INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY EUDORA ALBERTSON, HEX, DYLAN RICHARDSON, AND EULEA KIRALY
TRANSCRIBED BY EULEA KIRALY
In February 2026, Arkana had the opportunity to interview poet Donika Kelly who visited the UCA campus as an Artist-in-Residence. Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry; and Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowhip and Pushcart Prize winner.
Arkana: Welcome back to Arkansas, Donika Kelly. You lived here a while and got your undergraduate degree at Southern Arkansas University. However, in your poem “Every moment I have been alive, I have been at the height of my powers,” the speaker refers to “the South, to which I can never return.” How do you feel about returning to Arkansas today?
Donika Kelly: I love coming back to the South. My family is still here. But when I was working on that poem, I was feeling how inhospitable governments in the South have made it feel to return. There are so many parts of my identity where legislatures are like, “Oh no, this is not acceptable in this place. We will not protect you.” It’s hard to make a choice to come back to that. But I do miss the South very much. We moved to Magnolia when I was 13. I did high school, I did college there. I went to Austin, which is not the South, even though people who are not from the South and not from Austin will claim that Austin is the South. Then I lived in Nashville for seven years, and then I moved back to California in 2015. There was all of this legislation, really cruel legislation coming down the pike around women’s bodies, reproductive health, queer people’s rights, just rights to bodily autonomy. So it is the question of, where in the United States can I live, who can I be with? I think if I were closer with my family, or if those relationships were healthier, it [Arkansas] might feel more possible, but because of the dynamics within my own family, it’s just really complicated.
Arkana:You talk about the blue bubble and finding community. Can you speak a little bit more about finding community as a writer? In your book’s notes, you mention that a lot of poems were inspired by students or inspired by dance classes. How did you approach collaborative writing and finding other people to write with?
Kelly: The notes section of the book was really fun to write. Because the book is full of love poems and full of poems that are with other people, it felt important to name some of those folks.
Around 2017-2018, I began writing with my students when I gave them writing exercises, and that really changed things. I thought, “Oh, this is so fun. I’m doing a little writing with them, so I’m modeling for them. We are together as writers in a room, versus y’all are students; I’m the teacher. We’re together, making art. We’re all practitioners, so we’ll practice together.” I don’t know how it feels to my students, but for me, it changes the dynamic a little bit during those class periods when we’re writing together
These days, I’ve been actively writing with my friends. I have friends who are on the East Coast, I have a friend who’s in Dallas, I have a friend who’s on the West Coast. We’ll have a phone call and write together. The first part of the phone call is just checking in. How are you doing? What’s going on? Catch me up on your life. Then we’ll write anywhere from five minutes to thirty minutes, just on the phone.
We get to spend quality time together, make art together, and it feels really sweet. I think so many of the narratives are that the practice of writing poems and making this kind of art is lonely, and that it is a thing that we do alone. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes other people are in the room writing while we’re writing, like parallel play. Sometimes we get to be directly in conversation with other artists, or other forms of art making. I really love writing poems, so any opportunity to do that in ways that are unexpected feels really fun and delightful.
Arkana: Some of our favorite poems from The Natural Order of Things were the early ones grounded in Arkansas that captured the cadence of local speech. Can you talk about the importance of sound in your work and how you achieve that?
Kelly: I came to realize pretty early on in my writing practice that I was the one person in my family who wrote poems, but that everyone makes some kind of art. My sister and my brother and my uncle, who’s just a little bit older than I am, would make songs. They would get a beat, they’d write the lyrics, they’d record, they’d burn a CD, then listen to the CD in the car. They weren’t trying to get a record deal. They weren’t trying to monetize it. They weren’t selling copies. They felt moved to do that.
Fast forward 20 years, and part of what I realized is that a lot of the gifts that I have with language and with music and with cadence come directly from my family. My grandpa is so good at making figures of speech. His metaphors are really good. The way he observes things is really, really beautiful. My sister is very good. Sometimes she’ll say something, and I’ll be like, “Can I use that? When can I use that?” “The Bone Museum” that’s about about playing dominoes is a great example of this. Recently, I was telling my mom and sister about the poem, and I asked, “Y’all know, ‘Jimmy said Tennessee tidy’?” And they immediately replied “All booty, no body!” We have so much pleasure in language. There’s so much music in the way that my family talks. And I would say Arkansans in general. It’s a beautiful, beautiful accent, and a beautiful idiom. I love the music here.
I live in Iowa now, and when I moved there, I felt so lonely for the rhythms and the cadences and the idioms of this place. I thought maybe if I write it, I’ll be able to bring that closer. None of that’s an answer to “how.” It’s not exactly like score or a notation, but it is more like pulling out and then assembling those phrases and music that my family carries, and that I carry around with me.
Arkana: What would you say defines your poetics? What do you get excited about when writing poetry?
