Part 3: Echoes and the Poetic Line
An Interview with Sandra Beasley
On Thursday, October 6th, 2016, Sandra Beasley came to perform her poetry and nonfiction as part of Central Michigan University’s Visiting Writers Series. Earlier that day, Zachary Riddle and Regan Schaeffer had the opportunity to meet with Sandra to talk about her writing. Sandra has authored three full-length books of poetry, including Theories of Falling, I Was the Jukebox, and Count the Waves. Sandra’s poetry has also appeared in several anthologies, including the forthcoming anthology The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press).
Photo: Kennen White |
Regan: Last night as I was reading I Was the Jukebox, I kept thinking that the night before, I had dreamt that same image, in those same words—it was actually more of a déjà vu than a dream. I had also just read your memoir, Don't Kill The Birthday Girl, with an eye and an ear toward echoes I might hear in your poetry. But surely, I hadn't read—and you hadn't written— about capybaras. You had written about oysters, scotch, eggplant, and eggs, though. I also read around in the Traveler’s Vade Mecum, and I seem to have been infected with its rhythm. What can you tell us about repetition and echoes in your life and work?
Sandra: We all pick up totems and objects that have charged significance for us, that then become motifs in our creative work. You have some poets, like Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin, Gregory Orr, and Erika Meitner, where they’re really honest about that in the skin and surface of their work. Meaning they not only keep those images, but they use the same words for them each time; that's one type of pleasure. Then you have someone like me, who for whatever reason, I think, has been a little sneakier about it. So you have to almost be consciously read for those repetitions.
I’m sometimes to give readings that are a mix of poetry and prose, and there's one section of Don't Kill The Birthday Girl that I read more often than any other—one which references believing that the “food pyramid” went back to the days of the ancient Egyptians, with a subsequent punch line that involves canopic jars. Then, in I Was the Jukebox, there's a poem “Mortality.” I had a spontaneous realization at a reading, as I went through my set list: oh, my gosh, I've used “canopic jars” in back-to-back reading moments.
So, you have those moments where you catch yourself and interrogate your own repetitions. Because in the right hands, it's meaningful image and meaning-building. In the wrong hands, you're just copycatting yourself, right? You have to be careful that it's an intentional and useful repetition.
It's funny that you mention eggplants. There is a recurring figure in my work that, for me, has real-life inspiring material attached to it. He has appeared in every poetry collection I've written so far. You can find him in I Was the Jukebox, in “The Eggplant Speaks,” and you can find him in Theories Of Falling, in “American Thing.” You can find him in nonfiction that I’ve published, although not in the memoir. That happens sometimes. We meet people who we might only know for a short period of time, but they haunt our lives and our creative consciousness, so to speak. I'm okay with that; it’s fine. But what I would say, when you mention those echoes, is that they are absolutely there—they're not necessarily conscious, but I try to then become conscious of them and figure out whether I want them to be there.
Regan: You just mentioned recognizing and taking care of your own echoes as a writer, and the phrase that came to my mind, in response to that was, also: having the right audience. Not that there is a right or wrong audience, but having an audience who also can rise to the echo, as my brain started to echo, or imagine echoes. Everybody's walked on the beach, but we haven't given that voice to sand.
Sandra: Well, to follow through on that: we’re all fortunate, in life, if we can get a few trusted readers for our work. One of the things that is so tough, and can make transitioning from one set of trusted readers to the next necessary—if painful—is that you need people who can tell you if you're repeating or recycling yourself too much. And yet, you also need people who respect when you’ve locked into a topic that you want to explore over and over. And you also need people who then let you choose to change that topic, or change that formal approach. If they can’t respect that, and embrace the new approach, then you have to move on and find other readers. It's a really delicate and intimate relationship.
In fact, I had a group of fellow poets—I was friends with them, I'm still friends with them, but when I was transitioning from Theories of Falling to the poems that became I Was the Jukebox, I had to stop meeting up with that group. Whether they realized it or not, they were holding me to a sense of narrative-building that worked for Theories Of Falling, but did not work for the poems I wanted to be writing. We had to part ways.
