Tag: writing

Interview with Sarah Jane Sloat

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Sarah J. Sloat’s chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, showcases small moments that belie great significance and trumpet the author’s ear for the specific. This collection is rich with metaphor, and Sloat uses form in a way that emphasizes the lyric. Broad in scope, while still giving the reader intimate insight into the speaker’s psyche, these pieces are touched with the divine. In the Voice of a Minor Saint was re-released earlier this year from Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications.

 

Sundress: Do you have any writing rituals or routines?

Sarah Jane Sloat: I don’t. I just try. If I’m stuck, which I often am, I read.

 

Sundress: Your poems often deal with smallness and small things: tongues, bees, grains of rice. “My heart is small, like a love/ of buttons or black pepper” and “Mine was a small world, small/ and flawed.” Tell us a little about how this theme developed.

Sarah Jane Sloat: I have a button collection. And the world’s smallest Indian pot. I like things you have to get close to to appreciate. I like “things” in general. After “In the Voice of a Minor Saint” I put together a chapbook focused on things found in the home – the whisk, the faucet and toothbrush.

In the case of this chapbook, smallness has to do with the minor saint, patron of the overlooked and unassuming, who fail to get much attention. S/he’s their champion, though they probably would never ask for that.

 

Sundress: Tell us about the process of writing a cento like “Naked, Come Shivering.” Did you build the poem around one line, or did you find lines to fit what you wanted to say?

Sarah Jane Sloat: A cento shouldn’t use more than one line from any single poem. That’s the only rule I’d pay attention to.

Every cento I’ve written so far, including “Naked, Come Shivering,” I’ve done by  pulling lines I loved from French poets, mostly the surrealists. I am always struck by their beauty, their oddness, how many lines seemed self-sufficient and self-contained. I put the lines together in a way that rings right, without any goal in mind.

In “Naked, Come Shivering,” the line I started with was either “not wanting anything to die of hunger” or “the whole town has come into my room.” Both evocative, bust-down-the-door kind of lines. The title came last.

 

Sundress: What is your favorite poem in this collection, and why?

Sarah Jane Sloat: This is very difficult. Probably it was “Ghazal of the Bright Body.” I’m a big fan of the ghazal. This was the first one I wrote, and for me it shrugs off all its could-be burdens. It avoids becoming overwrought, which my less successful ghazals (hopefully unpublished) do not.

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Sundress: Besides writing, what is your favorite way to participate in the literary community?

Sarah Jane Sloat: After writing, I participate, if you can put it this way, by reading. I really believe  reading is a way to interact with the world. In reading, I feel I’m participating in the past, present and future. And you can chose your company. And be introverted to your heart’s content.

I recently got the latest issues of The Journal (Ohio) and the annual RHINO. I’m not ass-kissing when I say they’re really wonderful publications, and in both of them I found work I loved by poets I’d never read before, who are now my imaginary friends.

There are also dozens of online journals I read and love – DMQ Review, Adroit, Plume, Birdfeast, etc etc.

I live in a foreign country so my participating in an English-focused literary community excludes physical presence! I’m not terribly outgoing or social, I must admit. But I keep up, like most everyone, on social media.

 

Sundress: What is the best writing advice you have ever been given?

Sarah Jane Sloat: There’s no right way.

 

Sundress: If you could tell the world one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Sarah Jane Sloat: It would be what most poets who want anyone to read their poems would say:

I want to everyone know that I have not died

that I have a golden manger in my lips,

that I am the little friend of the west wind,

that I am the immense shadow of my tears.

-Lorca

 

You can find In the Voice of a Minor Saint for free here.

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Sarah J. Sloat lives in Frankfurt, Germany, a stone’s throw from Schopenhauer’s grave. Her poems and prose have appeared in West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Sarah’s chapbook of poems on typefaces and texts, Inksuite, is available from dancing girl press, which also published Heiress to a Small Ruin in 2015. 

Call for Submissions–Pretty Owl Poetry

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Pretty Owl Poetry is now open for submissions of poetry, fiction, and art for its summer issue, slated to launch in late June.

