An Interview with Robyn Sarah
TNQ Lead Poetry Editor, John Vardon, catches up with poet, Robyn Sarah to discuss how her poems take shape, her latest five poems published in Issue 175 of TNQ, and her upcoming poetry collection.
John Vardon (JV): In your decades-long publishing history, you have used many traditional poetic forms—pantoum, villanelle, prose poem, sestina, and sonnet—the sonnet being relatively inconspicuous and less “bossy” than the others, to quote from an on-line interview. You have also said that you like your poems to have shape and that you occasionally invent your own, as in sequenced poems akin to musical movements with repeated lines as motifs or your collage (or quilt) poems. In the sample of poems published here, I see a variety of stanzaic patterns. If the subject matter of a poem is partly subconscious, the same can’t always be said for the form or shape of the poem on the page. Or do your poems sometimes take shape in the same way that the form of a sculpture is released under the sculptor’s chisel? Does any of this have relevance to the poems in We’re Somewhere Else Now?
Robyn Sarah (RS): The formal variety that you describe is present in We’re Somewhere Else Now as it is in all of my earlier collections. When I first began publishing, it bothered me a little that the poems in my collections showed so little visual consistency from page to page – poems in recognizable traditional forms rubbing shoulders with prose poems, freeverse poems in various shapes, poems in standard-length stanzas or regular but unconventional stanzas, freeverse poems running unbroken for two or more pages, minimalist imagistic or aphoristic poems by themselves or grouped and numbered. Later I just accepted this variability as my normal. I like to try different things. If I come across a poem I like, and notice that it is in an interesting form, I may see if I can write a poem in that form, using some lines I’ve already written – unfinished notebook jottings – to serve as “ starter”. But mostly, I let each poem find its form as I write it – a process influenced by a number of variables: my mood of the moment, my “starter” lines, poets I’ve recently been reading, random things I’ve been thinking about, random observations of my surroundings. Your simile of the sculptor’s chisel is apt. Just as I rarely begin a poem with a definite idea or subject in mind, so I rarely premeditate a poem’s form. I begin with germinating words – a phrase, a couple of lines, that I sense will grow into something – and I let this fragment begin to evolve, trusting that the poem will show me the shape it wants to grow into, just as it will reveal what it’s about.
But whatever form they take, my poems are predominantly lyric poems, mostly short – oftenest a single page, rarely more than two or three. And in this regard, the new collection is a departure. Its first half is a gathering of individual lyric poems in my usual mix of modes, but the second half – covering some of the same thematic ground very differently – is a single poem running thirty-six pages, a continuous text in numbered segments. It is neither lyric nor narrative but philosophical: an extended meditation or soliloquy on the subject of doubt. While not completely unstructured, it is freer than any poem I’ve written before – a kind of thinking-aloud, moving back and forth between verse and prose (sometimes even within the same segment), and it was composed by a working method I had to invent as I went along.
JV: It’s been ten years since your last collection, and I know in the past you have wondered about the overwhelming amount of poetry published in this country and elsewhere, even suggesting that some poets should space out their publications in a way that does not augment the deluge. But ten years is a long time. In the interim, of course, there was your memoir, Music, Late and Soon, and clearly the poems in this book have been accumulating over that time. All this is a way of asking when you know it’s time to publish and what poems you decide to include.
RS: Ten years is the longest I’ve gone between poetry collections since my first published chapbook in 1978. (However, during that period – in addition to the memoir – I compiled Wherever We Mean to Be, a forty-year Selected published in 2017, and in 2019 I worked intensively with my translator on Mes souliers me font mourir, the French version of My Shoes Are Killing Me. So poetry was never very far away.) When first I began publishing, the collections were shorter, with a new one coming out every three years. As they got longer, so did the intervals between them, though never more than five or six years. Also, I never used to go a whole year without writing a poem, but apart from a “single” in 2018 – I wrote no poems between 2017 and 2020, or none I could consider finished. (This was the period of intensive work on the memoir.) The majority of the poems in the new collection were written between 2020 and 2024.
