Lily Starr: So we’ve been talking about how you choose poems when you’re giving a reading from your new book Let’s Not Live on Earth. Compared to reading from Mr. West, what has your experience been like ordering the work and interacting with the audience?
Sarah Blake: Well, what was interesting about Mr. West is that I started reading from that pretty early. I was adjuncting, so I got to participate in faculty readings and there were a few magazines that had printed my poems and wanted me to read. Actually, I understood the form of that book by reading from it. I was like, this is the first poem in the book. Originally that poem had been way later. And then I found myself reading that poem first to kind of explain the reading, the threads of the book are right there in that first poem, pregnancy, like weird voices.
LS: It became a key for the rest of the book.
SB: And it made so much sense as the key to readings. And I was like, it’s the key to the book!
LS: I got the key, in the words of DJ Khaled.
SB: So I learned a lot from that book, from doing readings before it was put together. Once it was together it was often a question of ‘Do I go in order?’ And then there were a few poems that are really long. When I read at AWP last time I did three of the longest poems in the book. I love those.
LS: Those poems are definitely for a hefty audience. Was your thinking that the attendants of AWP would follow you better?
SB: Yeah, they totally followed me. There were other times when I was funny. There were other times, when I was reading at high schools, that the kids wouldn’t be that familiar with Kanye, which was strange.
LS: Yeah, they’re familiar with Kanye as this public figure of dysfunction rather than an artist.
SB: Or as Kim’s husband. I’m like, wait, what? I think about Kim Kardashian as this whole other thing.
LS: Yeah, his identity is so focused on being associated with the Kardashians and the fashion mogul side of it. We sometimes forget that he started off making music.
SB: It’s been very bizarre to do. I recently went to a high school, and I had this book [Let’s Not Live on Earth] with me but nobody asked me about it. We only talked about Kanye. They were interested in him but they weren’t familiar with his work. There was one student who was interested in him, and the teacher said, ‘You should talk about Kanye! Could you just talk about him in front of us for awhile?’ So me and this student just riffed for five minutes on Kanye in front of the class.
LS: That’s so cool.
SB: That was fun. For those audiences sometimes I’d ask what they wanted to hear. There was one time I opened for a conference that was called Drunk Ted Talks that they do in Brooklyn, and I opened for their conference on Kanye. That was so weird because I’ve written this serious, kind of sad, weird book about Kanye, but then I was just an opening act where people expect you to warm up the crowd. So I only read funny poems. I have a funny bone. I like to be funny.
What was amazing is every poem that I thought was funny was funnier than it’s ever been to a Kanye crowd. Every joke landed. My sister videotaped for a second and she messed up, you know, where you click it at the wrong moment and instead you get just laughter and applause. And I said ‘No one’s ever going to make these sounds for me again like this. You captured the one moment.’ This happened on video. Now you can make it your ringtone for every alert. Just for you, everywhere you go.
LS: So you mentioned some long poems in Mr. West and then you have a really long poem at the end of this book. Then there’s a poem called “Monsters” that’s long as well.
SB: Did you read my weird one about being lost in the woods? When Aaron was born I didn’t write for a year and a half. I revised a lot. And then I wrote this really long poem. Half of it ran on the Los Angeles Review of Books website. So I have it and I love it and it’s very busy. It’s also written in second person, like “The Starship,” but it’s not the same. It’s a woman, you know, she has an affair. It’s just very clear in this poem, like there’s no gender, age, race, nothing. I tried to leave it the most bizarre in terms of personhood, and that person is lost in the woods with a mouse, a dead bird, and a few other characters. Sometimes you get to hear what they’re thinking, but not a lot. They don’t sound like characters or anything. I was just thinking of the weird voices that appeared. I think that that poem was a big divergence from writing about Kanye. There’s no pop culture in it. There’s no technology in it. I guess I needed a break.
LS: Yeah. I think about how people say that after they write their first book they don’t know how to write anymore. They just don’t know what to do.
