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Callaloo 27.4 (2004) 932-944



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"Within a Field of Knowing"

An Interview with Ruth Ellen Kocher


Ruth Ellen Kocher. Photo by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

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This interview was conducted by telephone on July 15, 2004, between College Station, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri, where Ruth Ellen Kocher lives.

ROWELL: You are quoted to have said that you try to be as complex in your writing as you are in your background. What do you mean by that?

KOCHER: When I was a younger writer I heard these wonderful poets read all the time, poets, who had a very specific sound and had a very specific story. I remember a friend, Gwen Mitchell, who was just wonderful and rich. And I tried to emulate her, and I realized that it wasn't my story and it wasn't my sound. So, it really wasn't genuine, and it took me a long time to get to that point where I incorporated things that may seem disparate until I found what I thought was a genuine voice. And many times I've had people tell me that that voice is a kind of a multiple voice made up of different forms and rhythms that you find and hear recurring in the poems.

ROWELL: Will you explain what you mean when you say, "my genuine voice is kind of a multiple voice"?

KOCHER: Ultimately, it's all about sound and music. But I suppose to answer this I cross over into scholarship, a bit, too. I do a lot of research on the idea that women writers, especially, employ the use of multiple voices to try to get to the idea of identity in a more holistic way. And sometimes that voice is the voice of the mother, or the voice of the daughter, or the voice of the poor girl, or the voice of the white girl, the voice of a black girl, the sick girl, the lost girl. And in some ways to get to a sense of true voice for me, I have to incorporate all those things. I have to let them surface when it works in the poem. So there's almost a cultured inconsistency that then creates texture, at least in my opinion, in the work, as the female voice in the poem moves back and forth between those locations.

ROWELL: Let's talk about voice and racial identity. In the United States of America, the voice of the black woman and that of the white woman are almost one and the same, yet different. That is, the black voice and the white voice are shaped by each other's presence; they evolved in the same room, and yet their positions or standings (and therefore experiences, however adversarial) in that room evolved through a [End Page 933] form of antagonistic cooperation, which privileged the one as dominant over the other. In Desdemona's Fire, with its reference to Shakespeare's tragedy, do you acknowledge how these two voices, informed by a complex history, come together?

KOCHER: Well, I am not white and so don't access a white voice or persona, per se, but because of my background, that white voice isn't always Other for me. The interesting thing about that idea is that a sense of voice and a sense of identity don't exist in a vacuum. There are multiple intersections. You know, one mode of intersection for me is class, especially when you are talking about the voice of poverty or the voice of lack. It transcends gender, and sometimes race, and a lot of times, when you go to that place, those voices sound similar. You know, we read working class poems by white writers or black writers, and there's a place of intersection. In some of the writing of Irish poets, for example, you can see huge intersections with the idea of being somehow culturally marginal, outside of the norm or the group, and also, that idea of a voice of lack, a...

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