The Interview : Sandra Beasley

(Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Sandra Beasley)

The Wise Owl talks to Sandra Beasley, an award-winning poet & author. Beasley is the author of the poetry collections Made to Explode (W.W. Norton, 2021), winner of the Housatonic Book Award, Count the Waves (W. W. Norton, 2015), Theories of Falling (New Issues, 2008), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize, and I Was the Jukebox, (W.W. Norton, 2010), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, as well as the memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life (Crown, 2011), which is a memoir and a cultural history of food allergies. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Her poetry has been in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2010, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and various prestigious journals. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today. 

Beasley graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, earned a B.A. in English magna cum laude from the University of Virginia, and later received an MFA degree from American University. For several years she worked as an editor at The American Scholar. Honors for her work include the 2023 McGee Visiting Professorship at Davidson College, the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships, and various stints at artist colonies, conferences, and festivals. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

Thank you, Sandra for taking time out to speak to The Wise Owl.

RS: You are an award-winning poet. Please walk us through your creative journey as a poet. Do throw light on the creative influences in your life.

SB: I was fortunate to be encouraged towards creative paths at a young age—in part because my mother is a painter and visual artist, and in part because my elementary school offered regular poetry workshops. The woman who visited my school to lead those workshops, Rose MacMurray, was an accomplished educator and writer who selflessly devoted her time to emerging voices and made sure we read poems that were playful, sophisticated in form, and full of rich imagery. On top of that, I was a total bookworm; I remember summers spent challenging the 50-book checkout limit at Tysons-Pimmit Regional Library in Virginia. I owe my love of language to the public library.  

RS: You have authored several poetry collections. Our readers would curious to know (as I am) what attracted you to the poetry genre. Who (if I may ask) are your favourite poets or poems and what is it about them that attracts or inspires you?

SB: Seems like poets have all the fun! Or, in the moments that are less fun (in moments fraught or melancholy), poets find the most powerful ways to shape and release tension on the page. Some poets I connected with early on were Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and all of the poets in Piping Down the Valleys Wild, an anthology edited by Nancy Larrick that I purchased with my Scholastic Book Fair money. High school brought me to the work of Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, E.E. cummings, and Sandra Cisneros. In college, my journey continued thanks to the amazing mentors and contemporary poets who taught at the University of Virginia, including Gregory Orr and Rita Dove. They taught me to value poems that are clear, musical, and willing to claim bold truths.

RS: What I have found especially intriguing about your work is that the “point-of-view” in your poem is not always that of the omnipresent poet. 'The Piano Speaks,' a poem I really enjoyed, encapsulates the point of view of an abandoned piano. Please tell us what made you adopt these different points of view in your works?

SB: The first time I committed to composing poems in alternate points of view was over a decade ago, and due to the confluence of two factors. One was that I’d started publishing first-person essays, initially through a series of columns in the Washington Post Magazine, and then I signed a contract to publish a memoir. So I really needed a creative space that veered away from memoir’s intimate focus; claiming the voice of a piano (or an eggplant, or an orchid) helped me do that. I was also part of a cohort of people drafting a poem a day, for a month at a time, an initiative often referred to as “NaPoWriMo.” These kinds of external prompts (“write in the voice of a platypus!”) give me a starting point for research and help me draft at a preternaturally fast pace.

RS: Your poetry has an element of unexpectedness. With some of the poems I almost felt like I was taking a sudden hairpin bend, not sure what I would find around the corner, especially in poems like 'Unit of Measure' and 'Inner Flamingo.' Does this sense of surprise reflect your response to the world around you?

SB: I think it’s important to let myself be “pushed around” by research, observation, and discovery. The natural and historical world around us has a genuine weirdness beyond anything I could invent from scratch. I also trust in the power of parallel structure, particularly anaphora, to activate associations and comparisons that may be just below of the surface of my conscious understanding.

RS: In your poem 'Let Me Count the Waves, you say “You must not use a house to build a home /  and never look for poetry in poems.” Could you please elaborate on this for the benefit of our readers?

SB: Well, those lines are ironic; I’m calling back to the epigraph, a quotation from Donald Revell in which he advises, “We must not look for poetry in poems.” I think what he’s getting at there is the importance of resisting self-aware poeticizing (read: pomposity of ideas, overly formal diction) on the page, but it is a funny way to say so. All well and good to parse the difference between a “house” and a “home,” up until there’s a storm and you’ve got raindrops falling on your head. In that moment, you don’t care whether house or home—you just need it to have a roof.

RS:  You are a prolific poet and writer. What advice would you give upcoming poets & writers on how to become a better poet?

SB: Read! I’m always so dismayed when poets tell me they don’t read contemporary poetry, as if that aesthetic isolation is the key to preserving their voice. Your voice grows sturdier in conversation with other poets, I promise—and less precious about taking a chance on those first, messy drafts. Even if you know that, there’s still a thousand ways that adult commitments (read: capitalist forces) try to convince us we don’t have time to read for pleasure. You have to make the time.

RS: If I were to ask you to describe yourself as a poet in 3 adjectives, what would those be?

SB: Precise, curious, and resilient.

RS: Our readers would be keen to know if you are working on a poetry collection or book now. When is it likely to hit the bookstores?

SB: My next publication will be creative nonfiction, actually; I have a completed collection of essays, and I’m working on the proposal for a second memoir.

RS: Thank you so much for talking to us, Sandra. It was a delight talking to you. We wish you the very best in all your creative endeavours and hope that you write a lot of creatively satisfying poetry and win lots of literary accolades that you most certainly deserve.

SB: Thank you for this careful attention to my work!