You ask how I know it’s time to publish a poetry book. Poetry-writing comes in waves for me. A wave builds, crests and then tapers off, the poems coming less and less frequently, at which point I start thinking I’d like to get this body of work off my desk and start a new one. Sending the manuscript out to a publisher liberates me do this. My poems accumulate pretty slowly – on average maybe ten poems a year that I consider finished and publishable. So it’s generally at least three years before I have enough poems in a folder to begin to think “book manuscript” rather than “pile of new poems”. At that point, things pick up a little, because in trying to arrange the poems in an effective sequence, I perceive gaps that my subconscious looks for ways to fill, engendering a small second wave of new poems. I also go back and look through my “outtakes” file, unpublished poem that did not make it into earlier collections. Sometimes a poem that didn’t fit thematically with an earlier body of work strikes me as fitting perfectly with this one. Or a poem I hadn’t thought strong enough to publish now strikes me as much better than I remembered. Or I see a way to fix a problem in a poem that had seemed unfixable at the time I wrote it. My later collections each contain a small number of poems that predate the current body of work by years, even decades – sometimes almost unchanged, sometimes with small but significant alterations. I don’t consider it cheating to include these as “new” poems – in fact, I consider a poem thus reclaimed to be a new one, because before, it was unfinished. Missing was my conviction that it was worth publishing.
JV: In the poem “Nothing’s Happening Here,” it seem that “nothing” refers to more than the poet’s frustrated writing process; nothing, companioned with the sudden silence, becomes a contemplative state of mind when the poet can perceive the details of her surroundings and, like the web-weaving spider, pick up life’s “thread of purpose.” In a sense this poem suggests something about the creative process. Does this make sense in reference to this poem, in which, in contrast to the title, everything is happening?
RS: I very much like your take on this poem! I hadn’t thought of it as suggestive of the creative process, but of course it is, in the sense that shutting off the heater triggers the “event” of silence, which empties the mind and allows the particulars of a new moment to seep into consciousness – that heightened awareness of “everything happening”. The view from the window (the outside realm) and the flowers on the table (the inside realm) cannot entirely banish world-worries and their assault on hope, as the daily news gives us its own spin on “what’s happening”. But the speaker in the poem feels kin to the spider in the window that “also spins”, pursuing its purpose “between inner and outer panes.” (Pun on the last word intended.)
JV: I imagine that your perspective on life, the universe and everything has changed considerably over the years, as it has for almost everyone, but the poem “Invocation” made me wonder about the curious human habit of hope and its possible decline at the present moment. “Hope for the world these days/I hardly dare,” you say in “Nothing’s Happening Here”, but here there is a direct plea for ever-ephemeral hope to return. Curiously, though, the poem seems more hope-affirming than hope-denying. Was this ambivalence intended?
RS: Yes, I think it was. How can we live without hope? Yet our capacity for it in recent years has taken a relentless beating as we’re fed a steady diet of dire news. The poem seems hope-affirming because hope is being “invoked” in the plea for its return – and how best to appeal to its beneficence, if not to praise it glowingly? – to portray its attributes in all their colours, as if to conjure it back through word-magic? Hence the series of statements praising hope by likening it to something resurgent, promising, beautiful, delightful, connecting, rescuing, comforting. It was only after I’d finished the poem that I noticed something else: the last line – “Hope, come back to me” – is ambiguous. “Come back” can be read as an imperative (the plea that I intended) – but grammatically, it can also be read as a participle, as in “Hope, [you who have] come back to me.” Instead of a plea, the last line can be heard as one last statement of praise in the series: gratitude for hope’s constancy. My first thought when I noticed this was to worry that some readers might misread the line and fail to hear it the way I intended – as a cry from the depths. And my next thought was, “So what if they do? I could as easily have meant it the other way. In fact I must have meant it both ways, or it wouldn’t be hope.” Writing this poem made me realize that the act of calling on hope to return is a sign that it is returning.
