Sarah Sloat
Interviewed by RSP Editor Jalina Mhyana
Sarah Sloat was born in New Jersey, where she attended college and graduate school. There were many books in her house growing up, but just a few poetry books that she remembers: the collected
ee cummings, an illustrated Leaves of Grass and a book of selected Keats poems. Traveling light to China in 1988, she copied many of her favorite poems into a notebook to take along. The inscription on the cover is from Dylan Thomas: “I myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only poems I like. This means, of course, I have to read a lot of poems I don’t like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is Here they are…” Sarah has worked as a NOW canvasser, a language book editor, a dog-walker, an English teacher and a reader for the blind. For about a decade now she’s worked for a news agency, mostly in Frankfurt, Germany. Sarah and her husband Carlo have a daughter and son. Her poems have appeared in Diner, West Branch, Stirring and Pebble Lake Review, among other publications.
Mhyana: Your poems are all organized on your computer, and you keep your rough drafts on the page, so you can reference back to them. You also have folders for rough drafts and finished and published poems. Can you go into detail about your methods?
Sloat: I’ve deceived you. I do keep my poems on computer. But the first drafts are always written by hand. Once a poem is far enough along, I type it into a file. Usually I then print the poem out and continue to work on paper. I do often save first versions and reworkings in a folder. God knows why. I guess because in some cases I’ve worked a poem to death and need to go back to the original to remember what I was aiming for, or what the inspiration was. And with poems that aren’t working out, I might want to salvage something from them, or rethink them later.
Mhyana: You keep successive versions of the same poem on one Word document so that you can easily scroll down the page to find earlier incarnations of a finished piece. Would you please cut and paste the life cycle of one of your poems here, from first draft through final draft? Choose one that started as a really ugly little duckling.
Sloat: Sure. This poem, “Toothache,” surely went through at least ten reworkings, but I’ve taken four from along the way. You can see the poem began with the ending, which changed very little along the way. Hold your nose!
Version I (Untitled)
Intimate winter
in the auditorium
Snowbitten, bleachers sting
the flesh, staggered
in descenging order
across the slaughter
littering the ward.
Lead white weight of night
the ice, the knife,
the wish to wake
suspended by the keenest need
to lie down, lie down
on these tattered sheets.
Embedded, the vise
pinches my purse of blood
until I tilt full sick
and dwarf the sun.
Version II Aspirin
Intimate winter in my boudoir.
Snowbitten, the pillows singe with chill
staggered in ascending order
across the mattress.
Along the corridors, the doors
groan on their hinges.
Lead white weight of night
desire of ice, desire for knives –
the wish to wake
leashed by the keenest need
to swaddle in tattered sheets.
Time will have her spite, reap
her rude corrosion.
At dawn, a raw wind spits
through the window.
The madness travels towards me.
I would leave these flush red chambers
but the vise bears down on my purse of blood
unitl I tilt full sick
and dwarf the sun.
Version III Toothache
Frost like gauze clings to the panes
making intimate winter of the house.
Snowbitten, pillows singe with chill,
staggered in ascending order
across the headboard.
I doze and hark
along the corridors, where
doors groan on their hinges.
There’s a lead white weight to night—
desire for ice, desire for knives;
the wish to wake leashed
by the keenest need to lie still
swaddled damp in sheets.
At dawn, wind spits across
The windowsill, eroded by rain
and age. At last
time has her spite;
past sweetnesses render
their rude corrosion.
I would rise and leave these chambers
but a vise bites down
on my poor purse of blood
and I tilt full sick
and dwarf the sun.
Version IV Toothache
Frost like gauze
clings to the panes,
making of the house
an intimate winter.
Snowbitten, pillows singe
with chill, staggered
in ascending order
across the headboard.
There’s a lead white weight to night –
desire for ice,
desire for knives,
the wish to wake, leashed
by the keenest need to lie still,
swaddled damp in sheets.
Time has her spite;
past sweetnesses render
their rude corrosion.
At dawn wind splinters
the windowsill
and I would rise to leave
these chambers
but two lips vise down
on my poor purse of blood
until I tilt full sick
and dwarf the sun.
(published in Tilt.)
