"Contributor Notes: A Q&A with Sarah Maclay" by Anne Cunanan
Contributor Notes is a new series featuring brief interviews with MORIA contributors. Below is an interview with Sarah Maclay, author of Issue Nine’s “A Breathing Lake.”
1. What kind of writing style are you most comfortable with? Why?
I teach a course called The Poetry of Night, where our flashlights on the path are poems inflected by the dreamlike and surreal, Deep Image, the liminal, and below that, perhaps, Symbolism and also sort of ontological, existential poems. That’s sort of where I live. Why? Poets like Transtromer, Lorca, Merwin, Valentine spoke so deeply to me, decades ago, and continue to and, for whatever reason, chimed with something I was up to, or something I felt given to do. I think we’re not given everything. And we don’t necessarily have a choice. And it has fanned out from there. Generally, I tend to be more comfortable as a lyric poet than narrative, but I challenge myself sometimes. Some of my newer ones are lengthy and narrative. I’m drawn to dream and to ekphrasis and to the places where borders blur or there’s maybe a sense of indeterminacy, line to line. Sometimes that means Eros.
2. Who or what first inspired you to write poetry?
I had the good luck of growing up in the country with a family that loved music and art and literature. My mother read to us every night before bed. We loved that time. So, it got in the bones. One of the first poems I can remember writing was about a lake, and the way I was starting to see beyond the reflected blue of it into the other colors, but I sort of fell hard into poetry at 13 after seeing Zeffrelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet. Within a few years, I fell for Lorca and cummings and Merwin and Sexton, then others, thanks to the Harpers and Atlantic my parents kept in the bathroom, and to Lynne Blumberg, my high school creative writing teacher and journal advisor, and the remarkable arts and writing community in Missoula.
3. Did you ever see yourself as a writer in the past? If not, what were you pursuing before writing?
Yes. Pretty much always. But not solely. I’ve also spent a lot of time with other arts—music, dance, acting, photography, film.
4. What formal elements of poetry are you most drawn toward, and have those changed over time?
White space, pacing, free verse, prose poetry, the image, figurative language, the surprise and momentary ambiguity available at the turn and the line break. Early on, I was in choirs for a decade and had read much older poems, so I had a strong foundation in meter, rhythm, and rhyme; those show up in really early poems and in some of my songs. Rhythm has stayed important, but it’s more sprung or simply an alertness to how sound falls in the air. I like that Tarkovsky notion of poetry as “sculpting in time.”
5. Are you working on any larger projects at the moment, such as a chapbook or full-length collection?
Nightfall Marginalia, the full-length that includes this poem, is coming out in 2023, from What Books Press. It’s mostly ekphrastic, and I’d say pretty liminal, with the occasional exploded OuLiPo. A friend of mine recently characterized it as a grimoire. And there’s a chapbook—The HD Sequence – A Concordance—looking for a home. Many of the poem titles are drawn from phrases in the center of HD’s Trilogy. The poems are odd, and came out of a sense of emotional urgency that was intense but short-lived.
6. What was your inspiration behind “A Breathing Lake”?
A particular image—more on this below—that I found while making a Pinterest board for my students. I’ve just discovered its origin while answering this question. It was a still shot of a moment in a Butoh dance called “Kagemi – Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors,” choreographed and designed by Ushio Amagatsu and performed by the SankaiJuku company. Here’s what he says about his title: “‘Kage' in kagemi means ‘shadow'. Both a play of light, from brightness to gloom, and the reflection shown in a mirror, on the surface of water, “mi” means “see”. Kage-mi gives us kagemi: "mirror". Origin of light, surface that we gaze upon, which looks back at us, which reflects, in which we are reflected. Rising up out of the horizontal plane of water, the face has become vertical. A vague and fleeting state evolving towards clear outlines. The right hand enquires, the left replies. To begin, set up a virtual plane.” All of this is new to me, in this moment, so it is strange to see how that starting point may have been translated so exactly to one image I was responding to, and then to the poem, without having seen the dance or known the title. That word Japanese word, kagemi, is also related to “shadow, silhouette, phantom . . . someone always at one’s side.” The work is also scored, but I was seeing it as a single shot, without motion, without sound. But here’s a link to a clip of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uv600h8JVk
7. "A Breathing Lake" had a very strong impact on us as readers. When writing the poem, did you have an idea of how you wanted the reader to respond to the piece? How much do you think about your audience while working?
