Poetry Friday, Week 28: An Interview with Kelli Russell Agodon

 Jan at Bookseedstudio has us pondering places to travel to in the summer while round up the poets.
Today, I'm sharing an interview with Kelli Russell Agodon.  She's a northwest poet that is part of the duo behind Two Sylvias Press. I've had the opportunity to take several of her classes along with subscribing to The Weekly Muse, a which resource for poets.
In her latest book, Accidental Devotions, Agodon looks for ways to understand a world of screens, ghosts, relationships, and aging.  It was a pleasure to interview Kelli

---

2008 in the Emily Dickinson Room

JRM: In a recent interview, you said, “You were falling in love with Emily Dickinson again (Missouri Review, 2026). How did that come to be?
Kelli: It was kind of an accident, which is maybe the whole point of Accidental Devotions. As an undergrad, I fell in love with Dickinson’s poems, then in grad school I fell in love with her again, not only with the work, but with the idea of her reclusive life, the white dress, the bedroom, her intense inner world. At the time, I was living in a small seaside village of under 2,000 people in a haunted house built in 1929, so I was probably already primed for a little ghostly devotion. Like many things in my life, it became slightly obsessive.
At one point, I went on a writing retreat with friends to the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, and stayed in the “Emily Dickinson Room,” a white vintagy room overlooking the Pacific. I was wildly happy there. I mean, Emily Dickinson and the ocean? That’s basically my version of a theme park.
When I began writing the poems that would become Accidental Devotions, Dickinson started slipping back into the work. I had been reading her letters, especially the ones collected in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson and through those letters, I felt I was encountering another Dickinson, not just the poet I’d studied and loved, but Dickinson writing to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson, the person she wrote more letters to than anyone else. It was an Emily I hadn’t quite known about—she had so much love and joy for “Darling Sue.” She wasn’t just the woman in the white dress anymore. She was complicated, full of longing, and energy, and brilliance and nerve, maybe verve! As they say in Open Me Carefully, she was writing letters to Susan that were filled with “courtly love with terms of spiritual devotion.” We were writing on similar topics in different centuries!.But when she started showing up in my dreams and back into my poems. My first reaction to this was--absolutely not. We are not doing this Emily Dickinson thing again—I’ve already written about her! I’m always trying to push myself as a poet, to stretch, to not keep reaching for the same bag to reveal yet again, Ms Dickinson! But then how do you say no? Am I really going to say no to Emily Dickinson because I’ve “already written about her.” I mean, how many moons, moths, orchids, otters, waxwings, do I have in my poems? I’m not looking at the moon and saying “Not you again.” 
So I guess at a certain point, I realized maybe my job wasn’t to be a control freak poet, maybe I could just write the poems and see what happens. I wondered if maybe Emily and I still had more to talk about. Maybe I still had more to learn from her (Reader, I did!). So yes, this is/was my third time falling in love with Dickinson, her work, her letters, her spirit. I’m an obsessive poet, and this is an obsessive and devotional book. So, as one of my poems says, I finally decided to “let everything in.”
JRM: What was the path that allowed space to give into your obsessions?
Kelli: I don’t know if I made space for my obsessions or if they had already moved in on their own and were eating all my noodles in my kitchen, drinking all my coffee. I know I’m an obsessive person. There are things I loved as a child that I still adore: cemeteries, humor, wordplay, talking about death, quirkiness/surprise, anything to do with the universe or the Universe with a capital U. I have always been questioning: Why am I on this planet? What’s the point of all this? I am always looking for meaning, even when meaning is wearing a fake mustache and hiding in the produce aisle.
So maybe the path was giving up the illusion that I can actually control what I’m writing about, and instead just write the poems I needed or wanted to write. Not the poems I think I should be writing. Not the poems that seem tidier or more acceptable or easier to explain at dinner parties, but the poems that keep showing up, tapping on the glass.
And I think the other part was that was trusting the reader more. I think I trusted (or hoped or believed) that if I followed the strange path honestly enough, the reader might follow too. Or maybe not follow, exactly, but recognize something. Maybe they also want/need/enjoy poems that are trying to make meaning out of this chaotic, beautiful rock of a planet we’ve somehow been assigned to live on.

