~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Interview and Book Review -

 Sheryl St. Germain's Interview by Dixon Hearne

Thank you, Sheryl, for agreeing to this interview with Delta Poetry Review. I know it is impossible to touch upon every salient point in an interview, but I know our readers will be very interested in your keen insights, observations, and experiences as a poet and writer.

DPR: Eudora Welty once said that one place understood helps us to understand all places better. You are a native Louisianan. How do you think cultural influences from the south play a role in your writing? How does that differ from regional influences in other parts of the country? What is particular or unique about the southern experience as it relates to writing—whether narrative or poetic work?

SSG: For some of us, place is perhaps the primary shaper of voice. As a writer from the New Orleans area, I come from a place surrounded with water: Lake Pontchartrain was three blocks from our childhood home in Kenner, and the Mississippi just a couple miles the other direction. Ditches that ran alongside our homes provided incredible possibilities for discoveries as a child—crawfish and snakes for us—and hurricanes and subsequent evacuations also gave shape to my voice and personality. Early poems of mine, such as “The Lake” and “Going Home” offer great examples of how both culture and nature were in my blood from the beginning. I love drama and color; the focus on sensory perceptions in both my writing and in the fiber art that I also work with surely comes from growing up in New Orleans. Food and drink play a large part in my early poems, an aspect of place that sometimes gets overlooked. I’ve written poems and essays inspired by gumbo, red beans and rice, and bread pudding, for example. Much of my work has also been influenced by the ebb and flow of water and flood, both as a theme and formal inspiration.
          It’s tempting to flatten out cultural experience, to say most people from any given place will respond to it similarly, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In my case, I have a love-hate relationship with the South because of the many tragedies that befell my family there, mostly related to substance abuse. I moved away from New Orleans when I was almost 30 for graduate school but never returned to live because there was a part of me that feared falling into the swamp of addiction and alcoholism that took so many in my family. There was a kind of excess in my family that centered on eating, drinking, and sometimes violence that frightened me, much as I loved so much about the city, Mardi Gras and gumbo, swamps and bayous, the music and diversity. I’ve written about this ambivalence in several of my essays, and I think it also comes out in some of my poems.
          New Orleans has a specific character—one might say it is a place of strong personality—unlike that of, say, Lafayette, where I also lived for a time, or Slidell, which I have only driven through. I think the regional differences that make my voice what it is are what’s most important. That might not be the case with someone who grew up in Iowa, for example, where I also spent many years.

DPR: What is your most recent book publication? Tell us about this collection. It’s such an evocative title. Where did it come from? Does each of your published books influence the content or poetic style of subsequent poetry collections?

SSG: My most recent publication, out this year, is a hybrid collection of lyric essays and poems called Fifty Miles (Etruscan Press). It followed a collection of poems, The Small Door of Your Death (Autumn House Press) that was published in 2018. I see the two as companions in that they both explore the death of my son Gray in 2014 of a heroin overdose. Most of the poems in The Small Door were written either before or very soon after my son’s death. At that time, I was struggling to find a narrative that would help me articulate and maybe even understand his death, so these poems are pure lyric, short and sharp as a shard of glass. They investigate a mother’s grief and present, I hope, a compassionate but unsentimental portrayal of a son, his mother, and their tragic journey. The title of the collection refers, literally to the needle mark the detectives found in my son’s wrist when they discovered him, that mark a small hole, the opening that allowed the heroin into his veins, which led to his death. But I also hoped the title would be understood metaphorically. The way to the kind of death my son experienced was through a narrowing of his life and his curiosity about the world. As he became more and more tied to drugs—and there were many, not just heroin—his world shrunk until there was finally just one door left that led, ultimately, to his death.
          Fifty Miles contains some poems that I didn’t think would fit in A Small Door, and they are sprinkled between longer essays that explore cultural issues that might have contributed to my son’s ultimate choices, including his being diagnosed with ADHD at 5 and being prescribed Ritalin and Adderall, which were the first drugs he ultimately abused. There’s also a very long essay about playing video games with him; I wanted to tell a story that didn’t demonize video games but showed how that playing connected us. These are just two examples of pieces whose narrative imperatives would not have worked well in poems.
          I have been alternating publishing poetry and poems in the last twenty years. It seems almost as if once the poetry book comes out, I realize there is so much more I could have said, and the essayistic impulse takes over. And once that book is out, I long for the pure lyricism of the poem again. I feel blessed to be able to work in both genres.

