Divine Reading: A Conversation with Sara Nicholson
Sara Nicholson | April | The Song Cave | April 2023 | 90 Pages
“Poems, ideally, should be like saints’ lives,” Sara Nicholson writes in her latest collection of poetry, April. That might sound precious, reverent and removed, but Nicholson clarifies: “That is, they should be experiments in magical thinking and include at least two miracles.” The explanation’s definitional pith comes up against the multiplicity of its final phrase. What does it mean for poems to “include” miracles? Should they refer to miarculous phenomena? Offer dependable astonishments? Invite potential astonishments, which may vary as we read (and yet not amount to more than “two”)? The sentence is vast and playful, and it includes a precise, receptive ambivalence; one sees these qualities throughout Nicholson’s work, as in the opening of “Spain.” The poem’s second line nonchalantly undercuts the dramatic situation of the first, and the third swoops toward both texture and abstraction:
Having never been to Spain
I left for it, as one who
Hazards faith in vagueness.
It’s appropriate, in such a poem, to hear a tender glitch in “hazards faith,” as though “faith” holds a hint of a verbal form. That is, the hazards themselves may place their faith in vagueness. It could get them through. Elsewhere, Nicholson evokes “the dream” of “a word only / Visible by grace of the dark.” Her poems are lit by such grace poised between what we don’t know (“I don’t know the Latin names of flowers”) and vivid intensities that nevertheless come through (“I know that there are cities wherein stars / Will labor to appear”). We corresponded about prosody and time and chance and knowledge and the grave.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Zach Savich: I deeply admire your poetry’s velocities, how phrases can compound and rush, along with its deliberations, its patience. Together, these swells and lulls can suggest the infinite. I’m thinking, especially, of a passage in Lives of the Saints: “I want to read poems the way monks read scripture, to practice what is called lectio divina (‘divine reading’). It’s a slow process, like building a fire with wet wood. It requires focus of a radically laborious kind. You might argue that not many poems demand such attention, that this is an unfashionable or even elitist thing to do, and you’d be right of course, but nevertheless, whoever you are—I write for the divine reader in you.” This might be out there, but I’ve been wondering how you think about time in your poetry—about how a poem can mark time, make its own time, compress or suspend or traverse time. “I wake up early nearly every day / thinking of [infinity sign],” you write. That suggests both the daily and the eternal. What interests you about poetry’s relationship to time?
Sara Nicholson: Poetry, unlike visual art, is temporal. You can’t take it all in at once, it has to unfold rhythmically in time. (I know there are exceptions but I’m happy to ignore them, for now.) Prosody divides a poem into durational units—the line, the foot, the beat—creates patterns in time.
Humanity has always been at war with time, because we’re afraid of death. Art is one way (maybe the least harmful way) we’ve found of seeking out the infinite, which is to say the eternal, in the everyday. Time is also what makes me feel like I have a self, whatever that is. A self that exists temporarily in the world. And poetry, whatever that is, is a particularly baroque way of insisting on one’s existence in time. Of saying, I was here.
Despite the title of my second book, What the Lyric Is, I’m not at all interested in defining the lyric or entering into debates on lyric theory. But if the word “lyric” means anything anymore, and I’m not sure it does, I think it points to poetry’s spatio-temporal immediacy, its power to collapse time and distance into what I guess you could call a lyric present. This is the most magical thing about it. I’m not a very “woo” person, but it really does feel supernatural to me—a superpower.
Attention, to mis-quote Simone Weil, is a form of love. Maybe it’s because I’ve been translating from the French lately, but I’ve been thinking a lot about attention’s etymology. From attendre, to wait. Nearly homophonous with entendre, to hear or listen. Both from tendre, to stretch towards. When I really spend time with a poem, in translating or memorizing it for example, I attend to it. I wait and listen. I stretch toward it, from the present to the past, just as poets do when they write, from the present towards the future. It takes time to read with care. And what is love if not a willingness to spend our precious time in someone else’s company?