Send us:

-something shameful. something surreal. a deluge of desire. confessions of crimes & hearts teeming with rattlesnakes. a merry-go-round that makes you dizzy.

-send us your yellowed sweet tooth in a plastic bag. or lockets filled with tiny twig hairs. tell us everything we don’t want to hear. say it in a way that’s sweet to the ear. send us a flash, a jolt, a tickle in your belly. something simple but ahh. give us something that slaps & stings.

-keep the quiet for the mornings & make us dance, twist, shout, & fold around our bodies. send us something to slink into. show us a basket full of molded fruit & take a picture of your mother’s grey, stained socks. tell us about the time you dreamt & flailed.

-keep us up in words. tell us every little thing.

-The Editors

Please submit all work through our submissions manager, which can be found on our website: https://prettyowlpoetry.com/submit/

Pretty Owl Poetry is an online quarterly journal that publishes new, emerging, and established writers in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts. We support all approaches to writing, be it collaborative or individual. We’re interested in experimental and traditional forms and flash fiction masquerading as poetry, all with a lyrical quality.

 

Meet our new editorial intern, Bradi Musil

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I’m Bradi, and I am one of the new Sundress Academy for the Arts‘ Editorial Interns this summer.

People who know me well will tell you I question everything, smirk far more than is necessary or appropriate and am way shorter than I look at first glance. Although I typically prefer reading works of contemporary fiction, I’ve found that I gravitate toward producing nonfiction pieces. Working primarily in journalism for the past three years, I have published over 130 articles for the University of Tennessee’s newspaper, The Daily Beacon. I focus my work on investigating and covering social justice issues, paying special attention to women’s health and empowerment and criminal justice reform.

Ultimately, my dream is so use my skills and passion for writing to promote social change. I believe that the written word is immeasurably powerful when used with intent, and that’s why I love Sundress Publications.

When I’m not writing, you can usually find me snuggling with my dog, Gregg Norman, drinking the wine he was named after, or re-reading Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves for the one-hundredth time.  I really love getting to share ideas with other creatives, and my favorite thing of all is getting to tell someone’s unique story.

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Bradi Musil is a senior English and Criminology student at the University of Tennessee, but she spends most of her time boarded up in the student newspaper, The Daily Beacon’s, office, where she serves as the Editor-in-Chief. She has written over 130 pieces for publication and edited twice that many. Bradi also works as an interviewer for the Planned Parenthood “Tennessee Stories Project” that tells the stories of East Tennessee women who have been affected by abortion.  What Bradi loves more than writing is getting to work with other writers who share her passion for producing work that pushes people out of their comfort zone and forces them to consider the uncomfortable realities of an unequal, unjust society. 

Interview with Donna Vorreyer

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks. She is the reviews editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection, and she works as a middle school teacher in the Chicago suburbs.

Sundress: Tell me about your process: Do you plan what you want each poem to accomplish, or does your writing evolve as you are working on it?

Donna Vorreyer: I rarely go into a poem knowing what I want it to accomplish. Each poem starts with some trigger –a piece of language, an idea, an image, a prompt, even –but then takes on a life of its own. I can start free-writing about tomatoes and end up with a long poem about a persona unearthing childhood trauma. I think that, once the poem lives on the page for a while, I can perhaps shape it to my will, but in a draft, the ideas and images of a poem have to be allowed to spread like ripples in a puddle. I believe that intellectualizing the poems too much at the beginning of the process can lead to stilted work. That’s why, during dry spells in my drafting, I don’t force ideas on to the page. The minute I say, “I’m going to write a poem about…” is the minute that I will draft a lousy poem. My initial drafts tend to be pretty rambling and somewhat prose-y in nature. In revision, I tend to hone image with particular attention to sound. And, as you have seen, most of my completed poems end up fairly short. So one could say I am more of a whittler than an architect.

Sundress: What’s on your bookshelf? Who are the main writers who inspire you and inform your work?

