By Christine Rice
Sarah Xerta’s language and images will lull you into lovely, quiet spaces and – just like that – slap you back to reality. She writes close to the bone, nicks edges so vulnerable that her work often challenged me to look away. I couldn’t look away, of course, so I held on tight to language that sent me reeling and images that seared my grey matter.
Rereading the collection in the wake of so much collective pain – here and abroad – reminded me of the very real imprint of suffering, of how it manifests, and how artists transform emotion into something altogether different.
Sarah and I connected via email to discuss Nothing To Do With Me (University of Hell Press), her writing process, and what makes her poems tick.
CHRISTINE RICE: I fell in love with so many of the poems in this collection. Tell me, did you write them over a period of months, years? Did you work on some, take a break, work on others? Some are so closely linked, almost narrative in movement from one to the other.
SARAH XERTA: Well this was originally my creative thesis for my MFA program. It’s changed quite a bit since I graduated in early 2013, but I wrote many of the poems during my final two semesters of school and the year that followed, so I guess the poems cover about a two-year span, which would explain the narrative links. Also the original concept for the layout of the book revolved around the word “party.” I noticed I was writing a lot about parties – wanting to throw parties, leaving parties, getting ready for parties – my initial thought was to try writing about something else but then I became curious and wondered: “Why parties? Why am I writing about this? What are parties?” This led me to look up the etymology of the word “party” and was surprised to find “to separate,” since I always envisioned parties as a coming together. But it made sense – to be part of a party is to not be a part of anything else that isn’t a party. I then separated the book into two sections – the first based on parties as celebration, the second based on parties as separation, and that helped me organize some of the various impulses in the poems. The first section is full of poems that desire and love – they yearn for a gathering, a celebration. The second section is built around poems that mourn – loss of love, death, the separation of child from mother at birth.
CR: Dictative ego. Yes. It’s something I have to push aside too.
One of the first poems in the collection,”Daisies the Size of Moons,” begins,
I was going to tell you that I am the nicest girl
you will ever meet, that in my hair
there are daisies the size of moons, but then I started thinking
about lightening bolts flashing across the nape
of my neck, and I got very scared, because I didn’t know
they were there.
That terrified me on so many levels. Tell me a little bit about your process. Do you start with a sound? An image? A combination? Or is your approach to each poem different?
SX: This poem was a bit different because I started out wanting to experiment with a “nice” poem, something overly and obnoxiously vulnerable and sweet, but when I went to write I couldn’t escape the image of the lightning bolts flashing across the nape of neck – I really did not want them to be in the poem, they went against my intent, but ultimately I realized I had to give in to what the poem wanted – I had to let go of my dictative ego and open myself up to a deeper level of consciousness. And that’s usually my process: listening. I don’t feel like I create anything, rather that I am a medium who opens herself and then transcribes whatever comes in. When a poem isn’t working it’s usually because I am not listening to it/myself.
CR: I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs and personal essay collections lately and your poems feel very confessional (“Blood Lines”), very connected to memoir. Am I completely off? Is that the question you dread…like when someone asks a fiction writer, “What’s your book about?”
SX: You’re not off at all! I’ve jokingly said before that I wonder when people are going to notice I’m not actually a poet but a non-fiction writer who likes to use line breaks. I often draw directly from both my inner and outer life – this synchronization is not only therapeutic but also what keeps the poems from being “too non-fictiony” but they are very real, yes.
CR: In many of these poems, there’s a yearning for intimacy – not just physical but emotional intimacy. Take “Coil,” for example. What is it about this culture or about this time in history that hinders intimacy? Or for you personally?
SX: I think abuse hinders intimacy. To be abused is to have your personhood invalidated, which can sever you from yourself, and if you’re not connected to yourself it is difficult to connect with others in a way that isn’t ultimately self-sabatoging. I don’t know how to be emotionally or physically intimate with someone if not obsessively, which makes me wonder if I know anything about intimacy at all, or if other people don’t know enough. We definitely don’t believe in Love/ourselves/each other enough. Where did we learn that?
CR: I’m not sure. Especially artists.
