Whispering, mystery, and the land: an Interview with Sandy Longhorn

                                                                                       by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: What I probably most like about your poems is how they almost seem to tell their story with a whisper.  Looking at the first lines of “1976,” we immediately notice the repetition of long s and vowel sounds, particularly in moments like “summer of the Bicentennial”, “diesel fumes and Swisher Sweets,”  and “on the tall gear shaft of his sub-nosed Freightliner.”

 

Is music/sound a way in which you attempt to “instruct” or guide the reader’s reading of this poem?  A way of giving the poem another layer of sensation and possible interpretation?

 

Sandy Longhorn: I’m fascinated by the interpretation of my poems “whispering.”  I like it.  I’m certainly not one to jump up and down and draw attention to myself, unless among close, close friends, so I think it fits that my poems should be quiet as well. 

 

I do think that music/sound is the poet’s fundamental tool, although I hesitate at the word “instruct.”  The sounds should guide the reader, as you say.  I use sound to pace the poem, and I read everything out loud over and over as I’m drafting, revising, and polishing (three distinct phases for me).  Oh, and yes, the sounds should add depth and intricacy to the poems.

 

AMK: You play with the sonnet form a number of times in this book.  Both “1976” and “Lover Say Prairie” are poems of 14 lines that live within the framework of iambic pentameter.  While these are both very musical sonnets, the eschew end rhymes, which are expected of a traditional sonnet.

 

I’m wondering what draws you to this form and why is  you’ve interpreted it this way.

 

SL: I have to admit that this question surprised me.  I am someone who struggles with formal poems.  In reality, formal work intimidates me a bit.  I have a tin ear for scansion, which I speculate could be because I come from a region with a relatively flat accent (northeastern Iowa) and I have zero sense of musical rhythm.  (I almost failed music class in the fourth grade because I couldn’t clap to the beat!) 

 

I wasn’t thinking of the sonnet when I wrote either of these poems.  I guess they could be considered “accidental” sonnets.  At the time these were written, I was in grad school, going through workshops and form & theory classes, and it seems to me that what I was studying in form & theory must have leaked into the writing a bit. 

 

AMK: How have you interpreted the volta in these sonnets— a turn in the poem that typically occurs between the 6th and 8th lines?

 

SL:  While I wasn’t thinking of the sonnet in the poems, I do often try to incorporate “a turn” of the volta’s nature in many of  my poems.  I love how when drafting poems they often begin going in one direction and through the process of writing I discover something new along the way, “turning” the poem. 

 

AMK: Reading “Lover, Say Prairie,” I just can’t get enough of it.  And while I know I’m moved by its music and images, I think that what really draws me to it is how it pleads with this “lover” that he/she commune with the speaker’s sudden moments of surrealism. 

 

I’m thinking of the “underground sea,” the metaphor of “grasses…like…girls dresses in sackcloth,” and “say prairie and mean the song of the canary.”

 

First, would you agree that these moves are surreal?

 

SL:  Thanks for picking this poem and for the kind words about it.  It’s on my list of favorites from my first book, "Blood Almanac," and I haven’t gotten to talk about it much.  I’m not sure about the label “surreal,” but one of my goals is to transform the Midwestern experience (where I grew up) into something as magical and mysterious as the Southern experience (where I’m living now).  I purposefully take what might seem mundane (the flat & boring middle country) and try to show it to the reader as I see it (complex & dense with interest).

 

AMK: Do you mind discussing how you came to lines like “Say prairie and mean the song of the canary”?  “A hazy, indistinct joining, the way their two bodies / meet under a quilt in the insect-loud night.” 

 

Do these lines come easily to you or is this poem the result of draft after draft?

 

SL:  Many of the images in this poem derive from my reading about the settlement of the American prairies.  The canary line came about because in my reading I discovered that many women arrived on the prairie newly married.  Because homesteads were so far apart, there wasn’t much socializing.  They often brought a canary to provide song/companionship.  The lines about sex have to do with the rural Midwestern sense of modesty.  My people were generally closed-up and inhibited.  Sex wasn’t discussed; passion wasn’t expressed.  The second stanza attempts to delve into the bewilderment, loneliness, and somewhat forced silence of the women I come from. 

 

Some of the lines, especially the ones with the strongest sense of sound (i.e. the vowel sounds of “prairie” and “canary”), come easily, but most of the lines are reworked several times in subsequent drafts.  As you can see in this poem, I can become a bit addicted to repeated sounds.

 

AMK:  When do you know you’ve written the last line of a poem?  When did you know these poems were finished?

 

SL:  I’m still searching for the answer to this question.  I struggle with each poem to understand its organic structure.  This is one of the drawbacks to not working in form.  At least there, you often know how many lines the poem will have.  I rely on two close poet-friends to help with revisions.  We exchange poems and provide comments for each other.  Often, I send poems that feel the least sense of closure and use their guidance to determine the next step.  What does Roethke say?  “I learn by going where I have to go.”  It’s a constant process of writing and rewriting until I get that contented feeling in the pit of me that says, yes, that’s it.  As for these poems, “1976” had the clearest sense of structure during the initial drafting.  The other two required many, many drafts before I felt the structure was complete.

 

AMK: “On The Great Plains’ Eastern Edge ” is a poem that touches not only on the study of the speaker’s local landscape but that makes use of the nightmarish dreams of those who exist within it as a buffer between story and narrative— if we can agree for the moment that narrative being the poet’s setting down of the poem on the page and story being that which is going on within the poem.  The result is a poem that tells two stories: the stories of the landscape and the stories of the people who are lifted up (or are let down) by it.

 

I’m wondering just how aware you were of this duality as you wrote the poem.

 

SL:  This duality that you are pointing out is the crux of the book and much of my current writing as well.  I am descended from farmers; however, both of my parents were the first in their families to leave the land.  I’ve always been stretched between the two: country/city.  Also, when I was in grad school in Arkansas, I began to understand regionalism, first and foremost by being taught by Southern writers.  I saw how the people of the South are informed by the history of the land, and I began to look at my somewhat boring “homeland” and try to dig deeper into its mysteries.  I wanted to understand why I whispered, to go back to your earlier question.  In the end, the poem is about the fact that where I come from whole communities depend on the land and the weather, and both often seem to swing to the extremes, when what is needed for success is moderation…just enough wind, just enough rain, just enough sun.  Farming, in a sense taming the prairie, is a battle for control over the chaos of the land and the weather, and I’m coming to believe that fighting that fight results in the stern, somewhat repressed, people I call family.

 

AMK: This is also a poem that starts off as a narrative of drought and tornado.  But, as the poem proceeds, it turns to more the lyrical gestures of the “bloated bodies…/ of gray-green lakes,” the “silt [making] room,” and ends in that imagined moment of the hungry pike and blue gill.

 

I’m not sure that any good poem can only be lyrical or can only be narrative.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that a narrative poem, must also be lyrical.  I’m not sure a lyrical poem needs a narrative.

 

How would you define lyricism and how important do you think it is to a poetry in general?

 

SL:  For me, lyricism is a focus on the compressed and concise image.  It is building the poem through a series of images rather than through character & action.  When pushed, I classify myself as a predominantly lyric poet.  I was drawn to poetry because of the power of imagery.  Having failed at drawing & painting, I found I could form the images swirling around in my imagination with words with much better results.  I struggle to write straight-up narrative poems, which always feel a bit clunky to me.  However, I really love to read narrative poems that are written well.  I think that lyricism is crucial to poetry, at least to my taste.

 

AMK: Thank you so much.

 

SL:  It was a lot of fun.  Thanks for your insightful questions and close readings of the poems.