Kenzie Allen’s debut collection, Cloud Missives (Tin House Books, 2024) is filled with poems as restless as they are carefully wrought. Building intimacy with rhythm and repetition, Allen, a Haudenosaunee poet, invites readers into a deeper meditation of what it means to survive. “This is an elegy against elegy,” Allen writes. “[W]e are not dead and gone.” Four sections excavate past, present, and pop culture, with Pocahontas, Tiger Lily, Indiana Jones, La Traviata, the Occupy Movement, and the ghost of the British Empire all getting some treatment. Allen’s poems lament, indict, confess, rebuild, and celebrate, while blending dark humor, sorrow, curiosity, respect, and healing into what might be called a new vision.
An artist and a scholar, Allen divides her time between Toronto, the Norwegian city of Stavanger, and the Oneida Reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She is known for asking penetrating questions in her work, shared in places like Boston Review, Narrative, Poetry, and The Paris Review.
I read Cloud Missives while traveling the Ring Road in southern Iceland, seeing glaciers composed of ice both thousands of years old and fresh as last spring. The tension is profound, and this landscape, somehow both personal and tectonic in scope, seemed a fitting backdrop for Cloud Missives.
Over the next few weeks, I exchanged emails with Allen about reinvention, the power and risk of the collective “we,” her many sources of inspiration, craft, and asking a horse to change its lead foot.
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The Rumpus: You’re an accomplished artist in several areas, including beadwork and vocal performance, specifically opera. How do these other artistic modes influence your writing of poetry? What does poetry offer, in contrast, that feels singular or unique?
Kenzie Allen: Living in many different places, needing outlets for energy and emotion, led to a wide-ranging creative impulse. Traditionally, in Indigenous cultures, our literatures take so many forms: beading, dance, earthworks, and more. Sometimes these other arts contribute subject matter to my poems, sometimes they inspire new processes and multimodalities, and sometimes they just allow my brain and body to switch modes for a moment, to come back to the page refreshed, with new insights or perspectives.
Glassblowing, juggling, spinning and weaving yarn, drawing, and music and singing have all come with their own sets of processes and techniques and histories. I think that’s ultimately what I’m attracted to across mediums and disciplines. It’s nice to have some processes from which you can mostly predict the outcome. You might be attempting to get better at the thing, but you generally know what the end-goal looks like.
With poetry, the destination isn’t as clear from the outset, nor is the path to get there. Sometimes it feels like I forget how to write a poem every time I sit down to attempt it. There’s an intense pressure in that, but there’s also great potential. Poetry welcomes experimentation in this glorious way. In other arts, I learn new techniques and challenge myself toward established milestones, but poetry’s possibilities feel endless and uncharted for me. I know I’ll never reach that horizon. There will always be something new waiting to be found.
Rumpus: Are there poems in the collection that, rather than being written in the traditional sense, carried you along through that ride of experimentation?
Allen: “Elegy Against Elegy” and “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song” were both surprises and affected my own reinvention. With “Elegy,” in comparison to some of my earlier poems about Indigenous identity, in which pop culture figures were the inciting incidents, I felt I could finally start directly from Haudenosaunee cosmologies. I didn’t expect it to take on the formal elements it did on the page—the different voices and conversations represented through vertical and horizontal space. I didn’t expect to end up referencing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address as a means of nullifying the “dead and gone” elegies often written about Indigenous peoples, but maybe I should have seen that coming. We live in community with our nonhuman cousins and with the land, our mother. That process of returning to your place in communion with the world around you is very important to the book’s journey as a whole.
As for “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song”—I cried after writing this poem! I had the original premise, but then I ended up grounding it in landscape more than I expected. Again, the land intervened in that poem, as well as the realization that, in the end, it wasn’t really another relationship that helped you move on, it was nurturing the relationship with the self that saved you.
The “against” element and the repetitions in the titles of those poems do emphasize revisiting and altering the form. My husband said recently, “Elegy has banishment built into it, doesn’t it? The meaning is baked into it, that what you’re describing is already gone.” I suppose the form reinvented itself right in front of me, when I finally understood I had to let that happen.
“Breaking Ground” is another poem I didn’t know I would have to write until the very end. It became apparent there was still a gap leading into the more abstract areas of the first body-oriented section, “Pathology.” I talk a lot about the camera lens, when it comes to anthropology and archaeology, and how it’s important to include the observer (with their biases and limitations) within the lens. Even though I thought the observer was in there, I hadn’t shown them with the tools of their art, their call to witness. Upon writing that poem, I understood it wasn’t just limitations and the act of observation being expressed, it was the speaker’s / observer’s stakes, their vulnerability and hopes, the mysteries that eluded them and the emotions that urged them forward—and that these things were important to share with the reader if I was going to ask them to go on this journey with me.