Mhyana: How do you organize your submissions, and how many submissions do you make per week or month? What makes you decide to join a contest, and how regularly do you do so? Would you cut and paste your current submissions into this document so we can see your method, and the places you’ve submitted to?
Sloat: On average I make three submissions a month. I send one poem to a maximum four places at a time. I used to keep that at two or three, but find it takes ages for some journals to reply and so I decided to gamble more liberally.
Below are my outstanding subs since the beginning of the year. The underlined poems have been accepted elsewhere. It looks like I’ve only subbed to print journals but the truth is the online journals are much quicker at answering, so they get removed from this running list more quickly. This year, online, I’ve submitted and gotten yeses to the online journals 3rd Muse and DMQ Review. DMQ took longer to answer but it was still only six weeks. In March, Shampoo also declined some poems I had sent in February.
Jan 12: Yemassee: Summer’s End, I saw a city, Ghazal at Ebbtide, Luna di Miele, Luisa
Jan 12: New Delta: Summer’s End, Alice, I saw a city, Ghazal at Ebbtide, Persian
Jan 16: SE Review: Flight, Summer’s End, Germany, Station Evangel, Postcards
Feb 1: Faultline: Summer’s End, Afraid of Myself, I saw a city, Flight, Benevolent State
Mar 18: Pebble Lake: Persian, Stovetop, Union County, Ghazal at Ebbtide, Humidity
Mar 23: New Hampshire Review: Snow is an Intelligence Officer, Arthur, Tuesday, What I Read in the Papers, Stovetop
Mar 27: Pearl: Ambien, Stovetop, Folk Art, Flight, Porch Rocker
Mhyana: There are so many different venues to submit our work to, some in print, some online, each with its own deadlines and simultaneous submissions policy – not to mention contests. How do you decide which poems will be submitted online, which will be submitted to one print journal only, which one will be simultaneously submitted to several journals, and which ones will be submitted to contests?
Sloat: First I read the publication and see if I want to be in it, and establish whether or not I might “fit.” With online journals you can decide in less than an hour, and many print journals have sample poems on their websites to give you an idea of what they publish. That’s crucial to me since I can’t just walk into a book shop in downtown Frankfurt and pick up Shenandoah or Spinning Jenny, for example. When I visit the states, I usually come back with seven or eight different literary/poetry magazines, and always buy some I haven’t read before. If I don’t know a journal and can’t read sample poems on the website, I check out the poets they’ve published and may decide that way.
As far as differentiating between which poems I’ll submit to online journals versus which I’ll submit to print, my decision would be based mostly on what the journal is publishing rather than differentiating between “online poem” and “print poem.” I’ve had poems rejected by online journals that later get picked up by print journals. A ghazal I published in West Branch had previously been rejected by three online publications.
If publications have a short response time I may submit exclusively but mostly I stick to journals that take simultaneous submissions. It’s inconvenient to wait six months for a rejection. I haven’t submitted to a contest in forever – I’m not organized enough.
Mhyana: Do you keep to a strict schedule for writing? How long do you have to hold on to an idea mentally before you can type it into your computer? Do you have a notebook in your purse, a kind of purgatory for images or ideas before they can become poems on your computer?
Sloat: Since I have a full-time job, two children, a husband and a dog, I do try to keep a regular writing schedule, though it doesn’t always work out. I wake up early, get ready for work, walk the dog, then have about 40 minutes to read and write. Evenings I also have almost an hour. I always have my notebook in my purse for lines, or words, or images. I write ideas and words down at work and on the subway. The other day a woman got into the subway in leopard skin pants, and I wrote “Welcome to the infinite swank of the morning.” I didn’t get farther than that, though.
Mhyana: Some people swear that poetry can’t be written on a computer, that the electronic aspect is soul-less. Why is it that you prefer composing on a keyboard, and do you keep any emotionally / spiritually significant items nearby to spark your inspiration and keep you true to your muse?
Sloat: That’s bullshit. It is more convenient to write by hand since you won’t be lugging a computer around in your jacket pocket, but writing on the computer never struck me as soulless. I get to the computer with a poem once the poem is up and running. I don’t have time to write out each successive version by hand. And I love cut&paste, and fonts. Nevertheless I do find the paper and pen a better experience, but that includes scratching up and editing a print-out of a poem.
