Poet Sarah Green on Grief, Resilience, and Crafting “The Deletions” [INTERVIEW]

Sarah Green is the author of a previous collection, Earth Science (421 Atlanta), and the editor of Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press.) She has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: I’m excited to talk about your book, The Deletions. It opens with the poem “Matter,” which you’ll recite later, and begins with the beautiful line “Today I touched lilacs.” Ordering poems in a collection is such a challenge, almost as challenging as writing a poem. What was your thought process for opening the book with “Matter,” and how you ordered and grouped the poems into sections?

Sarah: “It was really challenging to come up with the order for this book. You might have noticed it doesn’t have just one theme or one overarching story, even though the divorce is prominent. It was a constant, interesting puzzle. In the end, I decided that I wanted it to show the overlapping layers of loss and how they intersected. I’m a child of divorce, so there’s family poems about my own parents, and then there’s my own divorce, and there’s being a child and wanting a child. Instead of having separate sections for each of those topics, I decided the lived experience is that they overlap and cascade onto each other. I more intuitively allowed each section to mostly focus on—I think there’s kind of a more family section, a more romantic section, maybe a more spiritual section—but I wasn’t super strict about ‘oh, nothing else can contaminate this section,’ because I think they all talk to each other.

“In terms of this poem, I’ve always heard that you should have the first poem of the collection be one that teaches readers how to read the book, and you’ve probably heard that too. Readers have responded a lot to this one. This poem has grief in it; it’s about the death of a friend in part, and there’s this kind of slightly depressed-sounding ending. But it also has a kind of stoic resilience or acceptance, kind of meeting your fate. There’s a kind of ‘alright, this is happening and I’m actually going to let it happen,’ or ‘I’m meeting my destiny’ or something. So it has this dual nature; it has grief in it, but it also has this kind of stamina is how I look at it. And I think that that is the tone of the collection in general.

“That’s part of it, and then also, I’m kind of a fan of shorter poems to start. I’m also a musician, and sometimes I like the idea of a quick, not intimidating the reader or the listener with a 20-minute opus song. I think of this poem as kind of like a warm-up. You get the seeds of some of the things that are to come, but then you get a minute, then you can kind of breathe again.”

James: “Two Months in to the Separation, I Write Best” uses the page so effectively, with white space and separators, despite the poem being relatively short. And an em-dash as a final, elusive character. How did you approach the editing and revision process for how this poem appears on the page? That’s something that is so unique to poetry as compared to prose; the placement on the page is so important in many poems.

Sarah: “Thank you for noticing this poem. It doesn’t get mentioned very often, and I am fond of it, so I appreciate it having its moment. I took a couple of risks with form in this one and in the liver poem. For people that are just listening, there’s more horizontal white space, there are some unusual slashes creating section breaks, and like you said, there are these em-dashes that kind of leave a pause.

“I think that I was really scoring this poem, or I was trying to notate the silences in it. The underlying premise is when I was going through this divorce, I was reading these legal documents and exchanging these formal emails with my former spouse and really noticing the change in register. As a poet, we think about register and tone and diction all the time, and I thought it’s so odd to write ‘best wishes’ and things like that to the person that you were intimately close to. I think that in some ways, the kind of redacting that I felt was happening in boiling everything down to these legal exchanges—it was a very strange kind of eliding of so much other texture between us—made its way into the form of the poem. The poem kind of is more fragments or it leaves things out, and it’s trying to understand how there were these pockets of intimacy and now there’s this lack.

“I’m remembering now that there was possibly a more narrative first draft of this, maybe even a little bit more funny or sassy. It was a little bit different early on, and maybe that’s partly the arc of being in the experience versus being able to reflect on it a little bit more. But I think it always had the line breaks and the spaces in between the phrases. It always had this kind of floaty, bewildered, trailing-off quality because it’s a poem of being puzzled. I think most drafts had this kind of ‘I’m going to pause in the middle of the line and kind of wonder.’ It’s kind of a ‘I’m almost in the middle of it and then I’m reflecting and I’m trying to understand, I’m trying to put it together.’ So that floatiness, I think, was in it from pretty early on. One thing I’m noticing is that I was really trying to be greedy about how much enjambment could do for me. I’m looking, it says, ‘as if there was just this’ and then there’s a big break and then two slashes and then ‘one chance.’ I wanted it to read ‘as if there was just this one chance,’ but also ‘as if there was just this,’ and I wanted that to just mean on its own.”

James: There are so many decisions involved in editing and publishing a collection of poetry. You’ve touched on a couple of them. One of the most fundamental is knowing when you have a complete collection. What was your thought process to pivoting from writing poems to crafting a collection, and the sort of changes that occurred once you realized, ‘Oh, I actually have a book here’?

