The Visceral Experience of Faith: Poet Libby Kurz

in Conversation with Emily Chambers Sharpe

I've always been… fascinated with the body… wanting to get closer to whatever source of life you can find, whether that's God or the divine power and your faith or the core of the human body.

— Libby Kurz

Libby Kurz is a writer, poet, registered nurse, and US Air Force veteran. She holds a BS in Nursing from UNC-Charlotte and an MFA in Creative Writing from National University. Her work has appeared in Ruminate, Relief Journal, Driftwood Press, and Literary Mama, among others. Her poetry was awarded first prize in the New Voices category of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2017 Contest. In 2019, Finishing Line Press published her poetry chapbook, The Heart Room, which chronicles her experiences working as a cardiothoracic nurse in Norfolk, Virginia. She has taught creative writing classes for The Muse Writers Center and the Armed Services Arts Partnership. After a decade of moving cross country with the military, she now resides in Virginia Beach with her husband, three children, and Swiss Mountain Dog.

The following transcript has been edited. The full conversation is available in the audio interview above.

Emily Chambers Sharpe: I'd love to start by letting you tell us a bit about yourself and how your own life story embraces art and faith.

Libby Kurz: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to get to be here and talk with you today. Gosh, art and faith are so foundational to my life. I don't think it was until probably my late 20s that I really started seeing how fused they were—the process and journey of those, how connected they were in my life.

I definitely have always been into the arts. As a kid, that looked more like visual art. I loved painting and drawing and really didn't consider myself much of a writer. I mean, I wrote in my journal, but I struggled a lot with the formulas of English classes growing up. And then through a strange series of events, I ended up in my twenties writing more once I had kids. It felt like a more easy form of expression, not having to work with any tools other than my fingers and a piece of paper or a blank page on a screen.

Then I ended up deciding to get my MFA in creative writing. I was in the military in my early twenties, and when I got out decided to use my GI Bill to pursue an art degree. And I think that point was when I started really seeing the correlation between my writing process and the journey of faith. I became a Christian in my middle school years. And that faith journey has gone through so many twists and turns, and ups and downs, and building up and breaking down. So much like the writing process, where we start with a draft, and a lot of it gets scrapped, and then we keep some and have to figure out what we want to keep and what we need to dig deeper into.

ECS: I know that your collection of poems that you have out is a really beautiful blend that describes a lot of your experiences professionally as a surgical nurse in the heart room. And it includes a couple of poems that are very on point for that, that were honored by the Poetry Society of Virginia Press. So I would love to hear about this work as a nurse—very much engaged with people's bodies right in surgery when they're asleep—and how you have worked with that subject matter, what it means for you. Does it have a connection with your faith?

LK: Absolutely. I think one thing that's a central subject to most of what I write about, whether it's in poetry or prose, is the connection between the human body and the spiritual world. And I think I've always been drawn to that. That's part of what drew me to nursing and even surgical nursing, just loving surgery. Just being fascinated with the body and how it worked and seeing inside of it, wanting to get closer to whatever source of life you can find, whether that's God or the divine power and your faith or the core of the human body. And I think that search eventually led me to want to work in cardiac surgery, just for all the things that the heart symbolizes.

But yeah, there is just something really fascinating about that line of work. And it was particularly intense, to where there was never a day, I don't think, where I would drive to a shift at that job and not pray, because I think it was pretty palpable those days at work, how we walked that line between life and death with a lot of our patients. There are certainly routine surgeries we did where we felt pretty in control and secure, and that sense of threat wasn't as present. But there were certainly so many emergencies and unexpected things that could happen. There's a humility of knowing anything could happen, and you can only do so much. I think it all pointed to that greater mystery of life and death, and there's so much we don't know and can't control, and I think that's what a lot of poets are always trying to get to as well. So for me, those two—my life as a poet and learning how to see the world—just so much lined up with the heart of my role as a nurse, really.

There's a humility of knowing anything could happen, and you can only do so much. I think it all pointed to that greater mystery of life and death.

ECS: Did you work as a nurse during these years of the pandemic at all, and how was that?

