Abbie Kiefer’s debut poetry collection, Certain Shelter (June Road Press 2024), is a book that’s easy to connect with. The poems are honest, tender, and sharp. Kiefer writes with love for those lost, which in this book include her mother, her New England, and the three-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edgar Arlington Robinson. These three ghosts animate the book.
In the spring of 2025, Kiefer and I talked via email and Google doc. We started talking about the final poem of her book, and from there, we found ourselves talking about a wide array of topics, including my insecurities as a teacher, her insecurities as a writer, a delightful memory of Conor Oberst, as well as Edna St. Vincent Millay. Considering we are two fairly reserved people who have never spoken to each other, we proceeded to have a surprisingly intimate conversation, and my appreciation for Kiefer as a poet has only continued to grow.
Jefferson Navicky: Hi Abbie, I’d like to try something slightly different from other interviews. You’ve already done quite a few of them, and your thoughtful interviewers have already asked many of the questions I might ask you about Certain Shelter, so in light of that, I’d like to start at the end and look forward.
I love “Certainty” as a poem, and especially as a poem to end the collection. For readers who may not have read the poem, it’s about a neighbor’s bonfire. And although there’s the warmth and coziness associated with a bonfire, there’s also a bit of nervousness too, something especially eye-brow-raising when someone’s throwing old barstools into a fire. And yet…we trust “they’ll see it through / to cinder.” I was hoping you could talk a little about that poem’s creation, and your choice to end the collection with it.
Abbie Kiefer: When first published, this poem was called “August”—a month that, to me, feels like a threshold, with shorter days and colder weather coming. The speaker is thinking about midlife—another kind of threshold—and seasonality, and the title “August” helped set that scene. But considering the poem in the context of the collection, knowing that it was going to close out the book, I wanted to direct the reader’s attention to a slightly different place. Because, in assessing midlife, the speaker is really asking What can I count on to be true?
When she talks about her young adulthood—"[b]ack when we knew // we knew how everything would go”—you get the sense that certainty, for her, has shifted over time. In the present of the poem, here’s what she knows: the nearness of her partner and the comfort of proximity. The quiet of her garden. That the fire keeps flaring as long as you’ll feed it.
You're right about the fire being eyebrow-raising because even a planned burn has an element of uncertainty. It is not under our complete control. So there’s potential danger. There’s also decomposition. Those barstools, once useful, are going to burn just like the dead branches, like all the other fuel.
And the speaker who has complained about the ugliness of the waiting pile now takes pleasure from it—because that’s the tension we live in. The fire is a risk and a mess and a pleasure. It’s decomposition and it’s light and it’s warmth.
The speaker’s question—What can I count on to be true?—is one that follows me everywhere and Certain Shelter was my attempt to answer, even if the answer can’t fully satisfy me. I know lives must end. I know we can create and appreciate beauty within them. I know naming a certainty—even a difficult one—can be a form of consolation.
JN: I appreciate finding out that the poem changed a little bit once you decided it would end the collection. That question – “What can I count on to be true?” – makes me wonder about your relationship to your own work. Can you count on your own poetry to be true? Or your relationship to your own work to be true? That feels like a difficult question to answer, because one’s relationship to their own writing is always changing, I would think. Or at least it is for me. But yet there’s always the same things that go into it: the self + the pen (or whatever the instrument). I wonder how you think about that.
AK: I realize you’re asking about trueness in the way I first used the term—as a synonym for reality or honesty—but I keep reading true and thinking steadfast. If that were the question, I’d say yes, my relationship to the vocation is steadfast. There’s a line in the book that praises minor poets, calling them “faithful to work that will meet with quiet.” I don’t qualify even as a minor poet, I know, but I value faithfulness: consistently observing and considering and writing bad drafts that hopefully get better as I go. And I value the act of making the work, even if the work goes unseen.
But are my poems honest? Can I rely on their truth?
I want every poem to communicate an essential thing in a surprising way. If I’m successful at that—if the poem is well crafted and there’s a “necessariness” to what’s been said—I’d call that work true. The more difficult question, for me, is whether I’ve been true enough in a poem.
My writing style tends toward spareness and my personality tends toward reservedness and that results in work some readers deem too careful. An editor once told me it was like I was bracing my arms to hold her back from the poem, which was a real oof moment. I owe the reader honesty—but to what degree do I owe candor? Though poetry isn’t nonfiction, it draws on the experiences of its creator and in making a poem, I’m deciding how much I want to say about myself. Risking how much I want to make known. Does good poetry demand vulnerability? Yes, I think—but to varying extents, and a riskier poem isn’t necessarily a more effective poem.
