{"id":46108,"date":"2019-10-09T08:16:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T15:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/?p=46108"},"modified":"2019-10-09T08:16:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T15:16:59","slug":"waxing-poetic-with-sarah-galvin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/waxing-poetic-with-sarah-galvin\/","title":{"rendered":"Waxing Poetic with Sarah Galvin"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s more to see at Town Hall aside from the plethora of events that we have taking place (you can check out our calendar <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>). There is art to see. Town Hall commissioned several artists to create permanent pieces that can be found throughout our building. In the south stairwell, for instance, you\u2019ll see a poem written by local literary luminary Sarah Galvin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Town Hall\u2019s Jonathan Shipley recently sat down with Galvin to discuss her process, the poem, and gargoyle people.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>JS: What’s your arts background?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> I started writing seriously in second grade. I was obsessed with <\/span>Lord of the Rings<\/span><\/i> and Narnia, and tried to write a novel about gargoyle people living on a planet made of ice cream. People told me I might be older when I finally got to publish, and I remember feeling so frustrated. I wanted to publish a book RIGHT NOW. I think as a service to little kid me I will actually try to publish that book, which was about 90 pages long, at some point. I started writing poetry when I was 14, after reading Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl.\u201d I was very into stream of consciousness writing at that age and what came out of that obsession was terrible. At 16 I began going to performances by this one-man-band called Sexually Active Corpse. SAC, a man named Will Waley, sang pornographic, surreal nursery rhymes over beats made with a Casio and an assortment of children\u2019s instruments. My first real poems were sort of an imitation of his lyrics, which listed the hypersexual, surreal behaviors of a multi-gendered \u201cspeaker\u201d with the ability to change bodies and travel through time, among other magic powers. The poems inspired by Will were also terrible. I finally began to write real poems when I realized that music, a beat, and a tune provided Will\u2019s art a layer of meaning and a source of momentum that I needed to create somehow silently on the page. My first source of guidance for this was <\/span>Joe Wenderoth\u2019s \u201cLetters to Wendy\u2019s\u201d<\/span><\/a> which is (depending on who you ask) an epistolary novel or a series of poems using Wendy\u2019s restaurant comment cards as a formal template. After gaining a rudimentary understanding of how to structure prose poems from \u201cLetters to Wendy\u2019s,\u201d I started reading all the poetry I could find, and picked up techniques as I read.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>JS: How did you become aware\/get introduced to Town Hall?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG: <\/b>After I was accepted to University of Washington\u2019s poetry MFA program, I went to see my soon-to-be thesis advisor, <\/span>Heather McHugh<\/span><\/a>, read at Town Hall. I had been freelancing at <\/span>The Stranger<\/span><\/i>, and when I walked into the auditorium, several people I knew from the paper smiled at me and beckoned to me to enter the room. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I started to cry. I saw Heather, up on the stage, dressed as a bird in a flesh-colored spandex bodysuit, and all these people from the paper I could hardly believe had admitted me to work with them, and thought, \u201chow do I deserve to be in this beautiful place with these geniuses? How can this be where I belong?\u201d <\/span>Ever since that night, I have had tender and reverent feelings about Town Hall. I believe it is a cathedral of art in Seattle.<\/b><\/p>\n

JS: Why did you want to work with Town Hall with your poetry?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> It was an incredible honor, given my first experience of that space and what it has come to symbolize to me, to be asked to contribute a poem to be permanently on view there. I felt like I was completing something that began the first time I walked into Town Hall, answering for myself the question of whether I really could create anything worthy of the space. It is a magical place for me, in a way, the place where I went in a few steps from making a child\u2019s art to making grown-up art. <\/span>Town Hall for me has always physically manifested a right of passage. I was a student, now I hope it\u2019s time for me to teach, to beckon the next generation of artists into that grand hall.<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

THE STREET LIGHT TODAY IS AN ANGEL OF THE LORD<\/em><\/p>\n

Because you had never seen a seagull, your description of the one<\/em>
\nthat flew into the store where you worked inspired<\/em>
\nthe manager to call the police.<\/em><\/p>\n

I want everything to be like that bird, so overwhelmingly itself<\/em>
\nthat it is its own spotlight,<\/em><\/p>\n

but 90% of things are the guy sitting next to me who punctuates<\/em>
\nstatements like “I’ll pull together some numbers for you” by<\/em>
\npounding the table so hard, my coffee bounces.<\/em><\/p>\n

