Sarah Nichols : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?  

The last book of poems that I read was Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which is just so, so good, Minadora Macheret’s chapbook, Love Me, Anyway, which is so beautiful and layered, and Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, which I think has opened up a new way of approaching ekphrastic poems, with its investigation of the designer Alexander McQueen and his work. It creates a way to write about fashion, which is often neglected as art, ekphrastically, and to write about the artist, and finally, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ Vitamix and the Murder of Crows, which is gloriously absurd, but at the same time lingers and makes you want to know more about how the poems came to be.

Sarah Nichols : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

As I said, I find that attempting to compress a great deal of emotion into a confined space is one of the most difficult things about writing poetry. Another thing, and it is huge, and extra to the process, is the amount of abuse and straight up hatred directed at women, people of color, and LGBTQ people for having a voice and attempting to create spaces where it’s okay to write about the experiences of those identities. I’ve seen so many friends fight endlessly for the good of the poetry community, and they should be supported. This does not stop me from writing, but it does make me ask myself what I am doing to help regarding these issues. Not enough. To get back to the spirit of the question, another difficult thing is asking myself if I’m repeating myself. I have themes that I continue to investigate, but I worry if the material, or my approach, is going stale. It’s not a comfortable place to be. Having patience is also a difficult piece of the process for me. I’ve sent things out almost immediately after writing them, with little thought as to “maybe this should wait until you read it again and see how you feel,” to frustration over response times, but I feel that less than I used to.

Sarah Nichols : part three

How did you first engage with poetry? 

For all of my childhood, and some of my adolescence, I disliked poetry. I didn’t understand what I was given to read in school; in Fifth grade I was given an assignment: write a haiku for homework and come back tomorrow and share what you wrote. That terrified me, trying to get the correct number of syllables, and to this day I still don’t write haikus. I was 16 or 17 when I discovered Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton’s works, and that’s when I saw that I did have a connection to poetry, and that it mattered. I did not, however, see myself as a poet. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I was intimidated by poetry: there are so many opportunities to get it wrong; you have to, I think, compress a great deal of emotion into a small space and make it resonate, and I thought there’s no way I could do that. I made some small attempts but threw them away. In 1998, I entered a writing contest that my college was sponsoring, with a cash prize for the winners. I wrote an ekphrastic poem about Edward Hopper’s painting, Nighthawks, and it took first prize. I was stunned, and I consider that the beginning of becoming a poet.

Sarah Nichols : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you share ideas with?  

I tend to be almost secretive about what I’m currently working on, but I have moments where I tell writer friends ideas, or scraps of ideas, about things. I’ve noticed since I started writing more essays, I am more open about the subjects of those than I am about poems. How does my work first enter the world ? I frequently ask myself what’s the one thing that I feel that I must work out of my system, even if it’s a painful subject that I might find hard to reveal. I write a lot of found poetry, and so I am frequently looking at books not just as a reader, but as material for poems. I should also say that I am always looking at other art, as well. Movies, music, other forms of visual art. My second chapbook, Edie (Whispering): Poems from Grey Gardens, came directly from watching the documentary Grey Gardens, and turning the transcripts from that into poems. I was obsessed, and I wrote the book very fast.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that yes, I do have one friend, Cat Conway, who is a poet and a Plath scholar, that I regularly share my ideas and poems with. We read each other’s work; she’s designed two of my chapbook covers, we edited a journal together; we’ve written blurbs for each other’s books. I am so grateful to have her as a friend and colleague. Not everyone who works in this lonely business gets to have that one person (or several) to make it less lonely. While I write alone, it’s important to know that a community is there.

Sarah Nichols : part one

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut, and is the author of seven chapbooks, including This is Not a Redemption Story (Dancing Girl Press, 2018), Little Sister  (Grey Book Press, 2018), Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, 2018), and How Darkness Enters a Body (Porkbelly Press, 2018.) Her poems and essays have also appeared in White Stag Journal, Dream Pop, Memoir Mixtapes, and the RS 500.

How Important is Music to Your Poetry?

Music plays an enormous role in my work, and I think that that influence has grown deeper within the past few years. I read song lyrics of my favorite artists, and I write about my connections (or obsessions) with the music that I’ve listened to for over thirty years. Since 2016, I have written, and published, an elegy for David Bowie, and my experience with the Post-punk band Joy Division. I have also had the opportunity to write micro-cnf essays on specific albums for the RS 500 project and the journal Memoir Mixtapes. I can’t play music, or read it, but I think that this is another way into it. Along with reading and writing, the music I love has been there, working as a balm or asking me to explore it on a deeper level.