LK: That's a great question. I did a little bit. It's interesting because so I was not in any sort of acute critical situations. I had many friends who were on the front lines working in the ICUs. It really was like the front lines of a war from how they described it, and I was still a surgical nurse at that point. I had left my job at the heart hospital because I have three kids, and ultimately it wasn't a sustainable work environment just because of the long hours and call schedule. And I ended up doing more elective surgeries at that point. And of course, everything shut down in the beginning of the pandemic, so elective surgeries were not essential, and even my husband, who's a surgeon, had no work for a while. We were in this really bizarre situation as surgical specialty medical personnel, where suddenly our skills were not needed right now. So that was bizarre. We went back to work once things were a little more under control, but then all my children were home with the pandemic, so I actually ended up quitting my nursing job just about a year ago. I think the pandemic maybe sped that process up for me. I was walking the line for such a long time between my life as a writer and wanting to do more with it, writing and teaching, and then my work as a nurse, and ultimately feeling like I just didn't have space inside of me to do those anymore. So this whole past year, I've been making the transition to full-time writing, teaching. And I guess you can say maybe the pandemic was the best time to do that or the worst time, just because nurses were so needed. But yeah, it certainly felt like the best decision for our family.

The Heart Room, Finishing Line Press, 2019

ECS: The material for The Heart Room is so rich with images of you both in your home life and in your life as a nurse. And I'm wondering—because I know a bit of your subject, both from reading you and then I had the joy of being in a workshop with you at one point—I wonder what you think about where you draw inspiration in the world? I think that's something I remember about you and your teaching, is just calling us to pay attention and to notice things and jot them down. And so I'm interested to know, over time, what's caught your attention? Has there been evolution in that?

LK: That's a wonderful question. I have to remind myself sometimes to pay attention. And I had the chance to go speak to my son's classes in sixth grade and read some of my poems to his class and talk about poetry. And it was like I was reminding myself of that.

All of that's to say my inspiration has changed a lot. So, you know, as a result of the pandemic, maybe a little bit and also just my season of life being really probably more rooted in motherhood than any other thing, is just the ordinary moments of life that we get sick of that are mundane. But there's something to them. So I'll catch myself during the day now thinking, Oh, this would be a good entry point for a poem. I opened the junk drawer in our kitchen last week, and I was really frustrated by the chaos in there. And I thought, actually, what if I just wrote a whole poetry collection called Junk Drawer and even just listing out all the crap in there and how disconnected and yet connected it is, and what that has to say about my current season of life. 

So, yeah, there's thoughts that come to me all the time as material. Lately, though, I've been steering away from poetry. Not altogether, but I've been digging around in memoir pretty intensely for the past two years, working on a manuscript that is all about the story of my body as a child and some of the generational trauma in my family and how that actually had a lot of subconscious influence over my decision to become a nurse and even seek out pretty high-trauma, high-intensity work environments, almost as a way to numb myself from my own body's reality by entering into other people's bodies.

Those themes of how trauma reenacts in our lives, the human body, faith, sexuality, violence—I would say all of those themes have been my latest inspiration, and a lot of that story is tied to my experiences as a nurse in the military. So I've been researching a lot about the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, because those were going on while I was in the service, and I would see the wounds of those wars, you know, of the troops coming home. But we didn't get to hear a lot of the stories of what led to those wounds. It's been really profound to go back and just read a lot of the literature that came out of those wars. So yeah, my inspiration is all over the place, from pretty deep themes of war and sexuality and violence and human bodies, but also the humdrum stuff of junk drawers and dirty dishes. 

ECS: I'm really fascinated and would love to unpack a lot of that. I wonder—specifically from your experience in the military, and you mentioned the theme of violence and war, and maybe you can even put trauma there—how does your art play a role for you? What about faith? What role do they play in your processing of things like trauma or violence?

