An Interview with Laurie Saurborn Young

Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on getting your first book, Carnavoria, accepted by H_NGM_N BKS. What was your experience of sending out your MS, and how did you decide to send to H_NGM_N?

Laurie Saurborn Young: Thanks very much, Justin. It was a long slog and a learning experience. I sent it out to well over 150 small-press contests and open reading periods since I graduated from Warren Wilson in 2008. I never got the guts up to query bigger publishers like Copper Canyon or Graywolf. The more I worked with the manuscript, the more it became my own. I was constantly writing and adding and subtracting poems—I learned more firmly that poems and manuscripts are not static entities; that I’ll be making changes until the editor rips it from my hands. And the work became stranger. It’s not conventional, and at times I truly despaired of ever finding an interested audience. Though I got a couple of nibbles early on, as I continued adding new poems and removing others, the nibbles disappeared.

Once I referred to this phase (of not having a book out) as “limbo.” This was at a dinner here in Austin for the poet Harvey Hix, who taught at UT in the Spring of 2010. As I recall it, he said, “That’s a nice way of putting it. It’s more like hell.” A couple more rounds of sending it out into the Vacuum of No Reply and I changed my “limbo” to his “hell.”

Ultimately what I think was most valuable was that I became more certain of my own voice, more confident of my approach. It also taught me how to persevere, and made me certain both of myself as a poet and of my poems. When the rejections came in, I didn’t say, “Oh my God, how can I change this so someone will like it?” There is no way to predict which editor or committee or guest reader will like whose work, so that’s a non-productive, exhaustive line of thinking. Poetry is not about pleasing people (and this is a southerner talking). For me, it’s about finding readers and listeners interested in what the poems are saying—or what they interpret the poems as saying (something over which the poet has little, if any, control).

When Nate Pritts, editor of H_NGM_N BKS and fellow WW alum called me this past spring and asked if the manuscript was still available, I was absolutely thrilled. A couple of weeks earlier I read Matt Hart’s Wolf Face and Alexis Orgera’s How Like Foreign Objects. Honestly, H_NGM_N was the place I truly wanted to be published—but I didn’t hold out any particular hopes, given my pile of rejections. I love the books H_NGM_N publishes, and am extremely thankful to be included in their line up. But then I started right in on my second manuscript. Now it’s out in the world for the time being and I’m working on a third. I like hard deadlines, and I like sending out a manuscript and not knowing what will happen. Hope and feathers, as Dickinson would say. Reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at an early age definitely helped motivate me, though it took a while for me to build up my confidence. Time passes whether I write or not. I’ve decided I’d rather it pass while I’m engaged in this productive, invigorating, challenging art.


JB: I’m not necessarily attracted to the idea of a singular voice, and yet this collection seems to have one. The voice is obsessive, ravenous, mercurial, and still very much aware that it is a voice. (It says, “Today someone asks how I am and I say// Everything.”) This is the kind of tension that drives a reader crazy—in the best way. Are you interested in “finding your voice”? Do you think the ideal poetic voice is something polyphonous? Would you rather be the Ramones of poetry or the PJ Harvey of poetry?

LY: Already busting out the musical references, Justin? I’m in over my head!

“Finding my voice” was something I was very concerned about several years ago, when I was still laboring under the assumption that it was a set point I could reach. At one point, I wrote my WW advisor at the time, Debra Allbery, “I don’t have a voice!!” And she assured me that I did, when I let things quiet down and stopped reaching in every direction. But it’s a process that unfolds not by aiming, but by writing over time. It’s not always likeable or comfortable.

My background is in psychology, not literature, so I’m prone to making comparisons between human development and the process of writing. When you’re just starting out in your twenties, say, the world has a lot of possibility because you don’t have much of a clue how of things will turn out. “I want to be a judge! A computer scientist! The mother of five children! A pro-surfer!” That’s a confusing decade. My writing was all over the place, very unfocused and timid. “I want to write a novel! I want to be a journalist! I want to write an epic!” As you get older, you make choices and this range of possibilities narrows. I love writing poems and personal essays. I don’t enjoy writing journalistic pieces. Possibility narrows, but then you have a direction in which to productively focus your energies. To an extent, writing’s more flexible than aging—at any point I can decide to start writing sonnets. But I can’t decide to be the runner I was at eighteen.