Donna Vorreyer: My bookshelves (there are many, all over the house) have a lot of poetry, of course, but also everything from biographies to novels to strange non-fiction topics like deadly plants and museum artifacts. In terms of main writers who inspire me, there are many, but I have a shortlist. Classic favorites, I would say, are Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickens and Melville. The richness of their language and syntax teaches me something new each time I read and re-read. In terms of informing my work, anything that I am reading is an influence. When I was reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, the language of nature was an inspiration. Reading Melville, the long sentences make my brain move differently. Reading Katie Ford or Traci Brimhall makes me consider image, emotional urgency, and surprise. Reading Amorak Huey and Diana Goetsch teaches me about humor and movement from idea to idea. So, I can’t honestly say that one particular writer influences me more than others.

Sundress: You often reference an unnamed “you” in your poems. Do you consider it the same “you” throughout, or does the title imply that these poems are many different “apocalypse stories”?

Donna Vorreyer: It could be read either way. I’d like to leave it to the reader to decide.

Sundress: You use water imagery throughout the book: “of the sea pulling into itself, the science of tides,” “Useless life, wharf/ with no docks” “When we wake, we walk to the river,” etc. Did you intentionally use water as a theme, or is it an image you are drawn to as a writer?

Donna Vorreyer: I do not intentionally return to water as an image, but I am drawn to water in a personal way, so I think it creeps into many poems (hopefully not in a clichéd way). I love the sound of waves and rushing falls, the fact that water can be both transparent and opaque, its colors, its moods…As someone who grew up near enough to Lake Michigan to know water but far enough away to yearn for it, water holds a sense of mystery and grandeur for me. Of course, there is also the human dependence on water –we are, after all, made of those atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, and anytime one is writing about the human condition or relationships, the body looms large. And the body contains oceans.

Sundress: Tell us a little about the title of the book and its significance.

Donna Vorreyer: The book was conceived as a way to explore how society tends to escalate any problem or obstacle to the level of apocalypse. I work with teenagers, and their tendency to inflate the size of a problem is normal. But I’ve also noticed serious issues with scale in all aspects of life today, especially on social media. Everything is either great or a crisis, and that idea needed a story to frame it.

A love story is the most universal of all stories, and love is rife with problems, so in that sense, every love story is an apocalypse story.

Sundress: How were the subheadings chosen, and how do they affect the progression of the book?

Donna Vorreyer: The subheadings are lines from different poems in the book and are meant to guide the reader through the stages of the relationship: a sweet beginning, typical ups and downs, a betrayal, a descent into crazed almost feral mourning for what was lost, and then a reconciliation of sorts. The sections were originally numbered, and my editor Sara Henning suggested section titles, something that had also worked well for me in my first book.

Sundress: What is one thing you wish people knew about you?

Donna Vorreyer: I started writing poems by writing song lyrics when I was in junior high school. I play the piano (pretty well) and the guitar (badly) as well as sing, and I had teenage angsty heartbreak enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. (Damn you, Mike Dalton!) I stopped writing in college and didn’t start again until I was in my early 30s. It’s never too late to start over when it comes to something you love.

You can purchase Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story at the Sundress store!

Call for Submissions–The Chapbook Review Issue

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Issue #21 – Give It to Me E-gain: The Chapbook Review Issue

For our summer issue we want, to read e-chapbooks published from January 2014 to May 2016. Self published is okay, but each chapbook must be available for download online through a publisher or personal website. Chapbooks that are not currently available online do not qualify. We are not interested in your unpublished manuscripts at this time.

SUBMIT ONE CHAPBOOK ONLY. All members of our staff will be reading cover letters this issue—think of it as your back cover. Get our attention with 50-150 words describing your chapbook, a biography, and a link to where your chapbook may be purchased or downloaded online.

Publishers: Please feel free to submit your authors’ e-chapbooks individually, provided you have permission from your authors.

Selected e-chapbooks will be showcased in July with a mini review by one of our staff members and a mini feature of selected work (2-3 poems; 1-10 pages of prose).

Submissions due 6/11/16. Issue live 7/31/16.

An Interview with Sundress Author, Jill Khoury

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Jill Khoury is the author of Suites for the Modern Dancer, which was released this month from Sundress Publications.

Sundress: What is it about the body and disability that inspires your poetry?

