![]() PM: After having written several collections, is there a difference in how you commune with the power you’re describing here? What does it look like for you as a writer when you feel disconnected from such phenomena, if at all? We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life…” The singularity happened in poetry long ago! For me, Rimbaud’s Genie has always been the best metaphor for this poetic phenomenon: “He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. I think that there is a point where what is made has broken off from its maker and works on an independent level. SS: That somehow (and I’m not sure how) poetry is a system of thought, feeling, and language that, when combined and written at the highest levels, knows much more than the poet and has the ability to understand the future in ways we just don’t comprehend yet. PM: I ask this question of all the poets in this series: what is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry? As the spectacular and wise Zohar poet says again and again, “come and see.” ![]() Learning is communal and should be without power dynamics-it’s a radically egalitarian proposition based on questions, asking the right ones, of course, good ones, but collectively and with an open mind. That’s why ageism in poetry is silly-we can’t have the Songs of Innocence without its opposite just the way I’m as much my students’ student as I am their teacher. “One Art” is a great poem about experience and the basic idea is that you can only learn through it as opposed to reading about it or someone telling you about it. But my philosophy is that we learn from everyone. SS: Oh, they taught me prosody and all the da-dums I needed for a lifetime! And those sound patterns get embedded even if they appear and reappear in shards and fragments-like bits of sprung rhythm. PM: In what ways are those teachers’ work, aesthetics, poetics a part of your work now? Conversely, what aspects of their teaching did you find yourself resisting as a poet starting to make poems? There are also more mystical moments from early youth that were turning points like seeing William Blake levitating over a tree in a park. I even met my husband in one of those poetry workshops. They probably don’t know this, but their classes saved me from myself! For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged to a community, and I have lifelong friends and comrades (David Lau, the editor of Lana Turner, for example) from this era. I had three professors who changed my life: Cal Bedient, Stephen Yenser, and Harryette Mullen. I don’t know if the idea of “cleansing” that he uses is that helpful because nothing is clean, and clean things eventually get dirty anyway. When I got to UCLA, I was admitted to a succession of poetry workshops. My early life, unfortunately, was marked by a lot of chaos and abuse (and thankfully books!) I learned to focus my attention very keenly on art and writing because it was an escape and a way to feel free from my environs. I grew up in the 80s in small apartments in Los Angeles, and was raised by a single mother. ![]() SS: I was very “artsy,” and started writing poetry when I was in late elementary and early middle school. PM: Is there a moment from your childhood or youth that in some way suggests you would become a writer in adulthood? She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. ![]() She went to UCLA for her BA, University of Montana for her MFA, and Florida State for her PhD. She is the recipient of the Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on, the Academy of American Poets website. Her poems and criticism have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. Sandra Simonds is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry: Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |