced way, so self-care and maybe getting out more are also part of the ’25 program. I’m trying to generate some hope despite the election, and it mostly centers around small, local things. Thanks so much for offering this interview and for all of the support over the last five or so years.  Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is available from Diode Editions as well as directly from the author's website.
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