January 2023
Caesura Presents…Sara Lupita Olivares
Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image Journal, and elsewhere. She lives, teaches, and writes in the Midwest.
Of Uncertainty & In-Betweenness
John:
Congratulations on the publication of Migratory Sound; it is such a beautifully compelling book. I’ve read it three times now and cannot get enough. I’d love to start at the beginning, if I may, by which I mean your very first line:
before loss there is habit the moon implied beyond a fence
There’s something here that resonates with and weaves through the entire collection. Loss and what comes before it. Things being implied, not directly stated or shown. And the deeply (and unfortunately) human habit of building fences to divide. Can you tell me a bit about how you feel these themes help define Migratory Sound?
Sara:
Thank you, John—I appreciate you spending time with Migratory Sound and am honored to talk with you! The implied feels present throughout the book and in this poem, often in its connection to what can be lost or the ways that what has been lost still feels near. Lately I have been working through the ways in which we have been conditioned in terms of what we see and what we expect to see based on the past and on things that we have visibly or invisibly inherited. This feels like a lifetime project, but it is more so at the forefront in this collection.
In any subject that I am exploring, there is a distance that I work to maintain in attempting to sort of honor what I am writing about and to allow it to be multidimensional and beyond just my seeing. I think that this quality of space is connected to the divisions of place with the fences and the sense of attention and othering that these lines can define.
John:
Yes, divisions and distance. I sense quite a lot of both in your work. Yet there’s always a drive to understand, to connect, to empathize and unify. Perhaps it’s just part of the human condition to seek to heal the divides we ourselves hew. This reminds me of your poem “Collective,” which reads:
The birds highlight absence.
Similarly we make ourselves appear
as though illusory.
What does the body begin to owe.
Each debt it sinks
itself into.
In your work, how do you balance self-imposed ruin with that deep desire to not be ruined? Can one be both their own wound and own salve? And how do you feel this contradiction relates to the theme of migration that’s so gorgeously woven throughout your book?
Sara:
Self-imposed ruin feels so important here and the inability for us to see the ways we may operate in these ways. The base gesture for any of us I think and hope is of love—for ourselves and our surroundings—but I do believe that we can get outside of ourselves at times.
In movement or migration there is a circular quality of rebuilding and reorienting, and I think this process encourages us to be more present within our lives. The cyclical quality found in place has always been something I am perceptive to, and here within the collection in looking at how family members of mine initially became rooted in Michigan through work that was dependent upon the Midwest region and its seasons.
Anytime I leave a place there is a process of grieving, and I think about this each time I have moved. There has often been a sense of duty within leaving, for both myself and my family, and the need to also protect oneself wherever we may be. The illusory, or taking on an illusory state, seems tied to this as well as something learned and something that can be conditional to place.
John:
Throughout your poems, which are so often deeply rooted in a sense of place, there is always a sense of, as you say, the conditional. You have a birch tree that’s described as “impersonal” and a boat that “wore me,” and everything seems teetering, barely balancing, on the lip of existing for its own sake and existing conditionally. In the poem “Radiant,” you write:
we had been
looking
for air
the entire
time
Across the book’s precise yet expansive exploration, there’s a sense of longing for some kind of knowledge, epiphany, maybe even capital T “truth,” if such a thing even exists. What is it you think the speaker in these poems is really looking for? Is it something that reflects the deep emotional needs of all peoples?
Sara:
I think of Simone Weil’s idea of truth and the role of a sort of self-annihilation necessary in finding this. And maybe not finding it, but in delineating barriers that may keep us further from some idea of it.
With any subject or sense that I am writing around I think there is the importance in working to remove the self in some way and of seeing a situation at its essence. There are moments where I think this seeking feels more dire and it feels present throughout here in processing through trauma.
The poems within this collection look to an intuitive sense of truth, as well as a truth connected to more identifiable or concrete instances. I see this specifically in the ancestral work happening within the poems. These two particular questions of truth feel like incarnates of one another at times in looking back at what we carry from generation to generation and then the reality of social factors that are present and that have been present. In any seeking, I think that the poems do try to find understanding.
