SM: I learned a great deal about how to create a coherent manuscript in the process of working on Whore, in large part because I was reporting in to Ralph Angel, who taught me a lot about selection and orchestration—perhaps the core of this is, again, that need to “get really honest” about what really belongs in a given book and what does not.  I think the fear, in putting a first full-length manuscript together, can be that there will never be another one, so there’s an initial tendency to put in everything but the kitchen sink, especially if it’s been published and so has an acknowledgment. But in fact, not all of those poems may belong in something that, best case, coheres as a larger poem, a larger assemblage that makes a poem. It takes some faith to weed out even good poems that simply do not belong, and to trust that occasionally strange, unwanted poemsdo belong as linkages. If there’s faith in the prospect of more than one book, then this opens up a lot and it’s possible to make the strongest book with the materials that magnetize to any given project.

 

The hardest thing, perhaps, is to try to see the work as though for the first time, and we get only glimpses of that after putting it away for a while.

 

Maybe because I had tried a number of assemblages or long readings by the time it was really ready to put The White Bride together, and perhaps also because the work was already so linked and so clearly part of a series, it was much easier to orchestrate than Whore. 

 

After the first book, I needed a sort of chaser—a different attack, a different way in. Among other things, I needed, for a long time, not to say “I.” And I needed to look outward, to be triggered by sources that, for some reason, magnetized me. Of course both of those rules were broken or re-assembled once the next vein had opened and had become something I knew was going to continue for a while, but they served as a loose set of rules or constraints. Many of poems began the way individual lines so often do, but dropped in as assignments instead, based on a title (often a single word), or the trigger of a cultural artifact that felt ekphrastic but had not necessarily been intended as a work of art, per se—for instance, a mannequin in front of a pawn shop on Gardner, and another one in a costume exhibit, that became, along with the moon, one of the bases for the title poem.

 

I also let myself fall under the sway of influences from my teaching—the longest poem in the book happened as I was preparing to teach Ginsberg and O’Hara in a contemporary poetry class. They gave me, let’s say, a lot of permission to try a larger, more peopled canvas than I’d ever attempted. I’m still not sure it’s a poem, but it’s fun enough to read aloud that I’ve actually had people ask if they could be in the poem, too.

 

TL: Professional recognition in the form of awards is an essential part of building a career. As a recipient of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and other awards, what are your thoughts on professional accolades? How do you keep the recognition aspect of the career from pressuring new work?

 

SM: I was very lucky to be well under way with this new series before learning I’d won that prize, and even further along by the time the book came out, and so I’d been able to find my new direction while still working within the luxury of almost total obscurity—a luxury I’m happy to say I’m still able to enter into whenever I write a poem, in part, I suppose, because I remain relatively obscure, but mostly because there is something about the experience of writing, the absorption and immersion in writing, itself, that cancels the “noise” of outside concerns—for instance, concerns about how something might be received.

 

I don’t quite understand how or why this works, but the moment of creation is so shrouded from all other concerns that it still feels very private—again, mainly like an act of listening—and so I’m relieved to know that what I imagined might feel like a sort of pressure just doesn’t really exist around the writing itself. Pobiz, of course, is full of its own pressures. They just don’t happen to be the sorts that writers of fiction face. I think fiction writers of all kinds are much more under the gun to perform stratospherically in a commercial environment. It’s a double-edged blessing that poetry seems to operate relatively free of this pressure—at least, at the moment of inception.   

 

I think I’m a bit of a schiz regarding the whole “accolade” part of this. A Canadian fiction writer who I respect once told me that he thought awards actually helped poets quite a bit, in terms of finding an audience or further publication, and I can say that I think it’s been easier to publish since the publication of the first book. I receive more solicitations for poems. It was much easier to publish a second book, partly because my press wants to see the new work of its authors. But rejection also still occurs. This may be important to say for young writers who think that might not be the case—it’s good to know that we all face it.