About Katie Hartsock
Katie Hartsock’s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review‘s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her first book, Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse) was shortlisted for the Ohioana Prize in poetry. Her work appears in journals such as RHINO, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Image, and Poetry. Interviews live at Tupelo Quarterly and Nancy Reddy’s Good Creatures series. A letterpress chapbook, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered Via Subterranean Rivers, will be published in 2026 by Aureole Press. Excerpts of an in-progress manuscript, Glimpses of the Iliad, recently debuted at New Verse Review.
She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
Read more of Katie’s work at katiehartsock.com.
Author Profile
Notes on:
“Why I Haven’t Cleaned the Confetti Coins from Our December Drinks Three Years Ago Out of My Purse”
Years after an evening with friends, all poets, at a Michigan bar yard—one of whom brought the British party favors known as Christmas Crackers, which erupted with jokes, toys like an inch-high set of bowling bowls and pins, and silver confetti coins—I would still be surprised to find the confetti at the bottom of my purse. They became slippery symbols: of friendship, of both ephemerality and lastingness, of fullness and mortality. Out of all that came this poem, which I think is a kind of love poem. Like C. D. Wright’s amazing “Girl Friend.”
I had done my Peter Ustinov-Nero impression that night and he showed up here. If you haven’t watched MGM’s 1951 Quo Vadis and are in the mood for a Hollywood sword and sandal epic, I recommend! Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor star, but Ustinov often steals the show, as do Leo Genn’s Petronius, Nero’s “Arbiter of Elegance,” and his complex narrative with Marina Berti’s Eunice. (Then, rewatch Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood, where Ustinov voices Prince John, and delight in the comparisons – Ustinov had a knack for weak tyrants.)
The main challenge with finishing the poem was deciding on form. In early drafts I tried to remain in a stricter iambic pentameter; many of the lines are still shaped by IP, but eventually the voice and scope of the poem wanted different breadths. I played around with several different stanza lengths before deciding on a single stanza which hopefully unifies the threads. One of the friends from that night pointed out the final phrase is an inversion of what might be more expected (“cold but happy”), which I had not realized. Those last lines arrived as a gift in the first draft; I wasn’t in charge of them.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
I’ve been teaching prosody in my current gen ed poetry course, and I have joked with my students that scanning poems, and even grading their scansions (they’ve scanned John Betjeman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), have become like raking a Zen sand garden for me—I find scanning immensely soothing and calming. I scanned Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s wonderful “The Paperweight” just for fun, and sighed when done. And I love how scanning makes students read lines of poems out loud several times, feeling the embodied stress and emphasis in their own voices, and think about individual words down to their very syllables.
And on a different kind of listening: while I hate feeling somehow predicted by The Algorithm, I have been captivated by some songs I never knew which Spotify played on radio lists inspired by songs I love. Solomon Burke’s “Down in the Valley” gave Johnny Adam’s “Reconsider Me” and Howard Tate’s cover of “Girl of the North Country.” And Iris DeMent’s “He Reached Down” gave Kate Wolf’s “Across the Great Divide” and Barbara Keith’s “Detroit or Buffalo.” It is so good to feel a song etch itself as a new favorite into your heart.
Drink: I love Cantina Zaccagnini’s Montepulciano; every bottle comes with a little stick from the vineyard tied around its neck in haylike-twine. (Am I being predicted again? Do I fall into category of women who will just go nuts for that?) It’s not expensive and completely delicious, and its description has lovely phrases like “black violet color,” “aromas of candied bacon, mocha latte, apple pie, green pepper, and plums,” “medium-length berry jam on black toast finish,” and “an oak-driven Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.” I like feeling oak-driven, too.