Jill Khoury: From a young age my body was an object of the normalization efforts of others. At the same time, it was made clear that the body was a private thing. So I was told to be like the other kids, and be quiet while I was at it, and I internalized that message for a long time. So I do it because I was told not to. Nor are notions of normalization and privacy something that our society has moved beyond, so I guess I also write about these things because I want other people to tell their stories of difference and tell it loud.

Sundress: Did you ever read a work about either that really spoke to you? Anything you recommend?

Jill Khoury: So many! Here’s a brief list of books of poetry and memoir that have inspired me to think/re-think how I write about the body, in chronological order of when I discovered them:

    • Anne Sexton- Collected Works
    • Sharon Olds- Satan Says
    • Toi Derricotte- Captivity, also Tender
    • Stephen Kuusisto- Planet of the Blind, also Only Bread, Only Light
    • Georgina Kleege- Sight Unseen
    • Paul Guest- The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
    • Tom Andrews- The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle
    • Jim Ferris- The Hospital Poems
    • Ed. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, Michael Northen, – Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetics of Disability
    • Danielle Pafunda- The Dead Girls Speak in Unison 

Sundress: Your description of blindness throughout is very real. What’s your secret? How were you able to convey the experience of being blind in so few words?

Jill Khoury: My secret would be that I’m blind! Actually I’ve been trying to write elegantly about blindness for a long time, since college really, and I failed at it for many years. The (blind) memoirist and poet Stephen Kuusisto shaped a lot of my ability to write successfully about my own personal version of blindness. He taught creative nonfiction at Ohio State when I was pursuing my MFA there, and took several classes with him.

It turned out that I had to write about blindness in essay form first, before the poetry would come anywhere near to being how I wanted it. Although I don’t care for writing in prose too much, I needed a boundless space (which is usually what I don’t like about writing in prose) to give me enough room to explore the relationship with my blindness without the pressure to distill it into a poem. I really like the lyric essay. Steve introduced me to that form. It was just what I needed.

Sundress: In this book you write several poems about characters who are children or young adults. Do you think children have a special awareness of the body and the stigmas attached that older adults may miss?

Jill Khoury: Like I mentioned, I was taught in early childhood to not like my body and its differences. I spent most of my time after age 18 unlearning those things. I do think children are aware of their bodies with an innocence and a freedom that is so easily quashed by adults. The stigmas are learned very early, and internalized by all bodies. To say that I found the received stigmas about my body inhibiting would be an understatement.

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Sundress: Have you ever written a poem that you felt you just couldn’t get right? What’s your revision process like?

Jill Khoury: The title poem of the book, “Suites for the Modern Dancer,” was started in, I think, 2004. I wrote the final draft of it about two months before Suites-the-book was published. An earlier version of the poem appeared my 2009 chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, but it still was not complete, not nuanced enough to accurately convey the complex fluidity between blindness and seeing, and the consequences of, as mentioned in the previous question, received stigmas about the body.

My revision process is different depending on the poem. “Suites” was sparked by reading A. R. Ammons’ essay “A Poem Is A Walk,” in which he said:

“The motion may be lumbering, clipped, wavering, tripping, mechanical, dance-like, awkward, staggering, slow, etc. But the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words. . . . It can’t be translated into another body. There is only one way to know it and that is to enter into it.”

All my life I had struggled with walking. I went to a school for kids with cerebral palsy when I was very young to improve on some coordination issues that I was born with. As far as I know, I don’t have CP, but I do have issues with balance and motor control that seem similar to people with mild versions of CP.

I lived in one of those small towns where you go to elementary and middle school with the same kids that you graduate high school with. I would say I did not have a “normal” looking gait until I was somewhere in the elementary school years. That, along with my low vision, was grand fodder for childhood cruelty, and somewhat, for cruelty from teachers who really wanted to normalize me. Again, received stigmas.

It may have been the case that the professor who assigned the Ammons essay, also gave us an assignment to think or write about poetry and walking—I can’t remember now. But I thought a lot about the history of my walking and of my newly acquired walk, the one with the white cane I had recently learned how to use in order to forge across the wide midwestern streets of Columbus, Ohio. The cane gave me much better balance and bodily confidence, but I also felt like that girl who was learning how to walk being pointed at by all the mean kids, only everyone was grown.

