LAST PAGE: Kitty Jospe, 73
Poet Reflects on Her Colorful Career
By Mike Costanza
Kitty Jospe has lived multiple lives. The longtime Rochester resident, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees in French literature, has worked as a bilingual secretary in Brussels, Belgium, and New York City, taught French for a number of educational institutions and written seven books of poetry, including her most recent work “Whispers of Perhaps.” She has been with her husband Nick Jospe for more than 50 years and has two grown children.
Q. A love of the French language and culture flows through your life. What’s the source of that river?
A. My dream as of age 9 was to speak French like a French person, live and work in Europe and marry a French-speaking person. We had a native French teacher in fourth grade and I loved the sound of French. This, coupled with the fact that my maiden name was originally de Noyon, laid the foundation perhaps for wanting to be as French as possible and adopt the beauty of the flow of French.
Q. You spent much of your working life teaching French for local and distant private and public schools and colleges, including the Our Lady of Mercy School for Young Women, the Eastman School of Music and New York University. What drew you to teaching?
A. I come from a family of educators. My father was a teacher at an independent school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then headmaster at the Brookside School Cranbrook in Michigan. Each night as a child, he would read fabulous books to my sister and me. Coupled with his nightly stories, I lived on the Cranbrook campus, which had a magical feel. I think the best teachers are those filled with enthusiasm for life and an insatiable curiosity.
Q. From 1998 to 2023 you volunteered for the Memorial Art Gallery as a docent. What was that like for you?
A. One “volunteers” but the training is intensive to learn the art of observation. Without this experience, I would not be the writer I am or have discovered Ekphrastic poetry — poetry responding to art — which I taught at Writers and Books. I especially loved teaching as a docent in small workshops. Education, ideally, I was taught, is a matter of drawing out the best in a student, leading them to discover something they might not have realized inside of themselves that helps highlight their own understanding.
Q. As a poet, how do you approach the art form?
A. Robert Frost understood “surprise and delight” as the goal of poetry. It comes from a long humanist tradition refined by the late Renaissance mannerists. They branched out from the balanced, harmonious ideals of the High Renaissance to embracing a more stylized, sophisticated, often tension-filled aesthetic. I work a lot with these concepts and experiment with form for the same reason. What unusual trigger will entice a reader to want to continue reading? Elegance, artistic flair, music of the line and clever ways to get across a message and avoid moralizing or dull diary-type pieces.
Q. What message did you wish to convey in “Whispers of Perhaps,” your 2023 book of poems?
A. “Whispers of Perhaps” offers a reader invitations to consider multiple ways of understanding the world. In a way, I feel it is trying to convert people afraid of an answerless sense of chaos, that “perhaps” is a different kind of answer. I love the sound of “perhaps” in English. I say in the preface that the first and final “p” seem to give kisses and multiple tones of possibility.
Q. Are you working on another book?
A. No, not a book yet. I have a lot of material I haven’t had time to address this year. “Whispers of Perhaps “is still a strong theme though!
Q. Did you ever marry a French-speaking person?
A. I was lucky to meet my husband, Nick, who was brought up in Belgium and attended the French Lycée and is indeed a fellow linguist who not only is bilingual, but much more fluent in Italian and German than I.
“Whispers of Perhaps” and some of Jospe’s other works have been published by Foothills Publishing, foothillspublishing.com/index.html