Part 2: Becoming the Jukebox
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 |
Zach: So, I'm going to switch over. I write predominantly poetry, but I'm also interested in other genres. I enjoy writing fiction, I enjoy writing scripts, comic books…essentially, if you tell me to write it, I'm interested in finding out how that works. In interviews, you’ve mentioned that switching between poetry and creative nonfiction was like night and day. But it also seemed like you garnered a bit of attention from the media as a poet shifting to nonfiction, which, as we discussed in our last segment, was a 60,000-word memoir project. So, as someone who also writes in multiple genres, I'm wondering if you feel there are particular ideas or stories best told in a particular genre? Do you think that students should label themselves as poets or fiction writers while they're working on their particular degree programs?
Sandra: Well, I can answer the second part of that question easily, right off the bat. I do not think that genres should be segregated. In fact, when I was looking at MFA programs for myself, although I didn't know to look for it at first, I quickly realized that whether or not someone was welcome to workshop outside their “chosen” genre was critical to my level of interest in that program. I think that, especially if you are a younger writer—which many MFA students are—you don't yet know what your career path is going to be.
So, the only usefulness to proclaiming yourself a Poet or a Nonfiction Writer or a Memoirist is if that causes you to focus and create a higher standard of knowledge acquisition or craft vocabulary by reading certain foundational texts. I do find that it's hard for me to say to someone, “I'm not going to take you seriously as a writer if you've never read or considered Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. But I can make the case to a poet that if you want to move forward in the contemporary world of American poetry, you will feel much better armed if you've read Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. So, I can kind of push people a little more, within a particular genre.
But it's interesting, that point you make about people crossing over. A lot of times, when poets turn to memoir, they publish long-form extensions of their poetic sensibilities—very fragmented, very lyric. I find myself a little fatigued by the number of poets who publish memoirs that are, essentially, flash chapters of less than a thousand words each. Not because those works can't be great, in and of themselves, but it tells me is that what they've probably done is just extended their knowledge of poetic craft to another form. They haven't independently studied the craft of nonfiction. To me, that's kind of a lost opportunity.
So, just to be clear, I am not knocking the volume of lyric memoirs published with small presses or independent presses, and I'm not knocking experimental forms. For instance, Elissa Washuta is a young memoirist whose book is awesome, and it uses all these weird list forms. I'm not broadsword-critiquing that mode of approach. I'm just saying that it needs to be viewed as only one option, not as an automatic route.
Zach: I was glad that you said that you looked for MFA programs that allow you to broaden your interests, outside of just poetry, or just fiction, or just creative nonfiction.
I read I Was the Jukebox a couple of times in the last day—and instantaneously, thought, “this is awesome, and I'm glad it was brought to me.” As I was reading, I picked up on a lot of yin-yang elements like light and dark, humor and horror, happiness and anger. The line "I was the jukebox" is in the poem “You Were You.” It’s interesting when you juxtapose that idea with a poem like "Immortality" which seems, to me, to be concerned with embracing and loving the self. I wondered, as you were putting together I Was the Jukebox as a manuscript, how did these thematic elements—the light and the dark, the yin and the yang, the multitude of unheard voices, and the importance of loving oneself—weave together for you? Where those things even in your mind as you were weaving them together, or was that an intention?
Sandra: A lot of I Was the Jukebox was written in periods when I was committed to a poem-a-day writing, for a month at a time, otherwise known as the “NaPoWriMo” initiative. I mention that because when you're trying to write a poem a day, I do think there's a kind of punchiness of extremes that can happen. You have to keep yourself entertained and engaged, and so, for me, one of the solutions to that was constantly swinging that pendulum back and forth between light and dark, as you say, or tragedy and absurdity, maybe? And that's part of my sensibility. I think I'll always have that kind of dark humor in my poems, which is something I'm drawn to in reading others’, as well.
Yesterday, I was asked by Central Michigan University students why I chose a line from the poem to use as a title, versus making the book title “You Were You.” And I pointed out two things. One was that part of why I wanted that poem to be the “title poem,” so to speak, was that I wrote it early in one of those poem-a-day months and it felt like a tipping point. That was emotionally significant to me, because it was the first poem that made me realize that I was safely and firmly in the realm of writing my second book, as opposed to writing poems that I wished I could have crammed into my first book—of which, at that point, I no longer had control to change the manuscript. I was waiting for the first book to come out when I was writing the poems for I Was the Jukebox. So I wanted to honor that poem, for that reason.
I called that poem “You Were You,” because of the implicit yin-to-the-yang of that: you were you, but I was not me. And it represented the fact that this was a set of poems that would be about kind of shape-shifting voices, persona poems, inhabiting shoes and worlds outside my own. So it felt right in that sense. But there was something about the title of “You Were You.” As a book, it didn't have enough energy attached to it. So I went for I Was the Jukebox, because it's also a statement about inhabiting outside oneself. But it had all the musicality and color of a jukebox, a physical object in the world. It's always funny, for me, when I share that poem, particularly with young readers, since they often don't get the picture of a Wurlitzer jukebox—they picture this more electronic, or technical concept of being able to call up a Pandora station or Spotify any song you want, at any moment. There's something lost in the translation. That's the space that poem holds for me.
