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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Add Me to the Forest Floor

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Add Me to the Forest Floor.

(BACKGROUND CHATTER)

Katie Farris: Please, come on in.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Do you want me to take off my shoes?

Katie Farris: Not at all. You’ll see, it’s dusty in there.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Katie Farris: We’ve got a renovation situation, so.

Helena de Groot: Oh yeah, you told me.

Helena de Groot: This is Katie Farris. A few weeks ago, I went to see her at the home she shares with her husband, the poet Ilya Kaminsky, in Princeton, New Jersey. Their house is so many things at once: it’s cozy, spacious, and bonkers, in the delightful way of the ’70s, with one of those conversation pits covered in shag carpet (including the couches and built-in side tables). And they have a treehouse-like attic that holds more books than I’ve ever seen in someone’s home.

Katie Farris: Okay. What have we got?

Helena de Groot: Katie fixed me a fancy drink.

Katie Farris: Carbonated filtered water, pomegranate and orange juice, extracts of lemon peel, bitter orange, rhodiola, gentian, cardamom, and fennel.

Helena de Groot: And then she grabbed a picnic blanket and took us out to the yard.

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

Katie Farris: That’s the blackbird.

Helena de Groot: It was so idyllic.

Katie Farris: Such a pretty voice.

Helena de Groot: There was a pond with frogs, azaleas, birds, long soft grass for us to sit on, sunshine, a breeze. I was almost embarrassed to bring up the topic of her own book: cancer. In August of 2020, Katie Farris was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was young, not even 37, but there it was. She went through chemo, had a mastectomy, then radiation, which led to heart problems and nerve damage. And even though today, three years later, the cancer seems gone, the likelihood that it will return is higher than the likelihood that it won’t. Pretty bleak stuff. But the poems are anything but. She titled her collection Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, and you can just feel her pulse on these pages. Her poems are ecstatic and funny and sexy and lyrical, and once in a while, so dry it hurts. Like this one:

Katie Farris: Yeah. Okay, so this is “Tell it Slant”.

(READS POEM)

You float in the MRI gloam,

several speculated masses;

I name you “cactus,”

Carcinoma be damned—you make

a desert of all

of me.

Have I said it slant enough?

Here’s a shot between

the eyes: Six days before

my thirty-seventh birthday,

a stranger called and said,

You have cancer. Unfortunately.

And then hung up the phone.

Katie Farris: She—actually, I followed that up with, “Do you have any more information?” She said, “No, someone will be in touch with you in two weeks.” Like it was actually more brutal than what the poem shows. I was like, “Two weeks?” And I got up, I put on my clothes and I drove to the oncologist’s office and walked up, and I was like, “I don’t have an appointment, but I’m sitting over there and I need to talk to someone. I can’t wait two weeks to talk to somebody about this. So if there’s nobody who can see me today, I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll just be sitting over there, like, don’t mind me.” And I was reading Emily Dickinson at the time, which is why she’s such a big part of this. But yeah, it was like an automaton.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: It was a very strange experience, that kind of, like, emotionlessness of it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I was also wondering, you know, because I think human beings in general are kind of bad at saying the right thing

Katie Farris: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: when someone else is going through a hard time. And as a poet, I imagine that you’re particularly attuned to, like, the breakdown of language, you know? Do you remember anything else where you were like, “Oh, that’s an interesting way to react to me,” or not say anything?

Katie Farris: Oh, words wise? Oh man.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Words wise. Silence wise.

Katie Farris: Well, I think a lot—I mean, I can tell you the best response I got, which was from an old friend named Didi up in the Pacific Northwest, and she actually responded to a Facebook post. And she just, it was like, “FUCK” all in caps, which for me was like, yes! You know, some people will just automatically—a lot of people said this: “Thank God they caught it early.” And I was like, “That’s a really nice thought. They did not catch it early.” So it’s interesting the assumptions that people make.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Katie Farris: Or—and I’m very acutely aware now of myself doing it—is people responding to their own discomfort instead of responding to you, which is fine. Like I, as soon as I was able to understand that it had nothing to do with me, it became much easier to get those kind of, you know, responses. And to say something like, depending on the situation, either say, “Yeah!” or to be like, “Do I want to gently educate people today?” Because you can’t—you shouldn’t make that assumption, probably. In the ideal circumstance, you wouldn’t make that assumption. But, you know, that’s—cancer is scary. A lot of people have had scary cancer experiences before they talk to you or, if they haven’t had any cancer experiences, I think in some ways that’s the worst of all, because then it’s the unknown. I have a lot of compassion for people’s fear about the topic. But I think some people think it is a, you know, the worst thing that any human being can go through. And I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true, you know. I had endometriosis before that. I would have taken, I would have taken, honestly, probably most of, not all of it, but most of the chemo experiences, I would have taken over a really bad round, like, the equivalent amount of endometriosis pain. Or like trigeminal facial pain. I don’t have it, but I know people who do. That’s extremely painful. There are worse things than chemo out in the world. I don’t

know. So, like the poem in there about wanting sex midway through chemotherapy or something like that, it’s nice to just remind people that you don’t just turn into a shell.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Or just like, now you are cancer. It’s like you are.

