Sam Rush Explores Identity and the Beauty of Sonnets in “Swallow” [INTERVIEW]

Sam: “I think a lot of poetry comes from this idea of obsession. I’ve heard a lot of poets talk about how the reason they write something is because they just can’t stop thinking about it. And what I found when I was working on the poems in this book is that a lot of the obsessions I kept coming back to sort of crossed over. One thing they crossed over in was this idea of ingesting something, taking it in, and it becoming different. I also really love birds. Birds are something that come up in my poems over and over, and especially during the time I was writing this book, I kept finding birds in my poems. I don’t remember the exact moment I picked that title, but it felt like it jumped out with the double meaning—these two things. And yeah, just the idea of taking something in, it changing, becoming part of you, and the cycle of digestion and expulsion was really important to me.”

James: Yes, it’s a very flexible word, and it’s not been hopelessly overused, like the word “hope.” At some point, there was a poet who stole the word for good, so it can’t really be used again in any significant way.

Sam: “And I think when I started working on this, there’s a poem right at the beginning of the book that alludes to that. The work draws from many definitions of ‘swallow’—some of it comes from a Google search for the word. Once I found the title and started thinking about it more, the book definitely became a space that grapples with the trans experience. One thing that’s always stayed with me in my thoughts about the trans experience is this cycle of swallowing identity. I think identity, for any person, is a conversation with yourself—the internal self that’s not exposed to the world—and a conversation with the world. It’s about how we perceive ourselves and how the world perceives us. And to me, that feels like a series of swallows. We’re following a story that’s told to us, and we’re swallowing the world, and the world is following us. This kind of back-and-forth.”

James: I first discovered your poetry through Olivia Gatwood who shared one of your sonnets on Instagram. I was immediately captivated by your use of the form.  An excerpt from “Sonnet for burial rites & my firsts night on Grindr” that I found particularly effective: 

Their hasty needs. Their powdered power husks,
all musting & all must & all steeped in musk
& inborn androgen & close to blowing
only in the presence of a stiff breeze.

What draws you to sonnets, and the ways in which you nudge the rules of the sonnet? 

Sam: “I’m hard of hearing. I often spend a lot of time consciously running through possibilities of sounds that are very similar in my head. And I think, because of that, I’ve always been drawn to rhyme. My sonnets aren’t necessarily always formally rhyming, but I do keep that part of the formal sonnet structure in mind when I write. So even if they’re not perfect rhyme sonnets, I still play a lot with rhyme, assonance, and sound. To me, even if it’s not exactly the same as a formal sonnet, that structure still feels like a through line.  

“I’ve always been drawn to that in sonnets—when I was first exposed to them in school, I loved them. But I think what I most love about sonnets is that they’re a container. I was talking about them with a friend once, and they described them as like a little room with a diving board at the exit. You have this very small space to fit things in, but then right at the end, to me, that’s the most important part—the Volta. 

“The Volta is a shift, a change at the end that alters everything before it. It’s like a lens through which to see everything before, where you suddenly realize, ‘Oh, it was different the whole time.’ That also feels like a very transformative, even queer, concept to me—that there’s this moment that changes your perspective, and you look back and say, ‘Okay, there was something happening there all along.’ I’ve always loved that.  

“I wrote in free verse for a long time, and when I started playing with sonnets, I really appreciated having to pare things down and fit them into this little box. It forced me to get to the heart of what I was saying without playing around it quite as much.”

James: I went through something similar. I wrote free verse for years and years—no punctuation, lowercase, really easy-flowing style with a use of the page—and then I started exploring more received forms. Some sonnets, I wrote one sestina, which nearly killed me, but I’m very proud of it. A whole bunch of different formal forms. I tried not to approach them as assignments for school, but more to find where a poem felt like it should be a sestina. I’d take all this raw material and mold it. Like you said, it becomes a mold you pour into, and then you can nudge the rules if you want to. That’s the beauty of poetry: the rules are there if they’re intentionally helpful, and if they’re not, you can break them. It’s interesting that you came to the sonnet after your free verse journey.