Rumpus: These poems that are tonally and topically various begin to chime with each other due to a thoughtful, intentional sequencing. How did you become aware that your stack of individual poems was a cohesive book?
Allen: The sections of Cloud Missives really helped unlock this compilation of poems, although chronology also played its part. The poems were written over a decade and naturally follow a progression of thought and [my] personal journey, as a result.
Someone told me the sections seem like four chapbooks, and I realize they did emerge out of that categorical instinct. “Pathology” was originally “the body project.” “Manifest” involved the chronology of poems that traced my reconciliation of Indigenous histories and identity. “Letters I Don’t Send” were their own project. “Love Songs” were a loose play on defining that term as a form. Taping poems up on the wall or laying them out on the floor at various times helped reveal a larger narrative arc at the heart of all these things. Seeing them in that visual array illuminated the echoes between them. Once I noticed the connections, I set out to write new poems, or to edit the existing ones, to fill in gaps and to explore further inspirations.
Rumpus: Many poems in Cloud Missives allude to the honor and spiritual heft of communal connection and sometimes even communal obligation. What do you see as the relationship between the personal lyric, driven by the “I,” and the collective voice, the “we”? How does poetry help you consider that relationship?
Allen: I’m very interested in the communal “we,” although of course it’s a bit of a fuzzy distinction. The audience is no monolith. Maybe we can only speak for an individual experience, via the “I,” with any accuracy. But there’s a feeling of kinship in that move toward the collective, which really appeals to me. Poetry allows shifts to happen very quickly between “I,” “we,” “they,” and so on.
You have to look to shared experiences that way, to understand which “we” is being spoken of at any given time. “We” can very quickly break into “they,” even if you do continue to share some of the characteristics, when differing goals or ideals delineate new boundaries. And with “we,” I do think there’s a responsibility to do right by the story and the peoples involved, to hold yourself accountable to what you use it for. There’s power in the collective element, and damage that can be done. You don’t want to erase voices by using it. In another example, however, the more-than-human world may not be able to make their plea for survivance in the same way poets can with their words, so maybe aligning with that collective as a “we” can help you remember and honor your place as kindred, connected, and responsible for a good future.
Rumpus: Along with the connection to a collective, there is a sense of self-reclamation that drives your writing process. “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song” offers a powerful revelation to this point: “Some days, / I say you saved me. / But it was my tread at the doorway / and out into the road.” Did this awareness of self-reclamation occur while writing each poem, or is this something you realized in retrospect?
Allen: All of the above. I was finally able to put a finer point on this sense of self-reclamation after a significant amount of mental and spiritual work to get there. It was always something the speakers were, and I was, seeking out—a safe haven we might shape from the rock face of our memories and mythologies, a beloved landscape that might welcome us back to ourselves. Even the earliest poems in the manuscript had that aspect of recovery. As I continued to write, I began to examine its many iterations. They might represent a progression, from confronting the hurts and habits to understanding the self, and from reclaiming individual power to honoring the world around you that shaped you and in which you hold communal responsibility.
Rumpus: Some of the poems engage directly this idea that “the world around you that shaped you” is also one in which “you hold communal responsibility.” How did these poems lead you to new revelations about that power dynamic—how the world both shapes us, and is shaped by us?
Allen: In the earlier sections in the book, those confronting colonial and interpersonal violences, I don’t think of that as shaping the speaker, so much as being an obstacle that time and distance and safety helps them overcome. Responsibility does not lie in the victim. There is still a need to not perpetuate those hurts further. I think about things like futurisms and how to tell those stories in a way that focuses on personal reclamation, rather than reformation of the violent force.
I can’t reclaim Tiger Lily—she was never our invention—but I can redeem my own memories and experiences. I can reconnect to the good ways, in the words of our core values of the Oneida, that I’m meant to uphold. I see communal responsibility as what we owe or offer to each other, and how we might caretake the land and our more-than-human world. In that case, it’s not so much a confounding or paradoxical power dynamic so much as a reciprocal relationship.
The earth, its peoples, and our experiences have given us these many gifts. What we give back defines us, as much as we might define ourselves. Giving ourselves back to the world, or back to ourselves, is also part of this, especially in Cloud Missives. The body is shaped by our movements, and here, too, is a responsibility we could have, to caretake the body, to value and honor it and the way it carries us. The world that makes us what we are and our responsibilities to it are not in opposition, but rather, they live in shimmering juxtaposition. It’s a point the book reaches after a long road, reviving the body and spirit so that one can “give [oneself] back to the flock.” Maybe that is why many of the poems that most vividly come to mind for this question come from the final section—“Love Songs.” Love is that force that shapes us, in ache or awe, and love is the force we can offer back.
Rumpus: “Shimmering juxtaposition” seems to function as an engine in many of the poems—awareness of elements that exist both in concert and tension with each other. How does this juxtaposition engage questions about community, the environment, and history?
