Susie Meserve : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I have an interesting reaction to this question, because in addition to being a poet I’m a musician and songwriter, and while for many folks those art forms are siblings—or maybe cousins—writing songs feels very different to me than writing poems. I’ve really struggled to write decent song lyrics! I want to approach a song like I approach a poem, but that doesn’t work so well. To me, it feels like a totally different muscle, and I’ve been humbled by the incredible songwriters in the world who manage to rhyme and give us an ear worm and yet also do something lyrically fresh.

But maybe that’s not what you meant. Musical language is incredibly important to me; I’m always reading my drafts aloud to listen for off-rhyme and syllabics and line length (and sometimes I purposefully mess with all of that, and create lines that aren’t so musical, to indicate distress or ugliness or the like). When I had a first draft of my current manuscript, “Refloating,” I tried to create a sense of music not just within each poem but between them throughout the manuscript. This meant being careful not to repeat adjectives, say, but to purposefully repeat certain nouns and verbs, to create echoes. I remember discovering after I’d sent it out that I’d used the verb “coax” in two poems that were too close together and kind of freaking out. Ha!

I love playing with stuff like that. It’s the joy of the work, to me.

Susie Meserve : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Recent collections that have made a deep impression on me include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, Instant Winner and The Life by Carrie Fountain, The Carrying by Ada Limón, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke, Hundred Year Wave by Rachel Richardson, In the Time of PrEP by Jacques Rancourt, and some essential ecopoetry anthologies, like Black Nature (edited by Camille Dungy) and The Ecopoetry Anthology (edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street).

Susie Meserve : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

So many. The first poem I ever adored, in part because it was familiar and yet also mysterious to me, was Muriel Rukeyser’s “Effort at Speech Between Two People.” Then I got into e.e. cummings. This was in high school, when I first started writing terrible abstract poetry (at least I was writing). Contemporary and Modern poetry blew my mind when I discovered it in college. Some of the poets who opened that world for me include Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and of course William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Later, I began to love Robert Hass, Mark Halliday, Charles Wright, Anne Carson, Li Young Lee…I could go on forever. I have shelves upon shelves of poetry books. Looking back, it’s notable how few poets of color I read in the beginning. Luckily, that’s changed. 

Susie Meserve : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes. Many times. I thought for a long time that the “I” in a poem should be taken out, obscured, muddied, that the worst kind of poem was a deeply personal poem. My first book (Little Prayers, Blue Light Press, 2018) is filled with fantastical leaps and it takes a kind of sideways look at my personal experience. In 2017, when I started work on the manuscript I’m sending out now, I surprised myself by writing intensely raw and revealing poems about my experience with motherhood and my struggles with infertility, including the life-threatening miscarriage I suffered in 2013. I had to shut off a voice telling me that this kind of writing was bad. It’s been very freeing to write about this stuff, though the challenge, always, is to find some way of moving beyond the myopically personal into more universal territory, and I’m always looking for models. Franz Wright did this beautifully in his writing about addiction, God, and mental illness.

Susie Meserve : part one

Susie Meserve is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more. Her debut poetry collection, Little Prayers, won a Blue Light Award and was published by Blue Light Press in 2018. She is also the author of a chapbook, Faith. Born and raised in New England, Susie now lives in Northern California with her family.

Photo credit: Ashley Lauren Saks

What are you working on?

I’m actually writing a novel at the moment. I have a completed poetry manuscript that’s on submission, and I’m always writing poems around the edges, but over the spring and summer some material presented itself and as I tried to fill in the blanks to make sense of it, I realized I was creating characters. The novel’s got two protagonists, a current-day mother living in Northern California and a Swedish immigrant living on the prairie in the late 1800s with her family. The characters are autobiographical to some extent, and the book is requiring research; I’m excited about it (and a little terrified). I toggle between poetry and prose quite frequently, but a novel—it feels daunting, and it is, but I’m muddling through it.