an interview with Sue Goyette

CV2: With your newest book, Undone, it seems you have again “outdone” yourself. Given the success of your first collection of poetry, The True Names of Birds, and a critically acclaimed novel, Lures, how did it feel to get back to a second collection of poetry. Why, after a successful debut novel, did you return to poetry?

Sue Goyette: It felt great getting back to writing poems—especially after holding a novel in my head for so long. I didn’t plan on writing poems, I just tried to sit still long enough to create a welcoming kind of silence where form can meet idea. I’m not sure I had much else to do with it.

CV2: Undone, like your first collection of poetry, is sumptuous—with that exquisite clarity that was so striking in The True Names of Birds. The shape, even the title, is perfect. Undone—simple, obvious, and complex at the same time, so in tune with the writing in this second volume—where did the poetry in this book come from and what was the process of writing this collection, compared to the creative process for your first book?

SG: A great sadness began this book, a grieving that came when my marriage ended. I think I was trying to create a sort of lyrical map through emotional territory I knew very little about. It started there but then lifted once enough time had passed and I could apply craft to that wilderness.

The urge to create, I think, comes from wanting to participate in a sort of testimony, a witnessing and a mapping that is part archaeology and part rocket science that alchemizes our experience into something finer—something we can offer as a guide or company on the trail. That urge, ultimately, is what I begin with; it doesn’t change, I do. I was a younger version of myself when I wrote The True Names of Birds and believed that a certain amount of luck was necessary to write a good poem. Paradoxically, I know less about poems but more about myself.

CV2: Your poetic imagery is intensely domestic; huge revelations begin with deceptively small household events. What hold does the everyday have on your creative imagination—“Every evening you slide your plates, your forks and knives/and then your hands into what halos feel like. Watch yourselves then,/that impeccable moment of gratitude, the closing of your eyes: blissful.” What is it about these experiences that opens poetry for you, that gives you a source of revelation and understanding about who you are as a poet?

SG: I think galactic things can be expressed simply. I think we define who we are in our lives by how we spend our days. The way we are in our homes is the first ring when we throw our stones of truth into the water. Home is also the place to which everyone, no matter where they go to when they leave it, can relate. For me, the structure of dailiness offers a treasure of metaphors, and is the sort of language that doesn’t have to be decoded and that can transcend differences to honour the things we have in common. And honouring the things we have in common, for me, is an important step in honouring differences—accepting them— recognizing that beneath the surface of them we are all essentially the same.

CV2: With the completion of your second volume of poetry, how do you feel about your first? There are a few lines in your poem “And After” published in Undone that made me wonder—“You can have all the Audubon. Birds don’t convince me/the way they used to. There were whole years of days when I believed/that feathers were a true currency.” Is this a reference to your first book, The True Names of Birds, and if so, by what do you feel you were deceived?

SG: Thinking of my first book is like looking at pictures of myself when I was thirteen. I think: oh my god, look at those pants, look at that shag haircut, but it’s hard to blame a thirteen-year-old for looking thirteen. I wrote the poems the best I could and, yes, I would write them differently now but they would become different poems in the process so as a stick in the ground, a finger pointing, you were here on my map, it’s a pretty reliable landmark.

Believing feathers were a true currency is more a reference to myself while I was writing my first book. There was a system of talismans that I relied on in that classic “I have no power, it all comes from out there” way. It was a convenient belief system because it kept me from being accountable for my life and my work. In that way, I’ve changed a great deal. I don’t see it as a deception, but more as a revelation or an evolution.

CV2: It is quite often a mistake of beginning poets to grasp for the big concepts, words like, say, love, or faith, or something equally expansive, in attempting to give the appropriate size to their poetic intentions; but it is the seasoned poet who knows the biggest miracles of understanding often exist in the minutiae of everyday—how did you arrive at this realization? Who were the poets at your disposal, either in the shape of books or in the flesh, who helped you understand this aspect of “the poetics of space?”

SG: I think cracking open the abstract idea of love or faith is the only way to authentically write about those big feelings. It is one of the golden rules of writing, showing by way of metaphorical details rather than telling in the long-winded, abstract, sermonizing way. We love each other by taking out two cups rather than one from the cupboard, by leaving a light on. These are concrete details that serve as testimony of the feeling being experienced, details that are reliable witnesses that turn up every day.

I’m not sure how I learned that. I have boxes of really old journals filled with poems about love or loneliness called “Love” or “Loneliness” that go to great lengths about love or loneliness using just those words and I think, good god, why didn’t someone try to stop me! But I do think writing with the gigantic clouds of words like love and loneliness is a necessary part of the writing apprenticeship, ideas are being hatched, thought about, and sculpted. The attention to detail follows, I think, organically, once the idea is honed.