Mhyana: Will you write a short prose piece wherein you are the main character, at your desk, writing? For instance, what time of day it is, what’s going through your mind, what you can see from where you’re sitting, what you can hear, what order you do things in?
Sloat: Our aupair is chatting in Ukrainian in the kitchen with a friend, the language snaps like twigs underfoot in a forest. I think about a forest floor, the litter of twigs and green needles, the quiet. I would like to write a poem about that texture, or about an accent like breaking sticks. I remember a question a perfumier once asked: “When you turn out the lights, what is left of the most beautiful woman? Her voice and her perfume.” I think that could turn into a good poem. My aupair’s voice starts going up and down like a bird, and when she laughs, the bird flutters.
They exile the dog from the kitchen, and she curls up near my table. Through the back windows I can see the wind rattling the hedges, and the sun is shining. The kids are already at the park – at 8 am on Saturday! I don’t have all day, so I need to concentrate on writing something. I begin browsing a book of Lorca poems. I love the ones where he starts with a declaration or image, travels in a stanza or two through the images it prompts, then repeats the opening. Here’s one:
Snail
They have brought me a snail.
Inside it sings
a map-green ocean.
My heart
swells with water,
with small fish
of brown and silver.
They have brought me a snail.
Lorca is a real hypnotist. I use his idea, starting a poem with “dusk hung like muslin.” I can focus now. I’m image-oriented. I really enjoy how this taps the imagination. It’s wonderful to feel you have captured something in the right words -- even if none of this ever becomes a finished poem and remains an exercise.
The kids come home and put a necklace around the dog. Now she’s “medicine dog.” They insist I come over and pet her. “Just one time! Just one time!” And that’s the end of that.
Mhyana: I want to know how poems come to you. Would you describe, in depth, how the last five poems you wrote came to you? For instance, what triggered the first thought of a poem – what object, what song, memory, word, or desire sparked the poem into being, and what factors helped it to take shape along the way?
Sloat: Poems arrive in many ways – in words and phrases and sounds, in images and experience. “Toothache” began with imagining the mouth, gums and lips as a purse of blood. I then contrasted that red gooey image with the sharp whiteness of teeth and frost – the biting pain of toothache.
The last poem I finished, “Ambien,” was triggered by an article I read about people who take the sleeping pill Ambien, some of whom suffer the side effect of “sleep eating.” I found it fascinating how desires get confused. Drugged, insomniacs mistake the desire for sleep with hunger and stuff themselves silly. One woman went into her basement pantry and crammed a whole package of hamburger buns down the hatch. Don’t we do this all the time? Plug the wrong hole? The desire we can’t satisfy gets falsely fulfilled some other way, through food, through sex, through spending money.
Another recent poem, “Lice,” came just from that – having lice. One of my kids got them at school, and both kids and I ended up with them. I freaked out about the whole thing –bugs, combs, hair, washing- and we all went through four harsh chemical shampoos before they were ALL DEAD. One evening I sat down to write and couldn’t get away from the thought of them. In my notebook, I wrote “It’s not like a horrible car accident. Everyone lived.” And then the poem started. I wrote it to help me laugh myself sane.
“Summer’s End,” which I finished a couple months ago, was a sound poem. The words “noon wounds me” kept going through my head. I loved the /u/ of it, and used the phrase as the beginning of a poem. It took, however, nearly ten months between that phrase coming to me and the finished poem.
Another poem, “The Snow is an Intelligence Officer,” began when I was walking to the subway one morning in the snow. I leave when it’s still dark. Everything is quiet. No one else is on the streets. The snow was just fat and gorgeous and so cleansing! You know how in the ee cummings poem Maggie finds a shell that sings “so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles”? That was this snow. Near the end of my poem, it says: “The snow has kidnapped my opinions,/absconded with the list of wars.”
Mhyana: You’ve mentioned that you wish you could earn an MFA in creative writing. What do you feel this could do for you that you aren’t able to do now on your own?