Sam: “Were there any forms that, after you played around with them, really stuck with you? That you think you came back to?”

James: I love writing sonnets, forcing myself to find and hide the rhymes. Though, of course, I’ll break the rules with slant rhymes and other things. Sonnets are so compact and powerful. For the one sestina I’ve written, which was actually about the Tenderloin Museum for an upcoming book, I just felt the complexity of the form matched the complex history and contradictions of the Tenderloin, and I thought it was perfect. I didn’t start intending to write about the Tenderloin Museum using a sestina, but I’d always wanted to write one. I thought, ‘This is the perfect thing for this.’ So yeah, I now view it as just adding more colors to my palette, more tools. It’s really useful.

Sam: “Yeah, well, sestinas are so challenging, but there’s something about them… I think any form where a specific word keeps coming back kind of reminds me of when you see something in the world or hear about something for the first time, and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere. You know? There’s something cool about that. It feels, in a way, like it echoes the way memory works.”

James: One of the many things I love about writing poetry is the role that titles of poems play. Finding the perfect title of a poem can sometimes be as challenging as writing the poem. There are multiple wonderful titles, but this one in particular stood out:

“TV is making shows about gay teenagers & I still can’t masturbate to the cowboy movie because my body requires a more plausible argument as to why I’m in the room” 

This title for a prose poem is wonderfully impractical in length. How do you approach finding titles for your poems?

Sam: “I’ve talked about how it feels nice to have this limitation, this boundary, and I feel like the title of that poem you just read, and the poem in general, are kind of leaning into the opposite of that. I think the impracticality is part of the form. The poem deals with this disorientation of trying to find an identity that doesn’t feel accessible or, I guess, inflatable in a physical or sexual experience. So, trying to navigate, even with yourself, as a physical experience in a sexual context, but needing to place yourself in a story in order to do that—and not knowing how to, not having a story with which to follow.  

“I think the title being this maximalist, everything-stream-of-consciousness, almost overwhelming thing—it feels very clunky. It’s like talking to someone whose brain is moving a thousand miles a minute. I think that’s because that’s what it felt like to be in that space—there were just so many things happening in this stream of consciousness.  

“But yeah, titles differ a lot. For the sonnets, I tend to have a lot of fun with them. They’re usually a sonnet for one thing and another. I’ve really enjoyed that as a constraint because it’s been fun to think of two things that feel disparate, but are in conversation with each other in the sonnets. I also, okay, I don’t always use the rhymes, but I do think there’s something to the back-and-forth, like the Shakespearean rhyme scheme—ABAB. Having these two elements, even if they’re not directly connected, feels like a back-and-forth, a one-two, one-two, even if it’s all mixed together in a mixing bowl.”

James: Titles play such an important role in poems, and it’s something that sets poetry apart from traditional prose and novels. In novels, chapter names can be important to some degree, but not to the extent of the title of a poem. The title of a poem can almost be a poem in itself.

Sam: “Yeah, absolutely. There are some writers where sometimes you see a poem, and it’s like the title is its own Volta. You read the poem and then, with the title, everything becomes something different, which is so beautiful.  

“I was actually thinking—are you familiar with the Terrance Hayes sonnet? I think it’s just called… well, it’s the one with the line ‘We slice the watermelon into smiles.’ Does that ring a bell?”

James: It happens in so many of these interviews—I’m going to immediately afterward go scurry off and rediscover it.

Sam: “Yeah, it’s so beautiful. The title is a sonnet in itself. It’s one that I think, yeah, the title changes everything. Then it’s just the sentence ‘We slice the watermelon into smiles’ repeated 14 times, but broken up into traditional sonnet stanzas. I don’t know, it’s one of my favorite examples of a sonnet because of how the title shapes it. You have this idea of the Volta, and the way each stanza holds its own meaning—even though it’s the same sentence, now because it’s called a sonnet, it changes everything.”

James: “Swallow” is such an interesting mix of forms: sonnets mixed with experimental forms that challenge the reader in such a satisfying way. The poem “27 explanations for the lump” includes the lines: 

Once the fermentation starts the jar must be burped
at intervals release the CO2 shit fizzing of decay
& champagne stings the tongue like kissing dying

I particularly enjoyed the challenge of reading this poem out loud because there was so little punctuation, with multiple paths for vocalizing the poem. 

