Assistant Professor of English Kelly Franklin uses poetry to process his memories.
“In the poem, ‘Trespass,’ we found this shack and broke into it thinking it was abandoned. But once we got there, we realized, ‘Oh, somebody lives here,’” Franklin said.
As a child, Franklin spent three years in Latin America: one year in Costa Rica and another two in Guatemala. His parents were missionaries.
“It was a pretty formative experience,” Franklin said. “There’s just a lot of strong feelings there from some of the desperate poverty that I saw as a child.”
Although Franklin and his parents lived a happy life in both Costa Rica and Guatemala, they were surrounded by civil war, strife, and extreme poverty. While in Guatemala, they experienced a military coup (his parents told him the radio stations all played music, instead of news for a while) and an old drifter with an AK-47 coming up to their house asking for “security” money.
These colorful, unusual memories left an imprint in Franklin’s mind. They are ripe for poetry. Translated into lyrical verse these experiences enable Franklin to make sense of other happenings in his life.
“There’s a little Christian magazine that’s going to publish a poem that’s from a memory in Latin America. But it’s really helped me understand something that happened to me in the last year or two,” Franklin said. “So some poems are about the memory itself and other problems. Other times I’m thinking about something that happened as a way to understand something else.”
Two of Franklin’s poems on his experience in Latin America were recently published. “Trespass,” is about a memory from when Franklin broke into a shack he thought was abandoned, and then found out it was inhabited.
“On a day with no breeze / we found a shack in a forgotten field / littered with stones and husks of ancient corn. / We were afraid, / but we broke through the ragged bamboo fence / and went inside,” the poem begins.
The extreme poverty of the inhabitant of the shack made a deep impression on Franklin, producing a sense of guilt and shame: “Even now I wish that I had shut my eyes, / not to look upon the poverty of that man’s house,” the poem continues.
Franklin’s interest in writing “Trespass” was to recount the memory itself, but also, as a Christian, make it a metaphor for Jesus’ empty tomb. Franklin said that as a kid, he went into the shack and didn’t find what he was looking for (an abandoned hut), rather it was something else entirely (someone’s home). Franklin sees this experience as a meditation on forgiveness and redemption.
“There was a horror in realizing we had broken down someone’s fence and messed up their house,” Franklin said. “The next day when we came back, we could see that the fence had been repaired. And so I began to think that’s what God does: lovingly restores what we have destroyed.”
Given this double-meaning, “Trespass” is rife with Christological imagery. As the poem ends, “But had we sought the dead among the living? / The next day we saw / that some hand had restored the damaged fence, / and patiently / destroyed all traces of our trespass.”
The other poem, “Civic Duty,” recounts when an old soldier armed with an AK-47 came to Franklin’s house and asked his parents for money in exchange for “protection” in Guatemala. A leftover from a long-ago civil war, the penniless drifter evokes more sadness than anger or fear.
“I think in both of those poems, the lyric speaker has compassion for somebody who’s completely destitute in one way or the other. And that’s what I mean when I say I’m processing these memories,” Franklin said. “Nobody really prepared me for what absolute destitution looks like.”
Franklin’s poetry evokes empathy from readers, even when its subject is deplorable, such as in “Civic Duty.”
Two stanzas of the poem read, “And maybe she was right. / Maybe he had raped / and plundered in those early days, / when the war was young. / But I saw his hand shake, / when it held his cigarette, / like those quiet aftershocks when the earthquake is done./ And his cheeks were pitted like / pumice stones, / and his face drawn like a lobo / by hunger and thirst.”
Franklin’s focus in both “Trespass” and “Civic Duty” is the inherent dignity of the individual, sometimes lost due to circumstance.
“In ‘Trespass,’ there’s poverty there, but there’s a lot of dignity. The blanket is folded. There are pictures on the wall. It’s a human habitation, not an animal habitation, even though the person living there is very poor,” Franklin said. “I was trying to portray that dignity, that everyone has a story and that these are human, dignified qualities to the people in the poem.”
Franklin started writing poetry at a young age. He wrote throughout school and college, and studied and published poetry in graduate school. After he accepted a job teaching English at Hillsdale College, he stopped writing for six years, which he attributes to “poetic writer’s block.”
During his time at Hillsdale, Franklin has focused more on scholarly and journalistic writing. But last fall, Franklin met-up with friend and Hillsdale alum Andrew Kuiper, who started a poetry workshop with him.
“I would say part of the reason Kelly and I get a lot out of our workshops is our contrasting styles,” Kuiper said. “His work tends to use natural style and conversational diction which suddenly opens up into a powerful emotion. It’s extremely effective.”
Since then, Franklin has experienced a “rebirth” of his poetic mind. He writes poetry regularly and has multiple poems published (“Trespass,” and “Civic Duty,” among them). A new poem entitled “Failed Adoption, Michigan,” will come out in the latest Ekstasis Magazine. Practically, Franklin writes his poetry using archival ink and a fountain pen, (“I am kind of fanatical about fountain pens,” he says).
Franklin distinguishes poetry from journalistic and scholarly writing by describing it as “primarily feeling and memory.” He’s drawn to narrative poetry especially and believes a poet can do a lot with a word or image, evoking the emotions of the reader.
“Our hardest experiences can actually be transformed into our greatest art,” Franklin said. “When you suffer greatly, you touch rock-bottom on the most important things. And that’s what the great writers are in contact with, the most fundamental things.”
So too, is Franklin’s poetry, especially in “Civic Duty,” and “Trespass,” where he communicates a fundamental thing: the dignity of the individual.