Daniel Carden Nemo: The title Lonely Women Make Good Lovers borrows from a country song. Why did you choose to begin the book with it, and how did you want that phrase to break against the intimate truth of the poems?
Keetje Kuipers: We get to be a lot of different people in our lives, and one of the people that I am in one part of my life is someone who listens to country radio. Not only do I love the storytelling and metonymy and truly excellent harmonizing, but I also like the way that a lot of the songs push against my more tried and true ways of seeing the world. I don’t like being comfortable and I don’t like taking my own opinions for granted. And listening to country music is one opportunity for me to crawl out of one skin and into another. However, sometimes a song will come on that is not asking me to try on another skin but that is telling me that the skin I am wearing isn’t real or doesn’t exist. That’s what happened when I first heard the song “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers.” Its denial of pain and, worse, its lulling insistence that one person’s pain—specifically, a woman’s pain—might be a good place to find your own pleasure was so negating for me as a listener that I had to find a way to reply to it. And it’s not just that poem that is the reply—it’s the whole book that responds emphatically to the song, insisting on seeing each other’s humanity and humbling ourselves in front of each other’s pain.
DCN: Across the collection, the body is central: bleeding, pregnant, scarred, desiring, decaying. Do you think of the body as the medium of your poetry or as its subject?
KK: As I write in the book: “But can’t it be both?” Look, I’ve tried to write without the body. I’ve longed for the head and its cool intellect, its distancing, its ability, like a bad boyfriend, to say, “I’m just telling you the truth. Don’t you want me to tell you the truth?” But the body doesn’t have a single truth. It likes things complicated, shifting, not static but full of the potential for transformation—and for contradiction within that transformation.
DCN: A kind of solitude keeps recurring even though the book is crowded with others—lovers, children, friends, parents. Is loneliness a counterpoint to love for you, or a precondition? Is it an erotic, existential loneliness, or one that survives even inside marriage and parenthood?
KK: I found heterosexuality extremely lonely. And a lot of the poems in the book explore that. But as someone who started out as a music major in college, your suggestion of the concept of “counterpoint” feels like a useful metaphor for me here, so let’s try that:
In the simplest terms, counterpoint in music is the simultaneous deployment of two independent melodic lines. They are meant to work well together, to intersect, to overlap. However, they are not built for or around each other the way that a harmony is made from or responds to a melody. They are their own distinct stories, and they are equal contributors to the life of the song.
Now, before you start to think that I’m about to make the argument that straight relationships are always functioning within the structure of a dominant melody and a responsive harmony while queer relationships all get to enjoy the experience of a dual melody structure, let me stop you. My use of this metaphor, and my point, rather, is that for me to be happy and satisfied and content and fully myself in a relationship, it has to be one crafted in the mode of counterpoint: two equal melodies making a song together. There are plenty of folks who don’t function this way, who prefer in their romantic relationships—straight or gay—to have a melody and a harmony. That’s just not a dynamic that works for me.
And while I do believe that many straight couples are able to find their way towards creating a song with two equal and independent voices that intersect in a pleasurable way, I was never able to do so myself. My melody got muddled next to a man’s. I found myself trying to contort my melodic line into a harmonic one just so we could have an excuse to intersect. In the endless hunt for maximum closeness, I was always listening for his melody, and listening so intently that I forgot to listen for my own. And when I did manage to hold onto my own melody—to keep it in my ear and carry it forward on its own line—I felt like I was singing alone. Mostly I was always singing on my own.
To be clear, I’m not saying that men failed me. I’m saying that I failed men. Like, really: I flunked out of straight school. I couldn’t hack it as a straight girl. So yeah, loneliness was for a long time an inescapable element of my experience of love. And it’s not that I don’t ever feel loneliness now in my queer marriage. That seems to be an inevitable element in the human experience of intimacy. It’s just that it doesn’t feel insurmountable with my wife. Even if I can’t hear the song for a moment now and then, I know we’re still singing our two melodies—independently and equally—together. She’s knowable, and so am I.
As for how that’s affected my writing and continues to, we could really get into the weeds here about tonal music and functional harmony, but instead maybe I’ll just say this: My experience of loneliness in straight relationships—and the incredible frustration and sense of pervasive loss I felt at the lack of intersection and true closeness with my straight partners—was profound and haunts me. I suppose it has become existential for me. That elemental distance is the specter I’m most interested in exploring on the page, whether platonic or parental, romantic or fraternal. Don’t even get me started on the loneliness of being an American right now, the loneliness of being a human in this digital age, the loneliness of watching the world burn. That’s a lot of melodies getting sung alone.
DCN: Many poems move associatively, slipping from the present into memory, into dream, sometimes myth. Do you plan these pivots or are they the natural swirl or, say, turbulence of your thought?
