Catch Light
Author Interview

On Catch Light: Sarah O'Brien in conversation with Caryl Pagel

Caryl Pagel: The poems in Catch Light are concerned with all aspects of light, shadow, exposure, blankness, voids. You are also a photographer, and I wonder if you could discuss the relationship between photography and poetry as you see it. What can you express in poetry that you cannot in photography? Does one medium inspire the other? Is one easier for you, or more rewarding?

Sarah O'Brien: Well, poetry and photography have a very practical relationship for me. I started building my darkroom right as I began writing after a yearlong hiatus; photography helped me to find my way back into poetry, to see new angles in my writing. I was reading all of these manuals—how to build a darkroom, how to develop a photograph—and it only seemed natural to start writing my own “manual” because of the inherent poetic opportunity in the images associated with photography—light boxes, shutters, quiet light-proof rooms, magnifying eyepieces. Writing about photography allowed me to really learn it as an aesthetic potential.

Photography and poetry can both create a wonderful time-stop, and both can imply narrative in the most startling ways: a hand with no body at the edge of the frame, the poem's “I” who suddenly starts dancing. But you can hardly imply color in b&w photography, and I found that among all of this shadow and white, a little bit of red or blue in my poems created a most startling impact. And a photograph is an image; no matter how mysterious it is, it's still there. I was trying to point out to the reader—very explicitly in the “Captions” section—that poetry allows us to create our own mental photographs, which can shift and shudder with each new reading.

Working in both media was incredibly inspiring for me. I started thinking about my poems as photographic negative sheets—slightly different images that when seen all at once have a strange unity, because there they are, all together. I wanted to see how much I could write about the same thing, how subtle the differences could be (like slight variations of light and shadow), while still creating strong, single poems. I'm not sure that either one is easier for me, but after this project they feel resolutely intertwined in my head, at least. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to shake them loose.

CP: What are you reading now?

SO: Well, I'm reading a lot of history—specifically The Seven Ages of Paris, a very spirited account of the Parisian past, and Post War. Paris impresses me daily—I grew up in rural Ohio! Everything is so old here, and I like walking the streets and knowing how many people have walked them before me. So I'm on a history kick. I'm also re-reading Keith Waldrop's translation of Flowers of Evil, which is just wonderful.

CP: What is the last dream that you can remember? Do dreams influence your writing?

SO: The last dream I can remember featured a Darth Vader-like character, a haunted forest, and a lot of bicycles. Seriously. I would love to think that I'll some day find usable bits in my bizarro dreams, but usually I just wake up, shake my head, and forget about them. I recently read something about Lorine Niedecker keeping a pad and pencil next to the bed because she dreamt up wonderful lines and images. And I was jealous.

CP: Although you currently live in Paris, you've traveled extensively over the past few years and have lived for periods of time in Iowa City, Ohio, Providence, and South Africa. How does place affect your writing? Does it change your process? What images, details, words, etc. have your poems gathered from different locations?

SO: I think about this question a lot, because often I find myself trying to justify all this traveling—to family, friends, myself. I've visited over thirty countries in the past eight years, which means I didn't do a lot of summer internships and the like. Once I left Ohio at eighteen I felt like I needed to catch up, like I hadn't seen enough. This need to move around felt very urgent, and is still a huge factor in the decisions I make.

But I don't write that much when I'm traveling—just fragments here and there. What traveling—and place—do for my writing is less tangible. I like to think that traveling keeps me aware—of language, of weather, of the different geography of city streets, of what it feels like to be lost. Living in Paris especially keeps me thinking about language, because I exist for part of the day outside of my mother tongue, and the rest of the time I'm trying to explain the oddity of English grammatical constructions to befuddled French twelve-year-olds. I was recently in Morocco, where the cadences of Arabic got me thinking about the different rhythms inherent in the languages I speak.

I'm sure that practically speaking, certain images have stuck with me—come to think of it, there are a few airplane windows in Catch Light. But mostly place—or my need to keep changing places—affects my writing in that it keeps me seeing and listening and thus not complacent, I hope.

CP: Several of the poems in Catch Light are written in prose—or loosely prose-shaped blocks—although others break out of that shape and move more fluidly across the space of the page. How does form affect your poetry? How do shapes, fragments, sentences?

SO: I kept coming back to prose blocks in Catch Light probably because I enjoy working against that filled-in form—making the breaks in syntax and sound take the place of a break in the line. And probably something about the block of prose sat well with my idea about writing a manual, and my tinkerings with the idea of the frame. My relationship with form is wholly intuitive though—and I never get tired of the way white space fills in its own meaning. I like thinking about form, but in a way that's catalytic for me—i.e. I try to have fun with it, because I've never felt more attached to one form than another. That said, I might start worrying about this question a bit more if I can't get out of this prose block stage.

CP: Do you see yourself writing within a specific poetic tradition—formal, thematic, conceptual, etc.? Are there specific influences who continue to be a presence in your mind or work?

SO: I'm a giant sponge—everything I read influences me. But I wouldn't know where to place myself in terms of a specific tradition. I gravitate toward writers who are interested in the way language can glitch, and the way that glitch can create meaning. I love reading work that takes on a book-length project. I get really excited about a lot of French poetry—from the classics to contemporary writers. Speaking of French, the act of translation itself is a big influence on my work. There are a lot of books that I go back to whenever I can, many of them pointed out to me long ago by really wonderful teachers; but whenever anyone asks me about specific influences my mind invariably goes completely blank. There it goes again. But honestly the biggest influences on my writing have probably been my teachers.

Caryl Pagel's poems have recently appeared in Gulf Coast, GutCult, notnostrums, and Thermos. A chapbook of her work, Visions, Crisis Apparitions, and Other Exceptional Experiences, was published by Factory Hollow Press. She lives in Milwaukee.