Katie Farris: Yeah, exactly, I’m walking cancer.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Katie Farris: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: I love that poem, by the way, and would love to get back to it. But I was also, you know, since we were talking about like how people react and how they maybe react in a way that you’re a little, that disappoint you just a little bit, you know,

Katie Farris: Right, right.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering how Ilya reacted, you know.

Katie Farris: Yeah!

Helena de Groot: Because you kind of want him to react correctly, you know?

Katie Farris: Yeah. Of all the people, you want your partner to react.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: I remember sitting there and he was still asleep when I got the news. And I think I called my mom. You know, she had had cancer when she was 42. And then my stepbrother did have breast cancer twice. So I called both of them because they were like, you know, they’d gone through it, and I wanted to have that immediate support and also, like, advice, you know, quickly. And then when he came down the stairs, he took one look at me and knew. You know, he didn’t—I didn’t have to tell him anything. And basically, we just cried. But he was very— initially, he had a big class that he was teaching the next day. And I was calling, like, basically my closest people to tell them. And he went upstairs to prep for the class. And he was up there for like three solid hours, kind of just burying himself in work, which was fine. You know, like, I was on the phone anyway. But any time, any time I needed him, he was always there. He had no fear of the physical grossness or the side effects. He, like, I, pretty much cried only in the shower. I don’t know why. After a certain point that was the way, but he would always just come in and like, let me cry. Yeah, he did pretty much everything he could have done to make it as easy as it could be. And I was not working. I had pretty bad, like, nausea and side effects early on, because you actually take medications that they give to specifically, I read, schizophrenia. I don’t know if they do it for anything else, but they’re the sedatives. So I would just be asleep for like the first three days after chemo. So he also was doing a lot of, like, kind of going it alone. You know, he’d wake me up, try to feed me whatever he could, and that would be it for the day, pretty much for two or three days. And then I’d slowly crawl out of the sedative hole and start working again. I mean, doing life, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: But it was almost like every two weeks, like, going on a trip. Like, the week before I had my next infusion, I would start, like, cleaning up the house and we would do a bunch of cooking and we’d do, like, get everything ready as much as possible before it started again, because then it would be like a week where I was just down for the count, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: And then at the end, he pretty much had to do all that stuff by himself, because I just, I couldn’t do it anymore, but yeah.

Helena de Groot: And one thing I was also noticing in your book is like, how, you know, there are a few poems where there’s this kind of playful, teasing, bickering going on.

Katie Farris: Oh yeah.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like he ever kind of backed away from that and sort of treated you with kid gloves, sort of, in a way?

Katie Farris: There was only one time that happened, and it was actually last summer. He flew to Odessa without telling me. So he went back to Ukraine in the midst of the war.

Helena de Groot: No!

Katie Farris: He was, he had told me he was going to Germany and I was like, “Cool, see you later.” And then it was literally, he had just—so you couldn’t go directly to Ukraine. You had to fly to Moldova and then take a car if you could find somebody who would drive you like the eight hours. Usually it only—it was double. I can’t remember if it usually takes 2 hours. I think it usually takes four, but it was taking eight because of all the checkpoints and everything. And so, the minute he went over the border from Ukraine to Moldova back to return, he called me and he was like, “I got to tell you something.” And I was like, “Why did you not tell me?” You know what I mean? Like, “You, I’m trying really hard to not lose my shit right now. So like, explain.” And he was like, “I did not want to worry you. I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep. I knew, you know, and, and your health is just too fragile right now.” And I was like, “Okay.” And we argued about it for a long time. And I was like, “Okay, at the end of the day, here’s what I’m going to tell you. Like, if you pull some shit like that again, as far as I’m concerned, this is like divorceable grounds. Like you don’t get to make those decisions for me. If you had died over there and I didn’t even know you were there, like, can you imagine how that would have felt if you’d been bombed or something? And I didn’t even know you were there. All I knew was that you lied to me, and that was the last thing I knew? Come on.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Interesting.

Katie Farris: “Think your thoughts.” And at the same time, I understand that he really thought he was protecting me. But no, I don’t—I’m not saying I’m objectively right and he’s objectively wrong. However, for the purposes of our marriage, he’s very clear now. He’s like, “I still disagree. Like, if I had to make that choice again with the knowledge I had, then I would still make the same decision. But now I know.”

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Katie Farris: We make decisions together and we’ve always been like that. And especially because, you know, he’s in a position where, you know, he is, I guess, the shorthand is he’s just much more famous. So, it was important to me that, you know, we got married before his first book came out. And for 20 years we’ve been making decisions together. And I never felt like the underdog in that relationship. I have always felt like we are equals. And that’s the way he treats me, which is wonderful. And this was the one time where I was like, “No, you do not get to infantilize. I cannot abide being infantilized.” And bless him. Like I said, it took him a while and he still, there’s some part of him that’s like, “I would still rather take care of you in this way,” but he understands better now. And it’s not just him who has to make adjustments, to be fair. Like, I am a person who, I want to do things by myself. And physically, I cannot anymore do a lot of those things that I used to be able to do by myself. And he’s constantly being like, “Do you need some—” and I’m like, “No! No help!” And now I need it and I have to learn how to be a little bit more gracious about that. But it’s tough. It’s hard to, like, make that adjustment. I feel like I am too young to have somebody like help me up and down stairs or, like, carry my bags for me or something like that. But it’s just for now. It’s for now the reality. And it could change, but.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: It’s, it is what it is. So we both had to make adjustments in that way. Like sometimes I have to kind of accept, yeah, people—I hate it when, you know, people talk over your head, like, “What should we do with her?” But sometimes I have to be in a wheelchair at the airport, and they have to make a decision without me, because I literally can’t, you know, stand up and see what they’re talking about or whatever. And like, yeah, it’s, humility is a great exercise in poetry and in life, I keep telling myself.