ZS: What a spectacular etymology. And to think that “tender” also has a sense of “to tender an offer.” So, the stretching toward is both offering and receiving. That reminds me of some lines from your poem “False Sir John,” from that earlier collection, What the Lyric Is. I love the poem’s suggestion that “the look on my face while / I’m doing the things I do each day—that’s the central image of this poem.” Not the thing seen, but the look on the face of one going about their day. That’s one of my favorite articulations of how “subjects” or the “self” can work in poems. I look to the poem, as to the poet’s face, to see what happens. Is there a poem in your newest collection, April, where these dynamics of care, of tending, felt especially present while you were writing?
SN: Yeah, it’s a reciprocal force. Like how Keats, in the last poem he wrote before he died, stretches his hand toward the reader. I just looked back at that poem, it feels totally vampiric!
I’m not sure one poem in particular sticks out to me. There are people in the book I name by name. Some are living and some are dead. Maybe the act of naming them is a way of trying to save them all? The poems are referential—maybe to a fault.
A couple of months ago, I got a very kind email from a poet I very much respect and admire—isn’t that an act of care?—about April. He calls that “dynamics of care, of tending” you mention “our custodial duties as poets.” What he means, I think, is that as poets we’re tasked with remembering what’s been forgotten, with reaching from the present into the past out of care for the future. Another friend calls it “tending the fire.” I like the fire metaphor. It’s primal, primordial, Promethean. It’s also a reciprocal tend(er)ing: the fire keeps us warm, so long as we keep feeding it. April, you might say, is my twig.
ZS: I’ve been thinking about prosody, especially about what a phrase like “contemporary prosody” might mean. I can hear traditional English lyrical syntax and rhythms throughout your work, with moments of classicism, or even of purposive and moving anachronism. That can relate to references and to music. There are also many phrases that are more colloquial (“It must be nice”). How do you think about prosody, when you’re writing? What’s in that term for you?
SN: For me prosody—broadly considered—is just the most exciting thing. Still I’m not sure it’s possible anymore to write fully rhymed and metered poems in English, at least without falling into some sort of self-satisfied, ironic sentimentality. I feel a little sad about that. But there are quite a few poets out there doing wild things with prosody—Martin Corless-Smith, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and Alice Notley come immediately to mind. There are of course many others. On a recent trip to the UK, I picked up a book by J.H. Prynne, Snooty Tipoffs (2021), from Face Press (a press that appears to exist mostly to publish Prynne). 300 pages of rhyming poems, mostly quatrains, in various meters. Playful, pleasurable, delightful, a perfectly deranged little book—and all because of the prosody.
There is of course this big misconception that prosody is difficult. The standard technical vocabulary, borrowed from Greek, isn’t exactly welcoming, nor is it particularly useful for describing how rhythm works in English. When I teach it—and I am still working out how best to teach it—I try to get students to realize that they already know it. We live, for better or worse, a physical existence. Our hearts beat. We move our bodies to the silliest of music. The most difficult thing is getting students to trust themselves, to trust the truth of what they hear and feel. It seems obvious to me that doing this will make you a more attentive reader, a better writer.
Also, some things are just difficult. Learning a language is difficult. Jogging is difficult (for me). American culture is difficulty-averse, yet all the while life is becoming more and more difficult in real material terms.
All poetry everywhere, from all over the world and from all time, up until about a hundred or so years ago, was written in some sort of metrical form. The sheer variety of what it is possible to do with language, I find that totally humbling and inspiring. Wong May’s anthology of Tang-era poetry, In the Same Light, got me thinking about this recently, her discussion of classical Chinese prosody in that book’s wonderful afterward. I’m fascinated by the ways poets of other times and cultures have confronted the same question: how best to organize language and its rhythmical patterns into units of time. I don’t understand how you can be a writer and not want to read everything. All of it.
