Interview + Reading with Patrick Kindig (text + audio)

The following is an edited transcription of a longer Zoom conversation, which is available in-full below. Kindig reads his poem “The Problem of Survival” from 7:39–8:40.

Tell us about your relationship to writing.

This is a big, big question, so I’ll try to do it justice… I’m trained in several different kinds of writing: I write poetry and I dabble in CNF and fiction, but I also have a lively life as a literary critic and cultural theorist, so I’m often switching back and forth between these two modes. This can be frustrating, in that I’m always looking elsewhere as I’m working on a project, but I think it also can be enriching, in that my poetry is often informed by my research. And I think that my scholarship is also enriched by my sensibility as a poet, because I tend to make more tenuous associative leaps than some of my comrades in the scholarly profession, for better or worse (I like to think for better).

Do you have non-literary hobbies?

I do. My husband and I have a smooth collie named Ween (who is snuffling outside my office door right now), so that’s where a lot of our energies go.

I also am a pretty good baker. I won the English Department bake-off two years ago. I have a 30-pound trophy sitting in my office right now. I made some lemon macarons, which was trying to show off my knowledge of baking shows.

Were there other titles that you were fighting over that you’re deciding between? Was this based on something, anything?

Great question. No, there were no other options for this title. I actually began with the title and the epigraph.

A little backstory on the poem: A while back, I was doing some research into the history of psychical research and parapsychology, lots of stuff related to telepathy and hauntings and pseudoscientific attempts to explain these phenomena. I was reading a bunch of parapsychological texts, including Whately Carington’s Telepathy: An outline of its facts, theory and implications from 1945, where I found this really strange line (that became the poem’s epigraph) about the centrality of imagery essentially to the afterlife. I must have also pulled the title from Carington, though, as I was reviewing my notes, I couldn’t find the specific snippet of language. But the “problem of survival” in this parapsychological literature is the problem of survival of the self, or the soul or the personality, after death.

I was really caught with this shorthand for ghostliness, the problem of survival, this persistent problem for parapsychologists, as well as this description of the afterlife. And that inspired the rest of the poem, which is sort of an image-forward meditation on the line between life and death.

Some of your first-person poems (“birthday poem” and “At the Service Academy“) are very Oliver-esque, with lines where you’re pointing and looking, or you’re commanding people to look. Even in “At the Service Academy” (which is not particularly a happy poem) there’s this sense of wonder or amazement, or being moved and moving other people. But your third-person poems, this one included, tend to be much more sobering—there’s not really a great sense of joy coming from “The Problem of Survival”. . .

Can you talk a little about this difference? Where does “The Problem of Survival” fit in to your larger body of work, thematically?

I love this reading of my body of work: this actually makes a lot of sense to me. And I love that you pinpoint specifically “birthday poem” and “At the Service Academy,” because I think both of those poems are about approaching joy as a discipline, primarily in response and in proximity to death or the passage of time.

I will say that I do see this poem fitting into this broader trend of trying to navigate the relationship between more negative affects and joy. I am not personally a big believer in general (like, capital B Believer), but I desperately love the idea of believing. This poem is sort of my attempt to write my way into belief, in that it never fully lands on a stance. Like: wouldn’t it be lovely if the afterlife were a world of images, or this leaf were flying across the pond because of some force greater than we understand?

Three years after originally writing this poem, do you think reading it with new eyes is pushing you toward belief, now?

I think reading it less so. I think that the writing process always feels—mystical is maybe not the right word—but it feels like an altered state of consciousness, which gets me closer to belief, if not all the way there.

You’re an ampersand lover. When and how did this come to be?

A weirdly specific answer: There was an abrupt shift in (I want to say) 2016 where I took on the ampersand. There was a collection maybe by Judith Vollmer that oscillated back and forth between using ampersands and spelling out the word “and,” and I was like, “What is going on here? You can’t do this.”

Ultimately I landed on it because I like the way that it functions for me, the way that something like Emily Dickinson’s dash functions: as both a visual marker of separation, but also a chiasm, something that holds disparate thoughts together. It also looks like a little knot, so it’s sort of knotting together the words, which is maybe a silly dimension, but it’s there.

What are you reading?

Tessa Yang’s novel, The Jellyfish Problem. Over the summer, I did a deep-dive into Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as a few novels by Shirley Jackson. All of those, I think, resonate very nicely with the psychical research aspect of “The Problem of Survival.”

And in fact, I got on the Shirley Jackson kick because the scholarly piece I was doing all of this research into parapsychology and psychical research for was actually about The Haunting of Hill House. And I was like, “I’m loving this so much. Why don’t I just read everything she’s ever written?”

What are you working on now?

Two book projects. One is very much about climate change, tentatively titled, “We Have Always Lived At The End Of The World.” The other has more to do with my current employment situation where I was told that I needed to write poems that related to the mission of my current institution in order to get summer funding. That project is about my relationship with water and the way that proximity to, or distance from, waterways shapes the culture of a place.

I do have a poetry collection coming out called Agape. It’s about love, especially queer love, and its various manifestations and its relationship to things like domestic bliss and violence. I’m excited about that.

PATRICK KINDIG is the author of the poetry collections Agape (Saturnalia 2026) and fascinations (Finishing Line 2025), the academic monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (LSU 2022), and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, and other journals. He lives and teaches in Annapolis, MD.