Helena de Groot: Exactly. This is all good practice. Good practice. For what? I don’t know. (LAUGHS)

Katie Farris: Exactly. Yeah. Yep.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if you wanted to read the poem “A Row of Rows”?

Katie Farris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: On page 9.

Katie Farris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And is there anything you want to say before you read it?

Katie Farris: So Ilya sometimes gets like a pet argument in mind. And then he will ask everybody, including the mailman, what they think about this idea that he has gotten. So, yeah, he would just be like, “Hey, do you think Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman is the greater epic poet?” And like, most people were like, “Well,” you know, like, so anyway, that was the background of this. And yes, we do, we bicker a lot. We’ve been together for 20 years. I’m the older sister in my family. He’s the younger brother in his family. You know, we have some of those dynamics going on. So, yeah, we do have like a lot of little nitpicky sillinesses, so this is what that was about. This is called “A Row of Rows”.

(READS POEM)

We argue on the front

porch: whose turn is it to lecture

the other? Fruit salad or

steak? And was Whitman

or Dickinson the greater

epic poet?

We argue (Whitman)

about the ripeness of

bananas, the rawness

of the meat, and whether

it’s okay to throw apple

cores in the street (I hold

it’s not).

A pleasant row

of rows, little tugs

on the strings

of our love,

just enough

to pull our days

taut.

Helena de Groot: I love this poem, and I love that you write “A pleasant row / of rows,” right? Like, I don’t think I’ve heard people describe sort of the bickering in a relationship as like, “Oh, thank God for that,” you know?

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS) Right?

Helena de Groot: This is what “pulls our days / taut.” What I find so funny in the poem is that you use the poem, as you should, because it’s your poem, to win the argument.

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS) Yeah, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: You know, because you can’t really hear that when you’re reading it. But in parentheses, you write what you think is the correct answer, you know? “And was Whitman / or Dickinson the greater / epic poet? // We argue,” and then in parentheses, you write, “(Whitman)”.

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: “and whether / it’s okay to throw apple / cores in the street,”

parentheses, “(I hold / it’s not)”, you know? (LAUGHS) And so again, like, do you feel like any of that changed when, oh, now you have cancer and now you’re this person who needs to be taken care of?

Katie Farris: I don’t think so. Like the bickering and the playfulness, I think in some ways even increased, you know. I think part of it probably was, like, a cartoon of what it used to be. You know what I mean? Like a way of trying to make ourselves feel like things were normal, you know, even though they weren’t. But I’m grateful. You know, I think about how hard it would be to be in a new relationship. And one of my dear friends is sort of in that situation where just a few months after she got together with this man, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and they stayed together. And it’s, I mean, it’s kind of a wonderful love story for them as well. So it’s definitely doable. I just, for us, the, like the carriage, what am I trying to say?

Helena de Groot: There were deep grooves.

Katie Farris: Yeah, there were deep grooves. Exactly. And we were able to just kind of rely on those to kind of carry us home, even though, I don’t know, there were no horses in the carriage or (LAUGHS) like, the metaphor has kind of lost me. But yeah, that’s, deep grooves, exactly. And those, you know, since we certainly, no marriage is perfect, and we certainly have had awful, very difficult times, but by and large, like the, the, you know, the stones are there, you know, the foundation is built. And that really was helpful, you know, going through exceedingly difficult times. And unfortunately, you know, he lost his mom like in 2018. And, you know, he’s young to have had both of his parents passed. He was 44, I think, when that happened. You know, this theme of everything happening 15 years ahead of everybody, you know, I got married young. I got into my career young. I started teaching young. I got fucking cancer young. Like, all of the things. With the exception of kids, I guess. Everything else happened, like, super fast, so.

Helena de Groot: Do you want them?

Katie Farris: I did. Yeah. And that was actually, we were trying right around the time I was diagnosed. And now it’s too dangerous. It’s like, for my type of cancer, hormones in your bloodstream are like, they’re like cancer food, basically. So getting pregnant is a—it’s, you can, but it’s a very big risk. And so, and I mean, of course Ilya’s Ukrainian right now and there are a lot of kids who are now orphaned there. So I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I’m certainly not in any shape at the moment to try to take on any bigger project than a book and a house. But we’ll see what happens.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: It was sort of like, you know, some people, like, knew they wanted to be childfree and some people—mine was always sort of somewhere in between. I was like, I could go that direction. But increasingly I wanted to, and it just didn’t end up working out. Sometimes that’s just the way it is, though.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Well, there’s a lot of body stuff in the book for obvious reasons.

Katie Farris: Yes.

Helena de Groot: What was your relationship with your body and with your hair before cancer?