LK: For me, it's been really in the last 3–5 years that I was so frustrated as an artist that so much of my job as a teacher was helping other people make connections in their lives through their work, through their writing. And a lot of times, those would be so clear. As far as you know, most people have primary metaphors or images that show up again and again in their work and. Yet for me, I didn't know what those were. I mean, obviously the heart was a big one, but I didn't know how all of my fragments fit together, and the narrative especially. And so I went deep into the work of therapy, and through that, started making all of those connections. 

The craft of writing, and especially poetic language, is like a back door into accessing those parts of our stories that are hard to talk about.

I think my memoir writing has been borne out of that process, and it's so been interconnected with my faith and my journey as an artist. I'm just so compelled to make art out of life, really, and to fashion it in a way, and particularly drawn to how to do that with trauma. A lot of the classes I've been teaching in the past year has been how to write about trauma and how the craft of writing, and especially poetic language, is like a back door into accessing those parts of our stories that are hard to talk about or just seem to defy language and narrative, and how to use poetry and imagery as a starting point to get those fragments out. And then from that point, starting to find the bigger narrative and how much, especially for victims of trauma, that gives us a sense of reordering and power and control in a place we once felt stripped of it. I see that almost as a continuation of my work as a nurse, even though I'm not nursing, so to speak. I love that kind of working one-on-one with people to help them find language for those intimate parts of their lives. 

As far as how faith fits in with that, I think it's hard to talk about faith without talking about a sense of calling. And I think our deepest calling as human beings is so reflected in our voice and the life we have lived, the experiences we have, and no one else has that. So I think it's all interconnected—this sense of meaning you have about your life is connected to what your story is and what you have to say in the midst of your story, what you have to say to the world because of your story. To me, that's so intertwined with faith and our meaning in this life.

How to Handle a Heart

Wear gloves tightly 

fitted to your fingers,

but not too tight—

you will want to feel 

the surface purely,

the way the vessels 

hug the muscle 

like roots that shoot 

deep into the damp 

body of the earth.

You will want to feel

the tissue pulsing 

because it’s like 

listening to music

in your hand, 

and it will make you think 

that maybe the day 

God created 

the human heart 

was the same day 

He made rhythm 

and set the entire planet 

to one beat,

and when you’re done 

you must shake it briskly—

let any air out 

that might be trapped 

inside the chambers—

but not too hard, because 

it’s like cupping a bird 

in your hands—

the one that got stuck 

in your house 

through an open window,

the one you’ve managed

to coax and capture,

the one whose hollow body 

you feel flailing inside your palm 

as you walk onto the front lawn, 

release your gap-toothed grip

and watch its wings 

spread widely 

into the open sky, 

pumping the air 

like blood.

Originally published in The Heart Room, published by Finishing Line Press, 2019

ECS: I really love the thought that this is all an interconnected piece, and I see that in your work. I'm wondering if you would maybe read “How to Handle a Heart”? So people could hear you working this out.

LK: I'd be happy to. So this poem literally came from watching hearts exposed, hearts beat, and watching those hearts be handled by the surgeon and the surgical assistant literally wearing gloves and some of the practical aspects of surgery, but then how they were a window into something more transcendent or just metaphorical for life in general and the human heart.  [See poem in sidebar.]

ECS: There's so many images in that one poem. And I so love the way that you bring in the bird and then tie the bird into the heart in that last line about pumping the air like blood. It's a beautiful poem. Thank you for sharing with us.

I wonder, do you have voices of other poets or artists that have inspired you as you have been inspired by these images of things like the body or things like faith or violence?

LK: Oh, there are so many. I actually just put together a little bookcase, one of those cheap Target bookshelves in my bedroom because, as a result of COVID, I've ended up holing up in my bedroom as my workplace because it was the room in the house where I could shut the doors. There's only so many books that fit on this little shelf, so it is really the books that have inspired and influenced me, particularly in the last couple of years as I've still been writing poems, but also memoir. 

As far as poets, one poet I've been coming back to quite a bit is Sharon Olds. She's kind of a confessional poet, but writes so much and so openly about the body, about her body, about human relationships and vulnerabilities. And she was—is—so ahead of her time. I mean, it's hard to read one of her poems and feel indifferent to it. I love the shock of them and just how she will go there in her poetry. 

