#sandra marchetti

[6peaches]

Sandra Marchetti - Summer

Smallest grey triangle on my wrist bone— I blow the moth onto the sidewalk.

[troublewithhammers]

Featured Poet: Sandra Marchetti

Five pieces from May's featured poet, Sandra Marchetti.

[tlhopkinson]

50 Surprisingly simple ways to promote your book + more from Author Unlimited Author Unlimited is a writing resource site that recently gathered book promotional ideas from its author community for the following article.

[nateglogan]

I’m reading tonight in Indianapolis with Sandra Marchetti. Please come out (if you want).

[lunalunamagazine]

These Are My Confessions As a Writer

BY SANDRA MARCHETTI

This essay was originally delivered as a keynote address for Naperville Writers’ Group’s National Poetry Month event at Nichols Library in Naperville, IL on April 2nd, 2014.

Oftentimes when poets speak about poetry, they speak of their own work. I am most certainly guilty of this. I’d like to begin a bit unconventionally here, and attempt to remedy that situation. A poet who deserves more acclaim in the United States—the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz—will serve, in some ways, as a guide for this piece. The poem I would like to begin with is one of his later works from A Tree Within, titled, "As One Listens to the Rain." I would like for you read the poem, and pause as you do to monitor your gut reactions. Close your eyes if you would like. What can you see, smell, taste, touch, or hear? Does the poem remind you of something else? What lines echo in your head?

***

The responses triggered when I read this wonderfully cycling piece include the smell of asphalt after the rain, the rain itself as a sort of white noise, and the metaphysical presence of the narrator over my shoulder. Your rich and varied responses and my own are part of the reason why I champion poetry, which accomplishes so much with so little. This poem is less than 200 words, but calls up a whole homeland of experience. It is the house where we dwell in possibility, as Emily Dickinson says. I love how spare and fragile poetry often is; yet, it is also steel girded. It blows my hair back, leaving me empty, while almost simultaneously opening a door to a new garden. Poets do it with less, but so beautifully. I sometimes fancy myself quite an adrenaline junkie, actually.

Poets must live in the world but also outside of it. We are so influenced by our immediate surroundings yet able to transform the ordinary into oddly slanted and surreal visions. Even the rain itself in Paz’s poem is personified, "rising and walking away." Everyday images are conflated and merged, mixed up and re-envisioned. According to Paz, "Poetry is memory become image, and image become voice. The other voice is not the voice from beyond the grave: it is that of man fast asleep in the heart of hearts of mankind. It is a thousand years old and as old as you and I, and it has not yet been born." In essence, as he says in his poem, poetry happens in "another time that is now," and that’s an incredibly difficult place in which to live. How does one balance between the present moment and the past? This reminds me of holding tree pose in yoga. Poems encapsulate what is right in front of us but also a part of our memories. They call on our whole menagerie of obsessions and ideas about the world to sort possible truths.

***

In the film Before Sunrise, the character Celine mentions that God exists in the space between people—in our connections and conversations. Nowhere is this more accurate than in the connection a poet has to his/her reader, it seems. When we read a poem we cherish, or when we write poems that others love, we tap into the radical symmetry of poetry. We are funneled into that "other time that is now"—outside of the realm of the immediate, distanced from the world but yet still close enough to be pricked by it.

I am a poet (rather than an artist, or a historian, or something else I was interested in as a child) because writing has always presented these wonderful challenges. I had some talent for words, but I was never "the best" writer in my grade at school—a label with which many readers here may identify. However, the wrangling of language is a maddeningly perfectionistic way to spend ones’ days (or ones’ weekends) and I am maddeningly perfectionistic. How else will I find God? So, identifying as a writer suits my natural personality. Like Paz, I tend to write poems that work at a deep sensory level. I want my poems to singe your ears and delight your eyes. In fact, the sound of a poem often comes to me before subject matter and sometimes even before an image. I hear and feel the undulations in my poems and follow that music through its own spiraling sequence. Poets have to make music from words only—we aren’t allowed notes and lyrics as musicians are—and it has always been challenging and very satisfying for me to twist a poem into an artifact that brings both sonic pleasure and thought into a rough symmetry.

Like many of us, I work in cycles and take great comfort in routines. When I know I will have a morning to myself to "write," I turn off tech and mindfully make a pot of coffee, smell the beans, look out the window, and go to my desk. Sometimes I will read a collection I have practically memorized, revise a piece, send submissions or actually draft a new poem or two. I am fairly serious about cleaning my workspace, the entire house actually, before any of this begins. Then I sit in silence doing that thing I love, completely oblivious. It rarely feels like work once I begin. My partner, a very creative chef and restaurateur but not a writer, sees the interworkings of my poems with a deft and generous eye. His suggestions always make them better. Also, as I mentioned before, I am an obsessive reviser, so most poems go through 80-100 drafts (ranging from full-scale revisions to tiny edits) over multiple years before I consider them anywhere near "done."

