H. L. Hix: As indicated by its title, and by such instances as “Baby Names: Girl F” (21), the book is preoccupied with naming.  But one specific instance of naming gives me a way to formulate my question: “Bad Night, Bad” (78) begins, “Each star hangs / on a separate bolt of silk and by a different name / claims the universe.”  Here an act of naming claims the universe.  Is this representative?  What, for you, for these poems, is the hold, the power, of naming?

Kirsten Kaschock: Naming is inescapable.  Because it is language.  How language corrals thought.  I love names: the singularity, the known-ness of being named.  But it is also a terrible thing—to be named.  One thing is not another; we insist on it, I think.  So names are prisons.  My reason for writing many of the poems in this book is to insist that one can be one thing and also be another.  To show how these prison cells are membranous—possible to pass through.  As in birth.  As in death.  As in coming home from work, or being needed, or the timetravel of a long train ride.  We are capable of being other.

People have identities.  Plural.  We are all Clark Kent; all Sons of Sam.  Double living is not fiction: it is mundane.  And even if I were only one thing, that thing would not always be the same thing.  Our inner monologues can show our Hydes to us.

The first line in A Beautiful Name… is: “This is the house Jane built.”  I think that I am probably talking about identity, but also about the problem of using life as a way to establish identity instead of living.  In that poem, Jane’s name is repeated over and over, as if the key to unlocking the house of language is to make strange the foundation, the given.  There is a word for that: ostranenie.  I love that word.  It sounds like the name of a little French girl who can’t stop making fun of me.  Because, I suppose, I am dramatic.

To name is to see a flicker of the essential (yes, I believe) and to call it out.  Once it is out, however, it becomes an edifice, a structure, an institution.  The impulse to name is to utter recognition: it is you! But we fall in love with the sound of our own voice and the names become hollow.  I don’t know who you are, I just like the sound “you” make as I sing you to myself.

So, I guess I am trying to shatter names.  Or, I’m trying to reinvest them with love.  Naming is always a failure, but I believe in the beauty of failure.  To be doing what I can.  I believe in our isolation from one another and the way we can’t accept it.  I have lived that.  I’ve been a box.  As you are also a box.  Because we are both boxes, we bleed.  And that’s another human thing: bleeding together.  If we push through our cells and into each others’—it will be either the beginning of a great escape or a new and contagious cancer.  It is naming that will tell us which.

Kirsten Kaschock.  A Beautiful Name for a Girl.  Ahsahta Press, 2011.