Kelly: I wish y’all had sent me this question ahead of time! That’s such a good question. What I value in terms of content, as a reader, is other people’s business. I want to feel like there’s a kind of intimacy there, that I’m being let into something, let into an experience, let into a feeling. That is something that is important to me in my own work. Can I do that? Can I make work where I’m asking people to come in? If I’m asking people to come in, then what am I asking them to experience? Can I shape that experience in a way that feels ethically good to me? This is a weird way of framing it, but am I taking care of myself when I’m writing? Am I taking care of my speaker? Am I taking care of the reader? And taking care does not necessarily mean shielding from things that are difficult, but how are we navigating those waters?
That’s one aspect of it, but I also really like sounds. I like making noises. In my own work, I want the sound to be pleasurable. When I’m reading a poem out loud, I want it to transport me in some way, either to a place or to a feeling. So those aspects are really important to me. I like a beautiful image, but sound seems to be a much bigger driver. I think that’s because I come from a family where the rhythm and the language is so beautiful – and out of a poetic tradition where the music itself is actually really important.
Arkana: In many of our poetry classes, we talk about what other authors we are in conversation with. Who inspires you? Who are you in conversation with?
Kelly: I can tell you who I read, and I think that provides some kind of insight. First is Natasha Trethewey. Carl Phillips has been really, really helpful because his sentences are long, and I actually struggle with that. Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds are all important. Ladan Osman is a Somali poet based in New York; she really helps me think about poems in a different way. More, she helps me think about being alive in a different way. Gabrielle Calvocoressi. I don’t know if y’all read Gabrielle’s work; you should definitely read Rocket Fantastic. There’re other poets I’m working with who I think of as peers, like Tarfia Faizullah and francine j harris, Ama Codjoe. I like to think that I’m in conversation with Cameron Awkward-Rich, because I love him. I love his work, so I’m gonna claim it.
Arkana: Although you emphasize sound, the images in your poems do a lot of powerful work defining and redefining the self, and blurring the lines between self, nature, animals, and others. Can you talk more about how you see your work blurring these lines between different bodies?
Kelly: I feel sad when I think of myself as being only human. “Human,” as defined in this particular moment, as a being that is different from everything else around it, socially, ideologically, economically. There’s an isolation in that definition: that everything around the human is for the human and in service of the human. And if we can’t figure out how to make it in service of us, can we destroy it? I am thinking specifically of a definition of human that comes out of capitalism, that comes out of patriarchy. Christianity as practiced in the United States can add to an element of that, a sort of dislocation from the world in which we live. It’s an isolating structure. So maybe this is another part of my poetics: I’m just an animal. We are animals among other animals. We are in an environment. We shape the environment that we are in. We are shaped by the environments that we are in. To me, that feels more correct.
It also feels more joyous. And with that, there’s more responsibility. We have more responsibility.
But we can also demonize being human and say we are bad. If we’re living under capitalism, we’re living under patriarchy, we’re living under these dislocating narratives, then we do become bad in a way. But if we can imagine ourselves as just one other kind of animal moving about our environment, changing our environment as other creatures do, as water does, as wind does, then it’s, well, okay.
I feel like there’s a kind of softening that can make change feel more available. We have to ask: How am I moving in the world? How am I connecting to other people? How am I connecting to other animals? How am I connected? Not: what do I have dominion over?
Arkana: Let’s take that animal question further. Because several of us are in a contemporary mythology class, we’ve been talking about the book in terms of myth. Your earlier book, Bestiary, had many mythological creatures. What was the attraction of them? The animals there are not always very nice.
Kelly: No, the animals there are not always very nice.
In Bestiary, there’s a sequence of love poems. There’s a werewolf love poem, a centaur love poem, a satyr love poem. It seems like a million years ago since I wrote these poems, but what I love about those poems is they showed me (and they continue to show me) how I was trying to figure out how to be in a romantic relationship as it was ending.
I was going through a breakup, and I was trying to respect her boundaries. My family is not good at respecting boundaries, and the models for romantic love in popular culture are not good at that. I had some friends who might have been good at that, except they were lesbians who had been together for 20 years, so they were absolutely not helpful at all. They’d never broken up with anybody, because they got together when they were nineteen. So my question was, how do I figure it out?
What I see in the poems is me trying to figure out: how do I do this? How do I have my feelings, which are, “I don’t want to break up. I don’t want this to be over. I do want to come and knock on the door. I do want to make the argument that this could work.” How do I have those feelings and also respect the fact that she’s done?
What’s interesting to me about the animals is that I chose intuitively. A centaur is not known for being a consensual creature. They are figures who are often ravishing, often snatching up maidens and nymphs. There’s a kind of violence inherent in those figures. What if I had that tendency? I had to acknowledge that dynamic. But my centaur is more like “Yo, I was just talking. I was talking big. But actually, I’m very shy.” My satyr is standing outside thinking, “I see that your lights are off.” Still being weird, but not going to knock on the door.
For me, those animals, those stories, gave me another way into thinking about how to relate to other people. That was the beginning of me thinking I have to go outside the human to figure out how I want to be. Mythology using the animal or the creature is helpful for figuring out how to be a little person.
Arkana: Donika Kelly, thank you so much for speaking with Arkana!