Zach: One thing that you mentioned: you have those people that respect these obsessions you find in writing, and you have to focus on those for a while. We just had another poet, Dennis Hinrichsen, come visit the grad class that I'm in, and one thing that he was talking about was the idea that you don't really write the poem, the poem writes you. As if it guides you to where it wants you to go…I wondered if you had a similar sort of feeling about that, if you find those topics and you lock into them, and if that's what the poem wants? Or if you think that's something that you subconsciously or consciously want, in those poems?
Regan: Without destroying either the question or your answer, obviously, this is what fiction and prose writers say, too: that the character wants to do something. So, there seems to be some level of craft that's involved in our ability to write something, but, how I hear what Zach is asking, what is it that wants to come out?
Sandra: I can answer both questions. They overlap heavily. But, one thing, when you bring up fiction—the thing about fiction is that, usually, there's more than one active character. Part of the reason why fiction stories have a will of their own is that you have, within them, individual agents with different sets of motivations and goals. Otherwise, you don't have conflict. In that sense, in a fiction piece, a character sometimes does what you didn't “expect” them to do when you started the piece.
But in poetry and nonfiction, there is usually a dominant speaker. It's hard, unless its mode is narrative or epic and long-form, for a poem to sustain a very big cast of characters. The danger of that is if you forgo the ability to be surprised by where the poem takes you. I think that's what this other visiting writer was trying to get at, that you have to put enough starting material in the poem's premise or its idea that it can swerve. If your body of work is nothing other than a series of directly expressive personal lyrics, if the “I” is never complicated or challenged in some way, you're going to have a hard time maintaining the longevity of your career as a poet.
For me, there are two specific ways I maintain the ability of the poem to take over. I'm having to accept the reality that I am a “project” poet, in some ways, even though I never would have thought of myself that way. But I look back, and I think of Theories of Falling, with the “Allergy Girl” sequence; I Was the Jukebox, with the “speaks” poems; Count The Waves, with the Traveler’s Vade Mecum poems. I think about what I'm doing now, which is pretty much prose poems that are working with identity issues and memories connected to growing up in and around the DC area. What I see is, with projects, you're committing to or controlling a certain basic premise. So on that level, there is a lot of top-down direction. But on the level of any one given poem within that project—the inspiration point, and therefore the direction the poem takes—might be highly spontaneous or highly uncontrolled.
We were talking about how the “Travelers Vade Mecums” work as a body of prompts. You get to riff: there were a few places where I plucked lines from the Traveler’s Vade Mecum just based on what their number was. Then you have to work with that constraint and you have no idea, going into it, what the poem is therefore going to be. So that's one way that I can balance letting the poem surprise me, and also having some level of intent and control.
The other way is I engage releasing control is the sestina. I often describe them as the “gyroscope of form,” because you get this great balance. You commit to the end words, you control the end words, and you can do some basic strategizing; of seeing, for example, how those end words will recombine in the envoi. But you can't forecast where, narratively, you'll be by stanza four or five when you're making those first initial decisions. Because…the musculature of that particular received form, it's so strong and will, in fact, overpower or contradict your impulses as a poet. That, for me, is part of why I’m so drawn to it.
I enjoy sonnets; I'm terrible at writing villanelles, but with both of those, there's gamesmanship. That, is really satisfying when I read other people doing them well, but I know, for me, it doesn't have the embedded risk that a sestina does. Because with a sonnet or a villanelle, if I'm trying to pull one off, I probably kind of know where it needs to go—with a sestina, I never know.
Zach: That leads really well into another area I was curious about. Recently, I've kind of had an obsession with seeing how people feel about the poetic line, how you work with the poetic line, and how you craft the poetic line.
Sandra: The poet who I worked with who had the strongest opinion on lineation was Henry Taylor, a Virginia poet. What he really impressed upon me was the importance of having an end-stop line be the default, with enjambment as an active punctuation or counter to that for dramatic impact. He was also the first person who consistently challenged me to write sestinas. For a lot of people, the cheat, or the solution, to the formal problems posed by the sestina is to enjamb relentlessly. Because that's the best way to “work around” those end words.
I mention Henry because I do think that if there's one thing I'd love to see addressed more rigorously in contemporary poetry, it is the casual and, frankly, runaway way that people enjamb their poems. Enjambment becomes the default, with end-stopping popping out as the exception to the rule. The risk of that is that it denatures what a line break is supposed to do, at a certain point.