Katie Farris: That is an interesting question. I think that I, I have a somewhat—I feel pretty comfortable in my own skin, at least at this point in my life. And certainly before surgeries and hair falling out and all that stuff. On the other hand, it’s somewhat complicated by being six foot tall and red haired that you just can’t, you know, I can’t hide. I slouch, but I don’t know why I bother, because then I’m just a very tall person who stands out and slouches. You know what I mean? So, even as a teenager, I was like, “Well, I can’t hide, so why bother?” And I always, especially when I was a teenager, I wore a lot of really outrageous, like, vintage clothes, a lot of really bright colors, because I was like, “What’s the point of trying?” You know what I mean? “I might as well have fun with it.” And I was a kid who, like, definitely bullied a lot. I was always the weirdo, always the outcast, always, you know, the least popular, last one picked for all the sports for very good reason. I was a disaster and a danger to myself and others. I broke a bunch of girls’ noses the one year I played basketball in middle school.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Katie Farris: I broke three girls’ noses. So I probably should have been kept on the sidelines, but. So it was somewhat complicated, like with a lot of people. But I have a lot of the privileges of being thin and tall and having fairly regular features. And, you know, in some contexts, you know, feeling attractive. It’s interesting to have breast cancer before the age that most people think of people having cancers. At 37, I got put into menopause, which I will never go out of. So that’s, I mean, that comes with health problems, but it also comes with a lot of changes to your physical body. You know, certainly having a mastectomy and electing not to get reconstruction, which was a very difficult decision. It was a very difficult surgery. And I’m still grappling a lot with that change to my body, both because of esthetic reasons and also because it’s quite painful. I still am in quite a lot of pain.

Helena de Groot: Is it like muscle pain or what kind?

Katie Farris: So the radiation kind of like makes your muscles very tight and like sucks the juice out of them. It’s funny. It feels like a rope that’s, like, being held taut, my pecs now. So there’s muscle, but it’s a lot of nerve problems. And that’s partly because there was some damage to one of the major nerves that controls some muscles in your back that help with your arm and shoulder movement. But it’s also radiation damage. Like shooting pains, burning pains, phantom itching, oh my god.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Katie Farris: It’s like itching and you go to scratch the place, but it doesn’t exist anymore, which is so weird. Because it’s an amputation and people don’t think about the fact that it is an amputation. But just like, you know, people talk about those sort of ghost phantom pains if you have like an arm cut off or amputated, which is the same thing, but okay, fine. So, you know, you have an itchy nipple, but there’s no nipple there to itch, you know, it’s such a trip. Like I can still feel, like still sitting here, I can feel my breast as if it were there. But it is not. And it changes a little bit. And now I’m like, I’m starting to be able to feel the actual shape of my body. But there’s so much numbness, which is a normal part of, you know, most people have pretty extensive, like, just the most superficial level of nerves being cut. They just don’t operate the same way anymore.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Katie Farris: So, backing up, because you were asking about my beforehand, I feel like I had gotten to a place where I was more or less comfortable with myself, and I had kind of a sense of humor about it. And I was really starting to, for the first time, think about, instead of thinking about how I looked to other people, I think about this with dancing, particularly, because I’m terrified to dance in public. But at some point I was like, what if instead of thinking about other people looking at you, you closed your eyes and just thought about how it would feel good to move your body? Like, how can your body feel good? Do that thing. And like, that is the payoff, not looking good while you’re doing it. And it’s sad that it took me that long to get to that point. But, you know, around 30, actually, it was my friend Kerry’s wedding, and that was the first time I was like, I’m not going to dance like no one’s watching, I’m going to dance like I am enjoying the way my body feels moving in space. So, and that was, you know, a year and two months before. So it was a very freeing sort of moment for me. And the sort of irony following up of, you know, then getting poisoned, burned and chopped up. But those things can come back, you know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: It’s just, it takes, it’s taking me a little longer. And I think a lot of people do struggle with it afterwards. So I’m in very good company and I’m just trying to let it take the time it needs to take, I guess. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It sounds really hard. Because, I mean, I really relate to that, you know, like, especially as a woman, it takes us so long to finally feel comfortable. And actually, again, I feel like you were early with it. I don’t know if I felt comfortable in my body in my early thirties.

Katie Farris: Right.

Helena de Groot: And you did, you got there.

Katie Farris: Well, I was starting to get there. I mean, I was starting, just it literally occurred to me and I was experimenting with it, which is, yeah, but I think you’re right. I wonder, I know that men can be very self-conscious about their bodies. I wonder if they think as much. I just, well, who knows? But yeah, we’re certainly taught. Taught to do that, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And you mentioned something about “I was put in menopause.” Put in how?

Katie Farris: So I take two different medicines. I get a shot once a month that’s called Zoladex, and that one shuts down your ovaries from producing estrogen and progesterone, I think.

Helena de Groot: Ohh.

Katie Farris: And then I take a daily pill, because estrogen doesn’t just come from your ovaries, like, fat cells produce it. It’s produced in, like, smaller amounts elsewhere. And that just sponges the rest of the estrogen out of my system. So, most people get like perimenopause. So like you kind of start tapering down on estrogen and that’s when it’s like almost like a second adolescence for a lot of people. They’re like, “Am I, you know, my feelings are all over the place, I’m horny and but I’m also like, my body’s changing,” and like, it can be very strange sort of experience. Mine was more like, you know, going 60 miles down the highway and then just hitting a brick wall, you know, it was so abrupt. First you have it, then you don’t. And boy, estrogen’s, it does, it makes a lot of things easier. It’s just like, it lubricates so many different things in life, really.