SB: I had that feeling, I think. I just couldn’t write. I couldn’t think, I was just a milk machine, and I was totally gaga for my kid. So yeah, I wasn’t really thinking about it. I signed up for a little Barrelhouse workshop that they had that year because I was like, I should write. It’s when I started that micro-essay they had on Tumblr because I wanted to still be involved in poetry, but I couldn’t do it right then. I just invited all these poets to write little essays. I was like, ‘How do I insert myself?’ And it felt like I did, it felt like weird little live wires out into the community. And then I could go back to my life where I wasn’t actually writing myself. So I worked on that, and then I was adjuncting, and then in the middle of the two semesters “The Starship” started coming out and I remember, I was in a panic because I was like, the next semester is going to start in like two weeks and I won’t be able to write again!
But then “The Starship” came, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, am I ever gonna write small poems again?’ “Monsters” came out of a national poetry month. I was trying to write every day and I did.
LS: So did you write a section of it everyday or sometimes more than one?
SB: No, just one a day. Aaron went to bed and I was in bed and I wrote it on my phone. As it was happening I was like, ‘Dammit, you know, I will make sure I write a poem today.’ A lot of pressure. And some of them got changed. There’s about 30 in the book but I wrote more than that.
LS: There’s symmetry that happens when I read the book, because we have “Monsters” which is a long poem and then there’s “The Starship,” and then that kind of created balance within the book as well. So I can see how it would be craving that equilibrium in “Monsters.”
SB: Yeah, there are 25. So I tried really hard to cut one more section of “Monsters” so that it would be even, but they all needed to be there.
LS: I wonder if you might read a section from “Monsters” for us?
SB: Do you have a favorite?
LS: I do. It’s one of the earlier ones. I really like number four.
SB: My Dad joke!
‘I’m scared,’ you say. The monster replies, ‘Nice to meet you, scared. I’m a monster,’ because the monster is father to another monster. The younger monster would have acknowledged your fear. The younger monster would have been quicker with you.’
LS: I want to go back to the idea of space that we’re talking about and you finding your ground after Mr. West, like creating space for your work and your novel, which just got accepted and is going to come out soon! So can you tell me a little bit about the process of moving from a smaller lyric biography towards the epic poem, and then to the novel?
SB: Yeah, I really do think my pregnancy kind of broke me in a good way. It broke me open, and my brain was just like, ‘you can write long things’ and it’s like ‘Great, thanks. Thanks brain.’ And then once I’d done two of them, I started actually writing screenplays. I have three full screenplays written.
LS: What are they about?
SB: One is about miscarriages; they all have magical realism. One’s about mental health issues as a woman and as a mother, like the kind of fears you have when you have mental health issues and wonder who’s going to know, what are they gonna think of me as a parent if they know about that? And then I have a half-started one, it’s a comedy about a woman.
LS: Is it like being the funny girl or something like that?
SB: No, it’s jokes about sexual health, things that we’re not supposed to and don’t tend to talk about. I kept coming across women that didn’t seem to know sex health, sex ed stuff. I’m very passionate about sex ed, so that’s where that impulse came from.
LS: That’s also a theme that comes up in Let’s Not Live on Earth in “One Doctor Leads to the Next,” right?
SB: Yeah! It doesn’t come up as much in the poems except for indirectly. But in this screenplay, I’m just going for it. I’ve been talking about condoms especially. They really freak me out. A lot of men don’t know—this is gonna be weird, but you can write about it if you want—don’t know how to put on a condom.
LS: Yep.
SB: Which I don’t understand. But I remember that from dating. I don’t know if it’s changed because I haven’t been dating.
LS: Nope, it definitely hasn’t changed.
SB: You have to pinch the tip so there’s not air so it doesn’t explode. And all these things, rolling it down, everything. I dated a guy who didn’t know what size condom to buy. I was just like, how can you—this is your body!
LS: Yeah! And men still believe the myth that there are condoms that won’t be big enough. I’ve seen people shove their entire arms in one, or put it over their heads. But yeah. Okay, so you were writing about condoms and sexual health.
SB: I was struck. I was really obsessed with stories and different ways to tell them and how long it took to tell them. And certain things were coming to me more in dialogue so I was just going with it. Then I started writing all these persona poems about women in Genesis, fairy tales, and Greek myths because I was thinking of all the women that I was exposed to when I was young that I felt like I was really defining myself against, you know? I loved Artemis and Athena but was really pissed at the nymphs.
LS: So the binary of that.
SB: But then I felt like I was doing it to every female that I was coming across. I was so pissed at Cinderella.
