Sara Henning : part five

How important is music to your poetry? 

Music is incredibly important to my poetic practice. I grew up playing piano, and I will never forget my mother insisting that I play along with a metronome she would place on our piano’s music shelf. I hated the metronome at the time, but as I practiced scales and works ranging from Beethoven to Liszt, the pulse of the song became crucial to how I perceived the world. Rhythm is science and art fused into our daily experience—even the sound of our mother’s heartbeats mimics the iamb. Music was as crucial to how I experienced the world as a child as how I do now—language a collusion of assonance and consonance, grace and instinct. I am a fan of writing in form—sonnet and villanelle, specifically—because I find that the primal order of sound helps me to organize my rhetorical and aesthetic agendas. One recent form I have become fascinated by is Jericho Brown’s duplex, a new form featured in The Tradition, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. The duplex is at once sonnet, ghazal, and blues lyric. An example of one of Brown’s duplex can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152729/duplex

Sara Henning : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Early on, confessional and post-confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, Mary Oliver, and Dorianne Laux gave me permission to write about how I experienced the world. Poets who position themselves between narrative and lyric modes continue to teach me how to conceptualize experience and its music: poets like Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Larry Levis. Early on, I encountered the metaphysical work of Charles Wright—works from his trilogies like Negative Blue blended place, philosophy, and the self in ways which made the hair on my arms stand on end—but lately, I find myself being shattered in all the best ways by poets engaging with new possibilities for poetic form. Poets like Allison Joseph (My Father’s Kites made me fall in love with the sonnet all over again), Patricia Smith (Blood Dazzler and Incendiary Art are necessary reading), Diane Seuss (frank: sonnets just won the Pulitzer Prize), Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes (the creator of the golden shovel and whose collection of sonnets, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is one of the best collections of sonnets published in the twenty-first century) teach me how poetic form—once a gatekeeping device—presents constant possibilities for advocacy, witness, and innovation.

Sara Henning : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t? 

Poetry, to me, is the intellectual and aesthetic counterpart of the human heartbeat, and as such, I believe that poetry is the genre most connected to the body and to the physical expression of life. Poetry is tied to the body in the same ways as music, for poetry and music share the same genetic origins. In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily, who dies in childbirth, returns to experience life on her twelfth birthday, during which time she understands, with horror, the extent to which people take life for granted. When she asks Stage Manager, "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?,” he replies "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.” Poetry takes as its interest the life which pulses under each moment—its philosophy, its gratitude, its song, its psychology, its fierce yearning.  Poetry is my deepest love and my mother tongue.

Sara Henning : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? 

Without a doubt, my consideration of poetry has changed since I began writing. As I teach my creative writing students at Marshall University, one cannot develop a serious writing practice without simultaneously establishing a serious reading practice. Over the years, reading taught me crucial things about the field of poetics: its historical trends, its contemporary uses. I believe that if one does not evolve with one’s poetry, one is likely writing the same book (or the same poem) over and over again.

Sara Henning : part one

Sara Henning is the author of Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2023), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College), and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.

What are you working on? 

I am currently working on a new collection of poems, Yellow, an ekphrastic collection which addresses Vincent Van Gogh's life and art produced during his time at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy, then in Auvers, where he committed suicide. During this time, he produced some of his most famous paintings—The Olive Trees (1889), Irises (1889), and The Starry Night (1889). I have held a flame for Van Gogh ever since I was a child, specifically his relationship with the aesthetics of color. Through the use of color, van Gogh often rendered the physical world around him into a living anthology of emotion, and as such, van Gogh’s relationship between art and mental illness is of great interest to me. While exploring Van Gogh’s work, I am concurrently exploring my mother’s relationship with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.