In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk
Your poems, “Algae” (Algae untranslated) and “Babylon,” (Babylon untranslated) blend distinctly sharp images with emotion. How have you honed your writing and editing over the years into these poignant pieces?
Thank you, Jenn. I’ve been writing since I was a child, and I’ve come to a number of writing rules for myself empirically. Roughly they could be squeezed to two: 1) writing mainly when “it” comes itself, as an urge, not letting me do other things before I finish a text, not just when I have a spare moment and feel like I would gladly produce a poem now; 2) letting the poem that started going out define its own form and development, being merely its midwife.
How did you create and maintain the rhythm of Babylon? What inspired this poem?
Traveling almost every day in public transport in Munich (within the last 3 years) I enjoy observing faces from everywhere around the world, listening to all the imaginable languages. Surprisingly it’s Munich, not even Berlin, where statistically most of the foreigners live in Germany. Sometimes I close my eyes in an S-Bahn (city train) and immerse in the ornamental waves of different words around me; some of them I understand and it seems to be my secret because people in front of me have no idea that I do, some of them I really don’t understand, and they sound like mystical music to me. I’ve always been fascinated by letters, words, cultures, everything that is promising to bring me a new fairy tale, a new myth, a new colourful piece of mosaic in my world picture. So I was enjoying it, at the same time being very anxious inside, often at the edge of collapse, because of what is happening in my country, and therefore in my family and my life. And the mixture of these feelings is fully present in this poem.
Concerning the rhythm I would refer to my previous answer.
The idea of writing it in a mixture of two languages (Ukrainian and Russian) is rooted in my experiments of the University years, when I tried to make the most out of living in a bilingual environment and implementing Ukrainian into a creative field back then, when it was still unfortunately forsaken in a way.
Also it lay perfectly on the feeling of mine—turning into a Gorgon’s head, split into snakes of different languages I had to use here in Munich, switching them many times a day (English, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Russian), learning a new one (German). All that made my head almost blast at some points.
Algae encompasses this beautiful moment of being and grieving underwater. It’s a very physical and descriptive piece. Can you talk about where the idea came from?
There’s a small town at the sea shore in Bulgaria, where my family and I used to go almost every summer before the full-scale invasion (of Russia in Ukraine). There live parents of my two very close girlfriends, and it would be our gathering point, because one of the girls has been living long on the other continent, and the other one still lives in Russia, where they are originally from. I have never had doubts about my common grounds in political views with them, but it was still hard for me to go there the first summer of my refugee life (2022) when they heartily invited me to come with my children. First, because it was all too fresh, awkward and painful. I had to reassess all my feelings and thoughts upon it. Second, and probably even more painful was the idea of coming there for the first time without my husband, who wasn’t allowed (as all men under 60) to leave Ukraine.
In 2023 they invited me again (us – together with my children). And I agreed. I followed my heart which was saying to me that I love those two friends of mine. Besides that, my son was depressed, missing everyone and everything, and I felt it would do him good to see his close friend (the son of one of the girls).
When we first met with the girl that was still living in Russia, we both cried at the airport, at some points this meeting had seemed impossible to us. And at once, on the road from the airport, we had a long and hard talk—to clear up everything between us and also probably, once again—within us.
I know that some people, maybe even many people, might blame me for continuing this communication. But I felt I was doing the right thing. I felt we are friends and we are truly close people against all odds.
I’ve cut off communication with most of my blood relatives from Russia, because the dearest to my heart had expressed a very weird position at the beginning of the full invasion, when I myself was forced to flee with my children out of fear.
But with these friends of mine we’ve always found comprehension.
And this poem is mostly about this.
In general it was a very healing experience for me. I felt, if I could return to the place where I was happy, maybe my happy state could also return once.
And also there’s another aspect, a more physical one. That summer, entering the sea, I felt for the first time in my life, I’m neither repelled nor afraid of the seaweed as I previously was. Compared to the fears I went through since I had last seen it, some things have turned upside down for me. Now the algae, that I avoided even touching previously, were just another expression of life on the Earth, another living entity, tender and harmless, unlike some human species appeared to be.
While both pieces are distinctly different, there’s a theme of hair growing, hair being shed in both. Is this theme intentional?
Not intentional, rather subconscious. Thinking of it now, I can say, it expresses the overgoing changes through something happening to our hair. Stress causes hair to be shed. I was observing with every head wash how much of it stays in my hand, my daughter was losing it, everyone whom I talked to from the Ukrainians out and in Ukraine were losing it.
I first heard that people lose hair because of stress, when I was a teenager, and my godmother told me about her first strong but unrequited love and the handfuls of her own hair in the shower that struck her…
It was strange for me to observe how the whole country’s population is losing hair. Something so personal because of something so massive and impersonal. I was sometimes having thoughts that it had also to do with unrequited love, but the other way round. The unrequited sadistic love of a tyrant to the land he considers to be his, but that land doesn’t want him and she (the land) withstands.
At the same time hair was growing, to all of us, and it was a sign that life continued, notwithstanding anything, and also it brought other chores—it had to be cut somehow. Me and many of my refugee comrades tried to spare money, because a lot of us left homes with almost nothing and though we received help, no one knew what the next day was about to bring. Even the haircut seemed to be a luxury. We asked one another to give us a haircut.
At some point, I noticed, I started measuring time with haircuts, with hair getting in the eyes, and begging to be cut.
The waiting for an end to that period appeared to be longer than expected. I’m still in Munich. Temporarily. As nylon.
I stopped counting haircuts. I don’t know now how many times I had to cut it while here in Germany.
Both poems are translated into English from Ukrainian. What is the process of translating your own work like? What shifts in the narrative because of the change in language?
Translating is one of my favourite processes. Not necessarily of my own poetry. In general. I love the long, calm, thorough translation process. If not by writing, that is my second favourite way of earning money. I would love to be translating literature, especially poetry as much as possible. It’s again connected to my love of different languages and different cultures. The birth of a poem in every new language creates a new poem, even though I’m adept at the most precise word by word translation, with minimal translator’s artistic intrusions, only conveying the sense.
I usually always translate a text using a tool app, get myself a dummy, then start sawing and honing it out endlessly. And, oh, I enjoy that!
What themes or topics does your writing return to?
When I see something habitual for me with a new lense, or find a new way to return balance and harmony within me—I would write about it.
What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?
I’ll stick to poetry in the answer, otherwise it’ll be too long.
Ukrainian: Mykola Vingranovs’kyj, Vasyl Stus, Majk Johansen,
modern—Borys Khersonskiy, Vasyl Gerasymyuk, Ivan Malkovych, Kolya Kulinich, Roma Makljuk, Dmytro Maistrenko, Oleksandr Shumilin, Liudmila Khersonskaya, Lesyk Panasiuk, Daryna Gladun, Maksym Kryvtsov (killed in the war in 2024), Oleg Kyselytsia.
Italian: Bruno Tognolini
English language poetry: John Donne, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Ann Sexton
modern—Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ron Padgett, Moheb Saliman, Ed Skoog, Stuart Ross, Logan February
German modern: Karin Fellner, Nora Zapf, Sara Gomez-Schüller, Tristan Marquardt, Theresa Seraphine
Austrian: Ilse Kilic
What are you working on now?
I’m translating now my Munich-period poetry into English (apart from those that were originally written in English), and a very special wondrous Person, Poet and Translator—Karin Fellner—is translating it into German with the idea to publish my first book of poetry in German translations.
Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk was born in 1982 in Kyiv (Ukraine) and started to write poetry at age four when, with help from her granny Galya, she produced her first work in red pen and folded sheets of paper. Lavrenchuk has published three books: #1, Toothless Goluba Is Getting Her Teeth, and Tourmaline. For the last decade, Lavrenchuk has been working as a screenwriter. Since fleeing to Munich with her children in 2022, she took part in the exhibition “Border//lines” and in poetry readings “meine drei lyrischen ichs” and “Kooperationen 2024.”
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Janée J. Baugher
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Janée J. Baugher
Your poem, “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Goodbye My Love 2008,” blends loss and love in a unique format. What inspired this poem from the painting of Wyeth’s? What made you choose the format of footnotes for this poem?
Wyeth was born in 1917. By the time he painted Goodbye, My Love in 2008, he had a sense that his life was in a dénouement. Ultimately, that work did become his last public painting, and it was a fitting companion image to the last poem in my book influenced by his life and art, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles.