Regan: What is a line break supposed to do?
Sandra: It’s supposed to cue the reader to take a breath. But when you hear readings where the poets completely disregard their own line breaks, on the page, which many do, it represents a kind of frustration point for the reader. The poet has asked me to spend time with the page and really look at all of these decisions have been made there—and then gets up there and disregards one whole category of those decisions. What are you telling me about the craft that you're bringing into the process of writing a poem?
That sounds like a very curmudgeonly thing to say, and it is a very rigorous way of looking at it. But I do think about it.
Zach: And that's something we've been talking about. I took a “Craft of Poetry” class with Robert Fanning last year, and one thing that we did talk about was, just as you mentioned, not to enjamb just because you think it's going to look cool. Don't do it just because, “oh I really want to end on this word.” Instead, look at what is the whole line doing itself, to give a reason to why it should start and end with these particular words. And another thing that we talked about, as you’ve said, is that end-stopping can be really powerful and we shouldn't necessarily shy away from it, as we have. And I don't know if we were all taught this, or if it’s just consciously come up in contemporary writing…there really does seem to be an avoidance of end stopping.
Sandra: Part of what happens is, when you're drafting, you get about three or four lines in and your body starts defining what it thinks of as the median or the mode length of the line. You then start subconsciously breaking toward that length. In other words, there's a lot of contemporary poetry where the right margin is almost as even as the left margin. That is fine, three or four lines in. But by twelve or thirteen lines in, you’re probably going to be enjambing. It would be unlikely that your language would naturally land that way, over and over, in terms of your sentence length, right?
One thing that I always recommend to poets whom I mentor, and to myself, is that you should have an intermediate step of revision where you take out all line breaks. Move it back up to the level of a prose paragraph or prose poem, and re-lineate. If you truly find your line breaks in the same place, they were meant to be there. But, at least some of the time, you’ll think, what? Why was that there? How did I find that? You have to challenge yourself. There is a lot to be gained in thinking of the revision process as—amongst all the other inspirations, and responding to feedback that you get from readers—a certain set of hoops that you've got to jump the poem through. You ought to be sure to read it aloud, you ought to be sure to re-break it from scratch, you ought to be sure to examine the standard of what Gregory Orr would call "the four temperaments of the poem.” That is: think about the poem in terms of imagination, sound, structure, and story. Think about, what am I doing in each of those quadrants? Because most of us, when we first sit down to write a poem, are inspired by an impulse in one of those quadrants. The trick is to then complicate that by bringing the other ones into play.
Zach: I have one more question. This is very broad, but since we are a literary journal based on a college campus, we do get a lot of submissions from younger poets and fiction writers and artists. I'm wondering, what is your advice to young writers, of either poetry or fiction? What advice would you give them, if you could say anything?
Sandra: That is very tricky, because when you're trying to give advice to writers, it's so easy to take for granted the biases of how you came into the world, and what works for you. So, for example, a lot of times I'll give kind of practical advice about seeking community through residencies, conferences, and correspondences with other writers. In part, that’s because I am a social creature. What's funny, for me, is that I'm married to a visual artist whose impulses are not in that direction. He's kind of shy. So I've come to appreciate the fact that what for me can be a nurturing round of being social is, for him, kind of exhausting. Just like the fact that, as a writer, I put myself out in the world in a very voluble way, on social media. That works for me, and so it is very easy for me to say that will work for you, too. But I have to respect the fact that it doesn't work for everyone.
My biggest drawback, my Achilles’ heel as a writer, is the self- inducing guilt that I get when I've gone a long time without writing. I'm not an every-day writer. I do not put those 500 words down, no matter what, from the hour of 6 to 7 in the morning. I sometimes go for three months without writing. And sometimes, I'll write a poem a day for a month.