Sundress: What’s interesting about these poems is that some have a more traditional format and structure while others don’t. Do you ever find yourself leaning toward one or the other or does it always depend on the poem?

Jill Khoury: The poem determines itself. They each emerge organically. I wish I had a more adroit answer for this question, but it really is based on an intuitive feeling of sound and breath and the emotional timbre of the subject matter.

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Sundress: What progress do you think still needs to be made for disability representation in poetry and literature?

Jill Khoury: A lot of progress still needs to be made. Last year I heard an editor of a young, vibrant press that publishes “edgy” work and has been inclusive of other work based in identity, a place that I might submit my work to otherwise, say “I hate hospital poems [or poems that dwell on the body and its illness] because they are such a downer.” I was stunned. It was a comment you might expect to hear from a traditional “old guard” sort of press that had very particular ideas about what poems should and shouldn’t be about, but that wasn’t this.

With that in mind:

  • More journals and presses should be open to examinations of disability and the body as another facet of identity, much like has (recently) been given to examinations of the complexities of gender and race, for example.
  • Space should be given to works that focus on intersections between facets of identity, such as race, sexuality, and disability.
  • The personal narrative should be emphasized–meaning: more space for disabled voices writing about disability and much less space being granted to disability used as a prop, trope, or conflict to give more “depth” to a nondisabled person’s narrative fiction.

 

Purchase your own copy of Suites for the Modern Dancer in the Sundress Store!

Jill Khoury is interested in the intersection of poetry, visual art, representations of gender, and disability. She is a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow and has taught writing and literature in high school, university, and enrichment environments. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Arsenic Lobster, Copper Nickel, Inter|rupture, and Portland Review. She has also been anthologized in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Pudding House Press released her chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, in 2009. Her debut full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer was released by Sundress Publications this month.

2015 Best of the Net Anthology Released

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Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of the 10th anniversary edition of the Best of the Net Anthology! This year’s anthology includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in 27 different journals and features work by Claudia Emerson, Chen Chen, Jennifer Givhan, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sandra Meek, Eric Tran, Harmony Neal, Jesse Goolsby, Kimi Traube, and many more!

This year’s judges included Bruce Bond, Brian Oliu, and Kate Schmitt.

Bruce Bond is the author of fourteen books including five forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three full-length collections, So You Know It’s Me (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011), a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, Leave Luck to Heaven (Uncanny Valley Press, 2014), an ode to 8-bit video games, & Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping (Cobalt Press, 2015). essays on NBA Jam. i/o (Civil Coping Mechanisms), a memoir in the form of a computer virus, is forthcoming in 2015. His works in progress deal with professional wrestling and long distance running (not at once).

Kate Schmitt‘s Singing Bones won the 2013 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. A writer and visual artist, Kate Schmitt has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, including Earth Shattering Poems (Holt, 1998), Light Gathering Poems (Holt, 2000), I Just Hope It’s Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), as well as the literary journals Paradigm, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature. She was a nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast and served on the journal’s Board of Directors in 2008-2009. She has also edited and written for the companion website to a pilot television series created by Shelley Duvall, a wind energy company, and most recently for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her courses include nonfiction and poetry workshops, 20th-century literature, young adult literature, and Chinese literature in translation.

You can read the newest edition of the anthology online.

OUTSpoken Seeks Submissions from LGBTQ Writers

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OUTSpoken is an exciting new program from the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) that aims to amplify the experiences of the LGBTQ community of Knoxville, TN. By creating a platform for sex- and gender-diverse individuals in the South where they can share and perform their experiences, the program is able bring understanding into the entire community and unite them with art.

LGBTQ writers from all over the country can submit a wide range of work to OUTSpoken, including poetry, nonfiction, spoken word, and video submissions of a monologue, dramatic piece, or film.  Writers can submit up to three poems, 1,200 words of prose, or five minutes worth of performance or film clips. Winners will receive publication in Stirring: A Literary Collection and free admission to the June, 2016 OUTSpoken performance in Knoxville. All submissions should be sent with third-person bio to outspoken@sundresspublications.com by March 31, 2016.