An important craft element in poetry is form-follows-function. My years-long work with Wyeth’s images led me to trying a myriad of options for how I should best present the content. Once I had decided on the poems’ point-of-view—persona poems from the perspective of Andrew Wyeth, artist-at-work—I then conceived of the poems’ cry-of-the-occasion. Ultimately, I imagined that my footnotes could be physically attached to the bottoms of each paintings’ frame, thereby acting like footnotes in a book, in that the text offers commentary or a new layer of information.
The phrase, “The sky’s orb? Whether moon or sun is my prerogative” is such a wonderful line. It gives so much license to the creator (or to any author or artist). It appears in the middle of the poem and ties everything together. Can you talk about the importance and creation of this line in relation to the poem?
I was actually thinking more about the viewers’ license which ultimately might differ from the artist’s idea. Whether we are discussing the visual arts or creative writing, there must be space for the viewers’/readers’ imagination. Art of any type is a symbiotic experience, wherein the audience’s active participation is part of the deal.
Some of the lines of footnotes are factual, as seen by your own footnotes. What was your process in crafting this piece, in weaving your interpretation with the facts of Wyeth’s life?
I’m always open to seeing how both primary and secondary research informs my creative writing. One of the reference books that I use was by Richard Meryman, in which Andrew Wyeth is quoted as saying, “I have this hate within me,” and also “sometimes I think I’m not very artistic.” These testimonials of self-doubt from a well-established painter were surprising but also authentic and relatable. Every little tidbit I learned about Wyeth offered me kaleidoscopic portals into his paintings from which I wrote over a hundred poems.
I love how much of your work is based in ekphrasis. What drew you to this? Where did your love of getting creative insight from imagery begin?
While in graduate school, I was interested in making poems in which the self could be subverted, as in the T. S. Eliot quote, “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s this philosophy that has informed and guided my ekphrastic poetry, though in my craft book The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), I encourage the readers to write from all angles of their personhood. Because I suffer from artist-envy, working creatively in the service of aesthetics I could call my raison d’être, but let’s not get too precious. Politically, things are very tense in this country. Because I know my propensity for depression, I must limit what ugliness comes into my life. I could write ekphrastically because the world is burning, but I choose to write because the world is beautiful.
You have a book The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, coming in 2026, seen here: TUPELO PRESS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF THE 2023 DORSET PRIZE . What draws you to this painter?
The Wyeth paintings that I’m enamored with are not only bereft of human figures, but are ones in which the quotidian is made beautiful—a white sheet on a laundry line drying in the wind or the shadows of sunflowers against a house, for instance. For me, his work (which is subtle, of nature, and abstract) lends itself to the act of deep-looking, which is another way in which I can detach from my ego.
What literature or other paintings influence your work? What authors do you return to?
Over the decades, I keep returning to the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. And because I have an interest in the artist’s creative process, I love rereading Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right side of the Brain. Moreover, poems that concern nature are also my favorite, and to that end, the newly released volume of the ecopoetry anthology, Attached to the Living World is my current obsession.
What are you working on now?
Since late 2021, I’ve been writing a book that treats mental health, tentatively titled “Suicide in the Mirror: A Lyric Memoir.” I am currently finalizing edits for that project, as well as working on the launch of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press). On a non-literary note, I recently reignited my interest in the flute and will be auditioning for a community orchestra within the year. Regarding the next poetry book, I’m beginning to draft ideas for a collection influenced by my first love, human anatomy and physiology.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She’s an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress. The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-2025 CityArtist grant. For her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Baugher won Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2026).
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sadie Dupuis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sadie Dupuis
What is the story behind your poem, “Most of Last Year and the Years Before It,” that appears in Volume 27?
I wrote this poem in March 2024, in response to Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker’s ongoing bungling of harm reduction in our city. Parker had announced budgetary cuts to needed services such as syringe exchange, and was refusing to allocate any portion of a very large opioid settlement the city received toward these lifesaving programs; she was interfering with our city’s long standing harm reduction collectives and their lifesaving work. It felt infuriating to watch this newly elected official—whose opponent I’d believed in and rallied behind—fumble these crucial services, despite decades of evidence backing these programs. Her choices were sure to kill people, and they have. In the past month alone, two Philadelphians have died in police custody as a direct result of the mayor’s carceral policies.
I wanted to write about how protest can be rooted in memory and sentimentality, how negative emotional expressions can come from love and tenderness, how all of these feelings can comprise politics.
There’s this repeating image of cobwebs, which I imagine as sticky memories. Where did this image come from?