As to the idea of an ideal poetic voice, perhaps it’s something writers at times strive for, but I don’t believe it exists. The wavering mirage in the desert. Nellie in the lake. I don’t go in for tiers of superiority. I mean, I know what I like. But that doesn’t make my tastes an ideal. Honestly, I just don’t like to be bored—when I’m writing or when I’m reading. Engagement with the text, written or spoken or read, is my ideal. And honesty. If I feel the poem is inauthentic or posing, I immediately lose interest.

A while back I remember talking to a younger male poet and he said he wrote poetry because he believed it would matter. Believed it would exist in the future. It’s the opposite of what compels me—or, rather, frees me—to write. I had to get to a point where I felt no one was listening, in order to really have the space to build myself into poetry, so to speak. I don’t think my “job” is to speak for other people—I would be hesitant to ever do that—so that has some bearing on my use of the singular I. Though I would say that “I” can be an ethereal or global or various word. Everyone has an “I,” whether it’s culturally viewed as separate or communal. And an “I” can be multi-voiced, that polyphonous quality you mention. In Whitman’s “Song of Myself”— that “myself” is the world.

JB: The poems in your book demand a very heightened attention. I’ve been reading Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays, and let’s just say it ain’t Michael Crichton. I think a lot of poets like to shy away from the question of audience, unless they’re pissing and moaning that no one reads their work. Do you think much about audience? Who do you write for?

LY: The thing about audience is that you can never predict who will be listening. It’s out of the poet’s control as to who will read your work. If I’m writing for anyone in particular, I’m writing for people—poets or not—who are willing to listen. Who are interested in language and the imaginative space. I find I can cross between more conservative listeners and more unconventional audiences pretty easily—but it has taken work. I’ve spent time in two MFA programs—Warren Wilson and UMASS Amherst—with very different sensibilities, and I’m very grateful for my varied experience. I like to read to people who are willing to take a gamble and wonder—not what I meant, but what the poem means to them. When I first began giving readings, though, I had a lot of responses along the lines of, “I really enjoyed your poems but I have no idea what you meant.” Those sort of comments had a two-fold effect: at that time, it was more important for me to write the poems I needed to than to be understood. But gradually I began to see that if my goal is to write about the human condition in a new way, I have to have footholds or benches for readers to pause on. Otherwise all the language just tumbles around and effervesces to no accord.

I’ve always been drawn to the way words collide, to the interstitial spaces that open up when I write. It’s like Nabokov and his butterflies, pinning these flitting moments in place. In Speak, Memory, he talks about the quality of synesthesia he and his mother share—the perception that words, letters, numbers have their own colors, tastes, smells. When I write, often the words have some physical characteristics—form, color, sometimes smell. This-world and Not-this-world at the same time. When I write, I feel I’m out on forays into this dual world. And then I come back with these poems—these reports—to share. While I try to be mindful of my manners, I am going to say what the poem needs to say, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Dulling the edges or hiding what I want to say only means I’ll have to write the damn thing again.

I am aware that you can go so far in a direction that few people will want to follow. Some of my work right out of WW grew to be a little too obtuse. Too thick. Again, I come back to psychology and why I write: to figure out the world and to discover a way to exist in the world. A way to explore science and the animal world. As I’ve continued to write, I’ve accrued more confidence. With confidence I’ve allowed more space to enter the poems, in terms of structure and form and also in terms of saying the strange things I am thinking and being able to marry them to the human condition. Places of commonality, if you will. While the poems have a singular voice, I feel they clearly speak about things we all experience in life: love, loss, departure, yearning. I’ve gotten a warm reception from people of all ages and aesthetics. I’m not just writing to 30-year old divorcees or dog owners or daughters or truck drivers or white people or Christians or atheists. Robert Penn Warren has been a major influence, specifically “Audubon”—that marriage of history, the ghostly, the gothic and the natural world. The passage of time. I want to be buried with that book.

JB: I love the poem “Everyone Knew it was Roethke.” Aside from “Oh Roethke!” (and “Oh// Roethke . . .”), my favorite lines are: “. . . Of course I cannot recite every myth of creation// sprung from the greenhouse, but this doesn’t worry you/ as I button your vest. As I steal your linen jacket.” Again, the speaker has her way with the world even as she, of course, does not. I’m really dumbfounded by the sheer theater of these poems. Are you having fun when you write this stuff?