KK: I never plan my poems. Anything I’ve attempted to map out ahead of time is guaranteed to be dead on arrival. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes feel my way through the rhetorical impulses of a poem before I’ve fully drafted it. Last night I was writing and could feel each turn as a move that already existed and that I merely needed to execute competently in order for the poem to succeed. I felt the pull towards an assertion, then a question, then a memory, then a reference. As I was drafting, sometimes I knew what the question or the memory was, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to fill in the blank in the moment and sometimes I chose to leave it empty until the next draft. This does sound a lot like mapping it out, doesn’t it? Perhaps the difference I’m trying to articulate is that I’m not planning it consciously, I’m just writing down what I’m receiving, like it’s being transmitted to me and I’m just the telegrapher jotting down the message coming through from the other end of the line.
DCN: “The Magician at the Woodpile” and “Bleeding” confront sexual histories with candor, even humor. How do you know when and how to transform private violence into public language?
KK: I suppose it’s mostly that I know that I want to be uncomfortable, and that I want to be uncomfortable in a communal way. I have a terrible habit of just saying “the thing.” My wife teases me about this, how if there’s something that shouldn’t be said in a particular moment, I will feel compelled to say it. It’s like I’m powerless to this compulsion to speak whatever everyone else would prefer was left unsaid. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it even comes off as a sort of playfully manic party trick. The compulsion comes from a desire for greater intimacy, but it often has the opposite effect of shattering whatever closeness had existed just before I spoke. These are the times it can be really damaging, not because what I’ve said is cruel or unkind, but because by saying this thing I’ve pushed the person I’m talking with into an area of the conversation that feels unsafe to them—the ground isn’t solid, nothing is off limits, we could fall through the façade of small talk at any moment. In contrast, poems are a place where I don’t have to be afraid to make the reader feel uncomfortable or vulnerable along with me. And the along with me seems like a really important distinction here. If we’re going to get out of our comfort zones, I want us to do it together. I want to be holding hands with the reader as the floor gives out beneath us. Of course, that’s what I want in the conversation happening at the dinner party, too—it’s just harder to get people to come along with me on that roller coaster drop in real life. But in a poem I can create a space where the reader and I are safe and unsafe together, where our discomfort is a kinship that brings us closer to ourselves and to each other. And why else do we write except to be together in the truest way possible?
DCN: Some pieces celebrate queer domestic life, yet they’re also alive with desire, sometimes unruly, sometimes dangerous, depicting queer marriage at times as sanctuary, at others as site of contradiction. In “Now that we’ve been married all these years,” love seems to be a pact with the world rather than a private endeavor. Do you see love here as personal devotion, or as an existential stance?
KK: An existential stance, certainly. The epigraph to my book is from a Seamus Heaney poem, “The Aerodrome,” and that’s exactly what he calls love in that passage of his that I quote: a stance.
So love is a choice. But I don’t mean that to sound like a pop-culture prescription for a healthy marriage: I choose you every day, babe. No, that’s not what I mean at all. Instead, I think that love is a choice in that you are constantly having to choose to be a person who is capable of giving love and capable of receiving it. And you have to make that choice repeatedly against a backdrop that is constantly shifting.
Heaney also calls love a location, but, again, he’s not talking about location as fixed, but as shifting, as something we’re constantly having to reassess as we move through the world and as we move in relation to others. You are changing, your partner is changing, the world is changing. Can you keep your bearings? Tie a little ribbon to a tree branch and make your way back along the same path each time? And can you do so despite yourself? Choosing to be capable of love—to be capable of sustaining enough vulnerability and uncertainty to navigate the shifting path—is the greatest freedom I’ve ever discovered.
DCN: Several poems begin in narrative but end in meditation, almost essayistic. Do you think of yourself as writing lyric essays disguised as poems?
KK: This thought had never occurred to me. I don’t generally like writing nonfiction, where I can’t seem to land on the single voice that tells the “true” story. Poems allow me to move through personas (mother vs. lover, for instance), bend inconsequential but evocatively useful facts (like the color of the car my cousin was driving the night she died), and to write multiple poems about the same experience but with a different lens and a different emphasis each time—almost like they’re entirely different narratives. Richard Hugo famously wrote in his book of essays The Triggering Town, “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” That’s the kind of truth I’m after, and one that nonfiction doesn’t give me quite enough wiggle room to squirm around in.
DCN: The acknowledgments describe residencies, workshops, and friendships as essential to the book. Do you see the lyric “I” here as also collective, porous, plural?
KK: Oh, absolutely. If this book is about anything, it’s about being together.
DCN: And finally, if you had one piece of advice you could offer a young poet, what would it be?
KK: This isn’t just my advice for poets, it’s my advice for people: You only have any power over yourself. Over others, you have no control at all. So try to live your life in a way where you’re not the asshole—because that’s really all you have any say about.