Since I don’t write as often as I would like, I hardly ever throw anything out; all scraps eventually become poems because they are so precious and rarely received. This type of revision is something I learned after my graduate study. I also figured out how to find great readers for my poems. Traditional writing workshops never brought out the best in me or my work; the folks who advise my poems well are compassionate or oblivious—my husband is compassionate, and the oblivious are those poets I adore, who I can only speak to through their books. These poets include: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Li-Young Lee, Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Carl Phillips. Reading and being alone with my work allowed me to hone my own voice, and shape my poems into what they have become.

My goal in writing and reading poetry is always one of transformation. If the poem transforms itself, its reader, or writer in some way, it is successful. I look to hone the quality Paz describes in his final essay, "The Other Voice," when he says, "Nothing distinguishes a poet from other men and women but those moments—rare yet frequent—in which, being themselves, they are other." This trait of otherness is apparent in the readers of poetry as well. We will be graced with the "other voice” this month and beyond, especially in Luna Luna’s Expert Poetry Selections feature. So as you read, listen for the tuning fork’s hum, that golden tone rising. Let the other voice speak, cracked and muffled, through the din this spring.

Editor's Note: A version of this article appeared on our old site.

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a full-length collection of poems, selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith published by Sundress Publications.

[theturnips]

Rhyming with the Dead

By Sandra Marchetti

On a walk about a month ago, lines from an older poem of mine, “The Waters of Separation,” ran through my mind repeatedly: we wait riven to the rocks peeling back, black in the water.

I find you, my darling, knelt down and stung Why was I singing my own line? The stanzas sounded like another voice, not my own, but one just out of grasp. “My darling” seemed so cloying, yet I never could revise it out of the poem. Something about that “back, / black in the water” built to a grandiose and over-dramatic edge as well. Where had I found those cadences? Then I heard Anne Sexton’s distinct voice: My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we touch entirely. No one’s alone. Of course, these are lines from Sexton’s well-known poem, “The Truth the Dead Know,” which I’ve listened to as a Poetry Speaks recording hundreds of times, a poem I have memorized. Sexton wrote “my darling” into her elegiac poem. “Truth,” dedicated to Sexton’s parents, who died a month apart, appears strangely similar to “Waters,” which I think of as a preparatory elegy—it’s poem about how a river can separate the living from the dead. I had channeled my Anne Sexton voice without knowing it. Both scenes contain similar content—water, stones, rumination on the beloved and loss. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom outlines an argument that writers, in essence, must divorce their influences, their forbears in literature, in order to create strong, original work. He continues to say influence is so pervasive that most authors concede and incorporate others’ voices, thus creating weak work. However, I cannot see my poetic scope as anything other than inclusive of influence. My work is steel-girded because of my fathers and mothers in poetry. Instead of divorcing my predecessors, I would rather marry them or at least take up their causes. In fact, I am currently writing a book of poems centered on influence, loosely titled “Menageries,” in which each poem takes a line or the title from another poet’s poem and incorporates it into a new work. Sometimes the poet is mentioned by name within my new poem and thus he or she is called directly into the room. Before this current project I integrated rhythm and vernacular from other poets, as evidenced above. My influences include the confessionals, Bishop, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others. I have done it both intentionally and unintentionally; indeed, this is very common in contemporary poetry. When I write book reviews or critique manuscripts, my first instinct is always to rattle off a list of influences—books the writer might have read in order to produce the work. I have found all of my poems are part of this interconnected web and that is why certain lines ring in my head—they are not wholly mine; they chime with other voices. In short, I rhyme with the dead. “The Waters of Separation” is less formal, full of spondees and anapestic feet where Sexton’s poem is regular, and follows a strict abab rhyme scheme; however, an exploration of the temporal and corporeal is present in both. “Waters” ends like this: by the softness by the smoked waters

across from where we are— on the faster side of the stream—now fleeting. Sexton’s dead are in transition at the end of her poem as well. Staving off the finalities of the funeral, they “…refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” Both poems also alternate between the “I” and “We” voice, acknowledging that there are some thoughts one has individually about death, and some thoughts the dead/the beloved and the living/the lover must contemplate together, if it is possible.

