Inspired by a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”—“You must change your life”—poet Kathleen Hellen moved to Baltimore from West Virginia in 1998. She is currently an editor for the Baltimore Review literary journal, and a professor of journalism and creative writing for Coppin State University, where she says her students have taught her more about rhythm than she’s learned anywhere else. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, RUNES, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. A winner of the Washington Square Review, James Still, and Thomas Merton poetry prizes, she has also received individual artist grants from the state and the city.

This month, Urbanite’s editorial intern Rebecca Messner sat down with Hellen to talk about violence in Baltimore, poetry, Buddhism, and the unexpected convergence of all these things.



Tell me about your background—where did you grow up, and how did your childhood influence your life as a poet?

I was born in Tokyo, Japan. My mother’s Japanese and my dad is American. They were married after World War II. I came to this country when I was about 4½. I didn’t speak any English, and they plunked me into Catholic school and I fell in love with the English language. I just loved the sounds of the words and I loved the way they felt in my mouth when I said them. And I think that was the beginning of my interest in language. Poetry is just a natural offshoot, I think, of that love.

Later on, in my adolescence, I began to understand that I could manipulate those sounds, and that was a wonderful sense of power for me. I really felt as if I controlled this little universe that was on the page. But in the back of my mind I think, even as a child, I was very practical. I knew that you can’t make a living being a poet.


What was it like growing up half-Japanese in post-WWII America?

It was interesting—it was right after the war so there was a lot of hostility, still, towards the Japanese, and it was difficult, more so of course for my mother, because she looked so Japanese. We lived in a small town about sixty miles south of Pittsburgh and my mother insisted that we go to the city every two weeks to see people who looked like us, because in this  small town, there was no one. So we would go to Chinatown, to the fish market. I remember standing there in line, we had all these bags of fish, we were just turning to go, and this fellow, he had on—I still remember this—he had on this red and black lumber jacket, and one of the sleeves of his jacket was pinned up. You could see he was missing his arm. And he looked at my mother and he spit at her, and he said, “Go back where you belong, Jap.” And my mother froze—she didn’t say a word, she walked really quickly out, we followed her like little ducklings. We got in the car, we drove sixty miles home, and we never said a word about it. I think that was when I realized that we were really different from most of the people that we lived around. And she never talked about it.


How old were you?

I must have been 7 or 8, something like that.


So was this something you carried around with you, unaware, and then recognized later as being significant?

It took me a very long time to figure out what all the hostility was about. I remembered the sleeve of his jacket being pinned up and his arm missing—and years later, it struck me: He must have fought in the war, and lost his arm, perhaps. I realized that those war wounds, those war experiences last a lifetime. They don’t go away after peace is made between nations. Especially after World War II. I guess that’s also when I became interested in the subject of violence. I consider myself a product of the war—almost a metaphor of the war, because both countries are inside of me. I lived with that contradiction of cultures, and I think that war is the metaphor of my experience, my life, which makes me interested in subjects about violence. It’s one of the reasons I wrote “Eight”—that poem is my experience in Baltimore, to a large extent.


Has the Eastern culture influenced your work at all?

It has, and in imperceptible ways, I’m sure. My father wanted us very much to assimilate into the American culture. He didn’t want any stigma attached to us being Japanese. So my mother tried very hard to make us American. It was so difficult for her. No matter how hard you try to leave a particular culture, there’s no getting away from your roots. You are who you are.

I’ve been working on a collection for maybe the last eight years, of poetry that tries to grapple with this exact experience, of being Japanese and American at the same time. And loving parts of each culture, but also not liking parts of each culture. And my mother also managed to infuse us with Buddhism, so there’s a Buddhist track in my writing.


In what way?

In Buddhism, there’s a philosophy called “mutual arising.” It explains the war, and why my mother was never really angry about World War II. As a child I would say, “Don’t you hate Americans? They bombed Japan, they destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; don’t you hate these people?” And she would say “No.” And that is the idea of mutual arising—that as American destiny was moving in its own curve, Japanese destiny was also moving in its own curve. And the war was just a coming together of those two destinies. This is what Buddhism believes. There’s no wrong or right, there’s no good or bad, it’s this idea that karma, destiny, your fate moves in a certain direction, or trajectory. The war was just a meeting of those two trajectories.