Zach: Well, that transitions pretty well to speaking of the actual jukebox as a machine. One thing I picked up early, as I was reading your book, and you’ve also mentioned it in a couple of interviews: that the purpose of some of those persona poems was to take the power away from the “I” of the speaker and give it to another item. Some of these, like "The Minotaur Speaks,” and "Failed Poem About the Greeks," are about beings that we don't really hear a lot about in modern media or society. And there are other poems, and you mentioned this briefly earlier, too, they are somewhat political in nature, or have a political tinge to them. So I wondered, again, about an over-arching manuscript question: as you are writing these poems, giving voices to some of these things that we don't normally hear from, these poems having sort of a political commentary, if you will—how do these weave together, and why was that important, as you were putting together I Was the Jukebox?
Sandra: It would be disingenuous for me to take some kind of mastermind credit, that I had all these themes and I was going to find a way to weave them together…and so, I think it might be helpful for me to put things on a more relatable scale. Everything you just mentioned, I also see as being framed by a writer asking herself, “what do I write about now, and how do I make it fresh? How do I have something new to say in the 20th or 21st century as a poet?”
Keep in mind, that I had put Theories of Falling into the world, which is fairly personal—or, at least I would admit that it draws from the well of the autobiographical in some places. I was also under contract to write a memoir. So my personal life material was pretty well out there. And until I did some more living, I wouldn't really have as much to draw from, in terms of that well. In contrast, Count The Waves would return to drawing more from the biographical. So, okay. If we temporarily put aside that well of personal subject matter, I've got this great cultural inheritance of other subjects to write about, but still: how do I do something new?
One of the poems I shared with CMU students was Cornelius Eady’s poem written in the voice of Emmett Till’s glass-topped casket. Emmett Till had been written about by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, many African-American writers. But Eady found his own new way into the material by writing from the point of view of the casket.
About the poems that you’ve mentioned, something that I think of immediately in terms of the Minotaur, or the phenomenon of world war, or Greek mythology: these things had been written about so widely that I had to find a premise that let me feel like I had something to say. So instead of writing about the Minotaur as the third-person villain, I tried writing from his point of view. Or instead of trying to write a poem loyal to Greek mythology, giving myself permission to be flagrantly anachronistic. Label it a "failed poem" and take that guy to an amusement park, you know?
I'd love to take credit for a strategic approach, but I also know that I was just a poet trying to get poems written that felt fresh and new to me.
Sandra: Well, I can answer the second part of that question easily, right off the bat. I do not think that genres should be segregated. In fact, when I was looking at MFA programs for myself, although I didn't know to look for it at first, I quickly realized that whether or not someone was welcome to workshop outside their “chosen” genre was critical to my level of interest in that program. I think that, especially if you are a younger writer—which many MFA students are—you don't yet know what your career path is going to be.
So, the only usefulness to proclaiming yourself a Poet or a Nonfiction Writer or a Memoirist is if that causes you to focus and create a higher standard of knowledge acquisition or craft vocabulary by reading certain foundational texts. I do find that it's hard for me to say to someone, “I'm not going to take you seriously as a writer if you've never read or considered Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. But I can make the case to a poet that if you want to move forward in the contemporary world of American poetry, you will feel much better armed if you've read Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town. So, I can kind of push people a little more, within a particular genre.
But it's interesting, that point you make about people crossing over. A lot of times, when poets turn to memoir, they publish long-form extensions of their poetic sensibilities—very fragmented, very lyric. I find myself a little fatigued by the number of poets who publish memoirs that are, essentially, flash chapters of less than a thousand words each. Not because those works can't be great, in and of themselves, but it tells me is that what they've probably done is just extended their knowledge of poetic craft to another form. They haven't independently studied the craft of nonfiction. To me, that's kind of a lost opportunity.
So, just to be clear, I am not knocking the volume of lyric memoirs published with small presses or independent presses, and I'm not knocking experimental forms. For instance, Elissa Washuta is a young memoirist whose book is awesome, and it uses all these weird list forms. I'm not broadsword-critiquing that mode of approach. I'm just saying that it needs to be viewed as only one option, not as an automatic route.
Zach: I was glad that you said that you looked for MFA programs that allow you to broaden your interests, outside of just poetry, or just fiction, or just creative nonfiction.