JV: “On Reading Hopkins” impressed and fascinated me by the way in which you pay tribute to the poet by recreating his style, in syntax, metre, and diction. I think you have done something similar in your poem about Marianne Moore. I wonder how difficult it was to approximate not only Hopkin’s sprung rhythm but also his way off seeing the world.
RS: The rediscovery of that Hopkins sonnet at a dark moment did give me the unasked-for “lift” my tribute describes – like Frost’s crow triggering his change of mood in “Dust of Snow.” That shift of mind prompted the first lines (“In a dark vale, a lovely mile lit/ By a long-dead poet – the forms, forms unforeseen/ God’s smile can take!”) – lines scribbled in a notebook on July 28, 2020. I knew that in referencing the Hopkins poem – in something like his voice – I was aiming at a sonnet both in homage to his and modeled on it (my next move was to list in the margin, in two columns, rhymes for “lit” and “-seen” which would each have to be used four times in the octave stanza.) But there it arrested until June 2023. What brought me back to it three years later was that I had just completed writing a sonnet crown (a chain of sonnets that advance a single line of thought, each repeating the last line of the previous one as its first.) I was happy to have this appear in TNQ last year. Its basis was an unpublished sonnet I’d written in 2016 that I thought would lend itself to such development, but it turned out to be a feat I might never have begun had I realized how hard it would be. Three months of intermittent work, false starts and impasses, just to get a second and third sonnet completed – then three more months of intensive work to complete the next four! The ongoing challenge of meeting the formal requirements was obsessive, exhausting, and exhilarating by turns. And if I remember right, it was on the very day I finished the last sonnet that I picked up the Hopkins lines again and in the space of a single afternoon, finished the poem. It seemed to write itself. It felt effortless. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that by then I was thinking and dreaming in sonnet form, practically breathing in iambic pentameter – but it surprised me. Ditto for the ease with which I fell into Hopkins’ metre, voice, thought-rhythms and spiritual perspective. My acute aural memory and training in classical music have always made it easy for me to write in metre and to imitate poetic styles, but this was something beyond that facility – it almost felt as if I were channeling the poet. It was one of the more astonishing writing experiences I’ve had.
JV: Your collections have been published by a wide variety of publishers (Villeneuve, Vehicule, Cormorant, Anansi, Brick, Porcupine’s Quill, Fitzhenry & Whiteside) but your last two collections (not to mention your memoir) have found a home at Biblioasis. Without persuasion or bribery by its publicist, I can say that it is the best publisher in the country, but wonder what attracted you to the press for what will be your fourth book there. You have said that editors play almost no role in your own relentless revisions, but I wonder if Dan Wells and Eric Ormsby had anything to do with your decision.
RS: The new collection will indeed be my fourth poetry title with Biblioasis, but that includes the Selected Poems published in 2017; it will actually be my sixth title with the press. Besides the memoir, there was an essay collection, Little Eurekas: A Decades’ Thoughts on Poetry, back in 2007 – that was my first title with Dan, whom at the time I did not know. The person instrumental in making this happen was John Metcalf, who was involved with Biblioasis from its inception and was Dan’s mentor. John was looking for authors he could bring to the fledgling press, then in its third year. He thought I should gather my various writings on poetry – columns, essays, articles and reviews which had been appearing fairly regularly in Canadian newspapers and literary magazines (TNQ solicited a few of them) and to organize them as an essay collection. At first I was dubious, but who could resist such an invitation? An offer out of nowhere, to publish a book I never would have thought of publishing – and one that I didn’t even have to write, because I had written most of it already? (I wish more things in life would happen that way.) I’ve been with Biblioasis ever since, watching Dan with admiration as he has continued to build on the press’s beginnings to bring it to the prominence it has today.
You can explore Robyn Sarah’s latest five poems, published in Issue 175: The Lives of Others today.