~ Delta Poetry Review ~

 Sandra Meek's Interview by Susan Swartwout

SS: How did you come to poetry—or how did poetry find you?

SM: One of my earliest memories—I would have been three or four—is of being in my father’s study, and sneaking books off the shelf. I couldn’t read yet, and these were thick, pictureless books (my father was a political science professor), but what I remember is the feeling of intense pleasure I got from looking at tables—lists of numbers spaced in columns down the page. That early pleasure in the visual form of type on the page, in my own personal mythology, I see as the harbinger of my writing life, but when I first actually began to write—for myself, not for school assignments—was when I was a disaffected teenager. Writing was a way of surviving the angst and isolation of those years, as it is for many.

SS: You served in the Peace Corps in South Africa and were able to return years later. What was it like to revisit that landscape, at once familiar and changed?

SM: I was in the Peace Corps in Botswana, southern Africa, there from Nov. 1989 to Dec. 1991. When I first returned to Botswana, about seventeen years later (I’ve since been back a number of times), in packing, I literally prepared for a place that no longer existed. I packed head scarves because when I lived in Botswana, women had to cover their heads to enter the kgotla, the central space in every village where traditional court, village meetings, and communal celebrations are held, but it turned out that was no longer required. In fact, when I asked the wife of a former student I was visiting about this, she couldn’t even remember that women having to cover their heads to enter the kgotla had ever been a thing.

I also took no cell phone, remembering that I’d had to travel to the capital, Gaborone, in order to make an international call, back in the day. Well, this wasn’t back in the day. No one in Botswana could believe I didn’t have a cell phone—they all carried one. Development over the generation since I’d left had been extreme, both in Manyana, the village I’d lived in, and in the capital. My first realization of this was visual, with the radical change in buildings; squarish houses had replaced the traditional mud and thatch rondavels as the dominant home-type in Manyana, and Gaborone had become a city of gleaming skyscrapers. But the starkly beautiful thornbush landscape surrounding Manyana, which is on the edge of the Kalahari Desert—that endured and felt wonderfully, achingly, familiar.

SS: The cover of your book Still is absolutely gorgeous. How was it chosen and how would you describe the artwork?

SM: I came across the artist, Kevin Sloane, and his incredible work, online. I knew I wanted his Cache Reef for the cover of Still as soon as I saw it. I felt there was a real synchronicity between his image and the poems, with Cache Reef’s still life-like arrangement of both living and human-made objects, with his fusion of the beyond-human world and reenvisioned traditional still-life memento mori gestures, such as a pile of clocks in a giant clam and an ominous image of a hummingbird closely approaching the flame of a candle. And of course Still also includes poems where sea and sky creatures loom large, including barred owls, turkey vultures, Caribbean reef squid, and others, so there was that resonance as well.    

My editor at Persea, Gabe Fried, agreed the image was right for the book; Persea then contacted the artist and bought the rights. Their designer came up with the final cover design, which I love as well.

SS: Still unfolds a cornucopia of imagery that is anything but “still” in the theatres of memory and imagination, with a structure that both organizes and sets loose the poems’ imagery, while the poems all adhere closely to theme. Did you start this project focused on writing the theme, or did theme emerge from your daily writing? What thoughts created and drove this project?

SM: The motifs and concerns of Still emerged as I was writing, not before. Looking back at my files, I see I first started writing poems that ultimately became a part of Still in 2013. I was writing then about various particulars that had caught my attention traveling, both natural and artistic—flag trees in Wyoming, the chandelier at the Bone Chapel in the Czech Republic that contains every bone of the human body—and the idea of poem as still life emerged fairly quickly. I was thinking then, what would happen if I put these very different things together—what energy would come from their juxtaposition? What would happen if some of these “objects” were human-made objects, but many were living beings, especially the beyond-human?

From there my perennial obsessions—travel and ecology, how interconnected and endangered our world is—fused with a new one: Renaissance cabinets of wonder, which brought together small, human-made aesthetic objects, such as miniature paintings, with natural objects, such as shells, feathers, and animal skulls gathered from distant places, places Europeans claimed as “discoveries.” As beautiful things, these unfamiliar and often yet uncategorized objects resonated for their early viewers with wonder. But from this present moment, I couldn’t help but see these cabinets as harbingers of the full catastrophe of western imperialism, evocative of annihilation—cultural and environmental—as well as survival.

Researching cabinets of wonder entwined with my thinking about the still life, which led me to a meditation on the multilayered word “still” itself, which of course means something motionless or lifeless, but also something that remains; the word suggests, then, both violence and survival, just as the cabinets and their objects did, as well as a state of receptivity, as in the stillness of meditation. The final book is structured in sections labeled as “cabinets,” reimagining the Renaissance concept of the studiolo: a room for contemplation which displayed multiple cabinets of wonder.

SS: I was enchanted by the repeating strategy that you use in many of your poems of questioning a past action: “Didn’t I heal the wound / I cleaved you to?” “wasn’t I there to soften / the blow,” “didn’t / we bear it, all of it” are just a few examples. What overall effect do you hope this strategy will have on the reader?

SM: To me, in hindsight, this structure of question fuses the sense of speaking one’s truth with expressing a kind of incredulity, and can do so via a number of tonal registers—uncertain or angry, pleading or manipulative. This connects to the book’s concern with sexual and environmental violence: the examples you quote here are all from persona poems, from the perspective of a tongue-eating louse, a glacier mouse (a moss-covered glacial stone)/child abuser, and a working donkey whose owner has sold him for his skin.

SS: I noticed that many of your word choices weave throughout the collection, like “bone,” “glass,” “seed,” and the color white, among others. How did you select them; are they favorites overall in your writing or endemic to this particular book? And I know that this is as difficult as answering, “What is your favorite book?” but here we go:  What is your favorite word—or three? Did someone gift them to you or was it love at first sight?

SM: I don’t have a favorite word, but I love words that resonate with multiple, sometime opposing, meanings—like “still.” The working title of the book I’m about 2/3 finished with now is Bind, and that’s a similar, resonant word for how it suggests connection, in positive and negative incarnations, as well as being in a difficult spot—appropriate, it seems to me, for a work focused on climate and other disasters. (The earlier working title for the collection came from the title of one of the poems: “Cold Comfort for Doom.”)

I also like words that can be used as multiple parts of speech. Creating new words by changing their parts of speech, as well as juxtaposing them to create new compounds, is something that runs through Bind, as you can see in the poems included for this feature. Another core element in the poems of Bind is the creation of new, related forms based on vowels. Dante—erroneously—claimed in Il Convito (The Banquet) that auieo was an obsolete Latin word meaning to tie, to bind, as with words. I became fascinated with this idea. Through univocals (such as “Hindsight, v.,” here, which uses only the vowel “i,” and “Hoodoo-Flock, n.,” which uses only “o”), bivocals (such as the “au” combination in “Umlaut-Trauma, n” and “oa” in “Coda: Flashback-Gloss, v.”), and multivocals that follow the auieo pattern within a single poem, Bind imagines these patterns as languages, creating together a lexicon which embodies and explores tension between power and resistance as well as ecological devastation and survival.

For fun, I just did a word cloud of Bind, and not surprisingly, the most common words to date are “trees,” “remember,” “say,” and “back.” And I have to admit that when I had my dissertation defense (the dissertation, in revision, became my first book, Nomadic Foundations) at the University of Denver (in 1995!), I remember Rikki Ducornet, who was on my committee, making a comment about “all those resonant bones” in the collection—so apparently my obsession with that elemental word is longstanding and continues!