About Kathleen Flenniken
Kathleen Flenniken is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Post Romantic (UW Press, 2020), finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Plume (UW Press, 2012) won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, Famous (UNP, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open your World (Norton, 2023), and the documentary film “Richland,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Kathleen served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 – 2014.
Her website is https://kathleenflenniken.com/
A Profile of the Author
Notes on “1960s Skies”, “Late November, and “The Cat is Missing, Day Eight”
These three poems are part of a new manuscript called “Waking” in which my past–often my childhood past–intrudes on my present. Sometimes it overlays the present like a transparency. “Late November” and “1960s Skies” were both triggered by that sensation. Both are old poems that took forever to finish; by forever I mean ten years or more, almost done but with something amiss. In the case of “Late November,” it was the crows. They were just sitting there on a telephone wire, cawing, and my mother’s voice was underneath. When I finally let a crow fly and speak in my mother’s voice, everything aligned. “1960s Skies” needed a point of view. Sometimes I get so tired of the “I” and try to avoid it. There are plenty of ways around the “I,” but a reader wants to know where the voice is coming from, and this poem needed that sleeping bag in the backyard. Completing these two poems after so many years felt really good.
“The Cat Is Missing, Day Eight” was written out of grief and a need to atone to our cat, who I still think about every day, several years after losing him. And without me meaning it to be or even realizing it at first, it’s a companion to a series of poems about losing my breast to cancer at the same time.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
In the last week, out of the blue, I’ve become enthralled with the Voyager Mission. It’s not as if I didn’t know about it–I’m a child of the Space Age. Voyager 1 and 2 launched when I was 16. I tracked their photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and their path to the end of our solar system and into interstellar space. Maybe it was a profound need to escape the news at the moment, but I woke up Sunday morning thinking about Voyager’s golden records. I started reading about them, and combing over the music and greetings and photos they contain. I turned to Carl Sagan’s writing. I’m awash in this powerful stew of emotions and I’m trying to figure them out. Here’s one fact to consider: in a billion years, Voyager could truly be the last evidence that humans on Earth existed.