ZS: Thinking about Notley, in her introduction to her massive new book-of-books, The Speak Angel Series (Fonograf Editions), she’s pretty clear that writing, for her at this point, is mostly dictation from the beyond (or from the all-around). She’s a receiver. But she discusses some ways in which she shapes her poems for the page. So, the voices, the music, are coming from elsewhere, but she’s at least partly steering the visual configuration. In your own work, how do you experience the interaction of “things that come from elsewhere”—e.g., moments in a poem that surprise you, unexpected insights—and more deliberate, intentional effects? Or does the writing process mostly feel deliberate and intentional to you?
SN: Notley’s claims about her process, they’re as old as poetry itself. Hesiod and Caedmon say basically the same thing. Gods, angels, muses, Martians, ghosts: the spirit has a thousand names. Lowly cowherds and rude shepherds, receiving the gift of song from on high. For me, it’s proof that Notley’s work, for all its innovation, is deeply ancient.
I’m agnostic on all of this, for myself personally. There remains the fact that writing, at certain rare moments, can feel like magic: inspiration is real, a mysterious power like love or madness or grief. I’m very interested in other people’s processes when they claim connections to otherworldly or immaterial forces, to dreams especially, or whatever it is that speaks to or through us in dreaming. But such claims are also (smart, sly) ways of rejecting the authority of personal authorship for something much greater: the authority of the beyond. Better to be a scribe for angels than a lonely little poet here on Earth. It’s also a way of acknowledging the limits of the human mind, since nothing is created out of nothing (apart, I guess, from the universe itself). Is there something out there, apart from us, that speaks? Hard to say. It is difficult to talk about difficult things without metaphors. Hence the angels.
I don’t think of the unexpected and intentional as opposites. I allow phrases to accrete, lines to shift, morph, ring out, uplift (or destroy) each other until, magically, there is a poem. I intend to find the unexpected. I unexpectedly discover what I intend.
ZS: What helped this magic find its way to form on the page in April? How did a poem such as “Ten Lyric Pieces,” with its ten-line sections, develop compared to a piece such as “Lives of the Saints,” with its notational, meditative prose?
SN: Those two pieces you mention, they’re right next to each other in the book but were written years apart. It’s hard to remember exactly with “Ten Lyric Pieces,” it being so long ago now. I know I wanted to write something that barely cohered, with lines and sections that could bleed in and out of each other, but not total chaos, an organized chaos, anchored by the regularity of the form. I knew immediately that this had to be the last poem in whatever book I was writing my way towards.
“Lives of the Saints”—which is not a poem, but a collection of observations and aphorisms—was written differently. The German Romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel says that an aphorism should be “entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.” Most of these were written in 2020, under lockdown, and in them I welcomed prickly feelings, a little hedgehoggishness. It’s not something I sat down and wrote from start to finish; I wrote them when I felt inspired. They’re like little bursts of energy. The occasional, ephemeral, un- or anti-systematic nature of the genre can accommodate a lot of different kinds of thinking. I’d love to write a book of them but that would have to be a lifelong project, as it was for so many aphorists (Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is a particularly heartbreaking example).
ZS: Could you tell us a little about how and when April was written? Did that process differ from how you wrote your earlier books?
SN: Not really, no. April is a collection of poems, just like the first two. It collects all the best poems I wrote since What the Lyric Is. I wrote a lot of other poems in that period and scrapped them all. I wanted from the beginning to make this book as perfect as possible. It took a long time for the poems I was writing to cohere into a collection that had shape and scope. The title was the last decision of all. I’m still not totally happy with it! Poems would have been an OK title for this book, so I hope that April, with its obvious referentiality, could mean “poems” too.
ZS: What do you notice about that shape and scope, looking back? What do you see April doing distinctly, or deepening, next to your other books?
SN: I never return to my first two books and honestly have a pretty spotty memory of them at this point. People always compare writing a book to giving birth, but you have to take care of a baby for a long time afterward, right? I feel more kinship with those insects who deposit their eggs into piles of decomposing matter, hoping for the best. I hope I’m getting better at it (writing poems). And I hope this book is a movement forward, in terms of my practice or craft or vision of what it is possible to do with words. It’s important for me to look ahead. I try not to look back.