Allen: The poem “Love Song for the End of Us” notes that we’re meant to be caretakers of the land, but at the moment, we are also contributing to its destruction. I’m less interested in the doomerist or fatalist approach, in terms of seeing it as a foregone conclusion, but the poem does ask us to face the ways human-triggered climate change and human-driven poisoning of ecosystems are putting such pressure and hurt into our more-than-human world. It asks how, in turn, this leads to our own grief and loss. How does our very presence become the disruptive force? How does the end of that story always end with the end of us? How, at this point, can we say, “We didn’t see it coming”?
With “In Which I Become (Pocahontas),” I will say, Disney’s Pocahontas did shape me, in the way that dominant-culture and public characters and conversations and stereotypes can put pressures and expectations on the self and the spirit. I grew up in my grandmother’s house, surrounded by artwork of Haudenosaunee figures, where two generations raised me to know we were Oneida. When I went outside, I was surrounded by stereotypes and the Hollywood Indian. The “In Which I Become” poems, and several others in the “Manifest” section, are all about reclaiming one’s true self, either in spite of these dominant-culture mythologies—Disney’s Tiger Lily, Disney’s Pocahontas, Indiana Jones, the Ghost of the British Empire—or as guided by Haudenosaunee figures—Skywoman, Earth Mother, the muskrat, the Three Sisters. Working toward the Haudenosaunee cosmologies and lived-realities in the poems also puts those true images back into the world. This helps people understand, and helps us to feel seen.
“Ode to Lookouts and Lighthouse Keepers” [locates these negotiations in a particular place]. When you’re up on a fire lookout, you can’t help but reflect on your life, on the experiential forces that made you what you are as well as the geological forces that made the landscape around you. “You abide by the vast repose.” And you consider history, memory, imagination. All the minutiae of your daily tasks and your watchfulness, your keen attendance to your surroundings, are part of a greater service to the earth and its inhabitants. At the best of times, we bring that deep attention to all that we love. We are made small in the largesse of the forest or ocean, and our smallest movements can spark disaster or seed a new generation.
Rumpus: These poems are generous, forthcoming and vulnerable. So much seems implied, unspoken, in the subtext, pauses, line breaks, and blank spaces. I heard you once refer to poetry’s “page play.” How do you go about engineering the commentary of these non-text spaces? How do you shape the blank spaces or let them shape your poems?
Allen: Much of the book’s preliminary task is to reorient the reader into unfamiliar territories, or landscapes you might think you already know but that have new insights or truths to be found.
You have to be ready for those stories, and you have to leave preconceptions at the door—which is difficult to do if the overall environment has been, say, relentlessly promoting colonial ideas for half a century and more. Sometimes, you might need a shared reference point to set you on that path, or you might need to be nudged sideways to enter a more open state of mind.
Some of the time, I’m looking to shared reference points, through the imagery and in the white spaces. Some of the time, I’m looking to set things off balance, like asking a horse to change its lead foot, so you might change direction. Some images are composites meant to invite the reader into new understandings; like in “Token,” the Mountain Ute painted coffee mugs that are “not Oneida, but here—/ and I, here, and not also / inside cupboards” can reference both pan-indianism and tribal specificity, diasporic yearning, the refutation of The Indian in the Cupboard, and maybe also a reference to the dust collecting on remains of the earlier “Repatriation” poem in the book, as well as any other connections the reader might make given their own experiences and associations. These are just some things I was thinking while writing, or things I noticed afterward, but whatever the reader gets out of it is what I’m really interested in.
The white space or open space or “page-play” can encourage a reset and thus perhaps a re-seeing, as the physical story takes a circuitous path. I also think a lot about context-aware forms in all my work and using form to offer multiple ways of reading the poem. In “Elegy Against Elegy” and “Love Song for the End of Us,” the leaps across the page can also represent different voices—or in those and “In Which I Become (Skywoman),” they might also form contrapuntal poems read vertically. And in the “Letters I Don’t Send” [section], the march across different justifications (left, right, center, and back again) can be a progressive journey, or even emphasize the very meaning of “justification.”
And I think it’s worth it to bring the notion of play into poetry. At its heart, play is a creative act, too, and a release, and a practicing of skills, and an experimentation, and a means of connection. Those things are poetry, for me.
Rumpus: Is writing poetry a visceral process for you?
Allen: As a singer and a writer, I do think about the way the body is our instrument—how poems live in the breath and how the breath lives in our bodies. The abstractions take root in our bodies, too—some leave physical reminders, twisted scars or strengthened limbs; some shape memories, ideals, inheritances. There are poems I can’t read aloud without my throat threatening to close up, lines that make my hands shake as I write them, words that energize me, patterns of sound that feel like dancing or coming home to roost. Some ideas pull us along stumbling, some have us chasing them down.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kenzie Allen