Keetje Kuipers: We get to be a lot of different people in our lives, and one of the people that I am in one part of my life is someone who listens to country radio. Not only do I love the storytelling and metonymy and truly excellent harmonizing, but I also like the way that a lot of the songs push against my more tried and true ways of seeing the world. I don’t like being comfortable and I don’t like taking my own opinions for granted. And listening to country music is one opportunity for me to crawl out of one skin and into another. However, sometimes a song will come on that is not asking me to try on another skin but that is telling me that the skin I am wearing isn’t real or doesn’t exist. That’s what happened when I first heard the song “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers.” Its denial of pain and, worse, its lulling insistence that one person’s pain—specifically, a woman’s pain—might be a good place to find your own pleasure was so negating for me as a listener that I had to find a way to reply to it. And it’s not just that poem that is the reply—it’s the whole book that responds emphatically to the song, insisting on seeing each other’s humanity and humbling ourselves in front of each other’s pain.
DCN: Across the collection, the body is central: bleeding, pregnant, scarred, desiring, decaying. Do you think of the body as the medium of your poetry or as its subject?
KK: As I write in the book: “But can’t it be both?” Look, I’ve tried to write without the body. I’ve longed for the head and its cool intellect, its distancing, its ability, like a bad boyfriend, to say, “I’m just telling you the truth. Don’t you want me to tell you the truth?” But the body doesn’t have a single truth. It likes things complicated, shifting, not static but full of the potential for transformation—and for contradiction within that transformation.
DCN: A kind of solitude keeps recurring even though the book is crowded with others—lovers, children, friends, parents. Is loneliness a counterpoint to love for you, or a precondition? Is it an erotic, existential loneliness, or one that survives even inside marriage and parenthood?
KK: I found heterosexuality extremely lonely. And a lot of the poems in the book explore that. But as someone who started out as a music major in college, your suggestion of the concept of “counterpoint” feels like a useful metaphor for me here, so let’s try that:
In the simplest terms, counterpoint in music is the simultaneous deployment of two independent melodic lines. They are meant to work well together, to intersect, to overlap. However, they are not built for or around each other the way that a harmony is made from or responds to a melody. They are their own distinct stories, and they are equal contributors to the life of the song.
Now, before you start to think that I’m about to make the argument that straight relationships are always functioning within the structure of a dominant melody and a responsive harmony while queer relationships all get to enjoy the experience of a dual melody structure, let me stop you. My use of this metaphor, and my point, rather, is that for me to be happy and satisfied and content and fully myself in a relationship, it has to be one crafted in the mode of counterpoint: two equal melodies making a song together. There are plenty of folks who don’t function this way, who prefer in their romantic relationships—straight or gay—to have a melody and a harmony. That’s just not a dynamic that works for me.
And while I do believe that many straight couples are able to find their way towards creating a song with two equal and independent voices that intersect in a pleasurable way, I was never able to do so myself. My melody got muddled next to a man’s. I found myself trying to contort my melodic line into a harmonic one just so we could have an excuse to intersect. In the endless hunt for maximum closeness, I was always listening for his melody, and listening so intently that I forgot to listen for my own. And when I did manage to hold onto my own melody—to keep it in my ear and carry it forward on its own line—I felt like I was singing alone. Mostly I was always singing on my own.
To be clear, I’m not saying that men failed me. I’m saying that I failed men. Like, really: I flunked out of straight school. I couldn’t hack it as a straight girl. So yeah, loneliness was for a long time an inescapable element of my experience of love. And it’s not that I don’t ever feel loneliness now in my queer marriage. That seems to be an inevitable element in the human experience of intimacy. It’s just that it doesn’t feel insurmountable with my wife. Even if I can’t hear the song for a moment now and then, I know we’re still singing our two melodies—independently and equally—together. She’s knowable, and so am I.
As for how that’s affected my writing and continues to, we could really get into the weeds here about tonal music and functional harmony, but instead maybe I’ll just say this: My experience of loneliness in straight relationships—and the incredible frustration and sense of pervasive loss I felt at the lack of intersection and true closeness with my straight partners—was profound and haunts me. I suppose it has become existential for me. That elemental distance is the specter I’m most interested in exploring on the page, whether platonic or parental, romantic or fraternal. Don’t even get me started on the loneliness of being an American right now, the loneliness of being a human in this digital age, the loneliness of watching the world burn. That’s a lot of melodies getting sung alone.
DCN: Many poems move associatively, slipping from the present into memory, into dream, sometimes myth. Do you plan these pivots or are they the natural swirl or, say, turbulence of your thought?
