The author of life print, in points talks to Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal practices.
SN: What triggered your debut collection, life print, in points?
RMS: life print, in points actually had a unique genesis. I entered the Liverpool-based, erbacce poetry prize contest early in 2020 without really thinking too much about it. KV Skene, whose work I admire, had been published there, so I thought I’d give it a try. Much to my surprise, after a few months, I was informed that I was the runner-up. erbacce doesn’t normally publish runners-up, but they were impressed with my work, and so life print, in points was born.
In terms of thematic triggers, I felt that the title poem helped to anchor the themes of loss, love, and life which were key drivers in this book, and which I would say are to some extent recurring themes in a great deal of my work. At that time, I was also still thinking through my own heritage, which is Calabrese, in relation to antiquity, so that was another theme that emerged in this work.
SN: You have been working on a poetry and a novel MS simultaneously? How do you switch between the genres? How do you stop being a poet when you write your novel?
RMS: These questions made me laugh (in a good way!) because, to be honest, I’m not sure I have a useful answer. And, to be clear, it’s not as if I’m writing poetry in the morning, and then working on the novel in the evening (although that does happen sometimes). For me, I think it’s about whichever project has the most energy at the moment, and drives itself to be heard. When I was working on my first novel, which was shortlisted for a Guernica Prize in 2019 for unpublished fiction, the energy was with the novel, and the poetry (which I still continued to write), happened in the other available spaces or moments of inspiration. Right now, that impetus is reversed, so that while I’ve written about 80,000 words of a second novel, the poetry is taking up all my writing time. I think it’s partly due to the fact that the novel needs more time for incubation, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Either way, I believe the work needs to speak to the writer, to keep announcing itself in the mind’s awareness, so that as a writer, you’ve no choice but to sit down and write it.
SN: “Written Tenfold” is a collection that you compiled and edited in 2018. How did you get this assignment? What were your considerations for the structure of the compilation? What did you consciously exclude and why?
RMS: At that time, I was president of the Brooklin Poetry Society (BPS), and it had been a few years since the group had published a collection. As a group, we discussed publishing another anthology, and I agreed to it because I do have some experience working in editing, both in the publishing and academic worlds, so it made sense for me to take a stab at the project.
It’s a challenge to put together an anthology of other people’s poetry, because of course, you want to aim for the best poems you can include, and to provide a representative sample from the poets in your group. As with any publication however, some submissions are definitely stronger than others. For instance, I’m currently a contributing editor for Arc Poetry, where I have the opportunity to review incoming submissions before they get sent to the poetry editor, and it’s quite challenging – there are so many great poets out there! For BPS, I tried to meet both of those criteria – strong poems that were representative of the group based on its makeup at that time. I think if I were to edit an anthology today, I’d be more interested in experimental poetry.
SN: Poets, writers or artists in other forms or media sometimes influence the way one writes. Can you recall or reflect on a similar influence in your case that might have been proven to be formative over the years?
RMS: As a young person, I earned a grade 10 piano certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music, I took vocal lessons, and I sang in choirs, so music definitely filters through much of my poetry. My poems are filled with rhythm, by the flow of sounds, and I’ve been really attentive in recent years to better capture on paper the way I’d like the reader to hear the work. I suppose it’s like a type of musical notation with words. As a result, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the blank space on the page, and in so doing I’ve discovered there’s also a visual element at work when I’m writing or editing my poetry.
I also read widely, which I’ve done all my life. My interests take me from theoretical physics to history, philosophy, cultural theory, not to mention fiction and of course, poetry so that in addition to the thread of musicality, I think some of these other subjects and ideas have a way of seeping into the poems, often without my conscious awareness (at least at first).
SN: Can you reflect on a specific performance, song, painting, film, or other non-written artwork that generated or strongly influenced any of your recent work?
RMS: About three years ago, I went to see one of those screenings at the movie theatre, of a Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. I have been absolutely obsessed with this work ever since. It’s a visually stunning production, and I am a huge fan of the music of Philip Glass. I haven’t precisely been able to incorporate this obsession into my work yet, especially as I’m still trying to make a point of watching Glass’s other operas in this triptych, Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach. I think however, that the obsession probably stems from the fact that there is something that really resonates in Akhnaten for me, that has to do with sound, and rhythm, and repeated motifs, tools which I no doubt deploy in my poetry. So, yes, I’m hoping to get to some kind of Philip Glass-related project at some point.
SN; Do you have a writing routine? Or writing rituals? Or patterns you must follow regularly? Or rituals that you practice say, when you are writing in certain forms, say a longer piece of work like a novel, as opposed to a shorter piece, say a poem?