ZS: “There are no secrets in Poetryland,” you write in “Ode.” Other pieces refer to MFA programs, the “vainglory of poets / on Facebook, in Brooklyn or LA,” and other aspects of poetry’s social, academic, and professional worlds. What are some ways in which contemporary poetry’s industries, anxieties, and communities have influenced your work?
SN: I like this question and I will try to answer it in a way that doesn’t sound bitchy. I’ve always been inspired by people who refused to create art within the expected and/or institutionalized paths laid out for us. I realize the hypocrisy of my saying this, as someone who survives and creates art from within the academy. It’s an unresolvable problem.
It’s hard not to be discouraged by what I’ll call our socio-poetic ecosystem: the nepotism, the narcissism, the in-crowds, the groupthink, etc., etc. There is a lot of brilliant work being made by people who have no access to all that. A lot of this probably has to do with class, with the kinds of networks we’re a part of, something we almost never talk about. But I’m also deeply suspicious, for reasons I think should be obvious to us all, of the supposed democratization of writing via the internet. In an ideal world I would be a cavewoman. And make little chapbooks for my friends.
ZS: Keats’ “living hand” suggests reaching back from beyond the grave. It also extends a live hand into the present; the performance of the poem ends with an offering. We see a hand that could be grasped before death. I was thinking of related dynamics of offerings and the present while reading April. “Spain,” for example, ends with flowers left on a grave. “Song” offers a litany of present items (“potato masher, tin foil, rubber / spatula”). What do you hope April helps to make present for its readers? I know that might involve a further “agnosticism” (“In reality, I have nothing to give, and anyone can have it,” you write in one poem).
SN: It occurs to me just now that those objects in the first line of “Song,” they’re a still life. A kitchen one at that, so totally classic. I’ve always loved paintings of food: lemon peels, oyster shells, nuts, exotic fruits, dead birds strung up. There’s a still life poem in the book, “Plants in a Window,” but maybe some of the others have a sort-of still life quality to them too. A bounteous, grotesque display. I like that you’re tying that to the gravesite offering in “Spain,” it makes sense. If you’ve ever visited a famous person’s grave, you’ll see offerings everywhere: pictures, bracelets, flowers, notes, weird little objects. There is something deeply human in that. I used to consider myself a misanthropist, but actually I love our species. If I hated people I would have studied microbes, or moss, or outer space, or plate tectonics, or whatever. I wouldn’t have written poems.
In my work, I try to make visible my own struggle to understand why I’m writing at all. I don’t know why I write poems. It’s really a very funny thing to do. Form is a kind of meaning, or a way of shaping meaning and making it visible. Maybe we make art because what else can we do, when faced with the utter meaninglessness of existence. And in the end, publishing a book amounts to saying, “Here are some weird thoughts I had, in the prettiest language I could find. Hope you enjoy.” An offering, too.
ZS: April is rich with assertions of not-knowing (“I don’t know how to write / about the world”). How do you think about poetry’s relationship to knowledge and/or to thinking?
SN: I’ve always been allergic to assertions of knowledge. I’m much more interested in what I don’t know than in what I do. This is, of course, a very old way of approaching an old problem (Heraclitus, Socrates, Zeno, et al). Poetry is, or should be, a kind of thinking; it’s nothingness’s kingdom, where everything is possible. I use poetry to find out what I think.
For someone with my type of allergy, it might seem odd that I would be into aphoristic literature. But an assertion of “not-knowing” is also an assertion of knowing. So I’ve been asserting my knowledge all along! W. H. Auden calls it an “aristocratic genre.” “The aphorist,” he writes, “does not argue or explain: he asserts.” I think contemporary poetry needs more assertion. Not showing off what you know (which I find especially pukeworthy) but showing your movement towards the discovery of what you do (or don’t). I would love to read a book of poems that actually tries to say something. This came to me just now, via Auden: poets are the aristocrats of the spirit. So my best advice, if anyone’s asking for it, is to go out there and fucking rule.
Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, both from The Song Cave. She lives in Boise, Idaho.