LS: It was either a hard yes or a hard no.
SB: And the 12 dancing princesses, like sneaking around, I was like yes girl, yes we can do that! I was trying to revisit that and wondering if I could. Oh, and I was writing these collaborative poems with Kimberly Quiogue Andrews about the Sea Witch. I love Ursula, I think she’s amazing.
LS: She’s the best.
SB: I was watching the movie and I was like, ‘Why am I so hard on Ariel?’ I despise her. She looks thirteen or something. When I was young I thought she looked like an adult.
LS: She’s a child. She’s only supposed to be sixteen.
SB: Right. And I guess she does look sixteen. She’s got breasts.
LS: I didn’t look like that when I was sixteen.
SB: No, me neither. I was like, ‘What if I rewrote Ariel to be someone I did identify with?’ Like how could I make a woman that I would have been proud to have been exposed to? I still haven’t done that yet, but I did it with a bunch of other characters. I did it with Snow White who I also could not stand. It’s like, man, you got no awareness. Taking apples from creepy old ladies.
LS: Not a smart girl. Yeah.
SB: I was really driven toward that. Sometimes I was writing into characters I loved. Artemis is the first person I ever wrote about when I was ten. I wrote a poem about Artemis. First poem I ever wrote.
LS: Is this available in the world?
SB: I have a photo of it and I might have posted it somewhere at some point. It’s, you know, it’s ten year old me writing about Artemis being really pissed off at Apollo.
LS: My ten year old poems had no sort of awareness of anything at all.
SB: I went to a tiny little school where my mom taught. There was a poet in residence, so she came to each grade during their poetry unit each year.
LS: That’s pretty cool, being exposed to poetry at such a young age. I want to get back to the novel just a little more, how did that come about?
SB: I wrote a short screenplay about Noah and his wife and then I just couldn’t stop thinking about her. That ten minute screenplay turned into a good chunk of the first chapter of my novel and I just couldn’t stop. It was therapeutic to sit down and spend time with Noah’s wife.
LS: So how did you come to this fascination with the story? Had you grown up with it or did you just stumble upon it one day?
SB: I was raised by a Jewish mom, so I’m very culturally Jewish. But she was atheist. My Dad was raised Irish Catholic. Sixteen rolled around and he was like, ‘Nope.’ So by the time they were together and had babies, we were always pretty atheist. But I was obsessed with religion and I asked them to take me around to churches when I was seven. I asked my mom to take me to any service that was in the area, so she just did it every Sunday. I fell in love with Quaker school, maybe at six, and then I started going to a Quaker meeting every Sunday.
LS: What did you love about that?
SB: I loved the silence, just sitting in silence for an hour. But then I went to Sunday school and they taught me a story of Noah’s Ark. So I do have this odd reference point for it. And then my mom got pregnant with my first sister and she was like, ‘I can’t keep taking you Sunday.’ And I still love Quaker meetings. But that was very much the story that I always thought Noah’s Ark was, the childhood storybook version of a dude and animals two-by-two.
LS: Right.
SB: Which is not what it says in Genesis. And then once I did really read Genesis, as I was rereading to pick women to write into poems, I wrote about Dinah, I wrote poems about Sarah or wrote poems about Eve. And I started writing poems about Noah, his wife. But his wife isn’t even named. And the more I read the story the odder it became where it was like, okay, you’re going to take animals two-by-two, just kidding. You’re going to take seven pairs of clean animals. It just gets weirder the more you read it. And then there were waters on the earth for 150 days. God forgot about them and then God remembered they were there and then he sent a wind. It’s a very bizarre story and it’s very short, only about three chapters.
LS: And then it’s crazy how Noah, his wife is kind of without choice in the situation. She just does what’s asked of her. It’s just like, ‘Okay, we’re doing this now. You’re going to come along.’
SB: Yeah, and our sons are going to come and they’re all going to get married and then they’re going to have babies and then we’re going to have this whole story with Noah being a drunk later, but I’m not mentioned again, you know? Noah’s wife is gone, nobody talks about that, even though they’re repopulating nations, none of the wives are there.
LS: It’s so strange to even think about that kind of story in the context of modern fiction, all of the critiques that that would come if someone wrote a novel with those plot holes. Very wild.