Cobwebs, in this poem, serve as a few kinds of props: gross objects to be thrown, suspicious substances to try, intricate histories to share. Cobwebs are a way of making one’s presence known, of recognizing that you are tied to others’ lives and experiences. What differentiates cobwebs from spider webs is that cobwebs are abandoned. A cobweb implies the absence of a spider—a small, relatively harmless animal that inspires disproportionate fear in people. All a spider’s trying to do is build its home, hunt its food. Arachnophobia (like most phobias) is not rational, and sort of parallels the baffling way that city governments treat marginalized residents as frightening or disposable. I use cobwebs in this poem as a way of aligning the speaker with those who are wrongly feared, who are harmed by draconian policies that eradicate needed resources like SSPs.
There’s a musicality in this piece with the sensory details of noise. How does music influence your poetry?
I work in several creative mediums and do find they influence one another. I pick up on and pursue melodic or rhythmic threads in poems, and in line editing I like to consider how my lyrics can work as poems or as prose. I also make visual art which brings other perspectives to my poetry or songwriting. What kinds of colors do different timbres sound like? What emotions do the spatiality or architecture of a poem enhance? It’s all a balance of sensations. But in terms of communicating narrative in a poem, since I spend so much time working in and with audio, that is probably a sense I opt toward quicker. My mind’s ear is more active than my mind’s eye.
The line, “When time makes anger loud” stood out to me. You have many of these phrases that mix the senses. How did you develop this sort of phrasing?
Time and volume are entwined in emotion. Years can numb a wound, or make its outrage more acute. In this poem, those concepts are tied to “Sunday,” the end of a week, which should or could be a day of rest. Sunday here is a place in which everyone is “smoking the bad kind of gossip”; the stanza is about community conversations, where perhaps every participant feels inflamed. It’s about rightful collective outrage over issues that matter. “Time” and “volume” are intervals used to measure music, but they also can speak to commitment to a cause.
What themes does your work circle back to, if any?
Grief and harm reduction were major themes of my last book, Cry Perfume, which came out in 2022 but was written between 2016 – 2020. Several years later, I’m obviously still writing about that second theme, because it is so important, and because policy surrounding overdose prevention seems to be regressing, locally and nationally! Other themes I revisit include intersections of art, labor, technology, the body, and illness.
What authors or texts inspire you? What are some of your favorite books?
I’m really terrible at just picking a couple things. These are some faves: Sylvia Plath, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Michael DeForge, Audre Lorde, Eve Babitz, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Shaughnessy, Michelle Tea, Jaime Hernandez, Don Mee Choi, Simone White, Ariana Reines, Thomas Pynchon, Jenny Zhang, Chris Kraus, Fernando A. Flores, Danez Smith, Sawako Nakayasu, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Ruefle, Federico García Lorca, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Kate Zambreno, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, CAConrad, Hoa Nguyen, Jorie Graham, June Jordan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Kaveh Akbar, Melissa Broder, Tara Booth, Hanif Abdurraqib, David Berman, Ling Ma, Roberto Bolaño, Hiroko Oyamada, Samantha Hunt, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux, Sarah Gerard, Maggie Nelson… sorry!
If I were to pick some more recent loves, Johanna Hedva, Fady Joudah, and M.S. Coe are some of the best new-to-me writers I’ve read this year.
What are you currently writing or working on?
I shattered my elbow last June, which has been a very long and ongoing recovery, and which delayed a lot of writing and recording plans. That has eaten up a lot of my last year. But I’m currently focusing on tracking some long-postponed new songs for my solo project, which is called Sad13. I’m doing some light touring and sporadic festivals with Speedy Ortiz, which is always a fun excuse to see a lot of friends. I’m writing and editing some new poems, though a bit more slowly than in the past as computer use is still a bit restricted due to nerve injury from my accident. It’s been a lot more drafting by hand than in the past, which I find makes my poetic voice pretty different. And I’m getting or have gotten to be a conversation partner for some of my favorite writers’ Philly book tour appearances this year—Liz Pelly, Jeremy Gordon, Niko Stratis and a few more coming up! Interviewing other writers and musicians is one of the most inspiring things on my own work, so I always really look forward to these conversations.
Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter, and singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer and multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Dupuis heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and is a regular contributor to Spin, Tape Op, Talkhouse, and more. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 (Gramma); Cry Perfume, a second poetry collection, was released in 2022 (Black Ocean). She is an organizer with United Musicians and Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—JC Talamantez
Welcome back to Water~Stone! You had a piece last year, “Learning to Live With a Clockwork Orange,” in Volume 26. This year, your poem, “Half-Life of Krill,” puts oceanic and celestial imagery on the page. What gave you inspiration for this piece? Where did the title come from?
Thank you! I’m so glad to return to your excellent magazine. This piece is quite different from the previous, but now that I’m looking at them together, they are both rather anxious poems! Half-Life of Krill started life during a trip I had taken, back to a beautiful place where I was once young. My connection to the scenery seemed at once seemed far away, but also parallel, to the way my younger self has experienced it. That distance between moments in time looms quite large in my own life, but from the broader perspective, the gaps between the person I was and the person I am is actually rather brief. The title likely plays on this idea too, with the notion of a half-life as a measure of time and decay. That’s where it started anyway—this poem did end up taking a few turns.
There’s a lot of natural imagery in here, and you’ve said that you like to add nature into your work. In this poem, there are many references between sea and sky. What drew you to using these aspects of the natural world?
Indeed, I like to see nature shining through the organized, civilized world, such as when you watch a hawk hunting over a city street—it provides some elemental sense of fundamental creation in structuring our carefully constructed modern life. Some of this poem is rather literal—images lifted from places I’ve seen or moments that stood out for a particular significance. I think poetry sometimes is about picking out elements, what you see as important or meaningful, and fitting them together into a coherent mood.
Can you speak to the sense of fragility throughout the piece—not only mentioned at the very beginning, but later on through lines like, “bones swimming / taxidermic,” which gives an image of something delicately put together?
It is interesting that you point to that element as a bit of motif. It’s there, I think, not just because life itself is fragile—our bodies, the short lives of the animals that inhabit the world—but also because of the random nature of experience and our tenuous ability to communicate it. All of these things can give the appearance of solidity, but solidity is often an illusion. Still, fragile things can also be surprisingly strong, like carefully made lace, as well as adaptive and competent at surviving.
I love how you end on the phrase “the dowser’s bobbin,” as if there’s a question, some continued searching. What led you to that ending—or did you have it in mind when starting?
As some inside baseball, the end of this poem came about for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted something brief and punchy, thinking it would have more impact given the overall somber tone. And, I wanted to include some phrasing around taxidermy, which has a kind of morbidity about it while also being a craft of genuine skill. There’s something about how taxidermy captures an animal in motion but is produced by their death, that seemed appropriate (and just a little gruesome).
“Jawset” is taxidermy terminology, but I couldn’t find another requisite part with the right sound drawn from that jargon. So, the last two words of the poem are indeed a phrase I had set aside, and thought they had the right mood. Dowser’s relates to dowsing, a kind of divination or magic, while bobbin is drawn from, in my mind, sewing. Sewing and leatherwork are adjacent to taxidermy as crafts, and I had always found comfort in the sound of my mother’s sewing machine when I was young. Since I find this poem a little dark, or at least resigned, I was glad to end it with an image that seemed warmer and offered the possibility of carrying on. After all, what we can do is keep going and keep making.
Do you ever find your poems as a continuation of others, interlinking in their ideas or characters?
There was a time when each poem was pretty much its own separate world, but these days I am happy to embrace repeated ideas, images, even characters. Sometimes poems seem to cluster around an idea because there’s too much to say without crowding, and I think I’ve gotten better about letting the language breathe a little. So, one piece may start to bud off into other related pieces, and I’ve learned to let them develop and then separate them out when appropriate. I also sometimes get taken by a particular word, so individual words or even very brief phrases have a way of creeping back in from prior work if they really speak correctly.
What have been some of your favorite pieces or authors that you’ve read in the last few years?
I read literary mags as I can, especially while writing and submitting myself, and there is terrific stuff published all the time. I always notice the beautiful work of Sarah Ghazal Ali and have recently been enjoying some of Tony Hoagland’s later pieces. I’ve been reading a lot of fairy tales recently, sort of as research for a few poems but also just to appreciate their fascinating texture.
What are you currently working on?
A fair number of what I hope are strange and moving poems! I also write some academic philosophy in the area of political theory, and am doing publishing submissions for both areas. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me!
