Finding Her Place: Kathryn Jones on the Peace in Poetry
Interview by Marilyn Krum
After growing up on the Texas Gulf coast and later moving to Fort Worth, Kathryn Jones, a journalist, essayist, and poet, eventually found her way to her remote 125-acre Texas ranch that she has shared with her husband since 2004. Here, she is at home with her rescue cats, a Border Collie, two horses, and two miniature donkeys. On the sprawling ranch with limestone ledges, one can witness a spectacular view of the western sky with its “notched horizon.” The ranch, near Glen Rose with its cedar-lined rocky hills, is also a natural habitat for the golden-cheeked warbler, an endangered species of bird that breeds in Central Texas. Taking her inspiration for poetry from the natural world, she is able “to observe land, flora, and fauna up close and in detail in all seasons.” It is this unique setting that provides a respite and a place of peace for Jones, who can often be found with a camera and notebook observing and writing about nature.
Born in Los Angeles, Jones moved as an infant with her father and mother to Texas as fast as she could. Her mother was a small-town girl from Kingsville, yearning to return home. Raised in Corpus Christi and attending Del Mar College and Trinity University, Jones later launched her journalism career with the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “Beach Glass” and “Oysters Don’t Feel Pain” are poems inspired by the Gulf Coast. Jones completed her undergraduate degree at Trinity in San Antonio where she double majored in English lit and journalism, graduating in 1979. She liked the fact that Trinity was a small campus and she fell in love with it. “I always loved to write,” she recalls, “and my professor encouraged me to take journalism classes and I found I was good at it.” After her work in Corpus Christi, Jones covered the Texas Legislature and then worked as a staff writer at The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and as a writer under contract for The New York Times. She later freelanced for several prominent magazines, which she found allowed her more creativity. “Journalism taught me to be an observer and to do research when I didn't know about something,” Jones notes how both of those skills have been helpful to her poetry. Later, after moving to the ranch, she and her husband, Dan Malone, landed teaching positions at Tarleton State University. “Teaching dovetailed with my interests,” reflects Jones, who taught journalism. “I loved every minute of it.”
Jones describes her poems as featuring vivid imagery and detail. At Trinity, she worked for a professor who was a concrete or shape poet who ran a small literary press. Under this professor, she remembers studying T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. However, she followed the journalistic path and put serious poetry aside until 2020. Today, the “minimalist” desert and the western vistas of northern New Mexico also call Jones’ name. After spending several summers in Taos as part of a graduate program through SMU, Jones earned a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Southwest. Embracing the landscape and culture, she now looks forward to yearly travels to northern New Mexico, particularly Santa Fe. This is the place where her poems “Vessel” and “Resurrection” are set.
Jones’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on Texas Poetry Assignment, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She has also written a new nonfiction book, a biography of Ben Johnson, actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi in the upcoming year. In 2016, she was inducted into the prestigious Texas Institute of Letters, which Jones refers to as “a real honor.”
Although she began writing poetry as a child, Jones did not write poetry seriously until 2020 when her work as a journalist came to a halt. Tejascovido.com, now called Texas Poetry Assignment, filled the gap and provided connections to other poets during the pandemic. Jones states, “It was brilliant and survived.” With this group, writers were able to stay in touch, complete online assignments, hold monthly meetings online, and develop a sense of community. “It was a great way to keep Texas poets together.” She yearned to write. “Castaway at Midnight” (2020) is one of those poems. In this project, she found encouragement from TPA founder Laurence Musgrove and gained enough confidence to begin sending her work out. She also enjoys writing haiku with its simplicity and economy. She has written “Haikus of Texas” and “Moon Haikus” and enjoys reading Matsuo Basho, the master of haiku. Her fascination with the natural world continues, and a favorite poet in this realm is Wendell Berry.
Her upcoming chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, is actually autobiographical. Her father cared for the largest collection of orchids in the Southwest well into his 90s. He was an expert and became known as the “orchid man of South Texas.” However, he was completely self-taught. The Samuel Jones Conservatory at the South Texas Botanical Gardens and Nature Center in Corpus Christi is named for her father. This is the place where her father taught classes on orchid care. Orchids are the largest family of flowering plants and, though temperamental, they can grow in dry places like mountains and rocks. Jones states that orchids became a metaphor. “You can learn a lot by observing nature.” In a news article from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Jones reflected on her father, who died in 2018, "He was the ultimate cultivator. He found learning about them, teaching and mentoring people about them to a new generation ... as gratifying as growing them."