SB: Yeah. So I just became obsessed with her and imagining that year and what it would be like. I think too, [in Let’s Not Live on Earth] all the monsters became really interesting because of what I was seeing with Aaron; monsters are everywhere in children’s media, children’s fiction, children’s apps on the phone, children’s shows, children’s movies. It was just monsters, monsters everywhere.
LS: And then the cuteness of monsters versus the actuality of them.
SB: I loved them too. Adorable. I think talking about animated shows reminds me of this. I love anime and I just re-watched the live action Full Metal Alchemist that Netflix did and as a huge Full Metal fan I was like, oh my God, I don’t know what that movie’s like for people who have been exposed to the series.
LS: What is this?
SB: Oh my God. I mean it’s only if you like anime, but it’s this anime. It’s just really, really fun. It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen on television, and they remade it into the movie and it wasn’t as creepy in the movie. It was episodic. They could really do crazy tone building. And so, you can tell I’m obsessed with television and how it works and how narratives are told and I’m obsessed with the episodic that we’re talking about.
LS: It creates tension in the sections of this book too. Do you think you’re doing some of that in here as well?
SB: I think that’s why “The Starship” and the one about the woods speak to me. I can focus on a singular poem that has everything I want a poem to have. It has some juicy moment but it also is going to tell a story flat-out. Often I feel like when you read poems that tell stories, they skirt around because they’re more interested in language or image or something else. Sometimes that’s worth it, but for me I just needed to tell the narrative too. I really am oddly obsessed; I love movies and I was raised on foreign films. I’m a nut for all things visual and narrative.
Anime is really inventive with their weird world-building and tonal exploration. Trigun is one of my favorites. At first I did not like it because there’s some real hokiness that’s true to conventions of anime, but then they have this one scene where he’s whistling through this cave. It’s brilliant. The episode is brilliant and it’s funny because you can talk to other viewers. It’s like, did you watch Lost?
LS: I did watch Lost.
SB: Have you talked to other people about it? What’s your favorite episode of Lost? Everybody says this insane one, the time travel episode in season three. And you’re like, how is this possible? How do we all watch this and our brains were craving the same thing? It’s very odd. And it reminds me of poetry in that old school discussion, ‘Well if I write my best poem it will reach this weird deep down universal bit of you that’s in all of us.’
LS: In every workshop you hear about reaching the universal within the specific.
SB: I resisted that in poetry hardcore. That’s not what it’s all about. I think our ideas of how to reach that were often about avoiding pop culture. And I was like, no, no, no. It’s everywhere. The universal is a real thing.
LS: There’s also this idea that all poems have to be timeless, that speaking about pop culture somehow dates them.
SB: That never made sense to me. It closed off a lot of things. I felt like I couldn’t be funny, I felt like I couldn’t make jokes. I felt like I couldn’t do weird feminist stuff. It just ended up making me very confused about how I fit into poetry, you know? If I’m going to write something so specific to others but unspecific to me, then why am I writing?
LS: If I have to leave this whole part of myself out who am I really writing for?
SB: That’s exactly right. There’s lots of people who write, you don’t need me. I think about novel writing, I love that quote from Toni Morrison where she says that the books she wanted to read weren’t being written. That’s why I wrote, but I always thought that’s why I was never going to write a novel. I fucking love novels. There are novels I could read for years. And I love really long ones, I love Anna Karenina. I love weird, old, dense novels.
LS: Were you reading long novels as you were writing your novel?
SB: No, that was all in high school. Then as I went through college I was really into short stories. Then once I was in graduate school it was all poetry all the time. And then I started to read novels on my phone, and so I started slipping back into the novel world a little bit. I read Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau and I was like, ‘Maybe I could do this.’ And then I read Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. It’s a fascinating novel structurally because it has really short chapters that tell a linear storyline, but every chapter changes point of view. It’s titled by whichever character is telling that part of the story; one character is two brothers and their chapter uses ‘we.’ And it works. I thought going into something like that wasn’t going to work for me but it totally did. There’s lots of ways to write novels. They can be brief, in brief sections, they can be weird. They can do so much. I didn’t have to figure it out before I started writing. I just sat down and kept spending time with Noah’s wife every day, writing her into the next thing that happens on the boat.
