about Christine Klocek-Lim

Web-active poet Christine Klocek-Lim was born in the coal-mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and now resides in southeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons. She received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry and has two chapbooks: How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications) and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Poets and Artists (O&S), The Pedestal Magazine, Diode, the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory and elsewhere. She is editor of Autumn Sky Poetry and she may also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
 
 
Christine’s process notes for Cloud Studies

After hanging out with the online poetry community for the past ten years, I know that the most difficult part of editing or critiquing a poem is preserving the poet’s voice. It’s difficult to offer suggestions that improve the words, make the poem tighter and more itself than it would have been otherwise without inserting your own sensibility into the critique. It’s easy to see a poem’s flaws and realize immediately how you could fix it, but it’s another thing entirely to imagine how the author of the poem would fix it. Nic is excellent at this: every one of her suggestions and questions about the words I used to construct my poems pointed to a realization for improvement. Sometimes we went back and forth over a word: I was particularly fond of “corporeal” and resisted changing it until I listened to Nic read the poem. Suddenly I knew she was right. That word didn’t fit. Throughout our collaboration, I kept thinking to myself, Wow, she’s an incredible editor. I am so lucky. Nic never tried to change the voice of the poems, never tried to do anything but make them better.

The most surprising thing I discovered while working with Nic is how much I learned about the aural aspects of the poems. I’d written them as sonnets, so I’d already paid close attention to the way the lines sounded, how the meter worked, the rhymes. However, even though I read them inside my head, I’d never spoken them aloud. Listening to Nic’s draft recordings helped me realize that a poem is more than a collection of text on paper. Sure, I love the written form of poetry, of course I do! But the sense of the poem as a cohesive unit felt different when I listened to them, especially without the text in front of me. The sounds of the words (alliteration and meter, rhymes, phrasing) needed to make sense in a way that wasn’t so complex the ear grew fatigued but also wasn’t so simple the listener would grow bored. Nic introduced me to a world of sound that I thought I’d mastered. It was delightful finding out that I hadn’t because it made these poems fresh again for me and helped me revise them in a way that felt both ruthless and right.

The actual process of working out the mechanics of chapbook construction was wonderful. Nic and I were lucky enough to have a weekend during which we were both mostly free of other obligations and we were able to send emails back and forth regularly. We picked through a number of different designs for the look of the chapbook, discussed revisions, decided how we wanted to deliver the chapbook (online, download, print, CD, etc.). I expected some difficulty with this collaboration, either because of time-zone differences, aesthetic considerations, or just plain exhaustion, but none of that materialized. Instead, working with Nic so intimately on my poems felt like talking with a dear friend. She treated my words with delicacy and care, but wasn’t afraid to push at them either. When I first submitted my manuscript to Whale Sound, I knew that Nic was trying to do something completely different. When she sent me an acceptance email, I knew it was the beginning of an exciting conversation that would help my poetry step beyond where I could take it. For that opportunity, I am extremely grateful. Thank you so much, Nic.