JN: Wow, there is so much in your answer – I love it. Sometimes I wonder about how honest (in this case, meaning candid) a writer might be in responding to a rather vague question like my previous question. But I love those questions, because sometimes I get answers like your answer. I think what I most want to respond to, and ask more about, is the end of your answer. Vulnerability, it seems to me, is a bit of a buzz word at the moment in poetry; how could a good poem not be vulnerable? I don’t know, and I don’t know if that’s possible, but I do know that sometimes I think vulnerability gets substituted for poetic skill, or a sense of surprise. I once gave my students a prompt to write a secret in their pocket, carry it around with them for a day, and then try to write it into a poem. One student came back and just handed me the piece of paper with the secret on it, and said, “I’ve never told that to anyone.” He thought it would pass as a poem; it wasn’t a poem. It was a secret. I thanked him for sharing his secret, but in the moment, I didn’t have the editorial guts to tell him it wasn’t a poem. I wonder, considering this conversation, what would you say to that student. Or to me, for that matter! In retrospect, I think I may not have done enough to support that project.
AK: That’s a great prompt. I’m going to try it myself. Having to write down the secret makes me kind of antsy and I imagine something interesting could grow out of that unease.
In considering which of my own secrets I’d be willing to use, I was also thinking about your student and how his secret, to him, felt like a complete poem. Secrets are intense and intensity is at the heart of good writing, so I understand the impulse to let the disclosure stand alone. But to make personal revelation truly compelling, we need to do some translation for our readers.
Here’s an example: I have this old-timey filing box of index cards with scraps of ideas and one of them is that in April 2003, I saw Conor Oberst play with his band Bright Eyes at the Trocadero in Philadelphia and someone yelled from the crowd I love you Conor, and he yelled back You don’t even know me. Why am I holding onto this? Because the Troc was an old burlesque house and because no one wants to be rebuffed when declaring their love and because, when I think about myself in April 2003, anxious and adrift, I hear Conor Oberst singing me a lyric about working on a problem we know we’ll never solve.
My instinct tells me there’s good material here, and I trust that instinct, but this isn’t a poem yet because I haven’t yet figured out how to unlock its importance for a reader who isn’t me. That’s the part that I think of as translation: investigating what about my subject fascinates me and then interpreting that fascination in such a way that the reader can appreciate it, too, even if they didn’t spend their 20s immersed in sad indie rock.
Since writing is hard, my translations are mostly failures, but the file box helps me feel less pressure about the process. I just keep noticing what compels me and keep putting it down on index cards.
JN: That’s an amazing story about Conor Oberst and his accompanying index card. And I’m especially struck by your instinct that tells you something’s there, but you don’t know what. This makes me think of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I’m teaching a class about her now, so I’m steeped in her world and poetry. She once wrote, “When you write a poem, something begins to be a part of your thought and your life, and you become more and more conscious of it. It forms as if conjured out of steam.” For my final question, I wonder if this feels true to you, or if not, how does a poem feel to you as it comes into the world?
AK: The way she describes a poem slowly revealing itself—I recognize that experience. An increasing consciousness of what the poem might become. For me, that’s both thrilling and frustrating because I sense all the possibilities and I want those possibilities to be realized immediately. I’m an impatient writer. Guess what: poetry doesn’t care! Sometimes a poem needs to pinball around my brain—be part of my life, as Millay says—for a long time before I understand it well enough to shape it into a real thing.
Millay’s steam metaphor, though, makes me wonder if I’m doing this wrong. Because even on my best writing days, I’m less like a conjurer and more like a plumber. A really inept one. As in, I’m just going to attach this pipe and turn on this valve and let’s see what happens. And there can be a magic to that, too, but also an awful lot of mess. What do you think—was Millay ever messy? Would she tell me I’m okay?
JN: Well, this is fun. Let me think…What Would Millay Say? First, I think she might be a little puzzled, even turned off (pun intended) by your plumbing metaphor, though I happen to think it’s perfect. All things domestic, including plumbing and cooking, were happily taken up by her husband, Eugen, leaving Millay to engage in the act of poetry or the waiting for poetry (and also doing a little gardening). And it’s hard to say how she’d respond, because sometimes she was very generous, and sometimes quite stinging, especially, unfortunately, to women. Could she be messy? Definitely, although she could also be freakishly tidy with her poems – she once sat stock still for a few hours while a painter painted her portrait; when he was almost finished, she looked up and said, “It’s done,” and he said, “Oh no, I’m almost done.” She said, “No, I’ve finished my poem.” She’d written an entire damn near perfect sonnet in her head and then recited it to him (there’s conjuring a poem out of steam!). But, yes, she could also be messy. Her life got messy, many times, and sometimes she took months (years!) to finish a poem she’d promised to an editor, who would nudge her about the poem, and she would reply, it’s not ready yet! But say what you will about Millay’s life or politics, and say what you will about her poems, she was undeniably dedicated whole-heartedly to poetry, to writing the best poem possible. And thus, honestly, once she took a moment to read your poems and think about your question, I believe she’d say, yes, you’re fine. You’re doing it exactly right. It’s right that poetry is messy, and mistakes get made, people get upset, pipes explode. But there’s nothing more worth dedicating one’s life to.