Sarah: “A couple of people have noticed that this is a pretty skinny, slim collection. It’s right on the line of what would make a full-length book usually. For a long time, I knew that I wanted to write a book that in part included some of my infertility and pregnancy grief, baby grief, mother grief. For years, even while I was still married, I knew that this book was in some way coming, and I’d resisted crafting it because I really wanted a different ending. This is not related to the marriage at all; I just wanted an ending where there was a baby. So I kept not writing the book. I was like, ‘I know that I’m going to write a book eventually about these griefs that are coming along the way, but man, it’d be so nice if it could end in this other way.’

“In some ways, when the marriage ended and I was looking at the pieces of everything, it allowed me to have the courage to face what was lost and also accept this isn’t going to have that kind of ending. This book is not going to be tidy. In fact, this is going to be a book about losing a lot of things. Once I realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be a book of loss, not necessarily full recovery or salvaging all the way,’ it actually gave me more insight into how it could be a collection. I also had these stray friend elegies; some of the poems in this book are almost 20 years old. I had a previous collection that I didn’t ever do anything with. So once I realized it was going to be a book about seeing a lot of things implode and then kind of coming across the artifacts and figuring out what to do with those pieces, then the collection started to come into view.”

James: In the poem “Arrhythmias” you write:

A stranger in Bangalore tracks the monitor.
The Mars Rover is not afraid, I heard the Canadian
astronaut say on air to a small boy.

I love how this poem combines two images that are so seemingly unrelated on the surface in such a striking and effective way. The poem is a wonderful example of how poetry can interleave images in such a compact form. Talk about writing and revising this poem and combining these two on the surface seemingly unrelated images that work so well together.

Sarah: “I’d always been struck by some anecdotes of that Mars Rover radio moment. That had always stood out to me, and this is often how I’ll make a poem is that something will stick out and I don’t know why, and I kind of log it for later, bookmark it for later. I just know there’s something about that moment that’s speaking to me, and I’m not going to question it, I’m just going to hold it, and then at some point it will emerge at the right time.

“I knew that I had always found it so odd that we have the technology that I could be wearing a heart monitor and someone in another country could be telling me what’s happening in my own body. That’s so odd, but it was also comforting at the time because it was a lonely, scary time to be having some heart stuff, and I found myself ringing up this hotline—I always thought that there was poetry in this—I would ring up this kind of hotline on the heart monitor and say, ‘I’m having this sensation, explain it to me,’ basically, ‘Am I okay? Am I safe?’ That was such an unusual thing. At some point, it became clear to me that there was a connection between the feeling of being—I felt like I was in outer space in some ways. I was the Mars rover. I was the thing that was untethered or that was far out and that would sort of be radioing back in a way, like, ‘This is what I’m experiencing, can you make sense of it? Can you bring me home?’

“I think that connection started to become apparent, and the texture of having a second thing happening, I think was helpful because it’s challenging—you know, Emily Dickinson, as you know, said, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ We do like, I think readers and poets alike, we respond to, we like to hear about people’s real lives, but we’re most interested in when they can find some kind of angle that’s interesting or novel. So this was my angle.”

James: “Fifty Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth” is a terrific title for a poem, setting up what I expected to be a list poem, then going in a different direction. Titling poems is a challenge for many poets. What’s your approach to finding titles? Are you one of these miracle poets where they just pop into your head, or are you like most of us where the title is just an agony in itself?

Sarah: “I think I alternate between the two. In this case, it was an actual book that I owned in the 80s because I was a little ecological kid, and it felt like a gut feeling, like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of an irony that we were taught that people my age—I’m an elder millennial—we were taught that we were going to be able to do all these lofty things and we haven’t really been able to do those.’ So there felt like there was a connection between that feeling you have when you’re a kid, like your generation or you are going to be able to solve all these sweeping problems, and then what comes with age is realizing some limitations. There felt like a connection between that initial idealism and some of the idealism of being a new bride.

“But in terms of your bigger question, I’m looking through now. Often I’m looking for a central image or a central symbol. Sometimes I’ll pull words or lines directly from the poem itself. I think The Deletions is literally a word in the poem and then it became the title poem. But other times, like when I’m looking at ‘Lariat,’ ‘Elegy,’ I think often I will write either an image from a poem or a central line or word or phrase from a poem. Or sometimes it seems like I have this almost tick of wanting to almost provide a caption the way you would to a photograph, like a place and a date. So I have a varied approach.”

James: The poem “Lorain County, 1999” is a powerful example of a poem capturing a moment, without the need for paragraphs of context. It’s chilling. Your poem opens:

The driver says You're lucky you got me. Some other guy—He stops. Cornfields press in.

When capturing a moment like this, how did you approach what to include, what to invent, and what to leave out?

