Absence, Possibility, and Power: A Poet-on-Poet Interview with Stacey Balkun and C.T. Salazar https://ift.tt/4X30mlK
We often think of land as distance that separates, but landscapes also connect us. Mississippi is a landscape like this: the state is much larger than most of us will ever understand, geographically and historically. I spent three years in North Mississippi, working towards my PhD in Oxford, not far but worlds away from C.T. Salazar in Cleveland. We were both immersed in poetry, and shared much of the same community, but somehow didn’t even know of each other until long after I’d returned to Louisiana.
In the fall of 2022, we connected through Instagram, then set about reading each other’s work and chatting often about place, craft, and verse. We’re both drawn to story, voice, and absence. Our friendship grew quickly and by the new year, C.T. would stay in my guest room on a trip to New Orleans, and the conversation recorded below would be continued over Guinesses at a dive bar in the French Quarter. We’re both drawn to these places: the liminal spaces that connect as they separate. As poets, we understand how landscape is more — so much more — than a passive backdrop. As C.T. says below, landscape is voice.
Stacey Balkun: C.T., I am blown away by Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking! There is so much to love in this collection, and I see so many connections between these poems and my collection Sweetbitter. Many of the poems in HJTBH investigate language itself: the meaning/power of words/story. Can you speak to that idea?
C.T. Salazar: Hey, Stacey! That means so much, and reading Sweetbitter, I very much felt like I was reading a sibling in poetry. I love starting with this idea because I don’t know the answer. One thing I think of is how the laws of language are entangled with the laws of desire. When we demand more from our language, we demand more from that which may fulfill us. Maybe in the future I’ll have a more clear understanding of what this says about power. Or maybe possibility is what I’m confusing with power, the fruit I’m reaching for when I’m inside the language. I’m curious, what’s your take on that?
SB: I love this idea about desire and demand, possibility and power. I think stories hold both power and possibility. It’s easiest for me to think about this question in terms of erasure: Sweetbitter has a few poems that are erasures of 90s song lyrics. Making these was a process of exploration and discovery: what possibilities could these lyrics offer, besides the stories they tell on the surface? If the original story is harmful, what possibility for redemptions can it hold? These questions are my drive; I don’t think I have any answers, either. Biblical stories seem to be a driving force of your work. Do any of these questions (or others) inform your reading/writing of those?
C.T.: Oh, I love that! Erasure as a process of possibility. I’m absolutely infatuated with faith and what it asks of its believers. The King James is such a language of the South, so that’s my impulse to write through the old stories. How I understand faith is constantly changing, especially through the writing of HJTBH. I’ve never tried erasure, but from your description, it sounds like there’s also a kind of faith to the original text at work — that it can be transformed into something you need.
SB: Mm. Yes. “Faith” can mean a lot of things here, and I’m into that, especially as an encounter with transformation. Bible stories are so important to the girls in Sweetbitter because they’re trying to understand the world, and all they have to go on is the language they’ve been given: bible stories, fairy tales, song lyrics. What do those narratives collectively say about being a girl in the world? Nonbinary? Queer? The girls hold onto the faith that stories are powerful, that stories will guide them. But in the end, transformation is absolutely necessary for them to even imagine themselves into the world. And the imagery of those stories! HJTBH is full of fire and water, water and fire. Can you talk to the relationship of these two elements, and to the landscape of the book more broadly?
C.T.: Absolutely. I think all of these ideas are connected. The way we talk and the stories we know says something about where we’re from. The place we inhabit forms how we grammar, and in the poem we grammar a space for us to inhabit. In a lot of ways, voice and landscape are the same thing to me. I like water and fire because I used to think of them as having the duality of being both affirming and destructive, but now I think of them as a kind of revision our ecology participates in, that we’re part of and implicated through. And even though a poem’s logic is very much its own, I like an ecology working in the background. Belief is a big fixation of mine, so the presence of water —baptism? — felt necessary. And fire to dry it all off. None of this was at the front of my consciousness in the writing, but stood out in the revising. I like what you said about what’s necessary for the girls of Sweetbitter to imagine themselves in the world, and I’m wondering if that in any way is aligned with how you move through a poem yourself, either as reader or writer?
