I’m curious: what’s your elevator
pitch for your book?
Little Spells explores the paradoxes of fertility
from the circle of self to a larger study on restraint, the creative force,
not-being, and bounty making. It is both a personal and an existential
meditation, calling upon myths, folklore, fairytales, and natural phenomena to explore the scope of what slim margins all life leans on,
what rough spark we depend on every day to keep going. Much has been written on
the ‘gates of death’ but perhaps less on what guards the ‘gates of life,’ and
this collection is most concerned with threshold, potential, conjuring, from
many different entry points to speak more universally about how we become and
how we endure a stalled narrative. It is the poetry of dark beginnings, of
waiting, being suspended at the crossing; the work of everyday magic, loss, and
bounty.
How did you come upon the subject of
your book?
I wrote this book during a six year period defined by desire,
rootlessness, and deep quiet in my life. I lived in San Francisco and Michigan
and then LA’s inland desert, I was very much wanting to have a baby and that
had become nearly impossible though through great struggle, it did finally
happen. I didn’t want to write about the difficulty of that, didn’t want that
to be my narrative, but eventually it did present a certain narrative, and I
wrote around it and into it and beyond it. I wrote with directness into the
silence of infertility that is often treated cryptically in literature or with
blame and lack toward women. I wanted to humanize this and demystify it, but I
did not want the reach of the book to be limited to my experience. Drawing on myth,
medicine, fairytale, were all ways in and ways leading out of the dark forest. Subject for this book is so personal, and yet through writing, the
gravity of that was also transformed.
And the title? Sometimes, it seems
to me, titles can strike like lightning or can be extraordinarily elusive. How
did you go about finding your title?
“Little
Spells” was one of the last poems I wrote for the book. I think many books are
led by a tremendous “what’s-at-stake” energy, a guiding force that is so engrained
in the poet, she sometimes takes it for granted and doesn’t actually write THAT
poem. Finally, this integral missing piece poem tumbled out, the previous
flailing titles fell away, and the book landed into place. What I most wanted
the title to suggest were the spells that ferry us over the daily crossing by
our own personal magic. Mundane, necessary, ordinary, saving magic.
Tell us something about the most
difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.
It was
difficult to live this story, and it was difficult to pull myself out of the
sustained and blurry grief of it, and locate art, make art that had a lasting
impulse. Process involved a great deal of chaff. The circle of self was so
tightly coiled; writing was a continual crowbar creaking it open and it was raw,
uncomfortable, risky, and essential.
And the most pleasurable?
When I
first began writing seriously fifteen years ago, I noticed a tendency in my
poems toward the urge for disappearance—something Jane Hirshfield and Sandra Alcosser
have also alluded to in their early writing lives (why did I feel like nothing? why was I continually led back to vacancy,
disappearance, self-erasure?)—I think many of us have written ourselves out
of that adolescent-sprung place into being, perhaps one of the initial impulses
behind the act. Conversely, in this third book, I felt the quality of
disappearance in my own life as I struggled with the repeated intention: mother, and the repeated answer: not-mother. I felt my 30s drifting past
me, my sense of home kept shifting, but
this time the poems sent the golden feather down to the well and continually
resisted that sway toward plunge and hollow. Was this pleasure? Yes, resistance
and willfulness as a kind of pleasure.
What’s the best and / or worst piece
of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?
Best: Not writing
but applied to writing: living in San Francisco in my 20s, I threw myself into
an intense Zen study. The Zen teacher sat across from me one day and said
plainly, “Don’t try too hard to be good at Zen,” and left the room. This was
somewhat lost on me at the time, dutiful student of everything. But I get it
now. Let the effort be natural. Don’t push too much. Live the curious, messy, sensing-feeling
poet’s life. Enjoy
that.
Worst:
Never write about childhood.
Tell us one of your favorite books
you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.
So many!
But I would love to swoon about Blood
Lyrics by Katie Ford. This is also a book about dark beginnings as she
writes about her daughter born prematurely and struggling toward health
alongside others in the tenuous and often terrifying NICU. That fragility and intimacy is positioned
against the public as the second half of Blood
Lyrics addresses war, violence, and torture. Both subjects seem
extraordinarily difficult to write about, yet Katie Ford is so deft, restrained
when restrained, fierce when not, the poems are nuanced, surprising, and
musical. To plea for a baby’s life
alongside her, then to weep for a people ravaged by violence, these are poems
that mean and matter. I so admire this collection, what she accomplishes and
how she does it.
What’s a question you wish I asked?
(And how would you answer it?)
--Can you
discuss the process for one of the poems in the book?
I have a
section-long poem called Still Life With
Egg that is a variation on a heroic sonnet crown—a series of fourteen
linked sonnets such that the whole is its own “expanded sonnet.” That is where
the writing landed but it’s not what I set out to do. I was led in quietly, a fragmented nudge into
egg as both artist and art object.
Then came nest, clock, hollow, return,
thought, source. After each one, it wasn’t done with me. This was one of
the most harmonious memories I have of writing, calmly sitting with a week off
and nowhere to go thinking, well then I
will write another, which is to say it was much more like listening, and
that is how I know I am really in. First I realized I had written a series of
twelve which was cute, my little dozen, but then there was another and finally
one more. They were all about the same
brief length, and I began working with form as I revised, and a loose kind of
sonnet-shape/sense emerged and then as a whole, “the crown.” This was one of the first poems I wrote for
this manuscript and it ended up being oddly prophetic—what was the fascination with eggs?—when the struggle to conceive
one viable egg of my own was waiting for me in the future. I feel as if I have
been having the egg dialogue both consciously and unconsciously for about ten
years.
Can you share an excerpt from your
book? Give us a taste.
from STILL LIFE WITH EGG
to move
backward in time
a slow
motion unbraiding
of
threads and language
receding
toward mother and beyond mother
seed
return to cloud, cloud return to sea
tides
collapse in gradients of dark
to search
blindly in the earth
a
downward push toward the question
of water,
the numbers fall off the clock
and
become a trail of footsteps in the desert
I read
all my books backward
until
there is only salt in my mouth
I wake up
and find the origin
is not
where I left it
OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to
buy your book?
Here is the
page for Little Spells at New Issues
Press with blurb comments, sample poem, bio, and links to buy directly from the
press, or from SPD, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/titles/sweeney-littlespells.html
Thank you!
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