Sloat: I do envy those who have the time and resources to pursue MFAs. I suppose I envy the time to steep yourself in writing and reading and thinking about writing, sound and image. Frankly I’m up in the air about this. Can’t I, or whoever, be a good poet without an MFA? I goddamn hope so. No one is going to teach you how to have an imagination. But I’m sure they can help you cultivate it.
Mhyana: You’re a member of an online writers’ community. Would you tell me all about it, and would you touch upon the importance of this sort of kinship for an American writer such as yourself who has lived overseas for over a decade? Do you have any sort of community here in Frankfurt? Do you seek it?
Sloat: Being part of an online community was especially important to me when I started writing poetry about three years ago. At first I was part of an insulated community that had two or three poets who helped mentor me and whose opinions I respected. But it’s not as if I jumped in totally cold. I’ve read poetry since I was a child – I just kept putting it aside. Now I participate at Desert Moon Review, an online workshop, but also trust my own instincts a lot more than I used to. There are some very good poets at DMR, and the atmosphere is positive and supportive. Aside from workshopping there’s also poetry chat. I like participating because I don’t have a community of writers in Frankfurt. I do have a couple friends who write, but not poetry. My husband writes poetry, too, but he’s Italian, and doesn’t really understand my poems without some explanation, which, you know, takes the fun out of it.
Mhyana: Speaking of being an expatriate, would you bring us on a trip around the world through your poems? For instance, tell us about your experience living in China, Italy, and Germany, and paste poems that were inspired by those experiences into your answer.
Sloat: I was an early sinophile. As a child, I read Pearl S. Buck books, admired Chinese calligraphy, became a devotee of the TV show Kung Fu with the beautiful, sensitive David Carradine, and finally studied Chinese language and history and Eastern religions in college and graduate school. I had been teaching for a year in China when the Tiannanmen Massacre took place. I declined a teaching position at Beijing University the next year. Real-life China is of course much different than Taoism and the dynasties. Still I had a wonderful, eye-opening experience there. I’m sorry it ended as it did.
I’ve traveled to different regions of Italy with my husband, who’s from Sardinia, but only lived in Milan. In general, I should mention I was never one of those who consider Europe the pinnacle of culture. As I said, I was very interested in Asia. So, though there are many beautiful places, I didn’t go to Italy with romantic visions of drinking espresso all day and watching boats bob on Lake Como. I had a number of cultural adaption problems, most of all that I was not willing. Especially because I had a small daughter, I was disturbed by the image of women in the media. It also irked me how people took exquisite care of themselves and their homes but as soon as they were in a public park they littered without a second thought. And I disliked the Italian tendency to do everything in groups. If you were going to a restaurant, you had to call up seven friends and all go together. I’m not like that. I suck at pretending to have fun. Anyway, after the infamous Milanese smog gave my son bronchitis for the 17th time, we decided to leave. On the upside, my Italian improved, and the Italian shopwindows can’t be beat.
Germany is more difficult to describe. They say after you’ve been somewhere for a week you can offer up a keen cultural analysis, but after a year you don’t know anything anymore. I’ve been here so long, it’s of course a normal life for me, not exotic, not full of daily discoveries. I find instead now that when I go back to the US I’m overwhelmed by everything I love and hate about it. My awareness of what makes it America is much sharper. The bus driver who calls me sweetheart. The strip malls, sprawling wider than ever before!
Here are a couple poems – one about China, the other set in Germany. I also have a poem called “Year in Milan” up in the current DMQ.
______________________________________
At the Market in Dalian
Chignons shine
like black moons among the clutter.
Braids swing through the tent flap,
slant into coriander bundles.
The stench of a latrine mingles
with the muskfunk of incense.
Everything is for sale: seaweed,
firecrackers, an ambush of fruit.
This morning, Cao, with his sad smile
taught me to pronounce abundance.
It sounds like moon cakes,
or kettle, tin cup --
for some a fortune,
for some a souvenir.
It’s all negotiable. For a price,
even hopelessness has its appeal:
a cricket in a bamboo cage
singing to a bolt of fabric.