You revisit certain themes throughout: love, not deserving love, war, shooting, rape, kindness. What draws you to these?
SX: I didn’t incorporate them as themes. I just write from my life and I guess these things make up a lot of my life. Military life, physical war, and the aftermath of untreated PTSD had a huge impact on my childhood and family. There is a war inside me I spend most of my waking hours trying to make peace with. I don’t really know a life outside of pain, which is maybe why I long for that life so much.
CR: “Birth Poem” – oh my…it’s so lovely. The image of your child emerging from you and you emerging from your mother, etc., and the visceral physicality of the poem really struck me…and reminded me.
How do you write as a parent? What’s your process? How do you carve out time to write?
SX: I don’t think parenthood has changed my writing much. I had my daughter when I was 21 and still a junior in undergraduate school. I remember not writing during my entire pregnancy and for about a year after. I was just too far away from myself, felt like too much of an alien to want to introspect. Then I started my MFA program and had to write, so, that’s when writing became a bigger part of my life again. That’s also about the time I started to struggle with my mental health, and poetry became my therapy. And I write in spurts – I can go a month without writing a poem or essay and then write three in one week. Also I take notes in my journal and use Twitter a lot for brainstorming. I am never not moving towards the next poem.
CR: You follow the title “Whoever Thought it was a Good Idea for Lovers to Cohabitate” with:
must’ve been out of their mind.
And that sentence kicks off an entire narrative (as do most of your poems). It covers a lot of time. From thinking it would be a good idea to move in together. To moving in. To falling out of love.
That quick turn from humor to something funny but dead serious and the sense of narrative in your poetry really drew me in. Do you write short stories, too?
SX: I don’t write short stories because then I would have to invent something and I don’t know how to invent anything! I just listen. Although I guess my chapbook JULIET (II) could be classified as a short story, but I didn’t write it thinking I was writing a story. I didn’t think I was writing anything, really. I was just trying to get through the days. I don’t think as much about form as feel what works best for a particular piece as I am writing it.
CR: Another thing I really admire is your ability to take huge risks. There’s a bracing sense of vulnerability on every page. The poem, “Bear,” really shook me. I once asked Megan Stielstra (a personal essayist) about putting stuff out there. About yourself. About your experience. But do you ever flinch at putting it out there?
SX: I tend to dissociate from my work once it’s out there so it doesn’t feel like I’m being vulnerable. When I write I am in an altered state of mind and once that particular state of mind is over the emotions associated with the work are less intense. This isn’t as true for some of my newer work, though, especially JULIET (II), which, although it’s in third person, is more personal than anything else I’ve ever shared, and that’s because it spends more time dissecting the traumatic memory of rape than it does paying attention to any current moment. I have a hard time reading from that chapbook and mostly prefer not to.
I don’t look forward to my daughter reading my work. When she’s older I won’t stop her if she really wants to but I don’t want her to feel my pain. I wouldn’t want her to read it without me there to explain what I mean by everything, haha. I don’t want her to worry.
CR: What’s the first poem that made a lasting impression on you? Or book? Something that changed the way you looked at words?
SX: As a young teenager before I knew how to spot a misogynist it was Richard Brautigan’s poems in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster – they were the first poems that made me really want to write. The intimacy with which he wrote made me feel like I was eavesdropping. It hooked me and I remember longing to write poems that resonated intimately with others (which I now realize comes from a deep loneliness).
CR: Who influences you now?
SX: Lately I read a lot of creative prose. Clarice Lispector’s short stories as well as Agua Viva have been incredibly influential in allowing me to blend genres & moods, perspectives & realities. My writing is more influenced by music and non-poetry texts than it is by other people’s poetry. I read a lot of non-fiction work about quantum physics, psychology, trauma, history, political science, which influences my inner life and thought process, the recording of which is often my work. My current favorite poets though are Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and Sonya Vatomsky. They both make me feel like nothing I write will ever be as powerful as their words yet still they make me want to try.
CR: Has self-censorship ever been an issue for you?
SX: Ha, I think the opposite might be my problem! I don’t know how to tell you anything but the truth.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.
