A Virtual Interview with Varsha Saraiya-Shah

Varsha Saraiya-Shah and Usha Akella will be the featured readers Thursday, September 8, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman.

Background

Varsha Saraiya-Shah’s first poetry chapbook, Voices, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in journals that include Asian Cha, Borderlands, Convergence, and Right Hand Pointing, as well as anthologies from Mutabilis Press, and is forthcoming in BorderSenses.  She has studied poetry in Houston, New York’s Sarah Lawrence College, SquawValley Community of Writers–California, Reed College–Oregon, and San Miguel De Allende–Mexico, and was a poet-in-residence at Noepe Literary Center, Martha’s Vineyard, MA in October, 2015.

Saraiya-Shah’s work is inspired and informed by humans, literature, visual and performing arts, gardening, travels, and an untiring eye for the small wonders of life. She lives in Houston, and currently serves on the board of Mutabilis Press.

The Interview

CH: When did you first become interested in writing poetry? What first drew you to poetry as a means of expression?

VS-S: I believe I got smitten with poetry in fifth or sixth grade.  I wrote it in my mother tongue, Gujarati.  (Gujarat is a western state of India.)

I think it was the fascination for words; what one can do with them.  I’m sure my maternal grandfather’s poetic genes and the teachers gave me the seed of this art.  All of it ignited a lifelong love for poetry.  Being able to write and the freedom to play with words drew me in and will take me through.

I studied Hindi and Sanskrit as part of my education through high school.  Poetry in each of these languages has its own cadence and persona. Recitations were part of the curriculum as well as cultural way of life.  Acting and folk dancing were my two other intimate loves besides math and science.  The dramatic monologues they demanded with the magic of harmonium and the beat of tabla — all of it have contributed to my poetic expression. Performing words on a podium gave me a chance to express myself, and also gave a sense of power over the social constraints in adolescent years.

Learning English as a second language began in the 8th grade; I was thirteen and learning to sing Mary Had A Little Lamb… with my teacher and classmates. I could not have imagined then I would be an English poet with my own book some day!

CH: When did you first begin to think of yourself as a writer? How would you describe your identity as a writer?

VS-S: It came much later.  I guess when Houston Poetry Fest published my first poem in 1999: Tuesday Night Reading, kind of a love poem for my privileged encounter with the poet, Robert Creeley at MFAH.  As if I had arrived once again and knew, I have Miles to Go–– as Robert Frost expressed.

Winning contests for Gujarati poetry and debates deepened my interest and love for poetry.  When I started writing voraciously in English after a long dry spell during years of corporate career and family raising, I sensed a feeling of being “born-again” as a writer.

Writing has always been part of me, rather than a separate identity.  Being a financial professional (a Texas CPA with an MBA from California), I kept my writer side a secret during the grueling work years of “dress for success, failing is not an option, and work hard enough till you break the glass ceiling.” Though, I did enjoy all chances to do significant amount of business/technical writing.  And, grabbed every moment I could to write a poem in pockets of 15-20 minutes at lunch hours and while waiting for my children to finish their music lessons or game pursuits. For last five years or so, I feel grounded in a writer’s mojo.

CH: You’ve studied poetry in a variety of settings, from Squaw Valley Community of Writers to Sarah Lawrence College and San Miguel de Allende. What has motivated you to seek these experiences? How have you gone about selecting the programs in which you’ve participated?

VS-S: I sought these experiences to grow and satisfy that deep hunger to learn from the masters, to get better at the craft and seek critique from my peers away from home base.  A burning desire and innate curiosity to experience and enhance the creative process. To hone my calibre, to push myself in new ways while learning from others’ strengths.  All of these led me to workshops in a variety of settings. Repute and the repertoire of the faculty have been prime deciding factors.  Personal life and time constraints in which I could fit in these workshops also played a role in the selection process.  Then I simply plunged in with faith on taking a chance.

CH: Engaging in formal study takes a good deal of commitment, as does maintaining a writing life. What is your writing process like? How do you balance writing with other activities in your life?

VS-S: I try my best to catch on paper hints of creative sparks, through arrival of a phrase on NPR or a fleeting emotion, or when reading good books.  I’ve often pulled over from driving to jot down a few compelling lines.  At times a whole poem. I’ve locked myself in bathroom for a few minutes to catch my muse in writing when children were young and demanded non-stop attention. Some developed years later in beautiful poems.  My chapbook, Voices, has a few of those.

