Books, Interview
Scholarship, Song, and the Supernatural
Interview with Kendra Preston Leonard, PhD, author of Grab
Poetry gives scholars a way to manifest their insights into their subjects in thought-provoking ways to audiences outside academia. T.D. Walker spoke with Kendra Preston Leonard about her poetry collection Grab and how her research shaped the poems in her book.
Interstellar Flight Press: Grab begins with “Gretchen at the Loom / Gretchen am Webstuhl,” a poem in the voice of title character, a character in Goethe’s Faust who is seduced and will die for drowning her child, born out of wedlock. The poem shifts between English and German, and we see Grab and the juxtaposition of the English meaning of forcibly taking with the German for grave.
The collection ends with “Smash und Grab,” the concluding lines of which warn, “I will grab you / and smash until you are like me.” Again, we see references to both the English and German meanings of Grab.
We first see Gretchen contemplating her grave, then we see the speaker of the final poem threatening revenge. Did you begin the collection with this framework in mind? Or did the structure come about later?
Kendra Preston Leonard: Beginning with “Gretchen” and ending with “Smash und Grab” was planned. I wanted to open and close with poems that played with the English and German meanings of “grab.” Gretchen is weaving her lover back to life from the grave, but the revenant she creates is not what she expects, and her heart becomes her grave, the thing that undoes her. “Smash und Grab” seemed like low-hanging fruit, with its potential double meanings. It’s a reversal of the point of view of “Gretchen,” in which it’s the revenant who speaks, who comes of its own accord, who visits those who do not expect it. These two poems, both in English and German, are mirrored bookends for the collection.
IFP: Many of the poems are about or refer to storytelling. The speaker assures us in “A Ukrainian Love Story” that “Of course, this is a true story!” In “A Masque to be Played Before the Queen,” we see supernatural performers unfolding a story before the court. We’re also given the voices or images of figures from literature: Gretchen, Othello and Desdemona, and Cassandra.
So I’m curious too about the idea of the library as a place of great spiritual power. In “Prairie Ghosts,” we see “Ghosts come to the library, / and forever after whisper / recommendations in patrons’ ears.” And a harpy exercises her power in “At the Archive.”
For me, these poems serve as reminders about how story serves as spirit: guiding spirits, warning spirits, and so on. How do you want your readers to experience story in light of the way the poems and their speakers and subjects engage and fight against their own stories?
KPL: It’s true that for some of the poems in this collection, you might like them more if you know a little bit about the stories they reference: Bell, Book, and Candle, the myth of Cassandra, Shakespeare’s Othello, Goethe’s Gretchen, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, other things. Retellings and references like these are like fanfiction — they allow you to tell new stories about existing characters and explore new ways of thinking about plots. I don’t know that any of the characters I reference here fight against their earlier written incarnations, but rather are liberated from myth, given agency, or take actions we don’t read about in their origin stories. I hope readers come away from those poems thinking that for every story, there are countless possible tellings; for every story, we should ask who the narrator is and what their motivations are. Cassandra is a good example: the most common story told about her is that she promised to sleep with Apollo if he’d give her the gift of true prophecy. She agrees, he gives her the gift, and then she refuses to sleep with him, so he curses her, making it so her prophecies aren’t believed. In my “Cassandra at the Bonfire,” I use a different version of the myth, in which Cassandra’s gift comes from letting snakes lick her ears. I make a Cassandra with a radically different source of power, a Cassandra who hints at powers we don’t find in the classical myths, a Cassandra speaking for herself.
As for libraries — I’ve done a lot of archival research, and archives and libraries are places where we show what value we put on the life of the mind. They exist for the creation and use of knowledge and also for pleasure and hope. They’re magical and utilitarian and bring people joy and save people’s lives.
IFP: We also see dancing throughout the collection. There’s the dance hall at the center of “Macalla / Echo.” The speaker of “A Spell to Rest the Dead” will use dance as a way to ward off ghosts. Dead men are said to dance in the waters in “A Ukrainian Love Story.”
