Visiting with Samantha Kolber

by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor

What inspired your poem “Jewel Tones”?

This poem was inspired by my mother. She is a knitter, and her specialty is socks. I have about two dozen pairs. She has only sold one pair of socks, and it was to my poetry professor Rhoda Carroll. I would wear my hand-knit socks to class, and Rhoda loved them. When I told her my mother made them, she asked if my mother would make her a pair, and said she would pay for her time and materials. Once we worked out the deal, my mother announced that she was going to use yarn called “jewel tones”—a rich, gorgeous mix of color. Well, of course I fell in love with that phrase. As soon as I got off the phone, I grabbed my journal and wrote away, and the very fist draft of “Jewel Tones” the poem was born.

Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of this poem.

My writing process starts in my journal. I hand write everything, and then go back and pull things out and type them up and form them into a poem. The development of this poem actually has a nice, organic story behind it: I wrote it in my journal with no specific form in mind. Just the basic phrases and images came out about my mother, her knitting process and my perception of her, the socks, the yarn. I write to process my life, and I think a lot about my relationship with my mother came out in this piece. As I looked back and re-read it, then went to type it up for a poem, I realized that certain phrases were repeating themselves in a way that seemed familiar.

I had been reading a lot of different kinds of poetry, and I was studying The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms. The repetitive lines in my draft reminded me of a form I had read about, the pantoum. In the pantoum, the second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat as the first and third lines of the next stanza, and the first line of the poem is the last line of the poem, so that the poem forms a closed circle. I also had just read Nadell Fishman’s pantoum, “Something More True Than This” in her book Drive, so this form must have been stuck in my subconscious.

As I formed “Jewel Tones” into a poem, I had very little to change—it had come out of me organized mostly in pantoum form. Plus, the fact that the poem is about knitting—a patterned craft—makes it fit this form really well. Of course I tinkered with it to follow the pattern of the pantoum more faithfully, but I think the structure works so well because the poem came out that way on its own. There are times in my writing process when I do sit down and command myself to write in a specific form, and that can work well, too. Sometimes starting with a frame helps to get things out that might be stuck inside.

Name your favorite living writer and tell us why.

My favorite living writer is Ariel Gore. Her writing is raw and real, her voice is very poetic, and her ideas are radical and intelligent. I completely identify with her. As a single mother, she is an inspiration to me for mothering and writing and understanding the thin line that divides the two.

What’s the hardest thing to get right in a poem?

I think the hardest thing to get right in a poem is authenticity—being authentic to yourself and your own voice, but also being aware of your audience. I think you need to write for yourself and not to impress an audience. But I have learned things about my writing that I would have never considered without my audience’s perception of it, so that knowledge seeps into my awareness and tries to inform me as I write. That and the ending. I tend to write poems with closure, so it takes a practiced awareness for me to let it go and not tie it up into a neat little package. Except for the pantoum, of course!

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*Contact Claire with any questions or suggestions for Hunger Mountain’s Art + Life section at hungermtnal@gmail.com.

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