LY: Theater is a good word. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe poetry is my own shy theater. Oddly, the poem came as a response to a disagreement I had about appropriation in poetry. I’m big on citing sources and culled lines.

Coming from a line of German farmers, fun does not come naturally to me—or at least I work to make it part of my life. I’ve had the obligatory drudge jobs—assembly lines, child care, temp work, office work. Perhaps I’ll have more. When my husband was very ill—was dying— I had to give up an editing job and writing community I loved and come back to Austin. Still I kept writing and still my work continued to go un-noticed. It was either find a way to have fun in the world or hide under the bed. But I was needed in the world, so hiding wasn’t an option. So I became the poet giggling at her computer at the cafe. If it’s all cinderblocks every time I turn on the computer, why the hell do it? The outside world was a very difficult place for several years, and poetry has evolved into a place of safety for me. Not because it’s been easy, but because it’s a space I created on my own.

If I weren’t violently aware of Not Writing when I’m not writing, I wouldn’t do it. I tried for many, many years—about fifteen—to run away from writing. But always there emerged the nagging voice, “You’re not writing.” Eventually I just turned around and met it, head on. It’s a compulsion. I come back to my friends, those words. I think the ability to have fun bespeaks feeling more comfortable with poetry—it took me a long while to feel comfortable pursuing writing as a serious goal. But time passes, and the more you soak in—through writing, reading, listening, talking about poetry—the more comfortable one gets. And I think as we get older we realize we’re not going to have our way with the world. It’s going to have its way with us.

JB: You have a James Franco poem in here (“The Art of James Franco”). James Franco reminds me of “Y2K”: everyone’s talking about him, but I’m not sure why. What made you write this poem?

LY: Call it my concession to the reader. Originally the poem was titled, “The Art of Brendan Fraser.” But do most people remember Brendan? I didn’t want to have to explain who this person was. Franco’s name was everywhere, so in it went. It’s nothing personal, just a name occupying a space. The poem originated as I was driving home and for some reason starting musing upon Fraser’s movie career—how it seems to be arranged into three tiers. There’s the Ultimate Tier (Gods and Monsters); the Middle-and-Happy Ground (The Mummy); and Uh-Oh (Furry Vengeance). When grown actors pretend to dance around with CG animals, it’s generally not a sign of a career on the upswing. I kept thinking about Fraser on the movie set, interacting with invisible characters. That must be incredibly difficult, especially if you were once the erotic-lust-object of Ian McKellen and a mummy-defeating hero scaling the pyramids. So the poem flips around between these movie personas and also what I fictively imagined as Brendan’s home life. The potato appeared unbidden.

I also thought of his career in terms of my own as a poet. I am aiming for the fun of The Mummy combined with the conflict of Gods and Monsters. I’d rather avoid the cheap tricks of Furry Vengeance. Form and structure wise, it was one of the first poems I wrote after I had been in a very word-thick phase, structurally. I wanted more space, to see the sparks instead of cramming them all together. This happened up in Northampton—it’s the Garden of Eden for poets. There’s an immensely supportive arts and writing community in that part of the country.

JB: If I had to pick two poets I see in this collection, I would say Stevens and Koch. Am I close? Who are the poets you adore and why?

LY: Whoa, that’s a lot of male energy! I’d be honored to be linked to either poet, as I respect both greatly and enjoy their work. As far as influencing my own work, I’d say you’re closer on the Stevens count (there was some strange poetry coming from this insurance salesman in a suit, and my comportment is similarly conservative). Koch, I don’t see as much. His energy is very male, very confident. He mingles easily with joy. I can relate to how he moves in language (here I’m thinking of his poem, “Straits”—which is not really a typical Koch poem) but not much to where I feel he’s coming from. The New York School has always mystified me. It seems such a different energy than mine. I find my work very strong and very feminine. Southern Surreal Feminist might be a good description. Dara Wier, at UMASS, encouraged me to embrace the Southern—something I had fled from doing. The social inequality of the world is something that’s always been at the forefront of my mind. How can it not be, when the ERA never even passed? When the Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin was just defunded? I grew up in a very rural and poor part of the country, right in the Bible belt. Although my sister and I never wanted for food or shelter or state college tuition, I think growing up alongside the real poverty of others—classmates, their parents—curtailed any ideas I had about the world as a joyful or easy place. Did you see the movie Winter’s Bone? That was the world I lived alongside, and at times, in. I never dreamt of going to Harvard, for example, because I didn’t know it was an option. This is something I’m just starting to explore in my newer work. Politics and personal history.

