Creators on Creating: Sarah Schwartz

Poetose is delighted to publish your debut collection of poems, The Calling. Could you share a bit about how these poems came to be? What are your hopes for the book and its readers? 

And I’m honored to have them published! I wrote these poems over the course of many years. The oldest was written when I was in college, almost twenty years ago! I wrote the most recent about a year ago. I have hundreds of poems sitting in folders—both physical and digital—and when I decided to put together a chapbook, I noticed that a number of poems focused on a particular occupation. I went back through some of my favorite poems with that lens, asking myself, “Is this a poem about an occupation? Is it about a calling? Is it about a way of working in and seeing the world?” I was surprised to see how many poems fit, and how many poems were enlivened by a new title that pointed to a calling. 

I hope that readers encounter ways of experiencing and understanding the world that feel both familiar and strange. I hope the poems make a reader think, for example, “Wow, I know what it is to be an exhibitionist, though I’ve never called myself one.” My guess is that readers will see aspects of themselves in most of the poems. We are so various. 

Are there some callings that particularly speak to you? Apart from “The Poet” of course. And why?

I suppose my previous answer revealed more than I intended. A poet is, I think, an exhibitionist. 

As I think more about your question, I have the sense that it is the resistance to each calling that speaks to me. What each calling can’t account for. I suppose that makes my true calling the skeptic. 

You ask many intriguing questions in your catalog of callings. Could you talk a little bit about how you use questions in your poems (in this book and/or beyond)? 

I’ve always been drawn to questions. They are often more interesting to me than answers. And they are almost always the starting point of a poem. I heard once (who knows where, I’ve never been good at citing my sources) that if you know where a poem is going, you should abandon it and start a new poem. I like to start a poem a bit off-balance and once I’ve righted myself, the poem has ended. 

Sometimes in my editing process, the questions disappear or transform into statements. Perhaps that’s a way to build trust with my reader, to give the reader a sense that I am a trustworthy guide. 

How did you first start writing poetry? 

I wrote my first poem in fourth grade. I was lying in bed and a poem came into my head. I got up, turned on the light, and wrote it down. I was so excited about the feeling of translating a hard-to-pin-down feeling into words that I was almost manic with it. I couldn’t sleep. I think I went to my mom’s room to show her the poem, as if she could confirm that I had experienced something magical. I don’t remember her reaction; maybe she confirmed it, maybe she didn’t. Either way, I knew it was magic. 

In “The Accountant,” you write: “Look at your good fortune. Account / for it. Days sliced through with sunshine, night blessed / with an easy heat.” There’s a confidence and beauty to your voice and diction that feels so distinct. Could you talk a little bit about the process of finding your voice as a poet? 

I had a writing teacher once tell me that I could “get away” with commands in my poems, and that has always stuck with me. I think she was picking up on the fact that I take on a compassionate authority when I’m writing, strength that makes room. I sometimes call this “the goddess voice.” This voice is often nearly automatic. You know Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought”? That’s how it is with that voice. It comes into my head and it delivers words quickly, sometimes before I’ve even comprehended them. Maybe it’s the voice of my body, of my hands. It’s the voice of self-trust, and I think self-trust is always the route to finding one’s own voice. 

Why do you write? 

In some ways, it’s like how people describe an addict constantly chasing that first high. I am constantly hungry for that feeling my fourth grade self had—alive with my own mind and the magic of language. There’s no feeling I desire more. That’s enough to keep me returning to the page. 

Who are some of your literary influences? 

So many! Emily Dickinson was the first poet I loved. I’ve also been really influenced by my college mentor, Claudia Rankine, and all the poets she introduced me to: D.A. Powell, Brenda Hillman, Lyn Hejinian, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Cesar Vallejo, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And at Brown University, too, I was introduced to avant-garde and experimental poets that opened up my conception of poetry. I’ve always felt that I was a little less experimental than my literary influences, but I try, as they do, to let language lead, to let the music of it sing through me without trying to control its meaning. 

Who were some of the experimental poets you were most drawn to at Brown? And how was your experience in that MFA program? You wrote a poem a week, right? 

At Brown, I was reading a lot of Ben Lerner, Anne Carson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Pam Rehm, Heather Christle. I was especially interested in people playing with and exploding the lyric poem. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr’s anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language was hugely influential for me. 

I think I was too young (fresh out of college) to really appreciate what my time at Brown afforded me, which was, above all, time. A fully funded MFA is one of the only ways to get paid to write poetry, and I had no idea what a privilege that was. I was deeply challenged by my classmates and I wrote more than I ever had before. In a sense, I learned how to be a writer. I learned that I work best in the mornings, and that I must be reading poetry every day in order to write it. And yes, the expectation for our workshops was to submit a poem a week. Sometimes I had many poems I wanted to share, and sometimes submitting even one poem felt vulnerable. Sharing regularly was good practice for me. It made me less precious about my poems.   

Are there certain classes you particularly enjoy teaching?