The biggest thing that I have to remember is, I tend to self-punish by not giving myself permission to read when I haven't been writing. The first thing that falls off my to-do list is reading a book for pleasure. That is really dangerous. Because usually, when I need to start writing again, the number one thing I can do to feed that impulse is read. That's one of the realities when I contrast my life now, as a professional author and teacher who travels a lot, when I contrast that to being a young aspiring writer—I mean “young” literally, being a 20-something in an MFA program—the biggest thing that I remember is those whole afternoons that I would take off, just to read. I would go to Teaism, which is a DC spot, or I’d go to a bar. I would sit there in the candlelight and read poetry, a collection by someone else, just devour it. That was a really good time. I have to fight to make time for that, now.
So it sounds super simplistic, but my number one piece of advice to an aspiring writer, an emerging writer is: don't forget to read.
Zach & Regan: Thank you!
Sandra: We all pick up totems and objects that have charged significance for us, that then become motifs in our creative work. You have some poets, like Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin, Gregory Orr, and Erika Meitner, where they’re really honest about that in the skin and surface of their work. Meaning they not only keep those images, but they use the same words for them each time; that's one type of pleasure. Then you have someone like me, who for whatever reason, I think, has been a little sneakier about it. So you have to almost be consciously read for those repetitions.
I’m sometimes to give readings that are a mix of poetry and prose, and there's one section of Don't Kill The Birthday Girl that I read more often than any other—one which references believing that the “food pyramid” went back to the days of the ancient Egyptians, with a subsequent punch line that involves canopic jars. Then, in I Was the Jukebox, there's a poem “Mortality.” I had a spontaneous realization at a reading, as I went through my set list: oh, my gosh, I've used “canopic jars” in back-to-back reading moments.
So, you have those moments where you catch yourself and interrogate your own repetitions. Because in the right hands, it's meaningful image and meaning-building. In the wrong hands, you're just copycatting yourself, right? You have to be careful that it's an intentional and useful repetition.
It's funny that you mention eggplants. There is a recurring figure in my work that, for me, has real-life inspiring material attached to it. He has appeared in every poetry collection I've written so far. You can find him in I Was the Jukebox, in “The Eggplant Speaks,” and you can find him in Theories Of Falling, in “American Thing.” You can find him in nonfiction that I’ve published, although not in the memoir. That happens sometimes. We meet people who we might only know for a short period of time, but they haunt our lives and our creative consciousness, so to speak. I'm okay with that; it’s fine. But what I would say, when you mention those echoes, is that they are absolutely there—they're not necessarily conscious, but I try to then become conscious of them and figure out whether I want them to be there.
Regan: You just mentioned recognizing and taking care of your own echoes as a writer, and the phrase that came to my mind, in response to that was, also: having the right audience. Not that there is a right or wrong audience, but having an audience who also can rise to the echo, as my brain started to echo, or imagine echoes. Everybody's walked on the beach, but we haven't given that voice to sand.
Sandra: Well, to follow through on that: we’re all fortunate, in life, if we can get a few trusted readers for our work. One of the things that is so tough, and can make transitioning from one set of trusted readers to the next necessary—if painful—is that you need people who can tell you if you're repeating or recycling yourself too much. And yet, you also need people who respect when you’ve locked into a topic that you want to explore over and over. And you also need people who then let you choose to change that topic, or change that formal approach. If they can’t respect that, and embrace the new approach, then you have to move on and find other readers. It's a really delicate and intimate relationship.
In fact, I had a group of fellow poets—I was friends with them, I'm still friends with them, but when I was transitioning from Theories of Falling to the poems that became I Was the Jukebox, I had to stop meeting up with that group. Whether they realized it or not, they were holding me to a sense of narrative-building that worked for Theories Of Falling, but did not work for the poems I wanted to be writing. We had to part ways.
Zach: One thing that you mentioned: you have those people that respect these obsessions you find in writing, and you have to focus on those for a while. We just had another poet, Dennis Hinrichsen, come visit the grad class that I'm in, and one thing that he was talking about was the idea that you don't really write the poem, the poem writes you. As if it guides you to where it wants you to go…I wondered if you had a similar sort of feeling about that, if you find those topics and you lock into them, and if that's what the poem wants? Or if you think that's something that you subconsciously or consciously want, in those poems?
Regan: Without destroying either the question or your answer, obviously, this is what fiction and prose writers say, too: that the character wants to do something. So, there seems to be some level of craft that's involved in our ability to write something, but, how I hear what Zach is asking, what is it that wants to come out?