Helena de Groot: Like what?

Katie Farris: I find I am less patient with people’s bullshit than I was before, for instance, which apparently is part of the whole, there’s a cluster of hormones that estrogen also kind of interacts with. So, joints. I’ve always been kind of an achy joint person, which in some ways is lucky because at least it wasn’t like a first thing, but it’s gone up for me. The hot flashes. Oh my god, constant hot flashes. Brutal hot flashes.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. Because I thought that was also a transition thing, that once you are proper menopausal, you don’t have them anymore.

Katie Farris: Yeah. So, it can go for up to seven years. That’s what they usually say with the hot flashes. I know. I’m about—so I’m three years through it now, but they are, some people don’t get them at all. Some people get them in different ways. What I didn’t realize, like, for me and for a lot of people, there’s this feeling of like impending doom. And I’m like, like for me, I’d only had that feeling when I was, like, very depressed before. So I was like, oh my god, am I going to get really depressed again? Like, guys, this is not the time for that. But it’s actually just like your body’s interpretation of whatever stimulation creates the hot flash. Some people get itchy, some people get nauseated, but a lot of people have this feeling like, dun dun dun. That’s what it feels like suddenly in the middle of a beautiful day. You’re like, dun dun dun, and now I’m like, “Hand me my fan,” you know? Like I try to get out of as many clothes as I can and that’s my little like, notification.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Earthquake warnings.

Katie Farris: Right, exactly, totally. (LAUGHS) I get a little ding on my cell phone before it goes off, so that’s nice at least.

Helena de Groot: How long do you have?

Katie Farris: Oh, usually a minute or two before it, like, sort of kicks in. So I guess,

Helena de Groot: That’s not a lot. If you’re somewhere, in the supermarket you cannot start taking your clothes off.

Katie Farris: No, sometimes you just, like, have to suffer through it. And I think about all these women who have been going through this, like of my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation, who, like, said fuck all about it in public, but like, they are actively suffering. You know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: Like, I’ve seen women turn red and like, take their, you know, discreetly take their jackets off. But like, I didn’t put it all together.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Katie Farris: And now I’m like, “Ladies, fucking superheroes, how are you doing this without complaining about it all the time?” I’m not going to be that woman, alas.

Helena de Groot: No, please pave the way for all of us.

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS) Right.

Helena de Groot: When we get there.

Katie Farris: The elder millennial tells us how it really is.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly.

Katie Farris: But now it’s funny, like I, you know, now I’m like, “Call me.” You know, “If you find out that you have cancer, call me. And I can tell you what to expect.” Because there’s a lot of shit that I didn’t expect. I did not know your nose hairs fall out when you have chemo, and you just drip out your nose until they grow back, which takes a long time. Like, shit like that like, I didn’t even know that until, like, three quarters of the way through chemo, you know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: You thought you just had gotten really sniffly for some reason?

Katie Farris: Yeah, I just was like, why this constant—and they call it the chemo drip. And I was like, come on, guys.

Helena de Groot: That, too?

Katie Farris: I needed—I know, that, too, exactly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: But all that stuff, you know. But I’m interested in the science of it. I read a lot about it, and I have some of my own experiences. Unfortunately, because I ended up with a lot of the rare side effects. Like sometimes when people are like, “How was chemo for you?” And I’m like, “On a day to day level, it wasn’t that bad. But like, I don’t want to tell you that I got heart failure because that’s so rare and I don’t want to scare you.” You know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Katie Farris: Aside from that, I feel lucky to be able to be in a position where if somebody wants information that I can give that to them. So I often send a, you know, like, “Welcome to menopause! It’s shit over here,” like, kind of care package. And there’s always a little mini fan in there as well.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Do you actually?

Katie Farris: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: That’s hilarious.

Katie Farris: Yeah. Yeah. Vaginal moisturizer. A little, like, mini fan for hot flashes. I found a funny book or two. You know, not a lot of things, but, you know, just enough to be like,

Helena de Groot: You are doing God’s work.

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: There is not enough humor, you know, in helping women with the things that are inevitable. The cover of your book is a braid. Your braid, I’m assuming.

Katie Farris: Yes, it is.

Helena de Groot: It’s a very red braid.

Katie Farris: Yep.

Helena de Groot: Long.

Katie Farris: Yes.

Helena de Groot: How long was it?

Katie Farris: It was about to my elbow. Yeah. A little bit higher. Like when my hair was down, it was down to my elbow. But braided it up, it was maybe just a little bit above that. Yeah. So hair was, you know, hair is such a big symbol. And the way that I ended up getting the braid cut was sort of wonderful. So, my friend Teddy was like, “Why don’t you come over my house? We’ll do an all outdoor, like, little party.” And he built this—I was actually calling my tumor “left shark.” I don’t know how that started, but he built a shark out of cardboard about six feet long. Like, not quite life size, but my size anyway. And we burned it in a bonfire. And my husband and my friend Kerry took turns, like, kind of, you know, sawing through the braid. And that was the occasion. So, I don’t know, gathering with my, some of my core people and having an opportunity to, like, do a ritual around it was a nice way to feel at least somewhat connected with, you know, people as I went. And so, for me, losing my hair actually was not a big deal for me. I know some people for whom that would just be devastating.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: So it was definitely a part of my personality, but it wasn’t something I was particularly scared to lose. I was afraid and still really, truly mourn my breasts. I do. I couldn’t show, you know, my burns. I couldn’t show, you know, what it looked like to have chemo. Those things are

Helena de Groot: Burns?