As I recited Sexton’s poem, I found myself concentrating on another beloved line in “Truth,” at the end of the first stanza: “It is June. I am tired of being brave.” The speaker acknowledges her weariness—she cannot be bothered to mask her feelings, and this is, ironically, brave of her. This line represents a break in character, and an entrance into loss. When Sexton says “June” on the Poetry Speaks recording, she gives such weight to word. I remember my initial reaction to its heavy vowel jab. I have never forgotten it. “Lunch,” another poem of mine, incorporates the same syntactical maneuver of Sexton’s “It is June…” line. The second stanza of “Lunch” reads: Sorting the demands of red-orange, pink, cream, I flick stems on the bank, watch them wash downstream. It is noon,

the bees are circling for somewhere to land. This second stanza, and the beginning of the third, represents a break in the poem, which up until this point has followed a strict aba rhyme scheme in the first and then also last stanzas. The beginning of the poem describes cleaning and eating fresh produce. Here, my speaker’s attention diverts to time: “It is noon.” In addition to rhyming with Sexton’s “June,” is similar its mention of the temporal. The river, or the ocean in Sexton’s case, also seemingly recalibrates the clock in its sway. In the end, “Truth” is all about bodies: “throat, eye, and knucklebone,” and “Lunch” borrows heartily from this as well. My last couplet reads: “Fruit breaks on my teeth, spreads / through the mouth’s star—a galaxy expands.” While scanning “Lunch,” I also can’t help but see the bees. They are buzzing, “circling” in fact. Did they migrate from Sylvia Plath’s “Wintering”? Plath’s famous last line reads, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” Do the female bees taste spring with renewed vigor for life? Is this what “Wintering” suggests? Or is spring the time of their death? Plath says, “Winter is for women—” and she intonates that the “men” will come back in the spring. The bees in “Lunch” are living in the summer, but are still “circling for somewhere to land.” They seem lost, uneasy. Plath questions her bees’ fate as well: “Will the hive survive…”? “Wintering,” though it takes place in the opposite season as “Lunch,” deals with the challenges of preparing food, survival, and ultimately, joy. Plath asks, “What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?” and I think of the fruit I held in my mouth—“a galaxy expand[ing].” A jar of honey capturing the taste of a late season rose from a year ago surely is a galactic explosion on the palate. Of course, Plath’s poems have been tremendously instrumental to my work in their use of rhythm and rhyme. “Wintering” is irregular, unlike Sexton’s “Death,” and it showcases many spondees, internal rhymes, and near rhymes, techniques that appear in both “Lunch” and “Waters.” A few examples are Plath’s use of “hive” and “survive,” and “Winter” and“knitting.” Some of my soundplay includes “cream” and “downstream” from “Lunch,” and, of course, “to the rocks peeling back, / black in the water,” from “Waters.” The latter is one of the lines that began me thinking of Sexton and her sense of drama, but it also reminds me of Plath’s eerie description of the beehive, early in “Wintering”: “Now they ball in a mass, / Black…” The influence has circled back. Here is the other voice that demanded I leave my alliterative, vowel-driven line alone. Plath would have kept it; her poems are a rage of momentum. As I turn back to my “Menageries” project, a line from a new poem, “Ebb Tide,” catches my ear: “I tell you I spark into fire / the grass behind my strides.” Sexton is there, and Plath too, waving their hands in the midnight air. My poems are plated with these women—their words, their works—and the lines sing out not in spite of my influences, but because of my ancestors’ songs.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Marchetti, Sandra. Confluence. Knoxville: Sundress Publications, 2015. Print. Paschen, Elise and Rebekah Presson Mosby. Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath. Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2001. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print. Sexton, Anne. “The Truth the Dead Know.” Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications. She is also a co-author of Heart Radicals, a forthcoming chapbook of love poems from ELJ Publications. Eating Dog Press published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center's Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Gulf Coast, Phoebe, and Prick of the Spindle have honored Sandra’s work in recent contests and her poetry appears widely in Subtropics, Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Word Riot, Blackbird, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her essays can be found at The Rumpus, Words Without Borders, Mid-American Review and in other venues. 

[lateyellow]

I'm china, discarded under moonbeam.

Sandra Marchetti, from “Soon” (Mead Magazine, vol. 10, 2015)

[therumpus]

I swallow, lift at my chest where the freckles crack, where the wet wings gleam. Swallows sweep out to swing my heart up with the hawk who circles the skirmish, weeps, and screams.

From “Never-Ending Birds,” a poem in Confluence by Sandra Marchetti, which Michelle Donahue reviews for The Rumpus.