Samhi C. – Staff Writer

skc5908@psu.edu

On Thursday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m., the Creative Writing department hosted the first of the Spring 2023 Smith Creative Writers Reading Series sessions, featuring poet and professor Nancy Krygowski who read from her two poetry collections “Velocity” and “The Woman in the Corner” as well as some work she has yet to publish. 

The majority of Krygowski’s work draws from real life, whether it be larger cultural factors of the American society we live in or personal events from her own life, and sometimes a combination. Her poems are straightforward in language, in story, but each reveals the many intricacies of human life. As she says of her poem “How Old Are You?” her poetry is “getting at the complexity of what we think are simple.” For example, “The Women in the Corner” arose from a realization that “something about giving meant taking away.” 

In discussion of the craft of writing poetry, Krygowski told us that while she is “not big into form, [Abecedarian]’s a form [she] really like[s].” Though for her, she writes in what she calls “buried Abecedarian” so that if you look at the page you cannot clearly see where the poems break based on the alphabet. According to her, they are “really fun to try.” 

Krygowski has also written Ars Poeticas which, according to her, she did not set out to do but rather realized some of her poems were of this nature afterward. In addition, she has written odes in order to help her write during a phase in which she found it difficult to. Particularly, her poems featuring her fictional Pigeon Rose are rather endearing, in that they feature much adoration for a non-domesticated pigeon. They are simultaneously enlightening. My personal favorite line from “Pigeon Rose” was “We’re always moving toward and away from our fears” which I believe aptly describes the majority of human existence. 

In terms of revision, Krygowski emphasizes the importance of having “good readers” review your work and she explains how she herself is part of writing groups who help her in this way as well as keep her accountable and on track for completing writing projects for which she self-assigns deadlines. In order to describe her writing process, she says the following: “I piece poems together, I gather things… I’m always getting lines of poems when I’m either riding my bike or walking… have to read [out loud] to hear the music.” 

For revision, she also often thinks: “How many words can I cut and still keep the essence of the poem?” Finally, she says, “all poets have their tricks,” “tricks” referring to habitual writing practices that poets adopt which sometimes work magnificently well within a poem but other times do not as they can begin to fade away from artistic into unoriginal. “Sometimes that’ll make me scrap a poem,” Krygowski says, “if it doesn’t sound authentic.” 

As a final note, when asked why and how she gets away with writing so much based on real life, Krygowski says “I definitely write to understand the world… I feel like that’s how we can connect” and to those who wish to do the same, her advice: “I say, do it!”

Krygowski, who is originally from Youngstown, Ohio, earned her B.A. in English at Youngstown State University. She later earned her M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition at University of New Hampshire then an M.F.A. in Teaching and Writing Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Krygowski continues to reside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania today as a teacher for the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops at Carlow University and an editor for the Pitt Poetry Series.