John:
Since we’re talking about truth, I’d love to pick your brain about what I tend to call “truth vs. fact,” in that what truly matters is the underlying truth of a situation, not so much being factually accurate in a poem. Poetry is, at least to me, more akin to emotionally intuitive fiction than nonfiction or autobiography. Yes, many poems can be “connected to more identifiable or concrete instances,” but even in those cases we often need to embellish the facts in order to harness the fullness of the truth. This naturally brings us to Pablo Picasso’s famous quote: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” How do you feel truth and fact mingle, part ways, manipulate each other, feed and sustain each other, and otherwise play crucial roles in your poetry?
Sara:
In a poem and anywhere else, I value the inability to really know. I think in any form of art there is a transference happening and there are elements that will be lost and images that resurface on their own. I don’t think that I believe something is less real, or perhaps true, because it can’t be comprehended or maybe even seen. Maybe this is the underlying quality that you mention.
I have been thinking about Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” When I am writing and a place, animal, or anything else presents itself I believe that these come from real places within memory or that it comes from a means of perception that feels near the seeing that happens in dreams. The logic and quality of understanding in dreams—despite them often feeling illogical—has taught me how to navigate within a poem. The language found here feels intuitive and I think that in a poem I am typically more concerned about conjuring up a sense or feeling than directing it too much.
There is a limitlessness within poetry, but I think that this makes it that much more fragile. Sometimes in a poem I am trying to figure out how to say what I want to say, or I am writing to another who maybe is not there, and so forth. That feels like so much of the joy in creating art though, in being able to see what is within these gaps and beneath
John:
I love the idea of a poem need to be “fragile.” I often speak of how every poem should be deeply vulnerable, that the poet should always be truly honest with themselves in order for that honesty to felt on the page. And the uncertainty, delicacy, and fragility is a huge part of that. Similarly, if the poet isn’t surprised at their own work, how could a reader be? Do you find yourself surprised by your own work? When composing a new poem, do you have an idea of where it’s headed, or do you let the poem find itself during the writing process?
Sara:
I am definitely an advocate for surprises within poems, in beginning them and in seeing where they end. Within this collection, a lot of the shorter poems began while in the midst of walking or in doing something more so physically that let me think about them indirectly. Shorter poems for me feel like they happen more unexpectedly in thought, and they feel clear and whole when they do.
I think that forms have been helpful for me in beginning a poem with a different intention of movement and these have taught me to sometimes stay with a poem longer than I may have without the form. Maybe the constraints here almost help in letting the mind maneuver differently without needing to think of how it wants to take shape.
When reading or writing, I go to poetry knowing that I will end up having part of me softened or awakened or anything else. There is something too with connecting with ourselves and with others in ways that you cannot necessarily imagine. I think that a poem should initiate a journey of some kind and if I feel like I know where I am then I usually need to keep going.
John:
I’d love to focus on the ideas you present about the initiation of a journey. I whole-heartedly agree that poetry isn’t per se about “meaning” but about allowing the reader to have an experience—usually an emotional one, sometimes a conceptual one—fueled by the way we shape our experiences on the page. Too often folks (often non-poetry readers) ask what a poem “means,” to which I can only respond “what does it mean to you?” If it struck them in almost any way and took them on their own journey, regardless of the destination, I feel I’ve succeeded.
This kind of wild sensory experience seems at the heart of your work. So many poems in Migratory Sound simply explode on the page in natural imagery then leave us not quite sure what we’ve just experienced but knowing we have in fact had an experience. How do you approach your unique way of exploring imagery? And how do you walk that tightrope between not showing too much but never showing too little in a poem, allowing for readers to actively participate in a poem’s becoming?
Sara:
Yes—that need for a singular meaning can be so present! Which I think can make poetry seem beyond one’s understanding in a way that can feel personal. When I was in workshop during graduate school, I can remember so many conversations with teachers about accessibility. I remember feeling guilty in ways because I didn’t want to be writing work that wasn’t letting the reader in, but I also wanted to keep following what I felt I needed to. This accessibility exists in two ways for me in wanting the arts to be something that everyone has the privilege of, and in allowing the writer to be able to share their voice and seeing in ways that do not compromise their overall vision.
Within my own work, I feel like I am always following a Modernist thread in believing more in the image over my saying. Imagery goes back to dream for me and the associative qualities that are here. I think that images have more visceral knowledge within them, and they encourage feeling over thinking. Whether the images within my poems are reappearing through memory or in response to a painting or some other form of visual art, I am within the belief of the reader finishing the poem and it in part being out of your control.