Katie Farris: From radiation. Those things, although I try to talk about them and write about them, and to a degree, you know, there are people who go out and show their scars. And I think that that is amazing and wonderful. And maybe one day I will feel comfortable doing that. And I also know I’m not a big crier. I have a lot of emotional stability most of the time. Like, most of the time I don’t get fazed by, it’s hard to faze me. And oh, man, seeing the surgical scars, I was like, “Is this really going to happen to me? How am I going to deal with this?” You know? So that part was really tough.

Helena de Groot: How did you or how do you get—because here’s what I was wondering about. You know, normally, changes in your body usually happen gradually, right?

Katie Farris: Right.

Helena de Groot: We age gradually. We get thinner or fatter, gradually, you know? But this stuff all happened, like, bomb. You know, you cut your hair this one day. You had your breasts removed this one day. What is that like?

Katie Farris: Yeah, it is. It’s really, I mean, it’s like, the haircutting was the only thing I’d had experience with prior to that. You know, when I was 16, I did a similar sort of thing where I did just a big chop, which is very Riot grrrl, like Ani DiFranco, love of the ’90s. Like, I was feeling politically, I needed to get my hair cut. So that part was, you know, but the breast thing was so weird. Like reaching up for the first time to try to touch that place, and like, you don’t realize that, like, you know your shape so well that when you go to touch yourself, your hands are already making the shape of wherever you’re touching yourself.

Helena de Groot: Like curving yourself when you go in to touch your knee.

Katie Farris: Exactly. Exactly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: So when I went for, to touch myself, it was like a few days afterwards, I hit, you know, this bony chest and was like, oh, yeah, like, I’m going to have to relearn that shape now. And what a weird, like, I’m still kind of sitting with that first experience of that. I feel like I’m still scrambling around behind it, you know. There’s a part of my psyche or soul or mind or heart or something that’s still kind of like (PANTING) trying to catch up with what it means. And in some ways, like, I can kind of go from, well, it doesn’t really mean anything to being like, actually it means a whole hell of a lot, you know? And I write around the mastectomy a lot in this book, but I couldn’t write into it. Somebody wrote a review that was so beautifully said, it’s like it almost falls into the spaces between the pages. And I was like, oof, yeah, that’s exactly how it felt. I just couldn’t go head on into it. And maybe I will and maybe I won’t in the future be able to, like, actually talk about the experience of, like, going into the, you know, I was awake all the way into the surgical theater and got myself on the table and I was awake for a long time. And eventually the anesthesiologist was like, “Damn girl, like, you gotta go!”

Helena de Groot: Oh really, they were trying?

Katie Farris: Yeah, they were trying, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And did you do a ritual?

Katie Farris: I was trying, but I just couldn’t get it together at that point. I just was not feeling well enough to do it, you know? (BIRDS CHIRPING) Such a pretty voice.

Helena de Groot: What is that?

Katie Farris: It’s a blackbird.

Helena de Groot: I have like a last topic that I want to talk about.

Katie Farris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It’s like how sexy your book is.

Katie Farris: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I did not expect that going in. Yeah, so I was just curious, like, how did a book about cancer and death, the possibility of death, end up having so much sex and desire in it?

Katie Farris: Yeah. I love that question. I’m glad that it feels sexy in part. Yeah, the I think the first part of it is that as a poet and a writer who’s always written around the body, desire, and sex has always been a big part of my writing, what I write about. So, it’s hard to imagine having a book where it just wouldn’t show up at all. The book that I had before I found out I had cancer, I’d been writing poems for a long time, and I was already writing, I was writing kind of like a marriage book. And I had a pretty good, you know, set of poems. Actually, it was a much more explicit, but like the poem about like, “I’d like some sex, please,” that was very much something I wrote, you know, in the moment of that experience. And I think it’s sort of part of this idea of wanting to turn, like you said earlier, wanting to turn people with cancer into cancer. You know what I mean? Kind of taking away like, in some ways, I’m really lucky that I didn’t have to interact with people too much when I was like at my most obviously ill because of COVID, and I think it would have been hard for me to be treated like, you know—even afterwards when things started opening back up again, and there was a lot of awkwardness even around some of my most beloved people as they were sort of trying to figure out like how gentle do you need me to be and what is the best way to be gentle with you. But a lot of times what that ends up feeling like is, like, people tiptoeing around and me being like, “You guys, I’m still the person with the foul mouth and like, not that much has changed about my personality,” you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Did it feel like pity?