Two of my favorite classes to teach are Poetry Writing and Etymology and Semantics. Poetry Writing has pushed me to try to communicate my attitude to writing, which is very process-oriented and open, to my students. I want them to lose control, to experiment, to collage. And it’s always deeply exciting to see where that takes them. I’ve seen some incredible poems come out of that class. “Etymology and Semantics” is a study of theories of language, the history of English, and sociolinguistics. It’s another way to destabilize students’ relationship to language as fixed, given. And it’s always fun to learn the new slang when we talk about how the internet has affected our language. 

Could you share a few examples of your letting-go-of-control experiments with our readers in case they would like to try? 

The poet CAConrad has wonderful ideas about this kind of experiment. Ecodeviance: (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness is a great place to start. 

Here’s one I do with my students, based on what I learned from doing a workshop with CAConrad: Go outside and find a tree. Put your hand on it and listen to what it has to say. Write down everything that comes to mind. A few days or weeks later, return to the writing. Alternate between typing up what you wrote and doing a blind free write (this requires that you turn the light on your laptop down so the screen is black). Print out the document. Have someone else read what you typed up and highlight phrases they like. Using their highlights as guidance, cut out chunks of text you want to use in a poem. Have someone else rearrange the pieces for you. See if you like it. Rearrange it as you see fit. Edit it until you love it. 

This is a poem I wrote using that process called “Disciple of Trees”: 

It hurts to bind the truth
my body knows, to claim outrages 
as my own. I’m worthless
and precious as earth.
I like when it rains, soaks me
good, changes my color, fills
the stream so it rushes
symphony. Stab of
sunlight. My eyes
full of it, my mouth full
of my voice. I don’t worry
how I break off
as long as I’m rooted
in the good dirt. Drop down,
find out who sings there.

What is your writing process? Do you have any favorite rituals, if you believe in them?

My workshop with CAConrad solidified the importance of ritual to my writing process, though I think I’ve always been drawn to ritual. 

My rituals are always changing to suit whatever emotional landscape I’m traversing. This summer, for instance, I’ve been staring into my own eyes in a mirror for five minutes before I start writing. It’s been an extremely powerful practice that is helping me come into contact with myself as a subject, and not as an object. Martin Buber has this idea of I-Thou versus I-It relationships. And I realized recently that I often have an I-It relationship with myself. Looking into my own eyes forces me to see myself as whole. 

Claudia Rankine taught me that writing happens in two stages, with two very different energies. The first stage is impulsive and energetic; it requires that you put away self-censorship or any form of evaluation. You just get it all down. The second stage is when you bring in the editor. It’s more careful, more deliberate. I think of these two stages as being totally distinct, and I try to keep them separated. I edit weeks or months or years after that first rush of language. When I am in the second stage, acting as my own editor, I do a lot of collaging—taking bits and pieces from here and there to form a whole. Once I have what seems to be a whole, I delete and condense. Sharper, tighter. And, of course, everything must be read aloud in the editing process. You can't know what a poem is or how it’s working until you read it out loud. 

In this sense, it seems there is a kind of cyclical aspect to the writing process, of letting go and asserting great editorial control. Do you find one stage more challenging than the other? Spend more time in one stage than the other? 

Yes, it’s absolutely cyclical. Asserting control is much more challenging because it invites in the internal critic, and the critic is loud and harsh. As I work to condense a poem, I have to be careful not to condense it out of existence. It requires returning and returning and trying to see clearly. And yet, it’s something I can just sit down and do. I can be in just about any state to do it. Whereas the letting go requires some nurturing, some mental and emotional space, and a ton of time. I definitely spend more time in the letting go process—but that process includes, for instance, taking a walk, reading poetry, journaling, staring into space. 

How do you know when a poem is done or at least ready to be sent out into the world? 

I don’t send my poems out into the world all that often, maybe because I try to cultivate a feeling that writing is not a performance for others. Once I feel like I’m performing for others, I get stuck in self-doubt and social niceties. But I think a poem is done when I’ve read it at least three times out loud and nothing snags on my ear. There’s this nagging feeling I get when I read a poem I’ve written and I know it’s not done or something is wrong with it. I don’t always know what it is, but I can always tell. 

What are you currently working on?

For the past few years I’ve mostly been focused on writing fiction. I just finished a manuscript for a novel about a polyamorous woman whose unexpected pregnancy puts her into contact with a demanding ancestral spirit. And now I’m working on a novel about three strangers who find out they have the same anonymous sperm donor and where their shared desire to know this sperm donor leads them. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring young writers? 

Nothing that hasn’t been said a million times before. Keep doing it, forever and ever amen. Forget about publication or validation or confirmation that you’re good enough. You’re good enough. Everyone is good enough to write.

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Sarah Schwartz’s poetry has been published in various nationally recognized journals. She earned her BA in English at Pomona College, MFA in Poetry at Brown, and MA in English at University of California, Irvine. She teaches English at The Park School of Baltimore.

THE CALLING by Sarah Schwartz

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