JC Talamantez is a Tejano poet whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, Water~Stone Review, Nimrod, Guernica, Colorado Review, and others. She was a longtime student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sam Stokley
What was the spark behind your poem, “Ark/ee/awl/uh/gee,” that appears in Volume 27?
The spark was an ancient, buried loneliness that hit me while I was at home on an average day. Other disabled people might experience a similar feeling at times—knowing that every day will be a fight for life, and there’s often not a pearl at the end of all the physical and emotional pressure. I think I also rewatched Jurassic Park.
You use a lot of geographical references (“flashed forged rivers/sunken atolls”) within this piece. How did you come up with the idea of equating the body to geographical space?
This was easily the hardest question here because I think I lack the words to pinpoint a time when the body and the land were separated in my mind. My skin shifts like tectonic plates, blisters come and go like severe storms; when I bleed, I am the Mississippi River, remembering.
The ending, “to you know/what it’s like to feel/the pearl under your skin/not even bone can convince/doesn’t exist” is haunting. Can you talk a little about why you chose to end on this note, and what drew you to this particular ending?
There are tiny white balls called milia that grow under the skin inside damaged hair follicles, as I’ve come to understand it. You mostly see them in babies around their eyes and mouths, but they are especially prevalent in people with Epidermolysis Bullosa, and when they’ve been growing out of sight for long enough, they become, almost literally, perfectly hard little pearls that, using a small sewing needle, I can pop out of my skin like spring loaded relief. Often I don’t see the milia, but, like the princess’ pea, I feel something inside me, under the skin, stretching my flesh from the inside, and so I dig, and I dig, probing for the fossil that stops my tool in its tracks, knowing I’ve found the motherlode. Occasionally I’m wrong, and I can’t find the pearl, can’t put to rest the feeling of stranger living under my skin, and I know, like a when I’m writing a poem, that I have to stop before I’m left with a sink full of blood and not much else.
What is the significance of the title broken into syllables? Did the shape of the poem come right away or later in the process of creation?
Two questions in a trench coat! Re: the title—it seemed to echo many of the ideas and images that birthed the poem: the aged layers of dirt that represent times & eras, the idea that geography & time are pre & post language, the different sections of the finger where milia most often live. Once I broke it up phonetically, I also appreciated the words and ideas I was given: the “uh”s and “gee”s of people trying to navigate conversation with disabled people, the sharpness of an awl piercing leathery skin, an ark where loneliness was spiritually mandated out of existence by systemic soulmates.
Re: the shape—I tell myself, and my students, to stop writing boring poems. To me that doesn’t mean superfluous decoration, but rather a job assigned to me by the poem that I use every technique at my disposal to squeeze all the juice out of the poem. In this case, the shape serves many purposes, all designed to create more echoes bouncing around for the reader to catch. It is hopeful, pointing a way forward out of the loneliness and pain; it is sharp, like the archeological tools I use for my flesh digs; it lies in sections and layers like the millennia of souls I follow as a human and artist.
Do you find yourself circling back to particular themes in your writing?
Skin, politics, family is my go-to answer for what I “write about.” Skin because it has shaped who I am, politics because the radical idea that everyone be allowed a dignified life, that children deserve food, hospitals, all their limbs, is political, and family because it’s an idea I’m still working to understand.
What authors or titles have influenced you as a writer?
Inger Christensen, Monica Berlin, Olio, Spoon River Anthology, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sin Yong-Mok, Emily Oliver, Deborah Keenan, my Uncle Shawn’s life.
What are you working on now?
I am acutely interested in and investigating ways to take poetry from the page and into the world as an active disruptor and connector. Stay tuned.
Also, a book. And my IG: (@)bovinii
(This is unrelated to any question, but if Hamline follows through with the shuttering of their Writing Programs and of this very Water~Stone Review, they will feel the reverberations for generations and likely never will recover spiritually, artistically, academically. Sunset deez.)
Sam Stokley is a disabled artist and educator from Peoria, Illinois, and living in Minneapolis. He teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at SPCPA, a high school for artists in downtown St. Paul. His writing lives, among elsewhere, in Narrative Magazine, Brevity, Barrelhouse, Cagibi, Puerto del Sol, Fairy Tale Review, and The Arkansas International. Dystrophies, a chapbook manuscript, has been a finalist with BOAAT Press and Driftwood Press, twice a semifinalist in the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and longlisted by Frontier Poetry. Stokley has recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. Follow him on Instagram @bovinii.