How do you approach finding the form that works for the poem? 

Sam: “When I first started writing poetry, I would compose it in my head. I would just kind of—well, I was walking or going about my day—and I would make them up, but I would often never write them down. I was really involved in spoken word, so I would just make up poems and then I’d go to an open mic and say them. But when it came time to write them down, that was always really challenging, because it didn’t feel like putting it on the page was the way it was meant to be.

“I think as I’ve written more, especially as I’ve started writing more on the page, I do try to think about how my brain needs to process the things I’m thinking about. In free verse poems, I usually pick a form that feels like how my brain needs to think through the ideas, unless there’s a specific reason to do something otherwise. 

“I tend to be pretty experimental with language and sound, and I feel like my reader is already going to have to do enough work in that way. So I try to chunk ideas together so it’s not so difficult for the reader to just figure out what’s going on in the poem. 

“So for 27 explanations for the lump, it has repetition, where each stanza starts with ‘Once,’ and there are these little stories. Each one is potentially an explanation, and the poem itself is about finding a lump in my breast. So each ‘once’ is a potential explanation for why this lump exists.” 

James: I read, and re-read, and read once more the poem “After the moonshine I wake up beside a fern”. The poem reads like a soliloquy, it demands to be read aloud, to be performed. An excerpt I particularly love: 

Oh seed Oh sun
Oh supplicant
who prays outstretched & standing
Oh holy song
sung upright & only to the hook
on which the brightest star is hung
there must be some
god that lives
within these lungs

What role does performing your poetry out loud play in your editing and revision process? 

Sam: “Like I said, I used to really just write poems in my head. They were all about sound. I think I’ve heard some authors, some poets say, you know, there’s not a difference between a page poem and a stage poem. It’s just how you read it. And I have to say, for my own work, I don’t necessarily agree. I think that every poem I write is very concerned with sound, so I’m always thinking about the way something sounds in my head. 

“But I do also think that there are things that happen on the page. As a person with hearing loss, sometimes I have a hard time processing things from sound. So, I sometimes write a poem, and I do write it to be seen as well as heard, but always the sound and the rhythm of it—I’m always thinking about the way the sounds fit together.”

James: But I think it’s so interesting that poems—there’s the poetry on the page that you read and interpret, and it sounds the way it sounds to you. There’s the poet performing the poetry just with sound. There’s seeing the poem performed by that poet, and then seeing someone else perform a poem that they didn’t write. It’s like each poem has four different lives in my mind. I think that’s different from novels, where novels are more directive. Perhaps there’s pretty much one rough way to read it on the page and hear it because of the form. But poetry—the same poem could be totally different read by two different people.

Sam: “Absolutely. And I think, you know, every poem is different, but I think so often poetry is about taking an experience and then sort of cutting it down and just keeping some details or some elements. It’s that, by nature, every room that it moves to, it’s going to be slightly different. It’s so contextual.”

James: In contrast the poem “In the growing quiet my tinnitus sings to me” and to an extent “Background” are different poems if performed because the visual design of these poems is so striking. Both so effectively use the page as a canvas for print. How do you approach the balance of language and visual design in poems that are so striking visually? 

Sam: “Well, I think—so, In the growing quiet is a poem about tinnitus, and it comes from the idea that tinnitus is a constant ringing or buzzing in the ears, and it often comes from hearing loss. So, people with hearing loss often have tinnitus. One of the ideas of how tinnitus happens is that your brain is missing sound in a certain area where the hearing loss is, and so it sort of makes up the sound to fill that space. 

“So that poem explores that concept but also fills up a lot of space on the page. But I think, yeah, I was trying to also create a—well, the poem is very—there’s a lot of sound in the poem. I feel like it’s a very sound-forward poem. And it takes up a lot of space physically. So, I think what I was trying to get at in that poem was just, like, this expanding. I think that poem does that out loud as well. And obviously, you’re missing something either way.