And that’s in many ways the way I feel about “Eight.” It was a horrific thing to happen, the whole family burned alive. But it occurred to me that the young fellow, Darrell Brooks, was just as much on his trajectory as the Dawsons were on their trajectory. They met at that moment. And how to say one is to blame, how to point a finger … Who could you say caused that? Was it Darrell Banks, whose own life was such a sorrow? I don’t think you can say that he is the perpetrator, unless you start saying that everyone is the perpetrator. You’re the perpetrator, I’m the perpetrator. We all have a part in the violence that occurs in Baltimore.


How do you reconcile that with a sense of hope, and keep alive a sense of optimism?

I think you have to be in it, but not of it. You do what you can—and again, this is a very Japanese notion, the idea of bushido, the samurai code: You serve. And one of the reasons I teach is because I believe that service is an honorable thing—to serve in any way you can, to serve as a teacher, to serve as a writer, to talk about things that need to be talked about. I think we don’t do enough of that. And to talk about violence is important, because we don’t have rituals. For example, the Greeks had these amazing rituals to expel evil from their community. The whole idea of poetry grows out of Greek theater, and dance, and incantation—the idea that if you make it art, it makes it better. The idea of catharsis—where you watch the horrible thing happen, and through watching it, you achieve fear and pity, two very different things. Fear for yourself, because it might happen to you, and pity for the other person that is experiencing that sorrow. I think in today’s culture we don’t have that communal experience that expels evil.

Robert Frost called poetry “controlled violence.” And I take that to mean poetry substitutes for the rituals of the past. It substitutes for those great displays of terror, those tragedies, and through poetry we can experience and we can have that moment of catharsis. I think we need to do that. When 9/11 occurred, the impulse was to write poetry. It blossomed everywhere: It was in the newspaper, it was in magazines. People were trying to control the violence that was around them. I think we’re living in a time when violence is not just on the surface, but it’s also become a part of our internal life. I think we’re all walking around, traumatized by some violence. It could be verbal abuse, it could be physical abuse, it could be the violence of war, it could be the violence of poverty, it could be the violence of drugs. And poetry is one way to speak about it; it’s one way to control the violence, since we don’t have these rituals.


What was your intention, then, in shedding light on the Dawson tragedy? What was the process of writing “Eight” like?

I’ve been working on “Eight” since I’ve been here. There have been many, many incarnations. The first poem that “Eight” was derived from was a poem that was trying to come to grips with a student I had here at Coppin one of my first years here. He was in one of my writing classes and in his diagnostic exam in the beginning of the year, his writing really struck me as having a good deal of potential. He wrote about his experience in Baltimore; the street life was luring him back and he was afraid that if he didn’t get to stay at Coppin, he would ultimately get sucked back into selling drugs and living this precarious life on the street. His name was Gregory. And I thought, Wow, this was so beautifully written, this is a beautiful piece of work. Then the very next day he didn’t show up, and he didn’t show up again, and then he didn’t show up, and weeks went by, and his brother came to class and said, “Gregory’s not coming back. He was killed. His throat was slit in Druid Hill Park.”

I almost went home. That is the first experience I ever had with someone being murdered. I didn’t know if I had the courage to stay in a city where I faced the prospect of my students dying violently. And this situation in October 2003, with the Dawsons … I will never forget how I felt that day either. I was weeping the entire day. I couldn’t contain myself.

So how do you control that violence? You write a poem about it, and you hope that whatever was there that day, whatever made all of that happen, whatever brought those two things together in that trajectory will somehow dissipate and go away.


How do you feel now that you’ve written the poem? Is the violence “controlled”?

I think the work of writing about violence is not done. Every morning when I wake up, I hear about another school on lockdown, I hear another incident where a child is stabbed, and somebody shot … it’s constantly in the purview of life in Baltimore. You write about the things you experience, so I believe that the violence is going to be a part of my writing, much in the same way World War II is a part of my writing. You just hope that in writing about it, there’s something that will come out of making chaos beautiful, making what is utterly horrific and terrible into art—that there’s something redemptive in that process, there’s some hope that things will get better.

Not that there’s an end to it—I don’t really think that there’s an end to violence. Violence has been in human history since it began, so I think it would be foolish to assume that by writing a poem or by doing any other activity, we can make it disappear. It’s not going to disappear.

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