Katie Farris: I don’t know that it felt like pity. I think it really felt more like, you know, they didn’t quite know what to do. Again, we don’t quite know what to do. So, I think that was the, more of the vibe than pity, exactly. It was like, how do I love you? I love you, but I wouldn’t say that to you. Now I say “I love you” to all my friends, even when it is excruciating to me, because I don’t want them to not know that. You know what I mean? And I’ve gotten close enough and I certainly, my chances of getting cancer in again are higher than my chances of not getting cancer again. You know? I just—easier to let them know now. You know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: So you say I’ve gotten close enough, you mean to death?

Katie Farris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was, yeah, but trying to figure that out. I don’t know how to say that out loud, but like, kind of sussing each other out, like doing reconnaissance.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Katie Farris: Like, how close can I get? How far do I have to stay? How much emotion can I show you?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: Like, it’s almost like becoming friends again. You know what I mean? And this is one of the weird things of like, I am the same person, but also I’m completely altered. You know, there is a before cancer Katie, there’s an after cancer Katie, and there’s a lot of commonalities between the two, but I don’t, I know I am very different. I don’t have any question. I know a lot of people are relieved to try to get back to the person they were. That person does not exist. You know, I love her. I’m grateful to her. She got me where I am, you know, and, but things have changed too much for me to, like, feel like I’m getting back to anything. I can’t go back. Where were we even, starting with that, we were talking about sex, sexiness in the poems, something like that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, I think what is so funny is that I asked you, how did a book about cancer and death end up having sexy poems? And I think that basically you answered, “Well, actually, it was a book of sexy poems that ended up having a bunch of cancer in there, because that was what was happening in my life.”

Katie Farris: Yeah, the sexy parts were definitely a part of the cancer journey as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Katie Farris: Like, there’s one thing that has never made it in there, but someday I would dearly love to write a poem about it. And this is another thing where I’m like, am I going to regret talking about this?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Katie Farris: But I’ll decide afterwards.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, you can, you can call me tomorrow, you know.

Katie Farris: This is probably TMI, but probably this whole interview also has been TMI. So one thing I was not really prepared for, so I shaved my head, but one day I got into the shower and all my pubic hair started, like, coming out in clumps. And that was the thing I was trying to avoid by shaving my head. I didn’t want the experience of reaching up and having—I was like, that would be really upsettin. And it was really upsetting. So I started just bawling and Ilya got in the shower behind me and he started—it was like something out of a cartoon. He started stealing it like he was hoarding all of the gold in the land and like, pretending like he was like a pirate or something like that. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was so fucking funny. And it was, it was weirdly, it was weirdly, really sexy, which is the weirdest thing to say. But that’s the nuance of the experience, you know? And that’s the stuff that I’m interested in because it’s not one thing or another. It’s both at the same time, you know. It’s all that marbled together in a way that you can’t pick them apart. And I think in our culture and in our world, we’re so interested in having good experiences without having the flavor of bad stuff on them. But most of the time you can’t extricate one from the other. They’re all mixed in together, you know? I remember in undergrad I did a lot of mycology classes, and I was out in the field looking for mushrooms. And I found some mushrooms are what they call incorporative, which is to say they pick up everything around them and they incorporate it into their bodies. So like if a mushroom was growing up here, it would have like stalks of grass sticking out of it. This particular mushroom had picked up a whole pair of boxer shorts somebody had left on the forest floor.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Katie Farris: And I was just like, so that’s what I’m trying to say about cancer and sex somehow, that it’s an incorporative experience. You know, you don’t you don’t get to pull the pieces apart.

Helena de Groot: Do you want to read the sex poem?

Katie Farris: Oh yeah, sure.

Helena de Groot: “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway Through Chemotherapy,” it’s on page 14.

Katie Farris: Okay.

(READS POEM)

An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway Through Chemotherapy

I’d like some sex, please.

I’m not too picky—

(after all, have you seen me?

so skinny you could

shiv me with me?)

Philosexical, soft and

Gentle, a real

Straight fucking, rhymed

Or metrical—whatever

You’ve got, I’ll take it.

Just so long as we’re naked.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I love this poem.

Katie Farris: Thank you.

Helena de Groot: I mean, I have one last question, which I don’t know exactly how to formulate, but since we’re talking about desire in the face of death,

Katie Farris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: you know, what have you learned about apparently how you experience desire in the face of death?