I’m a compulsive reviser.  But, my role models are––great writers, say Donald Hall, who starts each revision with a fresh draft each morning and whatever it takes–– as many as fifty drafts to make a poem work.  His book, Life Work delves into his process. Occasionally, I do a complete re-write of a poem when the umpteenth version is not working.  Perseverance always prevails and patience with the poem helps me understand what it wants from me.

Balancing writing with other tasks is mostly a matter of discipline.  I do have discipline and focus but easily get channeled into other pursuits. Good distractions, such as practicing on piano, or trimming a bush, or a bike ride, or picking up a book that’s poles apart from what I’m working on, actually help me with synergetic ideas.  Sometimes listening to music or walking long distances help me move on from where I’m stuck or bring in a fresh thought.

CH: What was it like to be poet-in-residence at Noepe Literary Center? How has this experience shaped your work?

VS-S: It was a challenge to stay focused day after day since the nature is so abundant and unique at Martha’s Vineyard (the kind I am not used to in my Houston’s city life). Initially I wanted to play all the time.  I was the only “poet” in residence; the rest were fiction writers, memoirists, creative non-fiction writers.  Though, they introduced me into their challenges of writing life as well.

I learnt that I need more discipline but it’s harder and different for a poet than a writer who’s doing x number of pages a day and writes within a framework/plot, whereas a poet doesn’t.  The residency reinforced my understanding how important it is to just write each day without any excuse, though I still make many and often.  Also the experience underscored:  Read, read and read some more, to be a better writer.

CH: Your chapbook, Voices, will be coming out soon from Finishing Line Press. How did you select the poems for this book? How did you go about finding a publisher?

VS-S: I wanted each of the poems in this collection to have an expression: an inner or outer voice.  Whether it was a sweet potato growing roots on my kitchen table, or a man with one earring precariously leaning out from his window I waved at in traffic jam.  Sky and its myriad manifestations, a piano telling me pay attention to me, an art exhibit that triggers a new dialogue with the faraway motherland.  At the end, all those poems made a cohesive collection.

I sent the manuscript to Finishing Line Press for New Women’s voices competition.  I didn’t win, but they liked my collection and offered to publish.  So, I accepted it.

CH: You list gardening among the inspirations for your poetry. How does the world of gardening inform and intersect with your work?

VS-S: Gardening is about life, about surprise (a poet’s candy) and demise, about living in the present moment and accepting decay.  It reminds me all the time: Begin Again, whenever I get frustrated with certain poems.   There’s no ego.  No fear of growth or contraction.  A weed asks for as much attention as a beautiful plumeria blossom or a wild flower.  Wish I would spend more time out there but for the heat and mosquitoes, that often keep me from interfacing with my lovely space, eh!

CH: I’ve found working as an editor with a small press (in my case, Dos Gatos Press), to be a very rewarding experience. How has being on the board of Mutabilis Press informed your views of writing/publishing?

VS-S: Cindy, I concur fully with you; my work with Mutabilis Press has been rewarding indeed.  I have been involved with Mutabilis from its conception days at Inprint Houston.  Through this small service, I feel like an integral part of my writers’ family here and elsewhere.  I’ve come to understand and appreciate the arduous process of selecting for an anthology through reading pages and pages of submitted poetry day after day. It has taught me “how to read a poem” as an editor as well as a poet.  My ability to discern from good to mediocre has grown tremendously.  I also work as their treasurer; a stint using my left brain. I appreciate the vital role small publishers play in promoting poetry which is hardly a lucrative business.  It is sheer labor of love for the literary arts and service to humanity. I feel grateful to be a tiny part in that endeavor.

CH: Please name a few poets whose work has influenced yours. How does your work reflect that influence?

VS-S: That’s a tough one to answer since I read many of them simultaneously.  And, there are numerous new poets too that I find inspiring and energizing my creativity.

Here’s a few of the many who’ve influenced my work: Octavio Paz, Jorge L. Borges, R. Maria Rilke, Rumi, W.Szymborska, Edward Hirsch, Tony Hoagland, Robert Creeley, Robert Hass, Naomi S. Nye, Sarah Cortez, Lorenzo Thomas, Reetika Vazirani, Mark Strand, William Stafford, Antonio Machado, F. Garcia Lorca, Jane Kenyon, Ruth Stone, Yehuda Amichai, Anna Akhmatova, Rabindranath Tagore, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Gulzar, Ghalib.

