Interview with Miriam Sagan
“Every day I write is like living an extra day.”
Miriam Sagan discusses how poetry and life experience each other with Blue Edge Books’ publisher, Kathleen Lee.
Blue Edge Books: You write poetry, nonfiction and fiction...what is your favorite thing about writing poems? Your least favorite?
Miriam Sagan: My favorite thing about writing poems is being alive emotionally in a lyric stream of language. It is the best! My least favorite is that I can’t do it on cue. I promised myself many years ago that I wouldn’t force writing. If I don’t have a strong inspiration, I don’t try to write. Luckily I have many sources for poetry—it could just be thinking about history, or seeing a tree in bloom. But without that genuine impulse nothing can happen on the page, the poem would be flat. Sometimes I crave the rush of writing a poem, but I will restrain myself until I feel a more genuine call.
You’ve been writing poems for 55 years: how has your process or experience of writing poems changed (if it has changed)? Is there anything different in how you think or feel about poetry?
When I was a teenager, and really for the first few decades of writing, poetry seemed like this glittering mystical path I was trying to take. It felt very much beyond me, but I was inspired to work hard technically and emotionally, even though I didn’t have a lot of optimism about my ability to write poetry the way I wanted to. When I was in my 30s I started to feel more secure and in my 40s I began to have an intimate on-going relationship with poetry. That is, I wanted to treat it properly with love and attention. My grasp of craft got better so it was more like surfing than jumping out a window hoping to land in a puddle. Now we (poetry and I) are more spousal—there are things that are irritating but the connection is profound and rewarding, and at times also unexpected.
You and I have spent decades talking about love and death, often considered two primary subjects for poetry. Poetry is not self-help and yet, somehow it’s essential to experiencing love and death. I wonder what insights or perspective writing poems on these subjects has given you.
That is a beautiful way to put it! Thank you for the question. I could say I’d have no knowledge of love and death without poetry—and no knowledge of poetry without experiences of love and death. I sometimes tell myself I’m not really 70 years old but rather almost 140 years old— because every day I write is like living an extra day. I might add in landscape as well—I understand terrain because of language, and vice versa. In Iceland at Thingvillir where the ancient Viking Parliament was held I was incredibly overexcited because there were parts of the Icelandic sagas on informational signs—events that had happened in that very place. I embarrassed myself in front of other tourists by jumping up and down and exclaiming: “Look! There’s the mention of the red dress the heroine wears!” Rifts, stones, sky—all seemed more real, and luminous with the addition of language.