SB: Yes! So many of the dualities we depend on are false. I love this concept of fire and water as an ecological revision — whaaaat. I don’t think I was conscious of this either as I was writing the poems, but the girls burn with anxiety, fear, excitement, and mostly a yearning to leave: to break free of the destructive forces that hold them. Water binds the town: the next town over is literally called “Boundbrook.” Growing up, I loved the water. I still do. I’ll be the only one in the pool at a pool party; I’ll wade in the ocean in New Jersey in December. So, to learn of how polluted, dangerous the water my childhood was immersed in was — that was sobering. Terrifying, actually. I had a cancer scare at the exact time Sweetbitter was published — in January, a doctor essentially told me I either had lymphoma or was fine and they wouldn’t know until I could have surgery in April. It was an awful few months, especially as I was performing in support of Sweetbitter, which meant constantly interacting with the hazard of the woods I ran through, the water I swam in. I knew that chemical violence was a part of me; suddenly I had to face the reality that the landscape may have broken my body. That…doesn’t really answer your question about poetry, but I guess I move through poems and landscapes similarly: first, I clomp through. I’m not careful, attentive. That’s for the second and third and fourth journeys. In revision, re-reading, I focus and attend. I need to have an overview before I can really see. I’m learning not to feel guilty for this messy way of being.
C.T.: First, I’m deeply sorry you had that looming over you, especially through the moments that are supposed to be celebratory. The ways our bodies can act like documents and record everything they’ve been exposed to unnerves me. I’m an archivist by education, and that education is a process of critiquing what passes for a document, why and why not. At a reading at my alma mater there was a direct spotlight at the podium and I couldn’t shake how my shadow was documenting my body, contextualizing its presence in the room in relation to all the light. A lot of HJTBH was written with a kind of poetics of documentation in mind, especially with the created gaps of our cultural memory. As you’ve learned about the precarity of that world (honestly, our world), what’s it been like to write toward it? I know through reading Sweetbitter you’ve got a sharp perspective of the environment.
SB: Oh wow, archivist makes so much sense now! HJTBH is so rich; it’s an embodied archive. I think I have a similar impulse: I want to document an emotional truth, not just a photographic type of truth. This impulse worked out well for me since I couldn’t find much documentation on my environment: a few articles here and there, a few EPA reports that I struggled to read. Many anecdotal stories from friends and neighbors. I knew the truth was lurking in the gaps, but it was difficult to find, to see. I feel like the kind of environmental truth I’m interested in is complex, nuanced, fragmented. I’ve embraced fragmented forms, and love the idea of using caesura and gap to leave space for what cannot be seen or said. I know you share this, because I see Sappho all throughout HJTBH! Can you speak a little about your relationship to Sappho?
C.T.: It’s funny, when you said “the girls burn with” earlier I immediately thought of one of the fragments and the ways I’ve caught Sappho in Sweetbitter. It’s very much the archivist in me, but I’m infatuated with the fragments. A few in particular I’ve been trying to translate for around four or five years and love the possibilities; how a fragment is open on all sides. As opposed to a sentence which is kind of a closed system. A few of the fragments (translated by Carson) closest to my heart act as titles to a few of the poems in HJTBH. I love that, out of everything that hasn’t survived of Sappho’s archive, what we’re left with (in even partial sentences) is so unmistakably electric with desire and need. If we’re all erased how lucky we’d be if that’s all that survives of our work. Where do you find and connect with Sappho?
SB: C.T., I love this response. Fragment is possibility. I think readers are drawn to the gaps because it makes reading participatory: we’re being asked to get ourselves from A to B. What is the story between? And isn’t ellipsis the story of archive, too–what hasn’t been saved tells a whole story. That’s where Sweetbitter intersects with Sappho: the poems revolve around this sort of quest —desire — for understanding, and realizing the answers are in the absence. I’m drawn to forms that use absence: silence is an integral part of language, and desire, too.
C.T.: Yeah, that’s spot-on. The archive is equally what it lacks, and I love hearing you speak through the ways this is manifested in Sweetbitter. I’ve thought a lot with Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking that even in a flawed way, it documents how my relationship to these ideas and questions are still growing. And the things I haven’t spoken of are still speaking around me, and me being tangled up in all of it means I was here.
SB: Thank you so much for this conversation, C.T.! I’m going to hold these ideas with me: these questions of entanglement and archive; desire and absence, language and landscape. I appreciate your attentiveness and openness!
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State & teaches online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. She currently works as Coordinator for the Graduate and Undergraduate English programs at the University of New Orleans.
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award. His poems have recently appeared in Gulf Coast, West Branch, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. C.T. writes reviews for Rhino Poetry and is a faculty research methods librarian at Delta State University.
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