I love Marie Howe. Her collection Magdalen has been so central to a lot of the themes I've been writing about as far as who we are as women in the world. 

Also for poets, one of my all-time favorite poets is Carrie Fountain. She's the poet laureate of Texas right now. And her latest collection came out earlier this year or last year, 2021. It's called The Life, and it's all about motherhood and how she navigates the dailyness of life with young children. There's a lot of themes of faith in her book, especially as her kids start asking questions. So that's been one that I've held closely in the past several months. 

And then as far as memoir, there's a book called This Is My Body, by Cameron Dezen Hammond, and it's “A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession.” It's such a beautiful memoir. I recommend it for any woman struggling to navigate their place in the church who has a deep passion for faith but has had a hard time reconciling that with the reality of evangelical Christianity. And she really tells the story of her body. 

Another book is The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch. The story, her writing—it's poetic. It's like Sharon Olds. It just punches you in the gut. And she writes a lot about childhood sexual abuse and how that impacted her life and into adulthood.

I could go on and on. There's so many. Melissa Febos is an incredible writer who's written a couple of memoirs, talks a lot about the power of personal narrative and writing our trauma as a way to really change the landscape of the world. So those are a few of the ones that pop out. Of course, later on after this conversation is finished, I'll think of ten others I wish I had mentioned.

ECS: So when you are creating with words in the way that you are—and you mentioned you've migrated a little bit from poetry into memoir—how do you know what form your words want to come into or what form they want to take in the world?

LK: Well, that's such a good question, and I don't know if I have an answer to it other than just trial and error. These past two years of really working on a memoir, I think just knowing some place in my gut or intuition that this story was a full-length memoir rather than a poetry collection for no other reason than my own obsession to find a narrative in my own life. So I would say everything's gotten mixed together because I think I still approach a memoir through the lens of a poet as far as being driven more by images and metaphors and how those tie stories, scenes, memories together rather than just plot. I still approach it that way.

But I was reading an old issue of The Paris Review not too long ago, and there was an interview in there with the poet Robert Hass, and I think he said, Poetry is an act of the imagination and prose is an act of the will. And I would say that has felt really true to me. That to write this memoir has required a sense of discipline that I do not exercise as a poet. And it has meant sitting down almost daily and just getting words out, which feels like pulling teeth a lot of the time. I would say so many of the poems I've written just come to me. I'm not working that hard. There's certainly work involved, but usually it starts with just a line here in my head or an image, and then I'll start writing, and some things start flowing. Maybe I would just know the structure by the way it feels inside of me when it's coming out, if that makes sense. Although I wish there was a more clear-cut answer as far as form and structure go.

ECS: You mentioned earlier, primary metaphors or images and your desire to understand more of what that is. Is that something that you have been able to identify? I remember also you've talked about poetic obsession when I've had the privilege of hearing you before. So I wonder, what are your poetic obsessions?

LK: Oh, I love that you tie that to that, because it's absolutely all connected. I think we don't have to search too hard to find these things. I mean, really just sit down for an hour and write freely, and usually at least one of your primary energies will come out. The poetic obsession that comes from that Richard Hugo book, The Triggering Town. We think it's maybe a deterrent or a flaw, as writers, to write the same thing over and over, but actually it's good, and it's part of what we have to say to the world.

There's a reason, even though we might not be able to completely locate it, that we are obsessed with the images we are obsessed with. The heart, the heart beating—that's one of mine, for whatever reason, that’s so captivating to me. Blood—I mean, so much of my childhood memories and what I was drawn to is blood. How do I admit that I'm drawn to this darkness that I have been in my work? But maybe the violence that blood represents connects to life as well. And I'm also really kind of obsessed with images of the womb and the female body. And then so many images that have come up over and over again as I've been working on this memoir are our wounds, like bullet holes, shrapnel wounds—images of machinery mixed with flesh, which were so many of the images that I saw not just as a military nurse, but as a surgical nurse in the civilian world, using metal instruments with the human body. And so on a grander scale, you know, that opens up into bigger issues of what it means to be a woman in the world of patriarchy and machines and bureaucracy. So those are some of where my primary images have taken me and my narrative.