JRM: I always love your titles. They do a lot of lifting. What is your process for selecting a title? And also your process for deciding which poems going into each section.
Kelli: Titles can be mysterious little creatures and for me, a title has to feel good in my body, which sounds strange to say, but that’s often how I know something in a poem is working. I feel it before I know it.And if you like my titles, you may be surprised to hear they don’t always come easily to me. I can read someone else’s poem and immediately think of several titles because I love titling other people’s work, but with my own poems, I can often feel like I’m pushing a rope. Usually, if I’m struggling, I’ll give myself a constraint: this title has to begin with a C or a W, or it has to be six words long, or it has to include something not in the poem, or, or, or… I try to come up with anything that gives my brain a problem to solve. For me, that’s been my best technique. For a while I used to keep a bowl of titles on my desk, just images I came up with, weird stuff that didn’t ‘make much sense like “Sorrow is For Foxes,” “What the Devil Doesn’t Know,” “Even God Gets Spam Calls” and if I was stuck, I’d draw a title. Many times, it didn’t make sense, but occasionally synchronicity would be on my side, or something close (or closer) that I could work with.
As for the sections, I wanted them to act as containers, but not four separate little boxes. I wanted the sections to talk to each other because the manuscript is braided through themes of desire, spirituality, Emily Dickinson, technology, queerness, and my love for poetry. The first section, “Scrolling for God,” holds many of the technology poems: Alexa basically as therapist, overhearing a man trying to hold his relationship together via iPhone, Twitter, how we are so technologically connected in life but we get online to what?—connect more and still feel lonely?
The second section, “Rebel Angels”; those are pretty feminist poems, more queer/bisexual poems here, a few little edgy poems. “Cathedral of Clouds” is poems where we’re still searching for something, but maybe coming a little closer, but it deals with relationships whether its’ sexting (er, or not) in midlife or the challenges of relationships. And the final section, “Unmistakable Prayers,” is where the speaker begins to understand that maybe the sacred isn’t somewhere else. Maybe it’s all of it. Maybe this poem, this life is a prayer? We may never fully understand why we’re here, but as one of the poems suggests, wherever we’re going, “every route is divine.”

JRM: Many titles in this book start with “Accidental Devotion…” how did you determine which ones had Accidental Devotion attached to them?
Kelli: I wish I could say there was a very organized spreadsheet titled “Poems Which Deserve the Accidental Devotion Title,” but it was much more instinctive than that (I’m realizing as I discuss this book, how much I rely on instinct!). The phrase “accidental devotion” became a kind of doorway for the book. If a poem felt like it was circling the question of what we accidentally worship or obsess about (say an iPhone or trust or women poets…), then “Accidental Devotion” often belonged there. Maybe the form gives the poem a little altar to stand on.I also think those titles helped create a thread through the manuscript, a way for the poems to speak to one another. Some of the “Accidental Devotion” poems are funny, some are grief-soaked, some are love poems in disguise or hopeful, but they all seemed to be asking: what is claiming our attention, even when we don’t realize we’re praying to it?

JRM: My blog is shared with the Poetry Friday community which many work with young writers. You mentioned undiagnosed dyslexia when you were younger. What advice might you have for working with students?
Kelli: I think my advice would be to help students improve their writing by noticing what they already do well. Maybe one student thinks in images. Maybe another has a knack for using everyday language seamlessly in a poem. Maybe someone tells a great story, someone else is good with titles, and another student has a gift for endings. Help them find their superpower. Compliment what they did well and explain why it’s working, not in a vague “good job” way, but specifically: “This image surprised me” or “You created tension with that linebreak,” or “This ending opens the poem instead of closing it down.”
I feel the more we focus on what we do well and elevate that, the faster the not-so-great stuff begins to fall away. And I would love to retire the idea of “finding one’s voice.” We all have voices. We haven’t dropped them on the side of the road somewhere. They are with us at all times. If you can speak, you can write. Your unique perspective, the way you notice the world, the words you choose, the strange connections your mind makes, the quirkiness in how you see the world—that is your voice. It’s not lost, it’s just developing.
JRM: As a child and young person, were you known to make potions? Were you always interested in ghosts, Ouija Boards, magic, and dreams?
Kelli: This question makes me smile because my friends and I not only used to make potions and fairy dust, we used to sell them door-to-door! Yes, I was always interested in ghosts, magic, dreams, and Ouija boards, but when I finally did get a Ouija board, I was too afraid to keep it in my room. I remember slipping it behind the dresser in our our guest room, which I’m sure our guests appreciated!
I have a memory of being maybe three or four and my mum couldn’t find me. I had put myself in my closet, the one with the dark doors, and was using chalk to draw ghosts. When she found me, I was alone in my closet with my ghost friends, absolutely content. In elementary school, I read The Thing at the Foot of the Bed ghost stories and I remember asking my school librarian for a book of spells or one that would teach me how to make a voodoo doll. I wanted my last name to be Munster or Addams. Halloween was, and still is, my favorite holiday, and October, aka “Spooky Season,” is my favorite month.
I think all of that still lives in me as a poet. I’ve always been interested in what we can’t quite see but still feel: ghosts, intuition, dreams, the dead, the synchronistic messages the world seems to leave for us if we’re paying attention. Poetry, for me, has always been a little like potion-making. You take ordinary ingredients, a mourning dove, a text message, a childhood memory, some overheard conversation, a surprising image, and put it together to make something magical—or I guess that is the hope. 
JRM: What rituals might you have when sending work out?
Kelli: Only two—coffee and revision. And maybe a timer so I don’t waste my day on it.