Sandra: I can answer both questions. They overlap heavily. But, one thing, when you bring up fiction—the thing about fiction is that, usually, there's more than one active character. Part of the reason why fiction stories have a will of their own is that you have, within them, individual agents with different sets of motivations and goals. Otherwise, you don't have conflict. In that sense, in a fiction piece, a character sometimes does what you didn't “expect” them to do when you started the piece.
But in poetry and nonfiction, there is usually a dominant speaker. It's hard, unless its mode is narrative or epic and long-form, for a poem to sustain a very big cast of characters. The danger of that is if you forgo the ability to be surprised by where the poem takes you. I think that's what this other visiting writer was trying to get at, that you have to put enough starting material in the poem's premise or its idea that it can swerve. If your body of work is nothing other than a series of directly expressive personal lyrics, if the “I” is never complicated or challenged in some way, you're going to have a hard time maintaining the longevity of your career as a poet.
For me, there are two specific ways I maintain the ability of the poem to take over. I'm having to accept the reality that I am a “project” poet, in some ways, even though I never would have thought of myself that way. But I look back, and I think of Theories of Falling, with the “Allergy Girl” sequence; I Was the Jukebox, with the “speaks” poems; Count The Waves, with the Traveler’s Vade Mecum poems. I think about what I'm doing now, which is pretty much prose poems that are working with identity issues and memories connected to growing up in and around the DC area. What I see is, with projects, you're committing to or controlling a certain basic premise. So on that level, there is a lot of top-down direction. But on the level of any one given poem within that project—the inspiration point, and therefore the direction the poem takes—might be highly spontaneous or highly uncontrolled.
We were talking about how the “Travelers Vade Mecums” work as a body of prompts. You get to riff: there were a few places where I plucked lines from the Traveler’s Vade Mecum just based on what their number was. Then you have to work with that constraint and you have no idea, going into it, what the poem is therefore going to be. So that's one way that I can balance letting the poem surprise me, and also having some level of intent and control.
The other way is I engage releasing control is the sestina. I often describe them as the “gyroscope of form,” because you get this great balance. You commit to the end words, you control the end words, and you can do some basic strategizing; of seeing, for example, how those end words will recombine in the envoi. But you can't forecast where, narratively, you'll be by stanza four or five when you're making those first initial decisions. Because…the musculature of that particular received form, it's so strong and will, in fact, overpower or contradict your impulses as a poet. That, for me, is part of why I’m so drawn to it.
I enjoy sonnets; I'm terrible at writing villanelles, but with both of those, there's gamesmanship. That, is really satisfying when I read other people doing them well, but I know, for me, it doesn't have the embedded risk that a sestina does. Because with a sonnet or a villanelle, if I'm trying to pull one off, I probably kind of know where it needs to go—with a sestina, I never know.
Zach: That leads really well into another area I was curious about. Recently, I've kind of had an obsession with seeing how people feel about the poetic line, how you work with the poetic line, and how you craft the poetic line.
Sandra: The poet who I worked with who had the strongest opinion on lineation was Henry Taylor, a Virginia poet. What he really impressed upon me was the importance of having an end-stop line be the default, with enjambment as an active punctuation or counter to that for dramatic impact. He was also the first person who consistently challenged me to write sestinas. For a lot of people, the cheat, or the solution, to the formal problems posed by the sestina is to enjamb relentlessly. Because that's the best way to “work around” those end words.
I mention Henry because I do think that if there's one thing I'd love to see addressed more rigorously in contemporary poetry, it is the casual and, frankly, runaway way that people enjamb their poems. Enjambment becomes the default, with end-stopping popping out as the exception to the rule. The risk of that is that it denatures what a line break is supposed to do, at a certain point.
Regan: What is a line break supposed to do?
Sandra: It’s supposed to cue the reader to take a breath. But when you hear readings where the poets completely disregard their own line breaks, on the page, which many do, it represents a kind of frustration point for the reader. The poet has asked me to spend time with the page and really look at all of these decisions have been made there—and then gets up there and disregards one whole category of those decisions. What are you telling me about the craft that you're bringing into the process of writing a poem?
