Sarah Rosenthal : part five

What do you feel that poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I turn to poetry to be led by a different logic than the kind that produces a lot of the algorithms that increasingly dictate our behavior. Poetic logic derives from what the body knows, what arrives through the senses and heart as well as the brain. At a formative period I encountered the poetics of silence and I will pledge allegiance to that flag forever, and more and more, as the noise continues to amplify in a seemingly deliberate attempt to drown out wisdom and kindness.

I am finding that over time, doing art is less about trying to get something and more about wanting to make and to participate. Letting the ego sit quietly on the shelf for longer periods is a huge relief and actually leads to much greater productivity and happiness. I am grateful to all the friends who help me constantly recommit to a poethical (to quote Retallack) path.

Sarah Rosenthal : part four

What are you working on?

I’m engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Portland-based poet Valerie Witte. We are researching the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and their contemporaries. We had been reading material about Cage and Cunningham’s influence on contemporary art and were struck that Rainer, Forti, and other women who studied early on with Cunningham and used some of Cage’s ideas were less well known, yet made and continue to make significant contributions to the art world. They are innovators who helped redefine what dance can be and do. We wanted to bring greater awareness to these artists and to find out how studying their work and ideas might enrich our own.

The first publication this ongoing project has generated is a chapbook called The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow, a series of sonnets interspersed with letters to each other. The letters address the process of constructing the poems and what they mean to us, and branch into discussions of dance, poetics, gender, transgression, the unfolding disaster of the current political scene, and much else, in the associative weave that epistolary form enacts.

The second phase is a series of essays mashing up themes from our research with our own dance experiences. Following in the footsteps of the dancers we’re researching, we allow chance procedures to play a role in shaping the contours of this project.

This collaboration feels especially vital given that we’re both extremely busy with paid work. We feed this project by giving it our time and effort and thinking and imagination; it feeds us by providing a structure in which to continue producing creative work no matter how busy and by providing a forum for experimentation and meaning-making. We get excited about searching for innovative ways to enter each essay, and we take pleasure in our ever-deepening conversation about these artists’ work and its impact on us as well as on the larger culture.

Sarah Rosenthal : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most challenging part is entering a poetry project. I work best when I have a sturdy vessel that carries me. But first I have to build the vessel and every time, I’m thrust into beginner’s mind. It can take a long time to locate both a line of investigation and a form for pursing that investigation. While I’m waiting, I read avidly, consider many subject matters and try out various project ideas, all the while reminding myself that inhabiting the void for however long it takes is necessary in order to create new work. Sooner or later, one of my experiments develops traction, and I follow that for the length of a book or a chapbook.

At every point in the writing process I engage in a variety of practices: yoga, meditation, dance, drawing, reading across genres, watching documentaries and formally innovative films, attending dance and theater performances. I’ve always thought one of the great things about being an artist is that it’s an excuse to constantly expand yourself through active attention and participation in wellness and culture.

Sarah Rosenthal : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been immersed in Renee Gladman’s Calamities. I can’t get enough of her passion for language and the way her writing continually seeks to bring together body and mind. I’m entranced by the bemused and often funny tone of the book and the way it seamlessly integrates philosophical reflection with a sense of communion and community with Gladman’s many beloveds. I don’t want to ever exit this text but if I do, the stack on my bedside beckons: Katechon: Book One, Lines 1–500 by Michael Cross, Greater Grave by Jacq Greyja, House of McQueen by Valerie Wallace, (re)iteration(s) by Jill Darling, The Spectral Wilderness by Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Participant by Linda Russo.

Sarah Rosenthal : part one

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. A collaboration with poet Valerie Witte is forthcoming from The Operating System. Sarah edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals and is anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (P-Queue, 2008), Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2004), and hinge (Crack, 2002). She has done grant-supported writing residencies at VSC, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, NY Mills, and Hambidge, and has been a Headlands Center Affiliate Artist. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life & Professional Coach and serves on the California Book Awards jury. sarahrosenthal.net

How important is music to your poetry?

When I’m working at the top of my form, my ear drives my work. Image is important but probably second in line. I grew up surrounded by music and musicians and played the piano and flute—this has seeped in, along with the musics of multiple languages I heard as a child and my parents’ love of wordplay. Zukofsky’s maxim is always in my thoughts: upper limit music; lower limit speech. I feel compelled and designed to write poetry that means, not only in the way that sound, at the radical end, communicates its own meaning but also in the ways that we usually think of words communicating.