A Deep Dive with Mindy Kronenberg: Poet, Editor, and Professor

Visiting Assistant Professor Mindy Kronenberg is a celebrated and widely published poet—one who believes it’s important to engage with art in all its forms and find the rhythm in everyday life. Having first come to Empire State University as an adult learner informs her approach to being a professor—for the past 30 years, the memory of what initially brought her to the university has guided her approach to teaching and connecting with her students.

Framed by two large, light-filled windows that hint at the abundant shrubbery just outside, Kronenberg looks serene. She sits almost exactly between them, two small wooden-framed paintings hovering above her head in the space between glass panes.

Kronenberg: I was an adult student. I had gone to school, was not able to complete my degree, and I did go on develop a career in writing, but that was always a big gap that I wanted to fill. I can really relate to that aspect that exists in my students. I say, ‘Hey, listen, you’re doing it now.’ I needed that pep talk myself, those many years ago. I’ve been at Empire for quite some time in the capacity of student, and as faculty.

Irigoyen: And you are from Brooklyn, is that correct?

She smiles and bows her head, then jokes:

Kronenberg: I am from the cradle of civilization, proudly so.

Irigoyen: Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing?

Kronenberg: I have very fond memories. Interestingly, I went back to the building that I grew up in … in 2009. I grew up in Borough Park. Back then, it was a little more diverse. I grew up in an old building called the Plymouth, which I think was built in the 1930s. It was nice and shabby-chic by the time I came into this world, and it was a little bit rundown, but it was a great place to grow up.

She looks up, as if returning to the place while she speaks.

I think I learned early on that money could buy many things, of course, the necessities, but life is what you make of it. My parents were very literate, active, and interesting people. There were all sorts of books in the house, and music. There was a lot of dancing.

She says this with emphasis, to convey the importance of the memory we’ve just arrived at.

I’ve written a lot about these spontaneous dance routines. People in my family would just sing. They would make songs out of ordinary ideas that would come into their head.

She demonstrates: “I’m going to get the mail now!” in a peppy singsong, and then continues.

Everything had a rhythm or a song attached to it. All the things I was exposed to have contributed to who I am now—my appreciation for the arts in all genres. Times were not always easy, but I was gaining lessons that were invaluable, unspoken, but experienced and lived. It taught me a lot. I have very fond memories of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Then we moved to Jamaica, Queens … and I didn’t get to suburbia until I was about 16. My parents moved to Long Island, but I very much value my urban days. I’m still kind of an urban chick, you know? I’m a Brooklyn gal.

Irigoyen: I’m curious to know what your favorite Brooklyn staple is.

Kronenberg: Oh boy. I would say it’s almost neck and neck between knishes and the pizza that I had. There was a place that had pizza and knishes, which I know seems kind of weird, and I used to go there for lunch. Not health food, exactly, but when you’re a kid… it was like heaven.

Irigoyen: Thank you for sharing that. I feel that Brooklyn pizza is unbeatable. Now, hearing about your childhood, it’s no wonder that poetry has been your medium of choice.

She considers this for a beat. The painted rooster in the frame on the wall above her stands firm.

Kronenberg: It’s the predominant literary form that I practice. I enjoy all sorts of things. I think you mentioned in your email to me that you’re a nonfiction person, but none of us really exist in isolation when we’re practicing something in the arts, right?  We’re influenced by other genres entirely. I’m very impacted by visual art, by film, by dance.

When I was four or five years old, I studied with the New York City Ballet. I was in love with ballet, like a lot of little girls. To get to the studio, you had to go through a hardware store. They used to call it “the linoleum store” because of all these samples of flooring on the walls … I never took it up professionally and continued it, but it was a fabulous experience and being onstage really taught me a lot about collaborative work.

Irigoyen: Let’s get into your writing a bit. What was the moment that made you realize that you were a writer?

Kronenberg: I’ve been asked that question before, it comes up in class sometimes. I’ll tell you something similar to what I tell my students: most people I know who are writers, they don’t call themselves writers. They just do it. It is a practice that is connected to you, your personality.

I’ve been taking pen, or pencil, or crayon to paper for as long as I can remember … I would scratch out little songs, gravitating to the process of expressing myself. Maybe that’s partly because I was surrounded by people who did the same thing. The need to express oneself is really important in education … investigating something simply because you’re interested or curious.

I ask what writing does for her, knowing that each person derives something unique that sustains them from their art.

Kronenberg:  It keeps me alive, frankly … writing is a response to living. The summoning of ideas and responses to express what you see, what you feel, sometimes to try to reconcile with something, find your way towards something.

When I give advice to some who seek it, it’s: be mindful of what the poem has to say, not just the way you say it. There’s efficiency in certain levels of communication … but in something like poetry, you don’t want to forget the craft or the artistry of it. You can bring about something that will remain with the reader after they’ve forgotten the exact words. That’s not always easy to capture, but it’s what one should aim for.

At least in the last 50 years of my life, there was never any extended period of time that I didn’t at least scribble something down to play with and bring it to fruition as a full-fledged poem.

Furrowing her brow, Kronenberg then explains some reoccurring thematic elements in her work.

Kronenberg: I like to think of poems happening that way—this photographic moment of capturing. I’ve used that word, “capturing” several times when I’ve had discussions about poetry. I’ve tried to capture something before it disappears, capture things that are so fleeting. And the longer you live, the more you realize how fleeting things are in life.

I have a poem that I wrote … I was waiting to get into the Holland Tunnel. Naturally, there’s a tremendous amount of traffic. And I’m looking out the window and I see two people.

She gestures into the distance with her hand.