LS: So how long did the whole process of Let’s Not Live on Earth take for you? Because you said a year, roughly, a year and a half for Mr. West.
SB: This took years and years and years, but that’s only because of where the poems came from. I love the poem about being lost in the woods, but when I thought about doing interviews I didn’t really want to talk about it. It seems crazy to talk about anything other than like guns, anxiety, motherhood, feminism, and violence right now. I couldn’t just talk about being lost in the woods. I needed to write about it, but I couldn’t just talk about it. I just went through years of poems to find which ones spoke to “The Starship.”
LS: So “The Starship” is the cornerstone of the whole book.
SB: It is, and really it could have been published by itself and so could the first half. I mean they’re technically both book-length, but one needs the other. The sadness needs the release, and the release point doesn’t have the same gravity if you don’t know why you need it, you know? They needed each other. And it was really difficult to leave out some poems that I’ve written in the last few years that I’ve loved. I’ve placed a bunch in magazines, poems that haven’t seen a book, probably won’t ever see a book. I wrote a whole thesis, but I’ve only put out a little chapbook of poems, that chapbook about my grandfather’s death.
LS: With the interactive coloring!
SB: Did you do it?
LS: I really enjoyed it. I thought it was so cool. I’d never seen anything that was interactive in more than a sedentary way. And I’ve seen some poems in Diagram, but I don’t have a lot of experience with those kinds of, well, would you consider them a hybrid form?
SB: I wouldn’t, because I guess I did it because Banango was open to it and it was again, like my son was doing activity books and I was like, this is so fun! This is not fair. You always have such a fun thing to do and why can’t I do that?
But that book of poems is so sad for me. It’s sad to read. I hardly ever do readings from that because it’s so hard for me to go back to. And so to me, it needed a point of levity. I was really into prompts at the time, but I didn’t want to give just a book of prompts, so I did a back and forth between these prompts and these activities. I know so many people that are amazing visual artists. I feel like a lot of people who write need to express themselves in lots of ways and I wanted to tap into that. I wanted it to be free and printable. Banango was game and they were just so brilliant to work with and so supportive.
LS: When you read a book you often have to sit down or take a step back, but when you have an outlet to focus that kinetic energy while you’re still engaging with the text it makes it such a different reading experience. And then also it’s a collaborative project which is really cool. You talked about the poems that you did, about the Sea Witch, which are also collaborative. Are any other poems in this book collaborative?
SB: Sort of. I sent “The Starship” in sections to artists and these paintings [in the book] that Nicky did are based on the first section.
LS: They’re amazing. I was going to ask about the cover art and then also the art inside. How did this come about? It’s such an eye catching and visually stimulating cover and then the back is lovely as well.
SB: And that I didn’t see until it came out. Even the spine is three different colors. I love it. I love every choice they made. So I wrote a long poem and I thought ‘Everybody loves serialized fiction, these serialized podcasts.’ I wanted to do a serialized poem. I wondered who would be game for that. And I pitched it to a bunch of places and Berfrois said yes. And I said, “What about art?” And they were like, ‘Whatever you want to do.’ So I wrote on Facebook: ‘Anybody want to illustrate things for me?’ And a bunch of my friends said yes. So I sent them each a section and a bunch of them just did one illustration for it, but Nicky did thirty paintings and cut up my poem and put the text into the paintings. And so the first day of “The Starship” on Berfrois was this huge scan of my poem and her paintings, and I think some drawings from her daughter maybe, which are very awesome.
Then when it came time to pick artwork for the book I already had it. I asked Nicky if she could remove the text of my poem and she did. She’s a brilliant poet as well. She’s over in the UK now, but she came just for those two years to Austin to do her Masters and then went back. She’s wonderful. Lots of people in my life are artists. My mom has gotten into upholstery. She’s retired and she printed the artwork as a fabric and made a coffee table.
LS: It’s so interesting how it becomes a physical thing in some form or another.
SB: She’s very talented. She really has trouble not doing things. So that whole retiring thing for her was just inertia. This is her project, fancy and expensive merch that you could possibly sell.
LS: So speaking of family and mothers, I feel like we can’t talk about the book without talking about motherhood and how that has influenced you. We see pregnancy in Mr. West a lot, and then in Let’s Not Live on Earth that same child is real and alive. But there’s also fear, and leaving on this big expedition at the end, away from or almost to the thing that is making you fearful. I’m wondering if you think there’s even any way to write about motherhood without also writing about fear?