For Jones, writing poetry has been gratifying as it helps her today to cope with and to process grief. She coped with the loss of her parents in 2016 and 2018. And it is poetry that has helped her cope with her husband’s recent diagnosis. On social media, Jones refers to herself as a “writer and editor, poet, orchid keeper, lover of wildlife and wild spaces.” When she is not traveling to Santa Fe, hiking in Big Bend, and visiting other noteworthy landscapes in Texas, she finds peace outdoors at her ranch. She and I spoke recently about her background, process, topics of interest, and the craft and inspiration for her poems published on Texas Poetry Assignment.
How would you describe your origin story as a poet? What are your first memories of reading and writing poetry? Which people, teachers, and poets were most influential to you in the beginning?
KJ: I remember memorizing poems as a child. They all rhymed back then, like a song. Memorization came easy to me and I had a voice that projected, so I was often asked to read poems and plays aloud during school functions. My biggest influence was my high school English teacher, Dorothy McCoy, at W.B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where I grew up. She opened the door to the English poets–Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Blake, and others. After I graduated from high school, I went to a local junior college my freshman year–Del Mar College–and had the good fortune to work for a retired Baylor professor who was an expert on the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and was editing a book of letters between her and her cousin, John Kenyon. My job was to transcribe the letters and then see if I could find links between the content and her poetry, which I did. This professor had a fire-proof room in her condominium where she kept a large collection of letters she and her late husband had amassed over the years–letters of Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and others. Sitting there in the afternoons listening to her talk about a life of literature and letters never left me. I always harbored a desire to write poetry. I just didn’t know how to go about it. I read a lot of poetry. One of my favorite forms is Japanese haiku. I’ve tried lots of different forms, but free verse is what I tend to do these days.
How would you describe your writing process when it comes to poetry? How do you know when you are ready to write a poem and how does the drafting, revising, and editing process work for you?
KJ: I find inspiration for subjects from so many directions: an artwork, a photo, a video (like the one I saw of a murmuration), another writer’s poem, a memory. If I’m doing research on a topic –for example, my poem “Perseverance” about the Mars rover–I’ll open a file and start making notes. Then I think about format–would this be better in one long stanza or two-line stanzas or a form like a sonnet? I start drafting and revising as I go along. When I get a draft I’m happy with, I let it sit for at least a day, then look at it again and edit. Sometimes I’ll write a poem quickly, in one sitting, but most of them take shape over several days.
What topics or issues frequent your poems? Have those changed over time?
KJ: Nature still provides me with a lot of subject matter because of where I live. Sometimes I sit on my patio with my camera and take pictures or just observe. Place is a subject I come back to over and over again. This has changed over time as I’ve traveled more. I love northern New Mexico and spent part of my grad school days at SMU there; the university has a campus at Ranchos de Taos. I’ve hiked and backpacked over the years, especially in Big Bend. Canyons resonate with me. A lot of my poetry concerns place and how it shapes people. My parents died over the course of two years (2016-2018) and I have struggled with grief. My new chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, which will be published in August by Finishing Line Press, deals with that. Also, my husband was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s last year after struggling with dementia for four years. I’ve written about that more recently. I’ve come to realize that I process grief by writing poetry.
I have read your poem “Murmuration” on Texas Poetry Assignment. What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem? How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on the page? Shape? Line? Music? Comparison? Balance? Were there any new craft choices you made?
KJ: What I like most about Texas Poetry Assignment is that I write poems on subjects I probably otherwise would overlook. When Laurence sent out a call for poems about personification, under the heading of “What It’s Like Here,” I struggled at first. The poem “Murmuration” came about after I saw a video on Facebook of a murmuration of starlings. I got interested in what prompted murmurations, did some research, and came up with the poem pretty quickly. I wrote it so it would look like a murmuration on the page, with stops and starts and a swirling sensation. Every stanza is different, just as a murmuration is constantly changing. Then I came up with “Perseverance” and enjoyed writing both so much. Shape matters when it fits – I’ve written a poem called “Vessel” written in the shape of a Pueblo Indian pot. With murmuration, watching birds swirling in the air made me think of music. “Murmuration” is my most successful poem, I think, in terms of marrying subject and form. I read it last year at a TPA poetry event at the Lark & Owl Bookstore in Georgetown. I could feel the audience’s warm response. It’s fun to read aloud.