The OUTSpoken performance will also include creative work developed as part of our three-month workshop series, which began in January and continues through March. These workshop participants have the opportunity to participate in the staged reading in June, showcasing their work personal work.

As LGBTQ issues gain greater visibility, it is crucial that we explore the complexities of sex and gender diversity respectfully. In order to create a meaningful dialogue, we must acknowledge and listen to the stories, experiences, grievances, arguments, and counterarguments of all sex- and gender-diverse persons.It is our sincerest hope that this project will illuminate the struggles of Southern LGBTQ persons and celebrate sex and gender diversity in East Tennessee and beyond.

For more information, visit Sundress Publications.

Sundress Academy 2016 Poetry Retreat

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The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Summer Poetry Writing Retreat, which runs from Friday, May 27th to Sunday, May 29th, 2016. The three-day, two-night camping retreat will be held on SAFTA’s own Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee. This year’s retreat will focus on generative poetry writing and include break-out sessions on publishing, kicking writer’s block, and much more!

A weekend pass includes one-on-one and group instruction, writing supplies, food, drinks, transportation to and from the airport, and all on-site amenities for $200. Tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment are available to rent. Payment plans are also available!

The event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and provide an opportunity to work with many talented, published fiction writers from around the country, including Gerry LaFemina and Karyna McGlynn.

Gerry LaFemina
Gerry LaFemina

Gerry LaFemina is the author of nine collections of poetry and prose poetry, numerous chapbooks, two books of fiction, and Palpable Magic: Essays on Poetry and Prosody. A new collection, The Story of Ash, will be released in 2017. Among his awards and honors are a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Irving Gilmore Emerging Artist Foundation and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. A distinguished literary arts activist, he directs the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is an associate professor of English. He also serves as a poetry mentor in the Carlow University low residency MFA Program.

 

 

Karyna McGlynn
Karyna McGlynn

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and three chapbooks: Scorpionica (New Michigan Press 2007), Alabama Steve (Sundress Publications 2014), and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution, forthcoming from Willow Springs Editions. Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, AGNI, Ninth Letter, Witness, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna’s honors include the Hopwood Award, the Verlaine Prize, and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and recently earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston where she served as poetry editor and managing editor for Gulf Coast.  She is currently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin where she serves as the senior poetry editor for Devil’s Lake.

 

 

Space at this workshop is limited to 15 writers, so reserve your place today at
http://mkt.com/sundress-publications/safta-poetry-retreat

 

Lyric Essentials: Natalie Easton Reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds

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Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Natalie Easton reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds.

I’m such a Sharon Olds fan, I’m excited you picked her. Before we get into the great poem you recorded for us, can you tell us a little about your first Olds experience?

Natalie Easton: Picking her was almost unavoidable, for me. She’s always the first to spring to mind when I think about whose work I’ve enjoyed wholeheartedly. I knew of her, of course, but my first real introduction to her came after you visited my house in May 2014 and left Satan Says behind. (I still have it–sorry, you’ll get it back, promise.) I loved her accessibility, her lack of frivolity, her poetic narrative full of truth and completely lacking in pretense. I loved the way her poetry made me cringe; her descriptions of our bodies, of her sense of family, of conflicting emotions so tightly entwined that betrayal and love become almost indistinguishable. She makes it easy to believe that this dynamic is the norm. She implies–more than explains–how these feelings came to mesh in her mind, but manages to completely avoid sentimentality.

My love cemented further in June of that same year when I devoured Strike Sparks on a camping trip, her book in one hand and a drink in the other.

Sundress: I think what strikes me most about “Sex Without Love” is how she first compares two people having sex without love as “beautiful as dancers” and “gliding over each other like ice skaters,” then as pros, “the great runners, alone with the road surface” and how these ideas feel so contradictory, and yet, both are imbued with a sense of wonderment and admiration by Olds. What strikes you most?

Natalie Easton: What strikes me most about the acts you mentioned is obvious, of course: the physicality involved. These are sports she’s talking about, where there are goals achieved and medals given. Of course, those things can just be done for pleasure, but nonetheless there is a competitive nature there.