A lot of these poets invite me in to emulate their voice or style.  Or, like a jazz artist, take me into a  “Call and Response” spin. Others linger under my skin till the inspiration ripens. I’m a product of multi-cultures, so I find translated poets intriguing and challenging for my own expression i.e. blending of my roots and experiences as an Indian American.

Western and Latin American poets’ teachings have instructed my work the most.  Especially studying the craft books like Richard Hugo’s “A Triggering Town” and Edward Hirsch’s “How To Read A Poem”, and “ The Demon and The Angel”. Late Lorenzo Thomas was my first English creative writing teacher; my Reverend Poet. Thanks to him, thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye, and also to Edward Hirsch for giving me “thumbs up” on my talent in my early years of writing.  Their initial advice on how I need to read a lot of contemporary poetry and spread my wings, to submit, share, and work with my community of poets. Their advice nurtured the roots of the tree I am now.  A communion received in my early forties when most successful poets have published at least a book or two. I knew I had a lot of catching up to do, to continue the new chapter of my writing life as an English poet.  Many thanks to Inprint Houston for giving me a sanctuary, kind of an ashram to study poetry.

CH: What is the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

VS-S: Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen — An American Lyric”.

A Virtual Interview with Cheney Crow

Poet Cheney G. Crow will be the featured reader on September 10, 2015 from 7:15 to 9:00 at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar) for September’s 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic.

Background

Cheney Crow began writing as a young girl in Washington DC.  She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, and in 2014 she completed her MFA in poetry at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, The hiatus between arts degrees included more than a decade in Europe, a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and many years of teaching at UT.

In the last year Cheney’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, the online journal Human Equity through Art (HEART), the arts magazine Terminus, and Tupelo Quarterly, where her poem was a semifinalist in theTQ7 contest, and will be included in the anthology Best of Tupelo Quarterly. Her ekphrastic poem “Execution at the Temple” was selected for honorable mention in the 2014 Maine Media Character Contest. Last fall Cheney gave a workshop called “Claiming Collective Wisdom” at the Austin Feminist Poetry Festival. In 2016 one of her poems will appear in the Texas Poetry Calendar.

The Interview

CH: How long have you been writing? When did you first begin to think of yourself as a writer?

CC: I first remember writing in second grade, a “book” (based on Nancy Drew), called “The Mystery of the Hidden Staircase.”  I bound the pages by hand, drew a cover illustration and took it to school, where I added a library-style card that allowed my classmates to check it out. About the staircase – IT was hidden, but not in the sense one might think — one day it was missing! Ah, suspension of disbelief…

CH: II understand you spent many years as a sculptor. I also know that you have a PhD in Applied Linguistics, in addition to your arts degrees (including your MFA in poetry). As an artist, how would you describe yourself?

CC: I don’t believe one chooses art;  I believe art imposes itself, announces itself as a compulsion, something that must emerge. The form art takes is personal, and might be based on opportunity.

For me it was dance and music early on. I began writing songs as a 10-year-old, when I got my first guitar, so if you don’t count my spontaneous public ballet performances for my parents’ friends or my highly vocal enactments of my mother’s favorite opera arias (death scenes of the female leads in Madame Butterfly, Tosca and La Bohème)…I’d say performing music for wounded veterans air-evacuated to military hospitals in the DC area was the beginning.

By the time I was a senior in high school I was writing essays about the role of the artist in society.  The main argument of these essays was that the artist has a responsibility to society.  In a world where total annihilation was possible, I argued that the artist must present work that the public can both understand and participate in — that public interaction with art creates a dialogue necessary to society.  All this before I considered myself an artist.  I was preoccupied with the anti-war movement, politically active, working summers at the Capitol.  I got permission to spend the first anniversary of MLK’s death in my dorm room meditating and reading Gandhi.  I was a high school senior.

I still believe all those things. The critical decision in my life was the shift in focus from politics to art as a vehicle for change.  This happened when I was in my early 20s — I realized the inconsistencies and the ephemeral nature of political movements and attitudes; I began to believe that change can only come one person at a time. I looked to what lasts over centuries, and can change a life.  The answer was art.