Sarah: “This was a real scenario. I would say that the circumstances and the tone and the danger are real. What I invented was, in some ways, the dialogue. The dialogue is a reimagining of a very long-ago remembered exchange. It’s a kind of lyric condensing, which is what poems can do, right? Poems can condense because it’s probably an hour drive or something. It’s a lyric condensing of a kind of cataloging. It seemed, as I remember it, much of that drive was a person basically telling me how it’s not safe out there for women. And as I’m riding, I’m thinking, okay, this is kind of weird, hearing kind of percolating in the knowledge that this one person knows what guys are capable of. It was a very unusual thing.

“In order to get that across, it seemed to me that the alternate reality that he was alluding to, that I was supposedly safe from by being in his vehicle, that alternate reality where I was in danger out there became more and more close to home. It started to feel more and more almost tangible. It got closer and closer the longer we were in this car together. It’s like the separation between the bad guys out there and the guy in here, it all started to kind of just come closer and closer together. I think that resulted in the poem me wanting to illustrate and characterize, get really vivid with the dangers that he was describing, and in particular, what I think the poem gets across that was implied in his narrative, not it wasn’t explicit in our dialogue, but was the pleasure, the relishing that it seems he was relishing managing these urges that I think he was having and navigating not acting on them. But there was a pleasure in there somewhere. So I think in the poem, I try to get across that he might be saying he is rejecting these ideas, but he’s lingering on them in this kind of way that is kind of almost eroticizing the violence.”

James: “Tinder Bio – a cento of lines from the dating app profiles of Minnesota men” is such a fun collection of found lines, including:

I've made mistakes. I'm not gonna be your first choice.
Can we skip to the part where we're comfortable in silence with one another?

When I interviewed songwriter Daniel Ash, he noted that he uses the cut-up method for song lyrics, pulling phrases from sources like The National Enquirer and other magazines with over-the-top writing. How did you approach crafting and editing this poem?

Sarah: “It was very fun. It started as a bunch of screenshots. I was on the apps, post-divorce, and every time I would come across a particularly outlandish bio—I think I was actually just experiencing some dating burnout, so I needed something to keep me motivated or interest my brain.

“At first, I just saved all these screenshots on my phone, and I couldn’t decide what to do with them, but I started to think, ‘I wonder what I could do, I wonder if I can get these into a poem.’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, right, there’s a form for this.’ Then what emerged was, I typed them all out, and then even though they’re individual voices, I tried to arrange them in a way where it almost could work as a monologue of some kind by one person or some kind of collective, composite voice of the apps. It was really fun to put them together, but it was pretty quick, just kind of moving things around so that there was a natural next sequence.

“I used to have more sentences in one line, and this poem was published in Pleiades, and the editor, Jenny Molberg, actually made some suggestions about even spacing, even kind of slowing things down even more. So I really owe her some of the edits on just letting each line breathe on its own. It’s really fun to read this one out loud because every time I’m at a reading and I get to end with ‘Jeremy is my real name,’ people kind of make a little sound. It’s very fun.”

James: One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Apostrophe,” wants to be read aloud. The poem begins,

So often, I've shouted hello from a dock.
Water bouncing like light. Sound coming back
in the shape of a heron rising and leaving.

What role does reading your poems out loud play in the editing and revision process?

Sarah: “I mostly read aloud for cadence/not exactly meter, because I don’t write in meter, but I’ll just say cadence, really looking for a little bit of a regular rhythm of stresses. Some of that comes from this musician background. I have a past as a singer-songwriter. I’ve been a singer for my whole life and then at some point I also picked up the guitar. About a little over a decade ago, I put out a folk record as a duo with a bluegrass musician. So I do have a past as a folk singer, and I hear that sometimes in the way that I approach the line.

“I’m always trying to balance sound and image. I’m always tinkering with the line and also with stanza breaks so that I can satisfy some of the wishes I have for the music of the poem while simultaneously rendering the kind of visual impact that I’m hoping for. That’s always kind of the dance.”

James: “The Mower in the Dew” memorializes the death of a friend. Poems like this are so challenging to write and edit, with the subject no longer here to respond or comment. I’ve been asked to write a few poems about people who have passed, and agonized over every word, and been terrified of the live reading which comes along with it in almost every case. It’s likely most poets will be asked or compelled to write a poem about the passing of a loved one. What advice do you have for how to approach such an emotional and important task?

Sarah: “When I teach my students the elegy form, I always teach it on the same day as the ode, every time. My advice for both of those occasional poems is that I think the best odes and the best elegies contain a snippet of their opposite because that’s what real life feels like. So, even if it’s a grief poem, it’s also a celebration poem. Or even if it’s almost a psalm of gratitude, it has a little bit of a shadow of, ‘what if I lose this?’ or ‘I didn’t used to have this,’ or ‘someday I won’t have this.’

“So I think some of my advice for writing about a loss is, yes, the spirit of it is mourning, but the goal should be to characterize the living person enough that upon their loss, the reader feels it too; they feel that departure with you.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast