When she was a high school student back in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., Jean Kreiling fell in love with the sonnet. The simplicity of its 14 lines and sensibility of its rhymes and meter spoke to her in a way that’s never lost its appeal.
“That’s sort of when I got serious,” the professor of music recalled.
Dr. Kreiling’s love of poetry followed her through college, graduate school and into her doctoral years, even as she pursued a career in music (she’s a singer and pianist by training). A dozen years ago, a friend encouraged her to try and publish some of the poems she’d been writing. A few years later, Dr. Kreiling joined the Powow River Poets, a group of like-minded folks who come together on a regular basis to critique each other’s work and sponsor public readings.
In recent years, Dr. Kreiling’s poems have been published in many journals, in print and online, and have earned the String Poet Prize and the Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry. She’s also been a finalist for the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award, Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, Frost Farm Prize and the Dogwood Poetry Prize.
All this activity has culminated in the publication of her first book of poems, The Truth in Dissonance.
“By this point I’d written a lot of poems,” she said, noting that some in the new collection date back a decade or more.
Putting them together in a volume seemed the next logical step.
The collection is divided into four sections: everyday life, music, a year in New England, and love.
“I’ve written about virtually everything,” Dr. Kreiling said, citing her poems about family, shoes and ceiling fans.
That music figures in many of the poems is no surprise. One of her favorites in the new collection is “In the Alto Section (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).”
You sit behind the orchestra, spellbound
by complex chemistry you’ve heard before:
a measured mix of breath and time and sound
decreed by small black icons in the score.
You recognize these runes, for you’ve been trained
to translate this arcane calligraphy—
to be a catalyst for unexplained
excursions into immortality.
At last you stand: at last you get to sing,
your mortal, mid-range voice admitting you
to this inspired amalgam. Finally
your notes are needed for the rendering
of gold: believe, and count, and on your cue,
supply the center of the alchemy.
The change of the narrator’s role about two-thirds into the poem – moving from observer to participant – is the kind of “turn” that sonnets often feature. It’s the point where a transition takes place, a new perspective enters or a resolution seems at hand. That flexibility of viewpoint is one element that draws Dr. Kreiling to the form.
“I want my poems to be accessible to a wide audience,” she said, “but thought provoking, as well, with an unusual image or an odd choice of verb.”
As a musician and teacher, Dr. Kreiling is used to being in front of an audience, be it in the classroom or an auditorium. Writing poetry is different, being a solitary endeavor. Publishing moves the practice from one’s PC out into the world.
“As a poet, you spend a lot of time in front of a computer. It’s a very private activity, but creative, and it feels as if the results should be shared,” she said. “I wanted a product to be able to present to others. This is my performance as a poet.”
Winter Boats by Jean Kreiling
Becalmed in back yards, cold and mortified,
boats hold their breath until the day when stiff
blue tarps can be removed, when bows can glide
across blue bays. For months, the sleekest skiff
looks clumsy, inconvenienced by its own
unfloated weight, bound to a rusty trailer,
as buoyant as an old shoe or a stone,
when she should be bound only to a sailor.
But he’s a summer creature too: he knows
how briefly hulls and hearts are light, how short
the breathing season is. It’s he who tows
her, come the fall, to this ignoble port
beside the shed; he leaves her high and dry
and heavy with a longing for July.
(Story by John Winters, G ’11, University News)