__________________________________________
Leaving Berlin
briefcases, misgivings, cloaks shook and hung –
the miniscule sting of drizzle
razors the train windows
past nodding cranes
in Berlin they’re always building something
headlong past yards of idle locomotives
past kiosks and the gothic script of shop signs
dirt roads pocked with puddles
headlong past a blur of orchards
wind farms, churning like sprung clocks
the horizon of Berlin diminishes
behind us
Berlin Berlin
I have left my stillborn thoughts
in the desk drawers of your offices –
I have left a string of days
in the crisp sheets of a small hotel
whose name
already slips my mind
(Both published in Inkpot.)
Mhyana: Last time we spoke, you were putting together a chapbook of poems. Where are you at now, in terms of consolidating your body of work? How many pages of material do you have that you feel good about? Do you ever feel that a poem is “done”?
Sloat: I have put this project aside for now. When I look into chapbook competitions, I have the feeling it’s better to be thematic, and I don’t have 20 poems on the same or related themes. I’ve had about 70 poems published, and there are 40 or so that I’m satisfied with. So the poems are there, it’s a question of my deciding to go through with it, and how.
I do sometimes feel that a poem is done, but I’m not always right. I need time to be sure.
Just letting the poem sit. How many times have you gone to bed at night feeling great to have “finished” a poem, only to wake up the next morning to decide the poem is ridiculous? I have even crossed my fingers a couple times hoping a publication would reject a poem I’d sent them because I’d had second thoughts about it. I can be a bad judge of doneness.
Mhyana: Who are your poetic heroines, and why? Explain this not only in terms of their language, but also in terms of their lives.
Sloat: My favorite female poets are Anne Sexton, Lucie Brock-Broido, Olena K. Davis, Ingeborg Bachman, Jane Kenyon and Laura Kasischke. In Sexton, I love her free-wheelingness and surprising confidences. Brock-Broido is the maestra of exactitude. I love how a lot of what Davis writes is couched in idiom, then takes an astounding leap. Bachman is heavy and full of longing. Kenyon endows everything with a kind of holiness. Kasischke is pure imagination.
Are any of these women heroines to me? I’ve never thought of it that way. A hero or heroine is kind of superhuman in my mind, and poets are too human for that. Other than Sexton, whose biography and letters I’ve read, I’m not even particularly familiar with these poets’ real lives. Nor do I think it’s essential. I think what’s important is there in the poetry.
Mhyana: You speak German day in and day out, yet you write in English. Does this hinder your grasp of your mother tongue or does the study of German has bring to light even more possibilities in cadence, nuance, and meaning? Are you fond of any German writers, perhaps Goethe, Grass, or Hesse? How about contemporary German poets?
Sloat: I really love being able to speak German. It’s got such a different character. The German equivalent of “No way!” is “Das gibt’s nicht,” or “That does not exist.” It’s an authoritative, fist-on-the-table kind of language. It also has its beautiful and sweet words and lots of roll-around-in-your-mouth sounds. I think familiarity with another language is a good thing rather than a distraction when it comes to writing in English. It’s not a hindrance, and English is German’s grandchild. At the same time, I do miss being part of day-to-day English, the slang, the idioms, the English style of dialogue.
Of all prose and poetry writing in German, I hold Paul Celan above all. I also love Ingeborg Bachman. Among the contemporaries, I enjoy Durs Gruenbein and Sarah Kirsch.
Mhyana: Why do you write poetry? I mean, why do you juggle a full-time job, a husband, two children, a household, and poetry? What does it do for you?
Sloat: I’ve made poetry part of my life. I deeply desire to write and when words and ideas occur to me, I want to see where they’ll take me. To do it I need to be a little greedy with time. I would love to stay up late writing, but I get up every morning at a little after five. I love being the only one awake in the morning. That’s a gift. I work for a news agency and my job is very stressful and busy, so sometimes I don’t get time for lunch, but if I do I always have a book of poems and my notebook with me.
Mhyana: Would you still write even if you could never publish or share your work? How would the process or pace of writing feel different to you if it became a completely solitary pursuit?
Sloat: Yes, I would. Especially in an expatriate situation, writing poems is a way of connecting with myself and my language. When I started writing poetry, it didn’t occur to me to ever send it anywhere. Just like I don’t cook a meal so I can go out and sell it. I cook a meal to eat.
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