Each year, the Word for Word Literary Series dedicates an event to instructors from Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online creative writing programs. This year, the spotlight was on poetry for the first time ever, with instructors Carla Rachel Sameth and Stephanie M. Wytovich reading and discussing their work.
Stephanie Wytovich is an American poet, novelist and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous magazines and anthologies such as Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, Southwest Review, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volumes 8 & 15, as well as many others. Wytovich is the poetry editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press and an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University and Point Park University. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant and has received the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. Her 2023 poetry collection, “On the Subject of Blackberries,” is a finalist for the 2023 Stoker Award.
Carla Sameth is the 2022-2024 Co-Poet Laureate for Altadena, California, and is a 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her books include the memoir “One Day on the Gold Line,” the chapbook “What Is Left,” and, most recently, the poetry collection “Secondary Inspections.” Her work appears in a variety of publications and has been included three times among the Notable Essays of the Year in “Best American Essays.” A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, a Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Sameth teaches creative writing to diverse communities.
The following is Part II of an edited transcript of Carla and Stephanie’s interview (Take a look at Part I here):
W4W: What is it that announces a poem to each of you? How do you know that this particular idea is going to be a poem and not an essay, not a piece of flash fiction, not a short story?
SW: For me, usually when I’m writing fiction or an essay, I usually get a sense of the narrative arc. This is where I want to start. This is where I want to go.
Poetry for me is more of a concrete emotion or an image or a feeling that I want to express through different metaphors and pieces of magic. So usually, I have an idea of the form. But sometimes, if I’m being perfectly honest, it takes trying to write the poem and realize it’s not working and that it has to be a piece of fiction. Or I’m writing a short story, and I keep going into walls, and I’m like, “Oh, this was meant to be a poem all along.”
So sometimes there’s a little bit of exploration and adventuring that needs to happen before it presents itself. But usually, the image or the emotion is what leads me into the poem rather than the arc.
CS: That’s an interesting question. A number of times in the last couple of years, where I’ve been writing almost exclusively poetry, I’ve thought: the old Carla would have made this into an essay. But now I would say that I’ve just started to go back to trying to noodle around some topics in multiple forms.
I’m not a screenwriter, but I have a colleague, a close friend, who wants to write a treatment about a couple where one of them is transitioning and the other is the partner of that person. My friend wants to focus on the partner. Now, this happens to mirror my situation. My wife in 2021 made the decision to transition to male. The actual show is not going to be us, but to start doing the preliminary work, my friend asked me to write about the beats of the day when my partner had surgery. And I actually had a poem about that already. But when I started to try to write the beats, I tried it in three different ways.
I wrote it as a poem. I wrote it more as “these are the beats.” And I wrote it in an alternative-form essay. Oh, and I wrote an obit. I don’t know if people are familiar with Victoria Chang and her poetry that is often in the style of an obituary. And so I had an obit for the breasts, which were removed during top surgery.
So I would say that there are moments now where, honestly, I think some of what I want to say would be better written if I were to go back to essays. And I’m constantly straddling the line. You’ll see that many of my poems are longer form between flash essay, flash nonfiction and poetry. That’s a really rambly answer to your question!
W4W: I noticed there were fictional elements in the first poem you read. Dialogue, action tags, dialogue tags, things like that. So it seems you pull a lot from various genres into your poetry.
CS: That’s the great thing about poetry. You have a lot of freedom that you don’t in other genres. Although form can be freeing too. Sometimes the actual structure frees you up, as odd as that sounds. I have a poem, the title poem of my book “Secondary Inspections.” When I was working on it, I was in a workshop with the poet Eduardo Corral, and he said, “This poem is begging to be a sestina.”
I don’t know how many people know what a sestina is. It’s a series of six words that repeat at the end of a sentence in a different order. At first I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But then I gave it a whirl. And it ended up being a great container for the poem, in my opinion.
SW: When I started writing poetry, I was very anarchist about the whole thing. I was very experimental. I wouldn’t even consider form. It was all free verse. But like Carla said, I’ve taken some workshops and worked with some writers at different residencies that I’ve lectured at who inspired me to give form a chance.
I wrote a sonnet for an anthology titled “Shakespeare Unleashed.” And it was the most horrific experience, because the sonnet traumatized me as a high school student. I told myself, “This time, you can do it. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
So I sat down and wrote the sonnet. And then I started writing some different forms. And I did find it really freeing and exciting. And it was like a whole different playground to be in. But for me, the words always come first. Then I might start playing with form. I might start looking at white space. I really love using white space in my poetry. I’m a really big fan of listening to music while I write. So a lot of times, the musicality of what I’m listening to, versus the breathwork of when I’m reading it out loud, influences the shape.
CS: Trauma shreds memory. And so trying to write about a traumatic event chronologically can be difficult. This may apply more to essays, but writing in different forms can get you to that material in a different way, taking a more circuitous route. It’s counterintuitive, but form can actually be freeing.
W4W: Carla, can you read another poem for us?
CS: I’m going to read the title poem from my collection. This is the one I was talking about, the sestina.
‘Secondary Inspections’
A nose, a foreign look, a memory. “They just want to know if you’re Jewish,”
your mom says of questions about what country you came from;
you know that you’ll never pass for who you are. Everyone foreign claims your face.
City of Angels swelters, everyone here from somewhere else, still they ask,
“Where were you born?” and “How do you say hello?” You answer fearing hatred.
Fear you came by naturally after strip search and secondary inspections. Not beautiful.
“Go to New York–you’ll be sought out” the statuesque, unapologetically beautiful
Black, Colombian woman says. Here, you’re Toucan Sam, you’re a Jew.
“Angelenos look for an airbrushed effect, images of themselves,” she says. Hatred
for your ancestral look. “You have only a slight accent. Where are you from?”
Later old Armenian men shout out greetings from their balconies, ask
questions you can’t understand. You only know your strong nose on face
too ugly for years. For a girl. And you‘re hairy. White Angelenos seek their own face,
full lips, not too ethnic, not too angular, no rough edges. Beautiful.
Customs guards interrogate, hands grab your body. In Greece, Danish boys ask
you for towels, assume you are from Parros. A Jewish
journalist writes story, gets tweets—his beheaded caricature rises from
desire to make America white again. You are zoo animals watched by hatred.
You fear reaction to your ancestral aura. You find hidden outposts of hatred.
In the City of Angels, everyone came from somewhere else. Yet your face
looks foreign. Every day you hear, “no, where are you really from?”
No use saying you are second generation born in America, land of the beautiful.
Your mom’s answer to that was always, “They only want to know if you’re Jewish.”
You go with your son on a field trip. “What tribe are you?” the Cherokee guide asks.
“Of course we both came across the Bering Straits,” he says and doesn’t ask
“where are you really from?” when you answer. Shows no hatred.
“From Russia, Hungary, Palestine, Turkey,” you say and tell him you’re Jewish.
Watch what hashtag you use, lest it shows up on a cross burned on your Facebook
page. Maybe it’s true what the Colombiana says, “Go to New York, you’ll be beautiful
there.” Here, your Black son looks like someone they might shoot or run from.
You look like someone who might be rounded up, asked, ‘Where from?’
A man lingering outside 7-11 looks at you both and asks,
“Egyptian?” Your son mimes the “Walk like an Egyptian” dance, your beautiful
son. Later he says, “I guess there’s more racism than I thought.” Hatred
spews out of a parking attendant’s mouth spits as he yells at a face
that looked a lot like my son’s. KKK leader posts “Of course, they’re not white. Jews.”
You’re looked upon with suspicion, hatred. They wonder where you’re from.
Will they look at our faces, hear an unspoken word and ask?
You wonder if you’ll be beautiful, safe in New York, Jew and Afro-Jew.
W4W: Thank you so much for sharing that powerful piece, Carla. Where did you start with this poem?
CS: This one is based on reality. It was something that I’ve dealt with and thought about for a long time. Ambiguous ethnicity. My son had certainly heard a lot of those questions. It had been noodling around in my head for quite a while. By virtue of people not knowing where you’re from, you — and this particularly happens with my son — you get to hear a lot more racist or anti-Semitic remarks than you would normally, because people assume you’re one thing but not another.
W4W: Stephanie, would you like to read your last poem now?
SW: I’m going to read an excerpt from Chapter 5.
Chapter 5
In the event of a delicate stomach
I cut the pieces small, an eagerness
to keep him talking, to imagine
the hesitation of fingers
down my throat.
I gesture in anger, my voice
a shaking of sorry brought on
by the sight of his liver:
my lunch swelling,
begging “no” beneath
the knife.
I wash myself with pearls,
the ugliness of erased magic
a severed salamander, the slip
beneath a too-thin dress.
Mother’s diamond ring sits
on a pair of witches, their brooms
a flying harp, a wedding song,
the pride of polished teacups
hovering over mud.
Later on, I lick the backs
of wooden chairs, the smoke
in the attic the perfect guest
for wide-eyed spirits, their acts
disagreeable to men.
I watch the birds attempt
magic. Decide to eat them
nevertheless.
Three days of biting, of blotting
the faces of soft things, I eat
the wet parts inside, recall
a time when I disliked
people watching.
I laugh in red, the first
symptom of violence.
Oh, I’m quite uncomfortable now.
SW: Thank you.
W4W: I feel like I need to immerse myself in your poetry, Stephanie, in order to say anything intelligent about it. I found myself thinking of Sylvia Plath as I listened to this angry, violent, gorgeously wrought poetry.
SW: Yeah, Plath had a huge influence on me. I studied in the school of sad-girl poetics. So Plath, Sexton, Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald. I wanted all of the tortured voices, because that was what I needed to hear. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone, that other people felt the same way.
W4W: Thank you both for sharing work from your most recent collections, and good luck with your future writing!
This concludes our interview with Carla Sameth and Stephanie Wytovich. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more Word for Word events!
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