“But I think that’s okay. I think in the same way, you know, this idea that a poem is often about taking elements away from an experience, I think there’s still something really valuable to only experiencing the poem aloud, even though you’re not getting all of it, or only experiencing it on the page, even though you’re not getting all of it. It’s just two different experiences, it seems like facets, you know?”

James: “Sonnet for old ghosts & sound which blankets the earth when finished being heard” is such a beautiful expression of loss, of hearing, of a relationship perhaps. This poem has multiple layers and interpretations, yet doesn’t have an extraneous phrase or syllable. You thank and recognize many people in the Acknowledgements. What role does feedback play in editing a poem to its essence? 

Sam: “I think I was so lucky to write this book in a really incredible community of poets. I mentioned I was involved in spoken word in New England, and so I never did any formal poetry in school at all. I didn’t do an MFA or anything like that, but I was around all of my friends in that circle at that time. We were constantly reading poetry, constantly writing poetry, and giving poetry to each other. 

“We would come together at a coffee shop, we would write, and we would read each other what we had written, and we would give each other feedback. That’s just how we spent time with each other. I think it was such a beautiful way to build a relationship, and also, I feel like I got an incredible education in poetry just from being around people like that. 

“I think it’s a huge part of my writing. The editing process is so important to my relationships, and sometimes that’s just as important. The fact that writing has brought me closer to people is, I would say, just as much a benefit to my life as the poems that came out of it.”

James: Absolutely. Relationships with other poets are really rich by nature because when you’re discussing other people’s poems and providing feedback that’s thoughtful and meaningful, you’re really diving deep in and listening and being attentive. So yes, I find that experience as well with the people that I go to for feedback.

Sam: “Yeah, absolutely.I was thinking of your episode with Francesca Bell. In that conversation—and I’m sure in so many of the conversations you have—you’re discussing something that you really care about, a way that both of you connect to the world, a way that both of you interpret the world. So, of course, it’s going to be a rich discussion. Of course, it’s going to get you further into knowing each other.”

James: The poem “The Spandrels of San Marco” is anchored to a word with multiple meanings – the architectural meaning and the evolutionary biology meaning. An excerpt:

Spandrel:

I am afraid of a love that will turn me false god
only to prove me fallacy

The poem is in some ways a form of list poem, variations on examples of spandrels. How did you approach constructing this poem and was stumbling on the word possibly a spark for the poem?

Sam: “I came across this word in an essay. I was spending a lot of time with a person who was an atheist, a very academic atheist, and so there’s an essay that some people may or may not be familiar with, called ‘The Spandrels of San Marco.’ What it sort of posits is that—I’ll explain this in the lead-up to the poem—is that our human tendency towards belief in God is the result of an evolutionary adaptation. 

“That adaptation serves the function of allowing us to predict or see motive in the things that happen around us. The idea being that if we look at something happening where there’s no apparent motive—like a rock falling off a cliff—and think that there is some kind of motive, we might think, ‘Oh, the rock was pushed by God or some magical force.’ We’re better off making that mistake than making the mistake of looking at a lion and not thinking that the lion might want to eat us. I had read that essay years and years ago, and the idea of spandrels stuck with me. 

“The fact that something is a spandrel means it’s a sort of after-effect of an evolutionary trait that has another function. Evolutionary biologists refer to this as a spandrel. A spandrel in architecture, though, is when two arches are next to each other and there’s a space between them. It’s this leftover space around a functional object. Anyway, after I came across this, I sort of carried it with me over the years. I think I ended up thinking about a lot of things as spandrels, and I would be in discussions with people and say, ‘Do you know the word spandrel? Because I feel like what we’re talking about is right here, spandrel.'”

James: There you go. Spandrel.

Sam: “Yeah, exactly. It’s like what we’re talking about is a thing that exists because other things that serve a function exist. We can mistake it for being functional in itself, but also, spandrels often become really important parts of our culture and our life. Architectural spandrels—these spaces between arches—are often a decorative feature. They get carved with portraits and so they become something unto themselves. They become something with a function. But I think it’s important to remember that functionality is part of a story as well.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.