That sounds like a very curmudgeonly thing to say, and it is a very rigorous way of looking at it. But I do think about it.
Zach: And that's something we've been talking about. I took a “Craft of Poetry” class with Robert Fanning last year, and one thing that we did talk about was, just as you mentioned, not to enjamb just because you think it's going to look cool. Don't do it just because, “oh I really want to end on this word.” Instead, look at what is the whole line doing itself, to give a reason to why it should start and end with these particular words. And another thing that we talked about, as you’ve said, is that end-stopping can be really powerful and we shouldn't necessarily shy away from it, as we have. And I don't know if we were all taught this, or if it’s just consciously come up in contemporary writing…there really does seem to be an avoidance of end stopping.
Sandra: Part of what happens is, when you're drafting, you get about three or four lines in and your body starts defining what it thinks of as the median or the mode length of the line. You then start subconsciously breaking toward that length. In other words, there's a lot of contemporary poetry where the right margin is almost as even as the left margin. That is fine, three or four lines in. But by twelve or thirteen lines in, you’re probably going to be enjambing. It would be unlikely that your language would naturally land that way, over and over, in terms of your sentence length, right?
One thing that I always recommend to poets whom I mentor, and to myself, is that you should have an intermediate step of revision where you take out all line breaks. Move it back up to the level of a prose paragraph or prose poem, and re-lineate. If you truly find your line breaks in the same place, they were meant to be there. But, at least some of the time, you’ll think, what? Why was that there? How did I find that? You have to challenge yourself. There is a lot to be gained in thinking of the revision process as—amongst all the other inspirations, and responding to feedback that you get from readers—a certain set of hoops that you've got to jump the poem through. You ought to be sure to read it aloud, you ought to be sure to re-break it from scratch, you ought to be sure to examine the standard of what Gregory Orr would call "the four temperaments of the poem.” That is: think about the poem in terms of imagination, sound, structure, and story. Think about, what am I doing in each of those quadrants? Because most of us, when we first sit down to write a poem, are inspired by an impulse in one of those quadrants. The trick is to then complicate that by bringing the other ones into play.
Zach: I have one more question. This is very broad, but since we are a literary journal based on a college campus, we do get a lot of submissions from younger poets and fiction writers and artists. I'm wondering, what is your advice to young writers, of either poetry or fiction? What advice would you give them, if you could say anything?
Sandra: That is very tricky, because when you're trying to give advice to writers, it's so easy to take for granted the biases of how you came into the world, and what works for you. So, for example, a lot of times I'll give kind of practical advice about seeking community through residencies, conferences, and correspondences with other writers. In part, that’s because I am a social creature. What's funny, for me, is that I'm married to a visual artist whose impulses are not in that direction. He's kind of shy. So I've come to appreciate the fact that what for me can be a nurturing round of being social is, for him, kind of exhausting. Just like the fact that, as a writer, I put myself out in the world in a very voluble way, on social media. That works for me, and so it is very easy for me to say that will work for you, too. But I have to respect the fact that it doesn't work for everyone.
My biggest drawback, my Achilles’ heel as a writer, is the self- inducing guilt that I get when I've gone a long time without writing. I'm not an every-day writer. I do not put those 500 words down, no matter what, from the hour of 6 to 7 in the morning. I sometimes go for three months without writing. And sometimes, I'll write a poem a day for a month.
The biggest thing that I have to remember is, I tend to self-punish by not giving myself permission to read when I haven't been writing. The first thing that falls off my to-do list is reading a book for pleasure. That is really dangerous. Because usually, when I need to start writing again, the number one thing I can do to feed that impulse is read. That's one of the realities when I contrast my life now, as a professional author and teacher who travels a lot, when I contrast that to being a young aspiring writer—I mean “young” literally, being a 20-something in an MFA program—the biggest thing that I remember is those whole afternoons that I would take off, just to read. I would go to Teaism, which is a DC spot, or I’d go to a bar. I would sit there in the candlelight and read poetry, a collection by someone else, just devour it. That was a really good time. I have to fight to make time for that, now.
So it sounds super simplistic, but my number one piece of advice to an aspiring writer, an emerging writer is: don't forget to read.
Zach & Regan: Thank you!