SB: Probably not. My mother seems to not have fear. I would be like, ‘Aaron’s sick and I’m worried and this and that’, then she’d say ‘Oh yeah.’ I can’t imagine having another child because it gives me so much anxiety. I love him so much, but he gives me so much anxiety. Every time he has a fever I think he’s going to die. Holy shit.
LS: You’re taking care of this entity that just screams and obviously is in distress and is hot and and you’re just like, my God. Oh my God. Especially now with the world that we live in, schools and the shootings and violence.
SB: My husband and I are constantly talking about moving.
LS: Right. So you, you live just outside of Philadelphia now, yes?
SB: Yes, which I love and it’s amazing, but I’m talking about moving to another country with better gun laws. I don’t know if it’ll ever actually happen, but it hasn’t not been on our minds. We’ve taken trips to Toronto and scoped it out. We’ve gone through different stages of being super serious about it. Things were just set up where it was really difficult to move if my husband didn’t want to change his job or if I didn’t want to specifically get a job. So instead we moved to a little condo near where we’d been living but in a better school district. But moving has never left my mind.
LS: I’m thinking of this, too, in the context of “The Starship.”
SB: My husband loves space and sci-fi and he’s, well he’s not so much the woman in Let’s Not Live on Earth, but I’m definitely the husband.
I think part of writing this poem was figuring out why the ‘I’ felt the way that they did, that they’d love to go to space. I do feel like on the other end of writing it now, if a spaceship came I think I’d be more game than I had been in the past.
LS: This question is on the back cover, so we have to ask, would you get on?
SB: When I started writing, nope, not a chance. And now I think I might.
LS: I’m looking at all of the parallels that I’m seeing in our conversation and also the changes in your writing through these different forms. You said in the past that you could never write long form, but then that change became exactly what you needed.
SB: The novel really feels like a side of me fighting, because they’re on a ship that’s preserving all life that’s going to carry on. What decisions would you make? She was giving it a year, should she just stay and die or she can get on the ship and then it’s her job to take care of everything and everyone. Which one does she do? She has to get on the boat, obviously. You get a chance to save your kids. The book starts when they’re already a few months into the trip. That’s when they’re starting to wonder how long the water’s going to cover everything.
LS: One hundred and fifty days, right?.
SB: It was actually fourteen months. I wanted to stay as true to what the Bible offered as I could, but it was very little. It is an interesting story in that sense because some chapters or books do give you a bunch of information. The book of Jubilees, which is where I got a bunch of the women’s names from, doesn’t really offer you much more of the story.
LS: The Bible is bad serialized fiction! It tells you very small bits throughout instead of giving you more information at the head. I’m thinking about dialogue too, because you use a lot of dialogue in your poems. So are there any ways in which the dialogue that you write in poetry differs from the way that you approach it in fiction?
SB: No, it’s roughly the same. I hope I’m good at it. I think it shows, I hear it when I write. Have you ever heard of fiction described as putting two characters in a room?
LS: Yes.
SB: Characters are not in my head. For me it’s really the world building. Usually a character comes out of that. I’ll ask myself, well what if I put a woman there? And then I ask would she have a child or not? Would she have a husband or not, would she have a partner or not, would she be gay or not? I give them circumstances.
And so this woman in Let’s Not Live on Earth, she was going to be this person who was really independent. And once the ship comes, all her ideas of her heteronormative life get pretty shattered. And I really wanted the book, and I think that this came out of the poems, too, to be very graphically about the body and especially the female body. Someone just wrote a Goodreads review of this book, particularly the poem about the gynecologist appointment. She said it made her lose her appetite. I would never think of that poem as gross. My feeling is that the person who wrote that review is someone who is not talking about their vagina with other people.
LS: There’s an episode of Sex and the City, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, where Charlotte says ‘I’ve never looked at my own vagina. I think it’s ugly.’ I think that’s such a strange thing to be disgusted by your own body. When something bad happens, like the enlarged uterus that you’re talking about in the book, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re ugly and now you’re hurting me.’ It’s so easy to demonize our own bodies.