KK: I never plan my poems. Anything I’ve attempted to map out ahead of time is guaranteed to be dead on arrival. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes feel my way through the rhetorical impulses of a poem before I’ve fully drafted it. Last night I was writing and could feel each turn as a move that already existed and that I merely needed to execute competently in order for the poem to succeed. I felt the pull towards an assertion, then a question, then a memory, then a reference. As I was drafting, sometimes I knew what the question or the memory was, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to fill in the blank in the moment and sometimes I chose to leave it empty until the next draft. This does sound a lot like mapping it out, doesn’t it? Perhaps the difference I’m trying to articulate is that I’m not planning it consciously, I’m just writing down what I’m receiving, like it’s being transmitted to me and I’m just the telegrapher jotting down the message coming through from the other end of the line.
DCN: “The Magician at the Woodpile” and “Bleeding” confront sexual histories with candor, even humor. How do you know when and how to transform private violence into public language?
KK: I suppose it’s mostly that I know that I want to be uncomfortable, and that I want to be uncomfortable in a communal way. I have a terrible habit of just saying “the thing.” My wife teases me about this, how if there’s something that shouldn’t be said in a particular moment, I will feel compelled to say it. It’s like I’m powerless to this compulsion to speak whatever everyone else would prefer was left unsaid. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it even comes off as a sort of playfully manic party trick. The compulsion comes from a desire for greater intimacy, but it often has the opposite effect of shattering whatever closeness had existed just before I spoke. These are the times it can be really damaging, not because what I’ve said is cruel or unkind, but because by saying this thing I’ve pushed the person I’m talking with into an area of the conversation that feels unsafe to them—the ground isn’t solid, nothing is off limits, we could fall through the façade of small talk at any moment. In contrast, poems are a place where I don’t have to be afraid to make the reader feel uncomfortable or vulnerable along with me. And the along with me seems like a really important distinction here. If we’re going to get out of our comfort zones, I want us to do it together. I want to be holding hands with the reader as the floor gives out beneath us. Of course, that’s what I want in the conversation happening at the dinner party, too—it’s just harder to get people to come along with me on that roller coaster drop in real life. But in a poem I can create a space where the reader and I are safe and unsafe together, where our discomfort is a kinship that brings us closer to ourselves and to each other. And why else do we write except to be together in the truest way possible?
DCN: Some pieces celebrate queer domestic life, yet they’re also alive with desire, sometimes unruly, sometimes dangerous, depicting queer marriage at times as sanctuary, at others as site of contradiction. In “Now that we’ve been married all these years,” love seems to be a pact with the world rather than a private endeavor. Do you see love here as personal devotion, or as an existential stance?
KK: An existential stance, certainly. The epigraph to my book is from a Seamus Heaney poem, “The Aerodrome,” and that’s exactly what he calls love in that passage of his that I quote: a stance.
So love is a choice. But I don’t mean that to sound like a pop-culture prescription for a healthy marriage: I choose you every day, babe. No, that’s not what I mean at all. Instead, I think that love is a choice in that you are constantly having to choose to be a person who is capable of giving love and capable of receiving it. And you have to make that choice repeatedly against a backdrop that is constantly shifting.
Heaney also calls love a location, but, again, he’s not talking about location as fixed, but as shifting, as something we’re constantly having to reassess as we move through the world and as we move in relation to others. You are changing, your partner is changing, the world is changing. Can you keep your bearings? Tie a little ribbon to a tree branch and make your way back along the same path each time? And can you do so despite yourself? Choosing to be capable of love—to be capable of sustaining enough vulnerability and uncertainty to navigate the shifting path—is the greatest freedom I’ve ever discovered.
DCN: Several poems begin in narrative but end in meditation, almost essayistic. Do you think of yourself as writing lyric essays disguised as poems?
KK: This thought had never occurred to me. I don’t generally like writing nonfiction, where I can’t seem to land on the single voice that tells the “true” story. Poems allow me to move through personas (mother vs. lover, for instance), bend inconsequential but evocatively useful facts (like the color of the car my cousin was driving the night she died), and to write multiple poems about the same experience but with a different lens and a different emphasis each time—almost like they’re entirely different narratives. Richard Hugo famously wrote in his book of essays The Triggering Town, “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” That’s the kind of truth I’m after, and one that nonfiction doesn’t give me quite enough wiggle room to squirm around in.
DCN: The acknowledgments describe residencies, workshops, and friendships as essential to the book. Do you see the lyric “I” here as also collective, porous, plural?
KK: Oh, absolutely. If this book is about anything, it’s about being together.
DCN: And finally, if you had one piece of advice you could offer a young poet, what would it be?
KK: This isn’t just my advice for poets, it’s my advice for people: You only have any power over yourself. Over others, you have no control at all. So try to live your life in a way where you’re not the asshole—because that’s really all you have any say about.
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Keetje Kuipers’ most recent collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Poems from her three previous collections have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, POETRY, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.
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Keetje Kuipers, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions, 2025)
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