Sara Renee Marshall : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I’m not sure I go to poetry for renewal, unless renewal is activation. Literature doesn’t tend to soothe me; it stirs me. Agitates me, even. I guess those are renewals from boredom or complacency. Not all of these things could strictly be called poetry, but they are to me: I return over and over to Inger Christensen’s alphabet, the first line of which is scrawled permanently on my leg, Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities, Fred Moten’s B Jenkins, all of Lisa Robertson’s books but especially Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture and R’s Boat, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, L.V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley’s version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean”, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and Barbara Guest’s poems “Safe Flights” and “A Reason”, both of which are perfect.

Sara Renee Marshall : part four

How does a poem begin?

Often, I’m ambushed by the recourse to write—a single phrase, notion, question, or feeling—and a poem begins in that minor crisis. That’s eros; that’s desire, I guess. In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson writes, “Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally to the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy.” Her characterization feels true to my experience of writing, a delicious anguish, an awareness of an absence I’m compelled to fill, even while knowing I can’t. Ideas come as a feeling of otherness that takes me over or carves out a space in my attention without permission. I’m inclined to offer myself to that otherness—to satisfy it out of fear or out of some desire to master it.

Sara Renee Marshall : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

As a younger student of literature, I wrongly invested in what others told me was hip or important, deeply afraid that I’d make some grave error from which I would never recover. That included being afraid to confess anything, to put myself and my heartbreaks and my failure and my EXPERIENCE into my writing. It was received avant “knowledge” (read: currency) at the time that nobody wanted to hear about any of that. That inherently racist, classist, ableist, sexist thinking, and the entire sway of certain insidious strains of academic poetry, took a long time to unlearn. I’m still trying to rinse that shit off.

Further, I’m less invested in “poet” as an identity—or any particular writerly identity. I’m more interested in writing as a community practice, a way to reach out and participate, and at the same time, a way to listen, to show up for others, and to learn.

I once thought I loved poetry above other genres, but I think that too was a wrong-headed fad I fell for. I study and I write because I am a searching person. I’m hungry and hard to satisfy, so something called “poetry” doesn’t house everything I need. Necessarily, I go to podcasts and visual art; I go to 18^th century women’s fiction and the history of transportation. These days, poetry is just one name for an urge I follow or a set of associations I try on or take off.

Sara Renee Marshall : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Going to MFA school was the first chance I had as an adult to dedicate real study to writing. My graduate school mentor, Julie Carr, comes immediately to mind as a poet who taught me about risking something in your writing—risking vulnerability, leaving necessary space for uncertainty and intuition, which is another kind of risk or trust. She also taught me that every bit of our living is political, and you can write a book about that.

I keep learning from Fred Moten, whose mélange of music, vernacular, high theoretical thinking, and a deeply candid, personal writing thrills me. Reading Moten feels a lot more like dancing. I’m always brought back to my own body by Danielle Vogel’s physical and literal entanglement of ritual and composition. Lisa Robertson opened up whole new possibilities to me—that my research obsessions are welcome in any form, that form itself is radically plastic, and that’s the fun of it. Also, you can ask your reader to be rigorous.

Always: Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Bhanu Kapil, Elizabeth Willis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Alice Notley. More recently: Farnoosh Fathi, Angel Nafis, Morgan Parker, Hannah Brooks-Motl.

Sara Renee Marshall : part one

Sara Renee Marshall is the author of a few chapbooks, two of which are forthcoming this year from above/ground press. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, OmniVerse, jubilat, Jellyfish, in anthologies, and elsewhere. She has two degrees from University of Colorado, and she's working on a PhD at University of Georgia. With Thomas and her daughter Rosa Bernadette, she lives in Atlanta, Ga.

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

I want to follow Nathanaël here, who said they distrust “any genre delineation,” but to be more specific, poetry is, for me, only a chronicle of associations, attachments, and limits that I remember as I practice them, transgress them, subvert them, or ignore them. For me, composing is bodily, affective, ambient, and anti-singular. I read while I write. I walk while I write. I parent and pee and half-sleep while I write. Its urges and impulses emerge from so many sources and forms that I can’t always say what I am writing is a poem or that what I have written is certainly a poem. Or maybe I am less interested in the provenance or jurisdiction of poetry than I am in the affective experience of generating writing in a broader sense.

So: I remain a bit ambivalent about what poetry can accomplish, but I feel certain that writing can move us, can be a space of communion, politics, music, pleasure, pain, and solidarity.