DPR: How important do you think it is to experiment with form, or to at least have background knowledge of the way certain forms of poetry work?

SSG: I think it’s very important for poets to understand form before they begin to experiment with it. In my last years of teaching, I began to teach the prose poem before teaching sonnets or villanelles or even traditionally lined poetry because I wanted to make sure students understood the power of the sentence before they began to break it up into lines. I found that strategy worked well, and after having worked with the prose poem, they were then able to write lined poems whose line breaks were more intentional, and about which they could talk. After that, we began to work with some traditional forms. If you don’t know how to write a sonnet, you won’t understand how to write a broken sonnet or know how to play, or riff off that form.

DPR: We all deal with love and loss at various points in our lives. You write eloquently about the loss of your young son. It is often asserted that writing is therapeutic. How has writing helped you confront and deal with your personal loss? Do you recommend it as an intervention, i.e., more than just simple exercises?

SSG: Writing has often helped me work through tragedy. I have kept journals all my life, and the ability to shape something into a paragraph or a poem allowed me to have the (more often than not false) sense that I had some control over a situation. The poem or paragraph captured the experience, contained chaos if you will. Writing can be therapeutic, and it can contribute to healing, but it cannot substitute for therapy. I have had a therapist for over twenty years, and that relationship has counted more in terms of substantive healing than my writing has. Writing—especially poetry writing—helps me to lay things out in all their complexity. Here is the thing in all its horror and ambiguity, and maybe there is a small insight that comes out of that. It helps me to imagine other sides of a story, imagine what might have been, honor grief and darkness. I think tragedy drives many artists, not just poets, to work. While they are working, they are alive.
          It must be said that the reading of other’s works can sometimes be as healing as one’s own writing. I have taught creative writing for many years in jails and rehabilitation facilities where we begin by reading the works of others. To read a poem or story that articulates a courageous vision about some tragedy can be incredibly inspiring for the reader. Especially powerful are those works that present tragedy without moralizing or compromising a vision.

DPR: Your latest book, Fifty Miles Etruscan Press, 2020), is a mix of poetry and essays. Might you share a bit about the book, particularly its purpose and message?

SSG: The book traces my own journey and healing from substance abuse as well as my son’s journey to death. The title, Fifty Miles, represents two literal and metaphorical journeys my son and I took separately. When I was in my twenties, living in Hammond, Louisiana and attending Southeastern Louisiana University, I spent some months shooting up cocaine with a lover. At some point, I came to my senses (it’s actually much more complicated than that, but read the book to find out!) and drove fifty miles to Baton Rouge to stay with a friend who helped me recover. I took a bus to Hammond two days a week for classes until I graduated. Over thirty years later, my son would wake up one deeply foggy morning in Dallas, Texas, where he lived and had been in recovery, to drive to a small town fifty miles away, where he bought some heroin from a friend and overdosed. Many of the essays in the book, including the titular one, are lyric meditations on these two journeys.
          Overall, though, I would say this is a book about hope. Many of the pieces are about the ways I stayed sane, or tried to, while Gray was creating and living in ever troubling worlds, and how I worked with grief after he died, specifically through traditional arts such as crochet, and through traveling, gaming, teaching, and writing.

DPR: What guiding principles inform and guide your poetry and essay writing? What themes and topics (psychological, philosophical, emotional) appear most often in your writing? What literary devices and/or approaches do you favor, if any?

SSG: I am a great fan of metaphor and reflection in both poetry and the essay. I love prose poetry as well as the lyric essay, which I think of as being like a poem in old clothes. Prose lyricism might be something I’d say that I love to work with. I also love the work of poet Pablo Neruda and have always been inspired by his Odas Elementales, a collection of odes to humble things like socks, lemons, tomatoes, etc. I aim for the elemental in my own work. I aim to work as a translator might—to allow something to move through me to the page. I don’t want the reader distracted by thinking about the writing but rather to come out of a poem or essay moved and thinking in new ways.
          I also love what Franz Kafka is said to have written about good literature, that we should read only the kinds of books “that wound or stab us.” A book, he wrote, “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” I hope that my work feels like that axe.

Book Review by Darrell Bourque

The Small Door of Your Death by Sheryl St. Germain, Autumn House Press, 2018;

cover art, Gray by Morgan Everhart, oil on canvas, 2015

Reviewed by Darrell Bourque (Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2007-2011)