Karen Rigby

In her latest book, Fabulosa, Gilbert-based poet Karen Rigby strikes a pose between beauty and danger. The collection contains poems that are lush, filled with noir images that reminisce about a stylish cinematic past.

This is Karen’s second book of poetry. She has also published Chinoiserie, which won the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She is the recipient a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and an artist-opportunity grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has published poems in renowned journals and anthologies, and shared her work in many prominent venues.

Karen has long been captivated by poetry and poets. “I admire poets with verbal dexterity, movement, boldness, an instinct for sound and image, a heart, and a signature that is theirs. But there are many approaches to poetry, many styles and voices, so what I most admire is poetry that shows me something fresh. Or that takes inspiring risks. Or moves me.”

Karen includes a series of poems in her book that are known as ars poetica. Translated from Latin this means ‘the art of poetry,’ referring to poems that are about poetry. The first Ars Poetica was written in 19BCE by the Roman poet Horace, offering advice and guidelines on the craft of writing. This type of poem allows writers to examine their relationships with their poems and with themselves as poets. “Fabulosa explores the arts in their varied forms, from paintings to figure skating, but it’s also about writing itself and about how experiences are remade through that writing.”

Karen grew up in Panama. Her poems are infused with memories of her past, even if the location is subtly placed. “At first glance, my upbringing overseas has little to do with my writing. I’m not often writing about Panama as a topic or locale. But because writing involves memory, and comes out of an embodied, real life, there will always be traces. It is entirely plausible that I could only have come to write the poems that I write because I have had my specific set of experiences, and therefore have a particular way of thinking, absorbing, and understanding.”

Karen’s poems reveal hidden depths. “I’d like my poems to say more than they seem to say. If I write only about a bird of paradise, for instance, but fail to mention that it grew in a country of violence, then I will have only given you an ideal, ornamental flower. If I write about Dior’s Bar suit as an iconic fashion, but never imbue it with eeriness — and it can be eerie in museum photographs, between the blank mannequin that wears it, and the styling and lighting that surrounds it — then I’d be missing a layer. I will have observed only a little. It also invites asking what is just past the frame.” And many of her poems challenge her as a writer to explore new terrain. “A poem is both a tightrope I’ve already walked on (I know what I’m doing) and a new risk (I have no idea what I’m doing) every time. That tension interests me.”

Stepping into the poem at right is like opening a mystery novel or watching a femme fatale enter the scene. The poem combines an ars poetica with vintage images that recall a glamorous era of perilous moments. “Beauty and danger go hand-in-hand when I write poems, because poems are made out of, and reflect, the materials and history of this world. Life contains brokenness, and yet the arc must move toward restoration.”

For Karen poetry has the ability to instill language with meaning and the sustaining possibility of connecting with readers. “I’m fascinated by the idea that what I write may be read by someone else, in the solitude of a room, and I might not ever know anything about that. What if that encounter between writer and reader were to alter a soul, in however small a way? That in itself is haunting, and reason enough for me to keep trying.”

More at karenrigby.com.

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Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves

like twin gauntlets set on the margin: enter the female

assassin. The screwball debutante. Noir & glitz

mixed in one bad throwback to an age when dahlias

bowled anyone who breathed them. My poems arrive

wearing satin or suede to haunt you when they leave

no trace. I’ve watched a man pull off his gloves

with his teeth. The trick to undoing the wolf

behind the saint is to make a slo-mo invitation

of it. Because there’s never a plot unless one of us

goes missing, that’s me at the aerodrome

& you boarding a custard plane. Now fly

a desultory wind before you vanish. That’s

the tension we need. I love an overblown image:

a drawer full of hands wave in a solemn motorcade.

My gloves pantomime moods so thick

you could ladle gravy. About my first book

a critic wrote I’m a little bored with the aesthetic.

If that isn’t damning, what is? My poems wear black

to turn the dials & bag the ice. In the director’s cut

I’m driving the hairpin curve when the camera

rolls back to show you, looking louche, but alive.

You were always in on it. A poem is a diamond heist.

Tell the critic no one watches a woman enter a room

to look at her hands just like no one’s reading

this poem to picture my life. But a black glove.

Peeled down the avenue of my arm, what wouldn’t you do?

© Karen Rigby; from Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024), first published in The Spectacle.

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