There's a reason… that we are obsessed with the images we are obsessed with. The heart, the heart beating—that's one of mine.

ECS: That's really beautiful stuff to think about, and I like that it's not all beautiful in the same way, like things can be beautiful that might evoke feelings that aren't necessarily warm and fuzzy. That's something that I've definitely seen in your poems themselves. You can embrace a real range of feeling and keeping beauty quite strongly in the way that you draw out the image, or at least that you draw us into the image, maybe it's through painting it as a picture for us. I love that about your book, and that's one of the things I'm hoping people will get to experience in your new work that you're going to share with us. 

Would you like to tell us a little bit about the poems that you want to share with Vita Poetica and the inspirations behind them?

LK: So there's one [“Born Blind”] I have in mind that I actually wrote in response to a request from a pastor at a church we used to attend. It was during Lent, and he was going to talk about the story of the blind boy who could see, and he asked me to do it. I had never written a poem on request, in a way. So I thought about it, and I was like, yeah, I'll give it a shot. And so I actually ended up really loving what came out and using scripture as an entry point into the poem and the images. There's so many vivid images in scripture. I was particularly drawn to the image of mud, really, as what was smeared on the eyes, and then to open up vision and that dynamic of just dirt and grit mixed with healing.

Another poem [“Joy”] I had in mind was probably one of the few poems that I'm proud of that I wrote during the pandemic. Actually, I wrote it in response to an assignment. I took a workshop online with Carrie Fountain, which was such an incredible experience. She gave us different prompts, and so one of the prompts was to take a big word—and we do this a lot in poetry, like how do we bring things down to a concrete, specific image? How do we take these big general abstractions and make them specific? 

So she wanted us to pick a big word like grief or love or joy or whatever, and just write down whatever images come to your mind as representing that big thing. So the poem is called “Joy, and it’s images from my home that come to mind that you wouldn't really think were joyous. The poem led me to an unexpected place.

ECS: You talked a little bit about your practice of writing and how it's been different shifting into memoir. I like to ask people about their practices that work in terms of art, and how those practices have evolved is also interesting to us.

LK: Gosh, I feel like I'm always trying to search down what my best practices are. It's this elusive thing I'm always trying to get to. But I have noticed over the years—and I've finally given into it—that I do my best writing when I'm in bed. I've set up so many different desk spaces and tried to work that way, but I just really do my best work, especially drafting new work, I do my best in the early morning or late at night, when that critical part of your brain is turned off, and you're not censoring so much what comes out. So I've tried to make a practice of, once I get the kids off to school, once I've tended to essential things, I will get back in my bed and for at least an hour and try to—right now has been revising my memoir manuscript—I've had to start treating it really as a job which, I think a lot of artists don't like to do. It’s been a skill I'm developing, but I have learned that, yeah, my bedroom, the fan on, the curtains drawn, kind of this dark den of a place, is where I do my best writing, really cut off from the world for a little while.

ECS: You recently published a poem that you shared online -- the “Sunday Afternoon” poem. I love that you have a lot of very overt Christian religious imagery, but it's paired again—I would say, it's one of the things I think you do often, like the heart and the bird—you take things that seem quite different and bring them together in the poem. And I don't know if you have that handy and could read that.

Sunday Afternoon

It’s a slow wound
on a slow day.

It’s a dull pencil
in a hard pew.

It’s a stale wafer
in a metal goblet.

God, I want
so much more

in my mouth.
It’s the frozen

moment I come
home from church

and don’t know
what to do with myself.

Today I want to crawl
back in the tomb

with Jesus, deep inside
that cold rock.

I’d lie next to His body
wrapped in stains.

I’d talk to Him like
a patient in a coma.

Originally published in Ekstasis Magazine

LK: I wrote this poem actually a few years ago and revisited it a few months ago and decided to send it out. It's a short poem, but I really do love it. And it really came from a place of raw emotion inside of me.

OK, have it right here. I'll read it.