KJ: Another poem: “Yearning to Breathe Free.” I like to challenge myself with different forms I haven’t used before. Somehow, I heard about a form called an “acrostic golden shovel” and was fascinated. I had to try it. In acrostic poems, the first letter in each line spells a word or phrase. In this poem, the phrase is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” In golden shovels, the last word in each line is borrowed from an existing work, often a poem or a song. In this poem, the last word in each line comes from the end of the bronze plaque inscription and date on the Statue of Liberty from the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. I thought of Walt Whitman when I was writing it. Laurence called it a “fine poem” which made me very happy because he’s such an excellent curator and judge of poetry.
What advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry, writing poetry, and publishing their work?
KJ: Keep reading poetry; that’s the best way to learn. I have a folder on my desktop titled “Poems I Like.” I subscribe to the daily poem from the Poetry Foundation. I look forward to reading a poem in my inbox first thing every morning. I put the ones I really like in the folder. Sometimes a poem will inspire me to write a poem and I sit at my computer and start composing. Keep a notebook. Jot down things that come to you—possible subjects, a line that pops into your head, a description, your reaction to something. When I am stumped, I look at the list. I also look at titles and words [researching a word]. I also take a lot of photographs. Many times I’ll go back to a photograph to help me describe something. Give yourself permission to experiment. Challenge yourself to write a poem a day; I’ve been doing that this year. I spend 30 minutes to an hour early in the day or late at night. Getting in the habit of writing poetry and making time for it – not waiting for moments of inspiration – are key. You might write a lot of poems that will never get published, but you are improving and getting experience, and for every dozen mediocre poems, there might be a great one. Finally, I recommend subscribing to a newsletter like Duotrope, which compiles lists of mags and journals, and what I find especially helpful is deadlines coming up for poetry contests or open submissions. Then enter contests – some are free – and take advantage of open submission periods. Remember, rejection is part of the process in any kind of writing. Don’t get discouraged. Keep trying and you WILL get published!
If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?
KJ: I think Suzanne Morris is one of the best poets on TPA. She seems to get to the heart of what she’s writing about–she captures a word or a feeling. Her poems always stand out to me. Katherine Hoerth, who is the editor of Lamar University Literary Press, is another favorite. Hoerth’s poems have a lot of beauty and attention to form. They are very professional but also very emotional and approachable. Vincent Hostak is a regular and I love hearing him read his poems during our monthly Zoom readings. His poems are so ethereal.
How would you distinguish contemporary poetry from poetry from earlier eras?
KJ: I would say that subject matter and form are the big differences. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most published poetry rhymed. Much of it fits a formal structure – a sonnet, a pantoum, an ode. Contemporary poetry usually doesn’t rhyme, and some literary journals say upfront in their guidelines that they don’t want rhyming poetry. Stanzas are blown apart. Lines and spacing are all over the place – sometimes too much so, in my opinion. Sometimes scattered words and lines make it difficult to read a poem. If there’s a reason for it, great. Freed from the confines of the past, modern poetry can reach a wider audience and, in my opinion, communicate more emotion. It used to be that poets write about nature or love, but these days the subject matter is a lot grittier and realistic. Poets are more diversified, too, and that’s reflected in the subject matter about racism, social injustices, war, violence, politics, gender, and sexuality. I’m enjoying the poems written by so many talented Native American poets (like Joy Harjo) and Latino poets (Ada Limon) these days –both U.S. poet laureates. That would have never been possible in the past.
If you had a chance to ask a question to a poet you admire (living or dead), who is the poet and what would you ask?
KJ: Oh, good question. I guess it would be Emily Dickinson. I would like to ask her how she found the inspiration and courage to defy the restrictions of her day. How did she come up with her original wordplay, abrupt line breaks, and unexpected rhymes? She still has such influence today.
Marilyn Krum is a retired high school journalism and English teacher from Gonzales, Texas. She currently teaches and tutors at Victoria College-Gonzales Center. She is pursuing a second career as a college English instructor and is currently working on a master’s degree in English at Angelo State University.