RMS: My preference is to get up and write early in the morning before anyone else is awake. It’s a daily practice, and I do mean every single day, even if what I produce that morning isn’t fantastic—ultimately that doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s the quality of the daily practice that is important, just the fact that the writing muscles are being exercised regularly. I also practice yoga, so the yoga stretches and meditation come first, which I think helps to ground the mind for openness and receptiveness to writing. I took an online class with Natalie Goldberg during the pandemic, and she recommended sitting in the chair, taking a few breaths with your eyes closed and your feet firmly on the ground before writing. So even if for some reason, I don’t have enough time to include yoga and writing, it’s helpful to take those few breaths, to just centre the mind and the body into awareness. And I’m a coffee addict, so writing doesn’t happen without an espresso beside me!
SN: Are there any books that you keep visiting for inspiration?
RMS: This will perhaps sound like an unusual answer for a poet, but I’m actually really inspired by fiction and non-fiction, especially those science articles in The New Yorker. Those are my favourite! And just about anything that Paul Auster writes is inspiring for me, as are the works of Italo Calvino. At the same time, I think inspiration can come from a vase of dying flowers, a memory, a scrap of conversation overhead, and each of these sources has resulted in a poem for me. In terms of poets whose work I very much admire and keep returning to, then it would have to be the work of Anne Carson and Dionne Brand, in particular Carson’s Plainwater and Brand’s The Blue Clerk, although anything by either of these writers is pure gold. Other poets whose work I really admire are Lisa Robertson, Victoria Chang, Kaveh Akbar, and Ada Limón.
SN: Does your writing practice impact your emotional state in any way? Does it put you in a certain mood or an emotional state? Or helps you get away from a certain mood or an emotional state? Can you reflect on that?
RMS: I’m not happy when I don’t write. I was away for the Thanksgiving long weekend, and while it’s always great to get away, due to the contingencies of that particular trip, I wasn’t able to write much. When I came home, I had to almost immediately escape to a quiet room in the house to just sit and write. Writing is a form of grounding for me. I’ve been reading a lot of research in the field of creativity recently, and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi is one researcher who writes about the concept of flow (he even has a book with that title), where the creative person feels in a kind of optimal zone, if you will – challenged enough by the task or creative process at hand, but in a comfortable enough mental and emotional state to support the exploration of new ideas with great openness and flexibility. Writing gives me that, because I suppose it allows me to engage with my own creativity in ways that feel productive and valuable for me. I’m not willing to give that up.
SN: Who is your work in conversation with? (i.e., other authors/artists, specific people, audience, peers, etc.)
RMS: I hope that my work is in conversation with the world! Some of my poems speak directly to, or out of a line from another poet’s piece. For instance, my poem, “On memory” (reprinted in life print, in points)came directly out of reading one of Kwame Dawes’ poems. Sometimes I write to a specific person in my life, or someone I’ve encountered somewhere. For instance, a chance meeting with another customer in a coffee shop could turn into a poem. I don’t write for an audience, or with the audience forefront in my mind. In other words, I’m not trying to impress anybody. What I am doing, though, is trying to excavate ideas, vulnerabilities, frailties, the impermanence of this human existence as I see it in a way that I think resonates. Poetry has to have meaning, and it has to offer the reader something new, even if the idea itself isn’t really new. How can I shape language into ways that generate a new perspective on something?
SN: How do you know as a poet/writer if a piece of work that you have been labouring on, is finally completed?
RMS: Great question! I spend a great deal of time allowing a draft of a poem to incubate. I’ve never sculpted anything, but I imagine that writing a poem is similar to sculpture. You could have an idea in mind of what you wanted to create in stone or marble, but the demands of the material itself will likely influence the final product, in what it affords and what it doesn’t. Similarly, a poem’s first draft might not reveal the direction it needs or wants to go in, and so I have to give it time to find itself, to reveal its shape to me. When I reach the point where I think it has, where I think I can’t possibly make it better than it is, and where I feel some kind of gut sense that it’s done, I let it go out into the world. Does that mean it’s finished? Not necessarily, but I sometimes reach a point where my greater concern is that if I continue to disrupt the intrinsic construction, mood, or idea within the poem, I’ll ruin it, so that’s for sure when I stop.
Author Bio
Renée M. Sgroi (she/her) has published one poetry collection, life print, in points (erbacce-press) with a second forthcoming in 2024. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers Union of Canada, an executive member of the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto branch), and a contributing editor for Arc Poetry, Renée’s poetry has appeared in The Windsor Review, The /tƐmz/ Review, The Prairie Journal and numerous anthologies. She gratefully resides in Whitby, Ontario, on the lands of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, under the Williams Treaties.