Poet Natasha Sajé joins me today to chat about her new collection, The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023).
Bio:
Natasha Sajé was born stateless in Germany and grew up in NYC and suburbs. Professor Emerita at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, she continues to teach poetry and nonfiction writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and now lives in Washington, D.C. She is the author of three previous books of poems; a chapbook; a memoir-in-essays (Terroir: Love, Out of Place); and a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014).
Welcome, Natasha. What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
I relish the way constraints work against freedoms, the play, and the fact that each poem makes a discovery.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
This one was the spur for the title (albeit with a small change, since so many of the other poems are addressed to entities). I think of it as an abbreviated sonnet.
Gradual
“Just one word….plastics.”
The Graduate, 1967
I wrench and cut the clear thick film—
Envisioning its path to trash. And next?
The hiding place where no one ever goes.
This stuff gets smaller and smaller…
Micro to nano to who knows what.
Every way you look at this you lose.
1% of me is probably it
Already, seeding cells with particles,
Through infinitesimal scissor-teeth.
The vision that was planted in my brain.
In Latin, sapiens means wise.
The future will call us something else.
What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
All poetry is form. I love discovering new ones or making old ones (sestinas, for example) my own. For instance, I use homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms for the repeated end words to make the poem more lively, but I use iambic pentameter because those words have to be heard in a regularized rhythm.
What type of project are you working on next?
A long-delayed “food book”—advice and ideas for cooking and eating. This was the book I thought I’d write in Terroir: Love, Out of Place, but that memoir turned into an examination of identity: nationality, gender, race, sexual orientation, class, etc. I couldn’t, as I say in the introduction, combine rice pilaf with racism. That’s not to say the new book will be devoid of identity issues.
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
I mimicked whatever genre I was reading—animal stories as a young child, and in sixth grade I was introduced to poetry and started writing poems. We were poor, so there weren’t many books in the house, except some beautiful ones in Slovenian, which I couldn’t read. My German grandfather sent me children’s books in German, and as soon as I could make my way to the library (third or fourth grade) I became a passionate lover of libraries.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I enjoy finding homes for individual poems and essays, and I consider that business different from writing. I read the magazines, look up the editors, read their work, and try to understand how the organization is funded.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Let me change that to “reading quirk”: One of my jobs was teaching speed reading, and I use those techniques all the time. I scan or skim first, then return to the material (if I need or want to) with a kind of map in my brain produced by the first fast read. This enables me to read a lot of material. Of course, the poetry I love requires me to slow down and read it multiple times.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
We were immigrants and my parents didn’t understand the American educational system and neither my high school guidance counselor nor my college advisors gave me any idea on what I could do with critical thinking and writing skills. (The high school guidance counselor also did not explain tuition discounts, so I thought my parents had to pay the rack rate, so I chose a public university that I found in the New York Times Guide to College, a book from my school library.) At the University of Virginia, I initially thought I’d major in Political Science en route to a foreign service job, but my first professor read from his (boring) book in a large lecture hall. English courses were smaller and discussion- based.
As a child I wanted to be a librarian—I suspect I didn’t get a degree in library science because those programs don’t or didn’t offer fellowships. Or I didn’t know they did. I got an MA in creative writing because, as an unhappy law student at American University during study breaks, I’d haunt the corridors of the English department and noticed a poster for Johns Hopkins that advertised fellowships. I dropped out after one semester in law school and went there the following year. It was, to put it mildly, not a good educational experience, but it did allow me to do adjunct teaching, which in turn (many years later) led me to Ph.D. programs, first at the University of Delaware, then at the University of Maryland. I’ll always be grateful for that education and mentoring.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I’d love to share a little piece about making art: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/157851/