An Interview with Mel Kenne

I was born and raised in South Texas but have resided in Türkiye since 1993. I’ve published eight books of poetry, most recently Rites of Passage, All Told, Take, and the bilingual collection Galata’dan/The View from Galata. My second collection, South Wind, won the 1984 Austin Book Award, and in 2010 I was one of the winners of the Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Award. The Book of Ed, a series of my poems based on the Oedipus myth and set to music by composer Patrick Boland, was released by N’er Before Records in 1999. I am now retired and residing in the ancient city of Phocaea (Eski Foça) on the Aegean coast of Türkiye.

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Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The title of the book began with one of the poems in it: Rite of Passage: A Prayer. This poem encompasses some of the main concerns of my work in general, especially in regard to ‘the heroic ideal.’ Interestingly, I found later that it’s also the title of an album by The Indigo Girls with a song on it about one of my favorite modern poets, Frank Stanford, who committed suicide in 1978 by shooting himself in the heart. The song’s title is Three Hits to the Heart. The ‘rites’ refers to my own passages through phases of my life, from my early life in South Texas to my life in retirement in this beautiful fishing and resort community on the western edge of Türkiye.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

I was elated to finally be able to see how the book looked and to hold it in my hands. The cover centers on an artwork hanging on my living room wall, created by Shirley Verrette, a good friend living in Istanbul. The quality of the image and the design of the book surpassed all my expectations. I felt that this was truly a landmark creation relating to my life and my life’s work.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I suppose my first impulse to write came from my high school English teacher, Jack Grammer, who loved to read poetry aloud and exposed our class to poetic masterworks of the world, from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein. Jack was also a renowned basketball coach who was voted into the Texas Basketball Coaches’ Hall of Fame, and after I and my friends graduated, we’d sometimes meet with him to drink beer and chat about the books we were reading and our university studies. In university, I became enamored of the Transcendentalist poets, beginning with William Cullen Bryant and moving on to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. My ever-evolving influences were W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, David Ignatow, and many other poets of the modernist and post-modernist literary movements.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve had numerous jobs from working in a cotton gin as a teenager, to tractor-driving on our farm, to later stints in my twenties as a bricklayer’s and carpenter’s helper, and in my thirties as a temp in mainly clerical, janitorial, mail-clerk, and handyman jobs. Also, my career as a teacher of writing and literature began in my twenties and lasted until my retirement in 2011. After moving to Türkiye in 1993 to teach in a university in Istanbul, I took up translating under the tutelage and guidance of friends and colleagues in other Turkish universities. Since my retirement I’ve worked fairly steadily as a freelance translator and editor.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Most importantly for me was the culmination of my life’s work as a poet in the two books published with Atmosphere Press: Rites of Passage and All Told. Compiling these two collections gave me the chance to review and revise poems from a huge backlog and select and set down in print more than a half-century’s worth of work, making these collections a sort of personal legacy that I hope will last beyond my own lifetime.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

My poetry has been influenced throughout my lifetime by both popular and classical musical compositions, from sixties rock songs by The Beatles, The Doors, and The Rolling Stones and earlier, seminal works of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, to twentieth century composers of modern works such as Satie, Stravinsky, Elgar, and such jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Chuck Baker, and Rabih Abou Khalil.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I would like my book to stimulate readers to appreciate poetry as a serious art form that reaches far beyond greeting card verse, into realms that are new and exciting to them and perhaps offers them deeper perspectives on human relationships and on our species’ relationship to nature and the rest of creation.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

As I noted earlier, I’m mainly involved now in editing and translation projects, and I’m trying to stay as active as possible in dealing with the crucial issues affecting humanity and the world at large.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

My experience with Atmosphere Press has been positive in every way, from the concern shown by its staff professionally and personally to the superior quality of the publications produced. For anyone who is interested in having work published that is true to their vision and satisfies their desires to have their work publicized and promoted as effectively as possible, I have no reservations in recommending Atmosphere Press as their publisher.

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