That makes me so happy. Thank you. It feels so sort of off-trend to me that I didn’t know if anyone would really resonate with it. But no. I can’t think about audience at all while writing. It would stop me cold. I would be second-guessing myself all over the place. I have to just go in. Allow the poem to emerge. Find out what it wants. Sometimes there might be weeks or months between times when I can go back in and find it truly. I can’t jimmy it. I’ve had to remove lines from poems when an initial impulse had ended and I tried to finish it too fast, and then go back to the last place the impulse was true and allow it to open up from there. Sometimes a poem happens all at once, but sometimes it begins and then I have to get really patient. Maybe a line hits me while I’m taking a bath. And then this process is different, of course, from testing a piece in workshop, where I can get a sense of how something is landing. In this case, the title went through a few micro-changes, but that open article finally feels most right, and “breathing” continues to feel alive and strange enough to open that liminal space and that way a lake can feel. A few people questioned things I ultimately kept. The poem seemed to need them. A few things went, or shifted. I had to live with it for a while before it settled.
8. Can you tell us more about the origin of this specific poem? Were you at an actual lake when writing this poem?
No, though actual lakes figure in some of my other poems. Over the last few years, I’ve put a Pinterest board together for one of my classes—a creative writing course in three genres. We start with drama. But I’d realized that many of the students, if they hadn’t been involved in theater or modern dance, had a hard time thinking about the possibilities of an actual stage—both its constraints, its limits, and the way its physicality can allow us to think about the space we exist in, as humans. Just being in that space sets things off differently, frames experience in a certain kind of way. For instance, it struck me that one thing we can lose in film and video—which is more our lingua franca, these days, and which I also love—is a sense of our own relative punyness. I like the relative spareness and intimacy of a small, black box theater, but in gathering images for this board, I was so struck by the way a proscenium arch space with a very high ceiling can allow us to see human interaction so differently. It puts us in our place. And in this course, we do move into a writing space, at points, influenced by Beckett and absurdism and the surreal and beyond. If someone is steeped only in realism, which is only one style of getting at the real, of talking about reality, it can be very hard to subtract enough to make for a more minimal or dreamlike set design that might also create that echoey vastness. Many of the images I was drawn to are examples of that. One of them—which now we know is from a Butoh dance performance, “Kagemi”—I kept lingering over, imagining my way into, wondering what context or situation it could have arisen from or be portraying. It’s not a lake. I’m not certain that there were lanterns, exactly—they are small enough in the image I’d found that it’s hard to tell, though in some other film clips, in different parts of the dance, they look almost like rising mushrooms—I was trying to make out what I was seeing, trying to find a way to describe the feeling of it. Above all, there’s this feeling of suspension, of floating, of being enveloped. So, it’s an ekphrastic poem—I’m writing from art, from a still—but the feeling of it, as I wrote, became increasingly intimate, the sense of the we possibly smaller, and different from the image, and more like the space of a love poem with this sense of suspension and hush. It’s as though the image is an infusion for some space that partakes of it and also becomes itself, related, but different.
I kept coming back to this image. It spoke to me, drew me in. Something felt possible there. And then—I think I needed to find a way to enter this space of transport, to see if it was still available to me. And it was. A small miracle. Often, the world says it’s not. I think sometimes that one of the many ways a poem can heal is by just allowing us to go into this space where our psyches can breathe a little, without design or intention. Just to see what’s there, what might be there. I think I’m always responding to some stimulant, but that launches something that’s not predictable. I think very often about Cornell, living with his mom on Utopia Parkway, gathering things, and what I imagine, at least, is that the act of putting those collages together, allowing these odds and ends to wind up in the same space where they can resonate with one another—evocatively, but without didacticism—mended something, brought the psyche back to some kind of needed homeostasis. It’s like a kind of medicine. We don’t know the name of the disease. Or of the medicine. But we know that we need it and that it works. Maybe it will work for someone else, too. But the first thing is just to make it.
10. Do you visualize yourself actually at the location, possibly “floating” similar to the lines of “floating in the dark / like opened lanterns—”?
It’s as though everything else is so dark and feels so suspended and slowed that it’s hard to tell what’s underneath, but as though one could exist from the bottom of a lake, moving in water, which feels different from moving in air. In memory, I imagine this velvety, fluid, enveloping blackness. I just looked at the image again, though, and there, you can see an actual stage. But that’s not how the poem bloomed. And here’s the board, if you want to look: https://www.pinterest.com/uncorsage/tableaux-tips/
Anne Cunanan
Anne Cunanan is a student from Woodbury University attaining her BFA in Fashion Design. Aside from school, she also dedicates her time to her community in a church, Iglesia Ni Cristo/ Iglesia De Cristo/ Church of Christ as a Choir Member and part of the Christian Family Organization (C.F.O) in both the LA County and in her locale.