JRM: I loved the poem “In One Calendar Day, We Live a Thousand Lives.” What was the genesis for it as well as your ending poem, “Necessary Prayer.”
Kelli: “In One Calendar Day, We Live a Thousand Lives” was written in 2020 during the pandemic. I was in Major Jackson’s class at Community of Writers, which was on Zoom that year, and every day we had to write a brand-new poem to share with the class. The world was falling apart. We were in a pandemic, George Floyd had been murdered, and a woman had been incredibly unkind to me (perhaps, even cruel and uncompassionate) in a way that really stayed with me, which is where the line “hurt things hiss back” came from. I was trying to give her grace or at least remind myself that hurt people hurt people. I was in a lot of pain when I wrote that poem and honestly, it all just came out. I barely revised it. I think it was my mind/heart/nervous system trying to make sense of one impossible day inside an impossible world. Also, I knew Major Jackson would be reading it, so there’s also something about upping your game for your audience—I’m a huge fan of his work and I didn’t want to bring in something, well, sucky. (ha!)
“Necessary Prayer” has a very different origin story. The title came from Aaron Holmgren and Dave Nissen, the Bad Poetry podcast guys. One of them joked, “What’s the opposite of an accidental devotion? A necessary prayer?” And I immediately thought, What a title! Well, now I have to write that poem. But unlike “In One Calendar Day,” this poem did not arrive complete. I revised it probably more than thirty times because it needed to be exactly right. It’s both a sonnet and the final poem in the book, and I think of it as my gift to the reader. The page is perforated so the reader can take it out, and at the bottom it says, “Every poem is a devotion. Take this one with you or pass it on to someone who needs it. Fill the space left behind with another offering—a note, a feather, a poem of your own.”
When I was writing “Necessary Prayer,” I imagined the reader holding the book and me speaking directly to them, poet to reader, across whatever space exists between us. That’s what writing poems often feels like to me: “I rewrite the same poem to you. Lifetimes of letters sent to / your mailbox as if each line could bring / us closer.” Maybe that’s what the whole book is trying to do: keep sending something out into the world in the hope that it reaches the person who needs it.

JRM: Thank you for sharing these insights.  I'm looking forward to reading your next book.
 More Info about Kelli: Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest poetry collection, Accidental Devotions, was just published by Copper Canyon Press. It's a book full of spirits and spirituality, desire and grief, smartphones and Emily Dickinson with poems that ask—what do we accidentally give our attention to? Kelli is the author of five collections of poetry and the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press. She teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. Kelli lives in a small seaside town in Washington State, where she writes poems, paddleboards, and occasionally keeps company with the ghosts. www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com / www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed 
Postcards from a Poet newsletter: https://kelliagodon.substack.com/subscribe
Social Media:Facebook, Instagram, Substack, BlueSky, Threads,  X/Twitter 

---

Order Accidental Devotions from:

•  The Poetry Shop.
• Open Books Poetry Only Bookstore (signed copies).
• Bookshop.org
•  Amazon

---

​Thank you for Tilt love.
I appreciate those who have taken the time to leave reviews and also share their love of the book with our Poetry Friday community.

• Carol @ The Apples in my Orchard 
• Jan @ Salt City Verse
• ​Linda @ Another Word Edgewise
• Heidi @ My Juicy Little Universe​

---