 It's called “Sunday Afternoon.” [See sidebar.]

ECS: What I hear in there is that last line where you get back to a patient in a coma and I'm thinking of you as a nurse, and it makes me think, what do you say to a patient in a coma? But I think you did pull in so many different feelings in there and also images. Like a patient in a coma, Jesus in a tomb, wafers, metal goblets, dull pencils. I love that you can pack so many things, where my mind just has to bring all that up at once. When you have a poem like “Sunday Afternoon,” what would you hope that we, as readers, are going to pick up on are here?

LK: For me, it was a way to pull together a lot of images that left me frustrated and wanting in the church experience and feeling like I was bumping up against a wall in the church as we know it. It felt like the embodiment of that emotion was so contained within those images—that the dull pencil, the hard pew, and just wanting more of the blood, more of the body, more of the visceral, carnal experience of faith.

It was Lent when I wrote the poem, and so it just felt like this season where God was dead or dying, and we were in that season before celebrating the rebirth. We don't really think that much about that image of Christ and that dead place before we get to the resurrection, at least not in a really specific way. And there is something that is essential about going there, at least for me. And I had been there with so many of my patients and, I think it just came to me, the connection of what would it be like to allow ourselves to go there in our faith. You know, parts of our faith that need to die and maybe not be resurrected. 

One of my best childhood friends was in a terrible car accident when we were 15, and she was in a coma for quite a while. And it was actually one of the first times I realized I had this pull towards nursing. I would watch her ICU nurse come in and out of the room and was fascinated that she knew how to manage these the IV drips and the monitors. And I remember talking to my friend during that time, feeling like, I don't know what to say, but I know you can hear me. I think you can hear me. And so it feels like that with God. A lot of the time just approaching the mystery of “Where are you? Will you come back to life? Will you be alive in my life?" So that poem just kind of came out in one sitting. It wasn't one that I thought a lot about it just was there. 

So that's a bit of the back story. I haven't even answered your question, but I think for me, I hope that readers, when they read it, will feel some sort of permission to feel things that they maybe aren't given permission to feel so much in faith traditions, and that there's actually a lot of blessing in that, and wholeness of integrating all the aspects of our faith, the frustration and sometimes loneliness we feel, as well as the rebirth that comes. So I think that's probably the main thing. And to invite readers to think about how nothing's random. Life is speaking to us all the time through different images.

ECS: The one thing I would love to say is just, I appreciate that you want to give, through your poetry, a gift of permission to experience a range of feeling and to walk into these images.

And the last thing I'd like to ask you about is that I've noticed you use very accessible language in your poetry, and your inspirations [the poets] that you named, I think, do similar things. I know you introduced me to Lucille Clifton. She does that. And I wonder if you'd like to say something about accessibility in your art before we close.

LK: I think some of it stems from what state I was in when I came to poetry. I discovered poetry on accident. I went into my MFA program thinking I was going to take the creative nonfiction track, and then I took my first poetry workshop, which I was required to take—a class in a genre other than the one you were focusing in. So I took this poetry class and felt so timid, terrified. And through that experience I realized, these are my people. The way these people see the world, the way they express it, resonated with something so deeply in me. Even though I felt like I was so unskilled, I had no idea what I was doing.

I first gravitated towards poems that felt easy to understand, and I still do that—the ones that aren't too abstract. I think poetry shouldn't be hard, and I really love accessible, concrete images and language. That type of poetry was what I connected to in the beginning, and I think it's resonated ever since. And so that's the kind of poetry I want to write. I think I'm always on some sort of campaign to get people to like poetry and to teach people poetry doesn't have to be hard, to bring it down to ground level.

ECS: That's what I love. Well, thank you for being the type of writer and person in the world— in your nursing, in your writing—who really is kind of service-oriented in a way, and you're definitely teaching now too. I think it's such a gift to all of us.

It's been a great opportunity for me to talk with you today. I am excited for the Vita Poetica community to hear your voice literally and through your poems in our issue.

LK: Thank you so much. It's been such a gift to talk to you and get to share some more of my work and my journey.