So I’m curious about your use of dance in the context of the supernatural in this collection. What prompted your use of this thread throughout, and how do you see the language of movement in relation to the language of the supernatural?
KPL: Ritual movement is embedded in the idea of supernatural powers: in many stories and tales, practitioners use hand gestures as part of casting a spell or controlling someone or something. In some traditions, dance is used to call on supernatural beings or to communicate with them. Secular dance has its ritualized movements as well, from the way a dancer ties on pointe shoes to dancers lining up for a Texas two-step. I like the idea that moving in specific ways can communicate or bring about actions: in “A Masque to be Played Before the Queen,” it’s the patterns the dancers make that calls catastrophe to the court.
IFP: Although the collection starts in German language, we’re soon given a wider view into the world. The first poem is grounded in Gretchen’s experiences and shifts between German and English, but we’re also given references to magical rivers around the world: “jordan, styx, sanzu, yawar mayu”
Through the collection, we’re taken through England, Scotland and father on through Ukraine, Russia, and the American Midwest. There’s also a sense of restlessness in the poems of Grab, which creates tension with the idea of the grave as a resting place. How did you choose the locations you’d focus on in the poems? And did you find the contrast between locations pushing the collection in a particular direction?
KPL: No matter where you are, there’s something that can grab you.
IFP: Since you are a scholar, I wanted to ask about your work in musicology and your writing in other genres, such as plays and song lyrics. How did your academic work inform the poems in Grab?
KPL: In two ways: one, my academic background gave me the research tools I used in digging into folklore and mythologies and word origins and history; and two: a number of the poems are partially inspired by places where I’ve lived or done academic research, or ideas and works I came across while doing scholarly research. The harpy of “At the Archive” is based on a very real person at a very real place, and the musicians and the musicians’ gallery of “A Masque” came from my scholarly work on music in depictions of Elizabeth I on film.
IFP: To continue with the idea of your work outside poetry, I also wanted to ask about your other creative writing. I read the spacing in your lines as pauses for breath or contemplation, silences that give the speaker room to build to the next revelation. In “Kappa tankas” and “Trí Púcai,” indentations open this space for me, and the first and final poems give room for language shifts in this way too.
Which leads me to ask how you see the poems on the page in light of your work written for performance. Does your writing for theater and music parallel or diverge from your poetry?
KPL: My song lyrics are often very similar to my poetry, but I don’t use the more dramatic spacing like I do in “Gretchen” — everything is left-justified for ease of reading. In my libretti, I use line breaks and spaces very deliberately, but, again, everything is left-justified — and the line breaks and spaces are there to communicate the flow of thought, emphasis, emotion, and character to the composer and the performers. I also include notes like “with resignation” or “breathlessly” to indicate a character’s mood or the way I want the text to be sung. With libretti, I’m also creating multiple voices and personalities within a single work, so I use different kinds of patterns and language to distinguish them.
IFP: What are your current and forthcoming projects? Are they in the same mode as your poems in Grab, or are they going in a different direction?
KPL: I’ve just finished an opera libretto for composer Steven Sérpa and Opera Queens in Austin, TX, and it has a strong and beautiful queer supernatural component. I’m currently working on the libretto for the opera adaptation of my novella Protectress, which is a sequel to the Medusa myth and is being set by composer Jessica Rudman. It’s workshopped by Opera Contempo in Utah later this year.
About the Author
Kendra Preston Leonard writes about music, movies, gorgons, werewolves, Shakespeare, feminism, nature, ghosts, disability, drama, race, paleontologists, and much more. Her first chapbook, Making Mythology, was published in 2020 by Louisiana Literature Press. Her novella in verse, Protectress, a sequel to the Medusa myth, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022. Also a musicologist and music theorist, she has written numerous scholarly books in addition to poetry, plays, lyrics, and libretti.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