I read I Was the Jukebox a couple of times in the last day—and instantaneously, thought, “this is awesome, and I'm glad it was brought to me.” As I was reading, I picked up on a lot of yin-yang elements like light and dark, humor and horror, happiness and anger. The line "I was the jukebox" is in the poem “You Were You.” It’s interesting when you juxtapose that idea with a poem like "Immortality" which seems, to me, to be concerned with embracing and loving the self. I wondered, as you were putting together I Was the Jukebox as a manuscript, how did these thematic elements—the light and the dark, the yin and the yang, the multitude of unheard voices, and the importance of loving oneself—weave together for you? Where those things even in your mind as you were weaving them together, or was that an intention?
Sandra: A lot of I Was the Jukebox was written in periods when I was committed to a poem-a-day writing, for a month at a time, otherwise known as the “NaPoWriMo” initiative. I mention that because when you're trying to write a poem a day, I do think there's a kind of punchiness of extremes that can happen. You have to keep yourself entertained and engaged, and so, for me, one of the solutions to that was constantly swinging that pendulum back and forth between light and dark, as you say, or tragedy and absurdity, maybe? And that's part of my sensibility. I think I'll always have that kind of dark humor in my poems, which is something I'm drawn to in reading others’, as well.
Yesterday, I was asked by Central Michigan University students why I chose a line from the poem to use as a title, versus making the book title “You Were You.” And I pointed out two things. One was that part of why I wanted that poem to be the “title poem,” so to speak, was that I wrote it early in one of those poem-a-day months and it felt like a tipping point. That was emotionally significant to me, because it was the first poem that made me realize that I was safely and firmly in the realm of writing my second book, as opposed to writing poems that I wished I could have crammed into my first book—of which, at that point, I no longer had control to change the manuscript. I was waiting for the first book to come out when I was writing the poems for I Was the Jukebox. So I wanted to honor that poem, for that reason.
I called that poem “You Were You,” because of the implicit yin-to-the-yang of that: you were you, but I was not me. And it represented the fact that this was a set of poems that would be about kind of shape-shifting voices, persona poems, inhabiting shoes and worlds outside my own. So it felt right in that sense. But there was something about the title of “You Were You.” As a book, it didn't have enough energy attached to it. So I went for I Was the Jukebox, because it's also a statement about inhabiting outside oneself. But it had all the musicality and color of a jukebox, a physical object in the world. It's always funny, for me, when I share that poem, particularly with young readers, since they often don't get the picture of a Wurlitzer jukebox—they picture this more electronic, or technical concept of being able to call up a Pandora station or Spotify any song you want, at any moment. There's something lost in the translation. That's the space that poem holds for me.
Zach: Well, that transitions pretty well to speaking of the actual jukebox as a machine. One thing I picked up early, as I was reading your book, and you’ve also mentioned it in a couple of interviews: that the purpose of some of those persona poems was to take the power away from the “I” of the speaker and give it to another item. Some of these, like "The Minotaur Speaks,” and "Failed Poem About the Greeks," are about beings that we don't really hear a lot about in modern media or society. And there are other poems, and you mentioned this briefly earlier, too, they are somewhat political in nature, or have a political tinge to them. So I wondered, again, about an over-arching manuscript question: as you are writing these poems, giving voices to some of these things that we don't normally hear from, these poems having sort of a political commentary, if you will—how do these weave together, and why was that important, as you were putting together I Was the Jukebox?
Sandra: It would be disingenuous for me to take some kind of mastermind credit, that I had all these themes and I was going to find a way to weave them together…and so, I think it might be helpful for me to put things on a more relatable scale. Everything you just mentioned, I also see as being framed by a writer asking herself, “what do I write about now, and how do I make it fresh? How do I have something new to say in the 20th or 21st century as a poet?”
Keep in mind, that I had put Theories of Falling into the world, which is fairly personal—or, at least I would admit that it draws from the well of the autobiographical in some places. I was also under contract to write a memoir. So my personal life material was pretty well out there. And until I did some more living, I wouldn't really have as much to draw from, in terms of that well. In contrast, Count The Waves would return to drawing more from the biographical. So, okay. If we temporarily put aside that well of personal subject matter, I've got this great cultural inheritance of other subjects to write about, but still: how do I do something new?
One of the poems I shared with CMU students was Cornelius Eady’s poem written in the voice of Emmett Till’s glass-topped casket. Emmett Till had been written about by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, many African-American writers. But Eady found his own new way into the material by writing from the point of view of the casket.
About the poems that you’ve mentioned, something that I think of immediately in terms of the Minotaur, or the phenomenon of world war, or Greek mythology: these things had been written about so widely that I had to find a premise that let me feel like I had something to say. So instead of writing about the Minotaur as the third-person villain, I tried writing from his point of view. Or instead of trying to write a poem loyal to Greek mythology, giving myself permission to be flagrantly anachronistic. Label it a "failed poem" and take that guy to an amusement park, you know?
I'd love to take credit for a strategic approach, but I also know that I was just a poet trying to get poems written that felt fresh and new to me.