It's a bit of a thrill for me to provide this interview, and I hope readers will forgive me for not doing a simple Q&A. Sally and I
were high school classmates and friends. She has gone on to academic and
literary brilliance, while I languish as a journalist and dreamer. (Ok, perhaps I do better than "languish," and I'm not ashamed of being a dreamer.) She is an
assistant professor of English at Arizona State University and her poetry,
essays, and reviews have been widely published in a variety of journals,
anthologies, and now two of her own poetry collections. She also is the assistant director of Four Way Books, an independent press in the TriBeCa area of New York City. Her latest, Wreck Me, is available from Barrow Street Press. Through the
surprises of social media, she and I have reconnected after too many years, and
I now have an opportunity to offer readers a glimpse of some wonderful poems
and images.
Elephant’s
Bookshelf (Matt Sinclair): It’s funny to me, but when we reconnected via
Facebook, I could hear your physical voice in your words. Voice, of course, is
vital to strong, compelling writing of any form. Do you still hear echoes of
the girl from New Jersey in your writing, or does your work have a Western accent
to its voice?
Sally Ball: Matt,
you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you can’t…
And really, I still spend a chunk of every summer in New
Jersey, mostly at the shore, and I’m in Summit every May for a few days, other
times too. I always think of myself as an Easterner. Also, I was surprised to
see how strong the presence of the West turns out to be in this new book. I
live in a town, Scottsdale, that supports two predominant stereotypes:
cowboys-and-injuns vs. golf-and-botox. My poems tend to be a little bewildered
by the West, and I think the way I’ve found to most fully register the
strangeness and beauty of the desert, the appreciable difference between Here (AZ)
and There (NJ), is immersion in the “landscape”: slowing down enough to really
see the spindles of the baked-out cacti, as well as the Styrofoam insulation in
the under-water houses…
MS: How would
you characterize the nature and subject matter of your work?
SB: I’m always
most interested in poems as a way to follow a mind in motion on the page. Often
in my own poems this yields a kind of thinky narrative: there’s a story, but
the real interest lies in figuring out the why and the how of that story, and
then also its implications. My first book, Annus
Mirabilis, alternates between two main threads: poems about Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz and Isaac Newton -- rival inventors of the Calculus -- and poems
about a contemporary speaker and her own will toward knowledge (knowledge about
marriage, art, sanity). I was initially interested in the nature of ambition in
the scientist and in the artist: how these might be similar, how they diverge.
The new book, Wreck
Me, began when my dad was waiting for a lung transplant. I got interested
in the body, in resilience, because a transplant really is a violent surgery,
hard to recover from, and you have to choose
it. It struck me that the paradox of the operation recurs in regular life
all the time: we have to choose to endure something profoundly difficult to get
through to a new place, to stay alive at all—if we want to be alive in the most
resonant, important ways. The world wants us to be numb, to just go along, and
if you want to, say, go deeper into a marriage, or into your work, or into
anything valuable: well, sometimes that requires a type of (emotionally) violent
intervention.
MS: Your new
collection, Wreck Me, has just come
out. Your first collection, Annus
Mirabilis, was published in 2005 and was well received. You have always
written. I remember bumping into you and walking to school together and we’d
sometimes talk about writing. Why did it take until the twenty-first century
for a book to come out with your name on the spine?
SB: Ouch!
MS: Sorry. Of
course, the same could be said of me.
SB: Yes… I’m
…slow. And I have some other major commitments: three kids, a teaching job, my
work with Four Way Books. Also, I’m
just slow: I wait for things, which doesn’t mean I don’t pursue them, too.
MS: With your
busy family life and academic career, do you write every day, do you squeeze writing
in when time allows? How do you maintain the artistic element of your life in
the midst of the demands of “real life”?
SB: It really
helps me to go away. In December I spent just over two glorious weeks at the
Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. When I have time like
that—uninterrupted, no obligations—I have the best chance of starting new
things, the best chance to get really lost in what I’m writing. In Connecticut,
I worked for seven, eight, nine hours at a stretch most days. Summers, when
school’s out and Four Way is quieter, I get a lot of that same kind of work
done. During the semester, I don’t start much, though I do return to whatever’s
in progress. And—is this age?—I’m waking up so early. I am hopeful that these
new, alert 5 AMs are going to provide that same sense of solitude. When the
house is quiet and the world is calm. (That’s a line from Stevens: the same
poem says, “The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.”)
MS: Do you
write mostly poetry now, or do you still write reviews and essays on topics
that interest you?
SB: Mostly
poetry, also reviews and essays. A recent essay on contemporary poetry—in
relation to William Carlos Williams’ “no ideas but in things”—is here, in The Volta.
MS: You deal
with loss and doubt in Wreck Me. What
is it about these subjects that calls to you and compels you to share?
SB: Robert
Hass has this famous line, “All the new thinking is about loss./ In this, it
resembles all the old thinking.”
