"I’m interested in voices that seem like they’re telling you secrets": An interview with Sarah Fletcher
Born in New York, Sarah Fletcher moved to London aged thirteen. At fourteen, she had a poem accepted by The London Magazine. Now studying for a masters in poetry at Royal Holloway, Sarah talks to The Poetry Jar about her first pamphlet, Kissing Angles, as well as her new collection, Typhoid August.
Do you see Kissing Angles as a confessional collection?
Lots of reviews say the poems are confessional. I tend to think ‘confessional’ is a label given to a lot of female poets writing about themselves and their relationships – as though women can’t be relatable to the world beyond that. I did read a lot of Robert Lowell when I was writing this collection. Mostly, I’m interested in voices that seem like they’re telling you secrets, confiding in the reader without the reader assuming me, as the author, is confiding.
Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?
I was really young. When I was eight I wrote a poem to my Dad about colour. I think it was about lots of colours having a party.
What themes and images most attract you?
Even though it’s very cliché, I end up having lots of water imagery in my poems. In this collection, there is a lot of marriage imagery – actually, there are three wedding dresses in it. I’m really interested in weddings, and kissing. But a lot of the poems in here are quite dark. I’m intrigued by unequal relationships and love dynamics. I think a lot of good poetry comes from feeling trapped, and form can be freeing in this.
Do you have any favourite words?
Ephemeral - it’s a beautiful word. It flutters on your lips and sounds fleeting too. I feel like when I realise I’m saying it, I’ve already said it. Also, and I realise it’s not a nice word, but something about the word ‘typhoid’ I really like.
How did Typhoid August come together?
I think the earliest poem which features in the collection is ‘For Courtney Stodden’, which I wrote in the summer of 2016. Back then, it was a quite long, sprawling, disorganised poem — over the years it has changed quite dramatically and the shape and tone it began to take seems one that is distinct to this pamphlet as opposed to my other poems. The last of the poems were the dialogue poems, written in March 2018. They were a sort of framing commentary for the rest of the poems, and I felt they strung together some of the narratives and themes of the pamphlet cohesively. It felt, once they were written, I had completed a whole project, rather than just put individual poems together.
Which themes or images dominate this collection for you?
While obviously many of the poems in this collection deal with relationships, particularly with triangular situations, one of the main themes is how a distrust of others becomes a wider distrust, a distrust of everything one perceives. This leads to an inconsistency of image, and also a frustration with language, where it feels insufficient and slippery in the face of such struggling emotions. This is what leads to the fragmentary nature of certain poems as the pamphlet goes on.
Are you yourself seduced as a poet by the sensual females that reappear in Typhoid August, what might they represent?
This is an interesting question and one I have been having trouble answering. I think the truest answer is that I don’t have a relationship with my own poems that means I could view characters in the realm of ‘identification’. “Any resemblances between real persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental” etc. — which I don’t even mean ironically. “Coincidence” strikes me as an apt way of describing my relationship with the characters. I do think, though, that the reoccurring image of the flirtatious and mysterious woman, is primarily an image of fear: fear of men and women’s loyalty. I imagine it manifested itself as a flirtatious woman before anything else primarily because of the patriarchal circumstances in which we live.
Have you a favourite poem in the new collection?
I’m not sure favourite is the right word for my relationship to the poems, but I do feel proudest of the final poem, where I felt I’d finally broken into a new way of writing, after being unable to write for a few months. I was worried, a bit before it arrived, that I’d exhausted the Blue and Typhoid Mary narrative. But just when I assumed I was done with it, the characters asserted themselves in my imagination again.
Who are you enjoying reading at the moment?
Part of what I value about doing an MA is that I’ve been able to read outside my usual comfort zone. At the moment, I’m writing on Mina Loy, a very underrated Modernist/Futurist poet, who I’ve been enjoying immensely. This means I’ve also had the pleasure of reading the work of those who were involved in the circles she socialised in, which has led me to discovering Djuna Barnes, and re-discovering Ezra Pound. In terms of contemporary poets, I’ve been really struck by Black Sun by Toby Martinez de las Rivas. It’s written in a mode unlike much poetry at all being produced today. I’m very glad it’s been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes. The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx by Tara Bergin, published last year, really resonated with me, and I believe it tapped into certain themes I was writing about at the time.
How long did Kissing Angles take to write?
The vast majority was written in a two or three-month span, then the editing process began. Usually, my writing routine sees me writing for long periods, and working on poems that are lathering up into something else. In this collection, I started to experiment with the dramatic monologue voice, and this was a new thing.
What do you like about first-person narration in your own poetry?
Every time I try to write in the third person, the voice comes across so judgemental that I might as well be doing it in the first person. I’m very interested in characters and relationships, I think there are subtle aspects of relationships that are under-examined. For me, the third person is the surface, the day to day. I find that writing in first person challenges what we see day to day, it challenges the surface. The angles aspect is important for me. Using dramatic monologue is really me starting to become more comfortable with the idea of the ‘I’ conflating with me as the author. I think writing poems about people is always a tricky thing. Putting on the mask of dramatic monologue allows me to take something and run with it, rather than being confined to the truth.
Typhoid August is published by The Poetry Business as part of the New Poets Prize 2016/17.