I love moments of reading when something is illuminated but I can’t fully find the source, and I want that sort of conversation to happen within my work as well. In returning to the poem during my editing process I usually then know if there are instances that shift the poem in a direction that doesn’t feel tonally right or that has a different weight to it. I try to trust my process and that the layers that are there go together.
John:
Yes, I feel that poetry really comes from that search for illumination without knowing its source. Knowing that source, being so certain, is more the place of prose. But poetry always feel more of an attempt to understand, a desire to grasp what may or may not be graspable.
This idea of things being implied, not directly stated, is woven throughout your book. For example, there are these lines from the poem “Circuit”:
each morning the sulfuric air my inheritance is a dialogue of
transgressions the sound and shape of the landscape omitted
I really love those lines. Given so much of your work, like this poem, doesn’t use punctuation, I wonder if you feel that structural decision is linked to your feelings on incompleteness, that words strung together without overt beginnings or endings enhances that process of reaching and journeying. Maybe if you included too many periods, you would have inadvertently shown us that mysterious, unreachable, much sought-after source of illumination.
Sara:
“Circuit” began as a sonnet, so it is interesting to think of completeness or incompleteness here. The form helped me begin the poem and it let me feel like I was following a path, knowing that there would be a turn or sway, as the form requires. In my editing process I shifted the poem around a bit which disrupted the form that it began with. There is a circular quality to the subject matter and then to the way the lines blur throughout, which feels tied to the quality of thought that was present while writing this piece specifically.
Usually, my decision to omit capitalization or grammar has to do with a heaviness or a sense of formality that I think these elements can have. Grammar and form have often felt tied to ways of saying and creating that have been designated as cohesive or correct by certain terms. Disregarding these rules has felt important to me in thinking about my own discomfort that I have felt with them and in honoring members of my family who have been told that they speak incorrectly because of their syntax or use of Spanish.
I want for my poems to be a place where meaning can be multi-dimensional and experiential, and I also don’t think I always like to make decisions. In my more recent work, there are more poems that use punctuation like periods or question marks, and this usually has to do with pacing or with processing. I don’t know if punctuation and capitalization may encourage a directness or not, but I do think that they can bring a finality that can seem more closed.
John:
I absolutely agree that punctuation can bring a sense of certainty and finality that may conflict with your poetry, consciously uncertain and endless as it is. May I ask what you’re working on now and how it differs from the poetry in Migratory Sound? There must be a reason for the inclusion of more punctuation. Do you feel your newer work requires a greater sense of finality? Or are you simply stretching yourself creatively?
Sara:
Recently I have been focusing on my manuscript before abandoning the portrait, but I think the poems may be shifting. I don’t know how to completely tell if something is done, but it does feel pretty complete.
The poems that I have been working on look at disbelief and certainty in connection to disappearance and violence toward the body as well as the environment. There is an unseeable quality within these subjects, but also a very physical, calculable, and numerical sense. I believe that place impacts how a poem takes shape and many of the poems focus on vast, open, and somewhat empty spaces. I think this has done something to the type of friction in the lines or the need to stay with narrative differently.
While writing Migratory Sound there was a lot of walking while writing or writing on notecards. With this manuscript, I typically write on blank lineless paper and see how the form ends up there. I wish I was a bit more intentional with these shifts, but I just try to be receptive to where my curiosity is going.
John:
This sounds like an intriguing project, and one that’s changing the foundation of your writing practice. Following your curiosity, experimenting with new forms or approaches, and always pushing yourself to try something new are all, I feel, important elements to keeping your thing fresh for you, the poet, which readers will pick up on.
As a final question, as what you’ve already discussed could be considered lessons, what is one piece of essential advice you’d like to give emerging poets to keep them motivated, inspired, and always pushing their own creative boundaries?
Sara:
These changes can feel incremental and moment to moment depending on where the energy of the work is going. I try to just be mindful of whatever inner gauge I have without trying to push my poems into anything that they maybe don’t want to be.
This brings me back to what we talked about earlier here with the protected, ungraspable sense that I know within myself, and it is a place where I want to be making art or just operating from in general. I want for anyone to have a relationship to this within themselves and to honor it and to know when it may be compromised or imposed upon in any way. I think you can tell when someone is not writing or creating from that duende space and so my wants are always for people to see the need in accessing and maintaining a closeness to this. There is something stabilizing and unchanging within this and I think it has its own way of directing us.