I adore Whitman. I have an abiding interest in hospice work and palliative care. Whitman is a place I feel comfortable—he’s not pretending there’s a castle in the sky, or that life will all be worth it. But he gives us the great gift of MAYBE. And that’s where I put my faith. Plus, he just goes on and on. “Outward and onward.” I admire that. I’m always shutting myself up.

Definitely Plath. She’s the first poet I really read, who I have continued to return to over a (oh dear) 20 year period. I just finished Ariel again. Her poetry is water wielding an Exacto knife. When one of my poetry readers here in Austin read my newest poems, she said, “Go read Plath again.” My first semester at Warren Wilson, Alan Williamson re-directed me to her work. It’s strange—when you first begin reading poetry, you don’t know who you’ll return to. I used to read a lot of Sexton, in my early twenties. But she hasn’t stuck with me. At the time I admired her bald ferocity. The first book of poems I bought was Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, when I was seventeen. But I’m not drawn to his work right now.

William’s Spring and All I think has been an influence in terms of space and variation of structure and form. The motion, for example, in IX: "my legs, turning slowly / end over end in the air!" I tend to fall into stanza-ruts and to keep my feet on the ground. Williams creates theatrical stages in his poems so that “play” exists in two forms: as a mechanism for action and as something that occurs when words collide under his power. Basically, I’m drawn to work that I admire, and I try to learn what I can and see if in some way I can apply it to my own writing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to engage emotionally with my work at the outset, but also now can put some distance between the poems and myself. In that space that opens up I find I can more purposefully apply directional forces (i.e., craft) to the work. The poem ceases to be a work of emotion and becomes a piece of art in which emotion is one element. As opposed to the writing of my twenties, which was very emotional and hard to distance myself from in any productive manner.

I do know that poets often love work that seems to have no relation to their own—the creative beast is fed by many sources, not all of them obvious. Contemporarily speaking, I love the work of Ish Klein. I saw her read in Amherst. Theatrical, smart, inventive writing. Inexhaustible. My reading life is very broad: I read poetry but also biography, fiction, art books, photography books . . . Sontag, Hemingway, Andrew Wyeth, Henry Miller, Christina Stead are all on my bookstand at the moment. Oh god, and Charles Wright! His dropped lines have definitely influenced my own.

JB: I’m always interested to see what, if any, epigraphs poets choose for their books. You chose something by H.L. Hix: “Even a wrong course one sometimes ought to pursue/ to its end, till refusal of praise becomes praise.” Beautiful. And fitting. Reminds me of the spirit of Beckett, or something that could have appeared in Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness. How did you decide on this as the epigraph? Did you have others you were considering?

LY: I do love those lines. The epigraph is a souvenir from my WW thesis. I had never heard of Hix until I found one of his books, Shadows of Houses, in Malaprop’s, in Asheville. Immediately the work intrigued me. He’s a formalist and I envy that measured ability. I have a terrible memory for recalling quotes or things I’ve read with any sort of accuracy, so if I like something I have to write it down or it’s lost. This was such a great one that I held onto it. My current ms has an epigraph from Bly’s “Summer, 1960, Minnesota.” I have a chapbook manuscript out that has one by Wright. There’s one by Woolf I’m carting around, but it doesn’t have a home yet. Those lines of Hix’s have waited three long years for the poems that follow to catch up.

JB: Your poems make me want to kiss a grackle, press love letters in a diary of leaves, and beg for baptism by dragonflies in the frozen Cape Fear River. Am I your ideal reader?

LY: YES! If I have any specific hopes for my poems, it’s that they are possibilities for readers to see the world in other ways. I mean, that’s why I read poems. It’s a circular relationship—I’m trying to give back to poetry what I receive from it. The rest of it’s a bit of a mystery.

JB: Thank you, Laurie.

LY: Thanks, Justin. It’s been a real pleasure.

Laurie Saurborn Young is a poet, writer, and photographer, and has worked in factories, in the mental health field, and with hospice organizations. She holds an MFA from the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. As well, she has studied in the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her first book, Carnavoria, will be published by H_NGM_N BKS in 2012. She lives in Austin, Texas.