SB: I think the reason I’m very familiar with my body is because I had these closets that had a mirror door all the way down so I could just lay in front of it and look and touch and explore. Now in my house we only have standard bathroom mirrors. Even when I’m naked for a shower, I only see myself from the waist up. When I go to my parents’ house again and I see myself, I’m like, ‘Oh, hello body, I haven’t seen you in awhile,’ you know? I wonder if I should get a full one for my son. At some point he’s going to want access to himself.
LS: Oh, access to yourself, that’s such an interesting way to explain how we avoid seeing ourselves at times. How do we force ourselves to even be interested in our bodies like that?
SB: My mom put me in ballet. I love ballet. And that experience is all about mirrors. I love to dance. I loved all that. I wonder what my relationship with my body would have been if I hadn’t had all of that, but I did. I know for some people seeing themselves is a horrible experience.
LS: I remember taking a dance class in college and I could see myself from every angle. It made me very self conscious. We know other people can see us from all angles at all times, but we don’t necessarily want to have that experience for ourselves.
SB: I’m the opposite, I become totally free. I mostly do yoga at home; I’m scared to do it in front of people. I don’t know why, but I hate that I don’t have a mirror in public. How do I even know if I’m doing it right if I don’t have a mirror? What am I doing? I was a fencer for a lot of years. I fenced in high school and I went back during college and coached that same team. You had to really learn your position. There’s so much body awareness and a lot of that was in mirrors, you had to be able to see yourself. I think it gave me a very interesting and body-positive outlook that I do think a lot of women aren’t having right now, which is a shame.
LS: I’m thinking even back to when we were talking about Ursula. I loved Ursula too because she was a fat body on screen. Yeah, she was a villain, but in a way that was sexy.
SB: She goes, ‘Don’t forget about body language’ and she pushes her hip!
LS: And she’s just taking up space, which is amazing. She’s incredible.
SB: Yeah. Everything about her. I love that song. The “Poor Unfortunate Souls.”
LS: Me too. I hoped you would read “For Max” before I let you go.
SB: Ok, so you know someone who died horrifically
Ok, so you know an animal who died horrifically
In a fire let’s say or a building’s collapse
Or, ok, so you know someone who’s dying right now
Except maybe not horrifically
Except your idea of horrifically is changing
Like a gun death seemed less horrific than the gas chambers
Until the country kept ignoring gun deaths
Now they seem horrific
And then I really try to think about the word horrific
And horror and I think about how I only watch horror movies
In black neighborhoods where they make jokes
The whole time about the dumb white girl that’s going back into the house
Until I’m peeling with laughter in my seat
And I think so much of my country is dumb white girls going back
Into the house, except they’re men, too, and I’m offended by
The attribution of feminine qualities or I’m offended
By the qualities deemed feminine because I am one tough bitch
Who never has to be one because I don’t leave the house
I don’t know if I’m mourning you before you die
I don’t know if language can write me away or into anything
I’m a butterfly. I’m a pig. I was never in a body to begin with.
I remember as a child trying to think of what animal
I wanted to come back as and not being able to think of one
Because everything is prey to something and my luck
As a human seemed too great, irreplicable, next time I’d for sure
Be a child kidnapped or molested or abused
A mother on her way out of the Y last night told another mother
How she pinches her son because she doesn’t know what else to do
And then makes a joke about how she’s going to kill him
And it’s not a fucking joke, it’s not one
And I wonder if that would be a horrific death just because
it’s his mother committing the act
That seems like enough even if the death itself isn’t torturous
Or inhumane, and I don’t know what to do with that word anymore
Because almost every action I’ve seen lately lacks compassion
And every life I’ve seen lately has misery in it
Last night a man in my area tried to run a woman’s child over
Then got out of his car and said, “You dirty Jew, I should kill all of you.
I should come back with a gun and kill all of you.”
There are a lot of reasons for people to point a gun at me I guess
I might die before you I guess
Because that’s our country right now and either way
We’ll die without each other a little
And if I come back as a cricket, I’ll seek out the bird
If I come back as a mouse, I’ll seek out the fox
I could do this cycle a hundred times and still enjoy it
LS: Thank you so much.
Links:
“In a Wood, with Clearings, It’s Spring” in LA Review of Books
Named After Death (activity book)
Sarah Blake’s Website
Gulf Stream Magazine 