 What grabs me in general about the poem is her desperation to separate herself emotionally from the act, and how she even subtly hints at the pain involved when one cannot do that: “wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” She envies these lovers, but never has to state it; we come to conclusions about her emotional state of mind through what she doesn’t say.

Sundress: I agree, it is a lot about “What she doesn’t say.” Okay, for a minute, let’s say “Sex Without Love” is a lesson—what does it teach?

Natalie Easton: In terms of interpretation, I think perhaps it could teach us to look closer at how even the supposedly pleasurable is something to be worked toward. (Her work always teaches us about the failings of our humanity.) Common, everyday occurrences get parsed endlessly by people with high emotional intelligence, which I think certainly describes Olds. One person may experience something and walk away feeling strangely discontent, but an artist like Olds brings those muddled feelings to light and identifies them.

In terms of formatting, when I read this poem aloud I tried my best to capture the breathlessness of it–the running, the gasping for air: the passion in those line breaks. I’m not sure how well I got that across, but that was one thing that, for me, reading the poem aloud revealed. The other thing I notice in this poem is the imagery: first we have ice skaters, but then red steak and wine and wet babies and runners. Mixing images like this is something I’m wary of doing in my own poetry because it can easily become distracting and inefficient, but she makes it flow; there is a logic in her associations.

Also: no stanza breaks. She shows us with these poems that they aren’t always necessary, but again, this poem is all about breath; in this instance, the reader should feel close to running out.

Sundress: Having read the entirety of Strike Sparks, how would you say “Sex Without Love,” from her second book, compares to her newer work? What is essential Olds?

Natalie Easton: What the poems of Strike Sparks, her collected works, have in common is the gut punch. This is something she has always been capable of, but I feel that her more recent work has seen her style become more polished, her descriptions more keen. There’s that constant kernel of truth that makes you want to barrel on ahead recklessly, sucking in your breath the whole time. Of course, there is no questioning that she’s always been pretty fantastic.

Essential Olds is, I would say, about getting to the uncomfortable, and then living there so comfortably that we all squirm to read it but are unable to look away; who would want to, when what she has to say is so human and interesting? I marvel at her ability to discuss intimacy in the way she does, and how her own fractured relationships have led her to long for things in a way that never seems requited. Sadly. Maybe that’s partly the temperament of artists in general–a driving factor.

Sundress: How has Olds influenced your own writing?

Natalie Easton: I don’t know that my answer to this question will be anything but banal. I think what every artist does, in the face of work they admire, is try to learn by osmosis. There’s a certain helplessness there, as well: the idea that I will never do this. But we try to take elements of what we love so much, and then put our own spin on it. For me it’s the way Olds describes things…I feel the same way when reading Ted Hughes’ work: “How did she/he get to this description, to this thing I feel all the time, and put it into words?” Everything is so clear; even what we haven’t experienced feels like truth in their experienced hands. They make it all look so easy. It’s anything but. That’s the level I’d love to reach one day.

Sundress: Who else “makes it all look so easy?” Other than Olds, who would you recommend?

Natalie Easton: I love Mark Doty, always, though I can’t say he always makes it look easy; at times he gets quite cerebral. I enjoy it, but can’t emulate that. Ellen Bryant Voigt is fantastic; I particularly enjoyed her book Shadow of Heaven. I frequently recommend C.D. Wright’s “Deepstep Come Shining,” which was suggested to me by the poet Russel Swensen, who reminds me of a poetic Bret Easton Ellis. He’s a Black Lawrence Press poet, and they always put out good stuff, so give him a go. Michael Bazzett is another one; You Must Remember This is worth a read. I also have a slew of books I acquired while at Bread Loaf that I haven’t managed to get through yet, so when I’m done with those I’ll have a lot more to recommend, no doubt.

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Natalie Easton’s poems have appeared in such publications as Jet Fuel Review, Superstition Review, and Sweet. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2014, and was a contributor at Bread Loaf in 2015. Later that year she went to Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a week-long SAFTA residency.

Rhiannon Thorne‘s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Midwest Quarterly, and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, among others. She is the Managing Editor of cahoodaloodaling and an associate interviewer and a book reviewer at Up the Staircase Quarterly.