Until this time I was performing music, learning sculpture, but my focus had been political. When I chose sculpture as a way of life, it was also because the pursuit of art is an evolving question; each piece leads inexorably to the next, in ways grossly evident in sculpture; one can begin with a two-ton piece of stone and keep revising until it fits in a pocket!  The challenge is stopping.  That’s true in all arts.  Carving stone, your second draft is a new sculpture, begun with what you learned by the end of the first one – how it should have begun, or what should be altered, how or when it should end.

CH: For me, image and sound in poetry can inform it in a way that seems similar to material choice in sculpture. How would you describe the relationship between sculpture and poetry? How does your experience as a sculptor figure in your work?

CC: Sculpture in stone is a full-body experience.  That’s not part of poetry, but all the rest of sculpture is: choice of subject matter, line-by-line decisions, rhythm of form and coherence of line, a certain inevitability that should emanate from the piece — the need not to have a favorite side, section, or line.

In the carving process there are many tools, each with a different rhythm, so rhythm is part of sculpture, too. Sculpture shapes my poetry: all my poems begin as image and feeling, not words.  I seek words to embody the image, but I don’t feel a need to be totally clear.  I know that comes from my training in sculpture —“if you have to explain it, you haven’t finished”…

I like making something that engages the reader, viewer, listener, with something recognizable, but with room for interpretation. A sculpture does that: it’s an offering.  A viewer can see it all at once, or look into its lines and shadows, its many angles, its subtleties.  It’s all about discovery, despite the obvious form.

CH: I recall Gertrude Stein attributing the expatriate environment of France with helping her distill and create English anew in her work. Were you engaged in creative writing during your many years abroad? How did your expatriate experience influence your relationship with language?

CC: Goodness, yes (was I engaged in writing)!  Writing has always been how I kept track of my emotional world, which was constantly changing. I have an essay on 2 rolls of floral-bordered paper towels about the nefarious influence politics of the cold war would have on love. I knew everyone at my school would melt if Washington were bombed.  I wrote that essay as a suicide note in seventh grade!

When I moved to France I was 19. I stayed in Europe for all but one semester until I was in my mid thirties. Before email or cell phones.  Eight of those years were in France, six without speaking English.  Although I was fluent in French at an academic level when I arrived (Sarah Lawrence required fluency for working individually with French professors) —I could read and discuss Marx or Plato or Jean-Jacques Rousseau — I was not fluent in culture or identity.

Joining another culture is the ultimate work of translation, finding a “voice” for your self – your cultural equivalent — in a somewhat familiar, but truly unknown environment.  One begins from scratch.  This was self-evident in France and Spain, but England took me by surprise.  A very different language from American, even East Coast/New England American, and a culture far more foreign to my upbringing than France.  I moved to Spain aware of the challenge, and welcomed it.  One becomes a bit of a chameleon, I suppose, fitting oneself to each culture in ways that are most comfortable, with the perennial “get out of jail free” card of being a foreigner if one guesses wrong.

CH: How is your training as a linguist reflected in your poetry? Are there linguists whose work you would cite as an influence?

CC: My focus in linguistics was phonetics and neurolinguistics —  specifically speech production, a miraculous dialogue of the brain with all our articulators, a dialogue that differentiates for each language, each set of speech sounds. The rules that govern them, their order, their melody and rhythm.  I love the discoveries of language at both extremes, the physical and the philosophical.

As influences I’d cite Bjorn Lindblom, Harvey Sussman and Peter MacNeilage for opening my mind to phonetics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and speech production, then Wittgenstein because of his interest in the relationship between language, culture and thought, a sort of chicken-and-egg question, since the vocabulary and gestures of each language describe relationships that are often intrinsic to the social and cultural ethos it enacts.  Every bilingual person knows there are thoughts you won’t have in a language that has no word for it – that a language is a doorway to a new relationship with both the physical world and the humans around you.  We’ve all heard about the many words for snow in Eskimo.  It’s that kind of thing: what you can conceive of is limited by the words and concepts we have at our disposal! Wittgenstein says it well. Of course, in German you can invent a word if you need it.  In English we do less of that, use the same word for multiple contexts, like “like”… a paring down of expressive vocabulary is hard at work in our American language. Did Hemingway start that trend with his abbreviated syntax?

CH: What launched you on a trajectory toward poetry? What made you decide to get an MFA?