Kronenberg: They seem to be in the middle of something. And they start to kiss. Just when something might happen, the traffic starts moving, and someone behind me honks. The last line is: “I’m pulled into the burning mouth of the Holland Tunnel,” because I’m dying to know—was he going to leave her? Was he not?

Sometimes, when you look back on the portfolio of things that you’ve written, you barely remember the incident that inspired the poem. But you’re glad you had the poem because it’s a reminder of several things. It’s also important to expose yourself and push yourself towards things that are unfamiliar. To challenge yourself.

Irigoyen: I think my favorite part about graduate school was always getting writing prompts with constraints, very specific constraints, that push you to abandon your process, do it that way, and see what happens. This has kind of been absorbed into my methodology: using something as a vehicle to write about something else. It always helps to have a shift in perspective.

Kronenberg: I also think poets should look not just outside themselves, but also to the other arts. I got involved heavily with ekphrasis, which is the use of non-verbal art forms to create narratives—especially visual art, but I’ve done it with music as well. I’ve been part of an international ekphrasis project that’s facilitated by Joost de Jonge, who’s an artist from the Netherlands … it’s called “An Ekphrastic Notion.”

I teach an ekphrastic course where I present samples of things and have the students imagine what’s happening in the photograph to create a narrative. Besides the courses that I teach, I’m the poetry curator for the Center for Environmental Education and Discovery. There’s a trail on their premises, about 1.5 miles and filled with 22 sculptures, and every year I gather poets and match them with sculptures to create poems.

Irigoyen: I think one of the most powerful parts of writing, and the arts in general, is the community aspect that you’ve been highlighting.

Kronenberg: [Writing] really comes to life when you start to share it—when it comes out of isolation and becomes more of a communal activity.

It’s also important to remember that writing exists for the sake of the ideas that bring one to write. It’s not just about the technical prowess. Sometimes it has to do with not just the merit of the piece, but the thing that Robert Bly called “the psychic echo.” What we were saying earlier about what you are left with.

Art is really two things: it’s not an accident, and it’s not impractical. But you have to remember—when you go to the page, or the canvas, or whatever it is—the desire to do it validates it. Sometimes we can stop ourselves if we question it too much.

Irigoyen: I don’t know if you like David Bowie, but he has a song called “Conversation Piece.” There’s a line in it that I think about all the time. It says: “and my essays lying scattered on the floor / fulfill their needs just by being there.”

Kronenberg: You have to put yourself aside. It sounds odd, I know, because we’re writing, but you need that part of the process to allow the poem to breathe.

Irigoyen: All right, so you did share a few upcoming projects and initiatives already, but I was also interested in just touching on the forthcoming anthology, “Saving Ourselves: An Anthology Advocating for Women and Girls.”

Kronenberg: It’s to raise awareness and money for support of women and girls who are abused, who are disenfranchised, made vulnerable, and this includes all people who identify as female. I think it’s a good example of how poetry can be a vehicle for an important initiative, a way of bringing awareness, engagement and support of different communities of people.

We continue chatting about a range of projects, and Kronenberg mentions she’s been on four editorial boards this summer, besides her work as a magazine editor and developing her own manuscripts. “When it rains, it pours,” she jokes.

Kronenberg: I’ve been the editor of Oberon Poetry Magazine since 2015. One of the things I love about being an editor is things will cross my desk from very seasoned writers—names I recognize—and it’s lovely to get those poems, but every so often I’ll get a poem with a letter from a high school kid, or someone in college. They’re almost afraid to tell me “I’ve never published a poem before.”

With a smile, she says:

I’m always so thrilled when I’m able to tell them that we’re going to be their first publication. I never lose the thrill—it remains exciting, because I think back to when I started out. I remember the feeling, that kind of validation. It’s so gratifying that someone who doesn’t know you found something in your work that was so endearing or appealing on some level.

Going to poetry readings. I’m always delighted. I have my colleagues who’ve been doing this for a million years, and then you have somebody who’s up there shuffling papers. You can see how nervous they are, and they get that poem out. They hear the applause. They’re relieved because they’re received well, and they’re relieved because it’s over.

I like to go up to them after the reading, congratulate them, and say, “You’ve done it and you’ve lived through it, so that means you must do it again.”

Irigoyen: Can we talk about some of the mechanics of your style as a poet?

Kronenberg: I write free verse. I do believe heavily in rhythm and creating a kind of gravity in a poem from line to line, stanza to stanza. I feel that helps not just act as a mechanism for cohesion but makes the sound of language more pleasurable.

Irigoyen: Can you share a surprising, delightful fact about yourself?

She is caught off guard by my question, letting out a quick breath as the corners of her mouth rise into a smile.  “Talk about a possibility for a subjective answer,” she jokes.

Kronenberg: There are things I did when I was younger I wouldn’t do now, but when you realize you have more time behind you than ahead of you, you do realize you need to take more risks.

I went on this ride in Disney World. I went down there with friends, when we were celebrating our 70th birthday—and I don’t go on roller coasters anymore, but I went on the “Tower of Terror” ride. And some people would say, “Oh, child’s play.” But I never go on these rides.

You reach a level when you drop you down, it’s like zero gravity. So, you’re out of your seat—of course you’re belted—and on a sensible day, you would ask me, “would you do that?” I would say, “Oh, no.” But we’re down there, and then… I went in, and it was exhilarating. I’m trying to live life to the fullest, and I consider myself not a very close-minded person.

If we can go back to an earlier question about what I tell students, it’s to take some risks. I’m not talking about stepping into traffic—

I smile.

Kronenberg: but take some risks and go outside your comfort level literarily, artistically, to see where it brings you, because sometimes we cut off possibility by restricting ourselves without thinking about it. I think all of us need that advice as we get older, too.