SM: In an interview you did for “Largehearted Boy” you wrote, “At readings, I introduce Count the Waves as unabashedly full of love poems. Not to seduce, but to record: ‘Here’s who I am, and here’s how I got here. Can you love me on those terms?'” Can you tell us about the act of writing love poems and recording love. It could be argued that “love poems” written by women have been largely dismissed as a solely female experience and their merit generally brushed aside by the literary community. Why do you think that is, and what can we do to liberate the love poem from the pejorative?
SB: My first collection, Theories of Falling, was framed by many readers as expressing my coming of age. I can’t deny that, and I’m grateful for the attention. But my second collection, I Was the Jukebox, rebelled against any presumption of poet-as-speaker—titles such as “The Sand Speaks,” “The Minotaur Speaks,” “The Platypus Speaks.” For this collection, Count the Waves, I gave myself permission to return to the well of the personal. I wrote love poems because that’s what I had in me to write. Others have said this more eloquently, at length, but I’ll reiterate that for men writing about one’s personal identity is perceived as addressing the state of mankind. For women, writing about one’s personal identity is framed as being confessional or, worse, decorative. How do we liberate the love poem from the pejorative? One poem, one poet, at a time. We write smart critical essays about love poems. We mention them and their authors as favorite influences. We take care, in praising love poems (and especially love poems by men), to parse out when the “object” of affection is being treated as just that—an object—versus when he or she is being brought into real, fully dimensioned life.
This is a time of healthy upheaval in the literary world, as attention increases to previously marginalized voices, and I hope the celebration of women’s contributions to literature is part of that.
~from a February 2016 interview with Sarah Marcus for Gazing Grain Press
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