Katie Farris: Hmm. I find it much more acute and much more general. So I was, I actually got the opportunity to chat a little bit about this with Carolyn Forché, who also had breast cancer. And she was like, “In the first few days after I found out I had cancer, I was weirdly ecstatic.” And I was like, I had a fair bit of that, too. Like it was sort of—mine would swing back and forth a bit, but there was a way that I felt very clear. Like, okay, I’m going to strip away everything that doesn’t matter. And here are the things that matter to me. And it was not hard. It was like, poetry and my relationships, and trying to maintain the body. Everything else, the job of poetry, the job of teaching, completely off to the—I love teaching, but no, completely off to the side. I want to write a book that does some sort of justice to this experience, because as a, as a poet who is obsessed with the body, I was kind of like, it took a while for me to realize it, but then suddenly I was like, “Oh no, this is, I’m going to write about this.” You know? I did not know if it was going to be a book I was going to be able to share with anybody else. That hadn’t really crossed my mind yet. But I was definitely like, “This is an experience I’m going to write about.” And I felt very strongly that I needed to do that and that whether I was going to live to see the publication of that book or not, that was a huge priority and I was going to put a lot of energy into it. And the other thing I was going to put energy into was loving the people that I love and trying to, you know, some relationships needed healing, some relationships needed letting go, some relationships needed this or that. But I was thinking about connecting and connecting on a different level, which is to say, if I’m choosing to be interacting with you at a time where I don’t know how much time I have left, then you better be a person I want to connect with. You know what I mean? Like all of the bullshit, out. And boy, that was really—you don’t get a chance to do that much. And I felt really light, you know. And excited to clear everything else out of the way. I was so ready for it to happen. And everything just seemed so much more precious. You know? That feeling of, I don’t know, how many times am I going to be able to see, you know, azaleas bloom again? I remember very distinctly especially, I was, you know, I’d just finished chemo like a couple of days before Christmas, and I was feeling real bad. But I was like, I am going to get a real tree and I’m going to decorate the shit out of this. And we’re going to have a nice Christmas because it might be the last Christmas, which is weird. Again, it’s like, I wasn’t trying to make things more dramatic, but they were dramatic. And so it was almost like permission to be dramatic, you know what I mean? Like permission to just be like, I want to do things as big as I want to do things. And I, here’s the cancer card. You know what I mean? Like, I was passing it out everywhere I went, you know, like, no shame. Like if it made things easier or better or more enjoyable, absolutely putting that out on the table. Yeah, it was it was very freeing for me. I think as a person who tried very hard, always, to think about other people, think about other people first, and sometimes it’s nice to put yourself first, you know? And as it turns out, you don’t need to have cancer to do that.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Katie Farris: But it was the first time I let myself do it. And I have learned some things along the way that I will be putting into practice, hopefully, for a very long time in the future. So, ecstasy. And then specifically sex, I think, you know, menopause changes your body in ways that are really tough for a lot of people when it comes to like, the physical parts of desire. So I think sex becomes more psychological. It becomes more like a lifestyle. I don’t know how to—it’s like you realize how much of life can be sexy. You know, the playfulness of flirtation. I mean, specifically with a partner or with human beings, but it’s also with, you know, everything. Everything that’s alive. And that idea of being, you know, connected with what is living, like that last poem in the book where I turn into a tree or whatever, like, as much as I could make peace with death, that poem for me is really about making peace with death. The idea of being transmuted after death into everything else, like, really to be a part of something else. And to think of it as you’re already a part of it. It’s already a part of you. That kind of ecstatic feeling, you know, that seems very connected with desire. And desire is the thing that propagates and so on. But we don’t just propagate through having children. We propagate by rotting and making our selves available to all of this. And I think for some people that’s a very creepy thing. And sometimes if I’m in the right mood, it can feel very creepy. But most of the time it does not. Most of the time it feels like that’s what we’re here to do, you know? That’s what we’re here for, to pass our living on to another living being’s living or something. Got a little twisted at the end, but.

Helena de Groot: I don’t think that was twisted at all. I think that was perfect syntax, A, and also just a beautiful thought. And a lovely note to end on, even though I would like you to read the poem.

Katie Farris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: Can we just, can we sit here for, so I can record that.

Katie Farris: Oh, yeah.

(READS POEM)

What Would Root

Walking through a cathedral of oak trees

and bristlecone pines, scolded by squirrels

in their priestly black, their white collars

wagging with the force of their scolding, I

was struck simultaneously, in both eyes,

by some sort of flying detritus—pollen or seeds—

and stopped to lean against a rock

to scrub it (I thought) away. it was May,

it was May, it was May, and the air was sweet

with pine and island mountain lilac. The squirrels

(I mentioned them already, etc.). and the lizards

ran down the spines of rocks like a bad feeling. I

could see everything: redheaded hummingbirds

dipped their beaks into the little red hoods of penstemon

and I, a redhead, could hear everything: a red-crested

woodpecker who was not offended I did not know his name.

Everything smelled green: it was all green, really—

even the red was anti-green, and though my eyes

ached from everything-seeing, I could taste the granite

in the spring (oh yes I drank water from the ground; I

was wild even then, though the squirrels scolded

me and tried to convince me I was not). Soon I crested

a rise; the land spread itself greenly for me and I

wished I had seed to toss into that green, just to see

what would root. My right eye would not close to this

view (why would it?) but when I reached up to touch it I

felt a twig emerging, and another from my

other eye: that they were a part of my body I could not doubt—

they were living and enervated and jutting out. I

sat down feeling the hairs on the back of my neck

understanding for the first time they were not hairs, but roots.

Everything was everything: the twigs in my eyes

tasted sunlight with my mouth, the roots drew the salt

from my sweat into their vacuum, and I was no longer hungry.

Everything; it was all green; the roots in my skull shifted and I

lay down beneath my own branches. I had to wiggle a bit to

find a place to lay my head: the rock was very hard

and I needed softer ground—yes, a place for the top

of my head to come off, to nuzzle into the earth, to drink.

(MUSIC PLAYING) (BIRDS CHIRPING)

Helena de Groot: Katie Farris is the author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She also wrote boysgirls and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, Thirteen Intimacies, and Mother Superior in Hell. She won a Pushcart Prize and her work has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, and she teaches poetry at Princeton. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)