CC: My mother launched me. She was very musical, and she loved poetry.  She read to me rhythmically. Long before I could read she insisted I learn and recite poems by heart at every occasion: birthdays, holidays, bedtime.

I began writing my own poems in grade school, and never stopped, although I kept sculpture and music in the foreground of my artistic expression.  All that ended with my arm injury, which required a new career and a different arm. Hence the linguistics, which (barely) paid the bills but never fed me as an artist.  When I couldn’t draw, carve, or play music, writing became my primary expressive mode.  The compulsion to art was instantly limited to writing, which, over time, refined itself, but I knew I lacked craft.

Having assiduously devoted myself to the craft skills of the arts I had practiced professionally (music and figurative sculpture), I knew craft was the path to more options, better tools, for what I had to express.  I think that’s true of all arts.  Anyone can have a moment of inspiration that produces something magical.  I’ve seen it happen – a composer who wakes up in the night with an entire piece in a dream.  Lots of musicians talk about that gift.  But writing it down takes a set of skills.  So does improving the work we generate in poems.

As soon as my daughter finished graduate school, and I could quit teaching, I devoted myself full time to learning craft.  I approached it as a beginner learning piano scales. I went to workshops with experienced poets, beginning with a Sarah Lawrence professor, until finally I was working with Ellen Bryant Voigt, founder of Warren Wilson College, who encouraged me to apply. I had taken workshops with three poets who had said the same thing. It was time.

CH: How did you go about choosing Warren Wilson for your MFA program?

CC: I knew Warren Wilson was the right place for me because equal weight is given to craft analysis and creative work. There is a huge analytical focus that forces students to delve deep into a single craft features in one poem, sometimes even one stanza. Working one-on-one is what I knew as an undergrad, and Warren Wilson sustains a blend of brilliance, rigor, and freedom of investigation reminiscent of what I had fallen in love with at Sarah Lawrence.

At Warren Wilson there isn’t just one star teacher; they are all brilliant poets and demanding teachers, pushing students to discovery through extremely hard work. A different mentor each semester helps you design and carry out a program that adapts your individual writing needs and goals to the program’s analytical exigencies.

I could describe my experience as something akin to being pushed out a high window by someone with a net you can’t see. The student body was as astounding and varied as the faculty.  I felt myself a newt among ancient frogs; most of my fellow students were new BFAs or English PhDs, long-time poetry profs.  Very deep water. Thankfully, about a quarter of us were less-versed professionals from non-English-major backgrounds.

CH: Name three or more poets whose work has influenced your own. How can their influence be seen in your work?

CC: My earliest influence was Akmatova.  I began reading her work in college, and it’s obvious now that her raw emotions and compact, image-laden small stanzas shaped what my work would become years later.  More recently, I would say Frank Bidart, for his ability to use multiple voices, the seamless interweave of emotion and idea. Finally, I’ll name Ilya Kaminsky, for what feels like a sprinkling of magic that renders even poems about Soviet atrocities beautiful to read. This brings me to a fourth poet I want to name, my friend and classmate Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, a Cave Canem Fellow known on the slam circuit as Laura Yes-Yes.  Laura said something in a workshop at Frost Place last month about how dark poems need a “release valve.” Just the right word.  What I’m looking for lately.

CH: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

CC: Last Psalm at Sea Level  by Meg Day, who read at Bookwoman in July. Her images are extraordinary, and even her titles are compelling.  The poems themselves are as evocative and other-worldly as some of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s, yet they are grounded in a terse, tense field of reality. Impressive.

CH: What are you working on now? Where do you see your work going?

CC: I have a book-length manuscript that follows something of a narrative arc around a particular theme.  I’ve been sending it out, but I’ve also come to believe it needs a lot more work, or that I’d like to reshape it.

Currently I’m focusing on a series of poems that came out of the two months I’ve spent in Valencia, Spain over the last year, and where I’m returning mid-September. My experience there was equally external and internal.  Living in a city founded long before the Roman empire, in a building with a convent, during months laced with enormous religious celebrations, day-long processions honoring Christianity and Valencia’s Moorish history, it was impossible not to address questions of history and faith.  I believe these poems will become at least a chapbook within the next year. That’s the goal I’ve set for this work.  I never know where the work is going.  I follow it as it comes and then do my best to craft it.  For some poems the process takes years.