Secondarily, here’s a story from our New Jersey days:
between junior high and senior high, I went away for the summer, and when I
came back, I didn’t have any friends. Or, the group of friends I’d assumed I
would return to had closed the door, and I started that year very much alone.
Mostly now I remember the kindness of Elizabeth Andersen, who solved this
problem by becoming my lifelong friend. But I knew pretty quickly even back
then that part of what made me thoughtful about the way the world does whatever
the world does was having been hurt by the ongoing tramp of everything. We
don’t question what makes us happy; what we interrogate, what we crave to
solve, to understand (in order to purge
ourselves of it? and prevent its recurrence!—) is pain.
If I wrote an autobiography of my mind, I’d say the
formative event, for which now I have to be grateful, was the surprise of that
loss--the obsessive, yes, but also multifaceted and productive attention I paid
to what had happened and why: self-examination, compassion for others,
wariness, gratitude, the panicky hopeful circling Why—
MS: There was
a time in Celtic and other cultures when the poet or bard was one of the most
important, most powerful people in society. Today, many folks are amazed when a
person reads a book much less a poem. What has society lost by our
disconnection to the poetic of life?
SB: Well, I
think this question is larger: we’re disconnected from nature also, right? And we
regularly lament the ways our text messages and our “connectedness” dampen—or
permit us to avoid—real intimacy. (Not much is more intimate than poetry can
be.)
In general, we all eat in the same restaurants, buy our
clothes in the same stores; everything’s a chain, a copy. Disconnection from
particulars makes the mass economy chug along. But we have to turn off certain
parts of ourselves to endure this; capitalism works best when everyone (or
everyone downstream) is a little numbed out. When I’m teaching poetry
workshops, I return and return to two charges: you have to write what only you
can write, and poetry is, in Heather McHugh’s phrase, a discipline of attention. The cultivation of our attention, learning
how to engage it and then to record its findings—that’s where creative force
comes from. You can’t be numb; you have to be on. (The poet Anne Carson said recently in a New York Times interview, “Every accuracy must be invented.” Zoom.)
Poetry—for those who seek it out and have figured out
where to find it—is actually a great force for good in the world, in terms of
enlivening our attention, reminding us what it’s like to look and to really
see. I’m not that worried about poetry being marginalized (it’s not going anywhere).
Here’s a little list of books to try, for someone who’s thinking, Hmmm… if
that’s what poetry has to offer, I’m in: Underdog by Katrina Roberts, National Anthem or In a
Beautiful Country by Kevin Prufer, Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke, The
Beds by Martha Rhodes, Granted by Mary Szybist, Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey….
MS: How do you
respond to people who say they don’t “get” poetry or who say it is irrelevant
to them?
SB: Well, when
I’m feeling a little ornery, I ask what poetry they’ve read and wonder aloud if
any of it was written recently. A fair number of students start out by saying,
“There’s no good poetry after X” (“The Raven” or Shakespeare). Then it turns
out they haven’t read much after “The Raven” or Shakespeare…. Maybe they’ve had
a bad poetry class where the teacher presumes that students can’t (maybe even
shouldn’t) understand until the teacher decodes everything for them. They have
no idea where to look for whatever sort of poem they would actually enjoy.
—And that’s the rub. I think there are so many kinds of
poetry you can’t put one umbrella up to protect them all, and you can’t yank
one rug out from under them all. I can probably surprise any (reasonable)
skeptic either by finding them a poem they turn out to like, or by talking
about why I like a poem in a way that makes them at least interested in what a
poem can do, and how.
John Berryman is a poet I love, and the first poem in his
best-known book The Dream Songs is a
favorite of mine. The ending tells us something we all already know: you can
paraphrase it like this: “Life is difficult and everybody dies.”
But when I say that
to you: who cares? The language has no power to cause anything but a shrug, or
maybe a little disdain for such a dour outlook.
Here’s how Berryman says it:
Hard on the land
wears the strong sea
and empty grows
every bed.
I can talk about those two lines for a pretty long time: the
way the poem ends not with “empty,” which is how we’d usually assemble that
sentence (“every bed grows empty,” subject-verb-adverb) but with “bed”: the
thing we all go home to, where we expect to be safe and cozy and fine.
That little bit of disorder leaves us in a singular and
frightening sad place.
Is poetry relevant to you? Well, are you alive? Are you
sometimes lonesome? Just as “every accuracy must be invented” reveals a paradox
about creativity, poetry’s ability to describe even the most alienating
circumstances lets us feel connected, alert, alive to our hopes for the world, and
for ourselves.
MS: Thanks so much, Sally!
SB: And hey: if you or your readers want to come out
in support of Four Way Books, the independent press in TriBeCa of which I’m
associate director (publishing poetry AND fiction)—it’s our 20th
anniversary! And there’s a benefit party and I’ll be in New York for it,
Tuesday, May 7 (from 7-9 on Lafayette between Houston and Prince).
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