His animation lacks the meaning of emotion it references, like<\/em>
\nan elaborate set with no play.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are so many sets. The absence of a play seems like an emergency,<\/em>
\nconsidering the amount of wasted resources,<\/em><\/p>\n

but there’s not really anyone to call<\/em>
\nabout that kind of emergency, which perhaps is<\/em>
\nwhy people pray.<\/em><\/p>\n

JS: What was the inspiration for the piece?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> Richard Kenney, one of my professors in grad school, was talking about poets in a lecture. He said something about how people look at poets like they\u2019re crazy in their exaltation of mundane moments. Something like: \u201cWithout poetry, you walk up to somebody and say, \u2018the streetlight today is an angel of the lord,\u201d and they think you\u2019re nuts. But you really saw that.\u201d <\/span>Exaltation of mundane moments is what poetry is all about. <\/b>The primary project of art in any medium is to lift the veil of familiarity from life, which we need in order to function (imagine being blown away by every streetlight! You would never make it home from work.)<\/span> When art works it makes every experience it exhibits feel like you\u2019re experiencing it as a child again. <\/b>Shortly after I met my wife five years ago, she said when she first got to Seattle as a teenager she worked at Urban Outfitters, and one day a seagull came into the store. Being from North Carolina, she had never seen one of our gigantic stretch Hummer seagulls before, so she called security and told them a \u201clarge waterfowl\u201d had entered the building, and they better come quick. They of course laughed when they saw it was just a giant Dick\u2019s fries-fed Seattle Seagull. It\u2019s a love poem\u2014I adored the exaltation of something familiar in her response to the trespassing seagull. Over and over, she makes my world new, gives me inspiration, and this poem expresses that facet of our love. Art is the core of our relationship in a lot of ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

JS: What’s your process with your poetry? Is it systematic (specific times\/places you write)? How much editing do you do after?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> I usually start with words from a conversation I found interesting. In this case it was Richard Kenney\u2019s lecture. But it can be a sentence from a dream, something from social media, a poorly translated restaurant menu. I don\u2019t think initially about what it \u201cmeans,\u201d I just follow a train of associations to create the poem. It feels like a desire to answer a question, like, what did that random sentence mean to me? Why do I keep thinking about this image? And because of the inspiration, my poems usually get their momentum from a poetic device called \u201canaphora\u201d in which the same image or concept recurs and develops throughout a poem. I will write for four or five hours, finessing the same small set of words, then let the draft sit for a week or two, after which I dive back in for an intense round of editing that lasts vastly different lengths of times based on the length and complexity of the poem. Very occasionally, a poem just appears in 20 minutes in exactly the form it should be.<\/span><\/p>\n

JS: Are there specific messages you’re wanting to convey in your work or are you opening it up to readers to give their own interpretations?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG: <\/b>I would say I hope the readers wind up in a similar emotional space after reading my poems, but I want that to be specific and personal to each of them. <\/span>I want them to finish the poems with a sense of conclusion, yet with more questions than they had before they started reading.<\/b> And I want them to feel deeply excited by the questions. You know how when people in cartoons turn invisible, sometimes somebody throws flour or a sheet over them and you can see someone\u2019s there? That\u2019s how poetry works for me. It outlines meanings that are too complex to be directly expressed with words. But I try to make the poems accessible\u2014I want every reader to see that the invisible cartoon character is Donald Duck and not Mickey, even if they see an outline and not all of his features. It\u2019s not language poetry, which tries to de-commodify poetry by completely relying on the reader to create meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

JS: What do you hope Town Hall attendees get from this particular piece? <\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> Well, as I mentioned the only words that can express what a poem is \u201cabout\u201d are the exact words of the poem itself\u2014I\u2019m fond of the idea that \u201cpoetry is \u2018about\u2019 something the way a cat is \u2018about\u2019 the house\u2014but this one is about love, and how when you really love someone, their day-to-day experiences fill you with wonder, awe and endearment. <\/span>It\u2019s also about how, as humans living through late-stage capitalism, we spend much of our time trapped in a sort of quantitative experience of life, and the little moments of love and art that free us from that.<\/b> I hope people will read the poem and feel a renewed appreciation for the people they love and the moments of beauty those people bring. I hope they feel compelled to tell the important people in their lives they love them, and to make art.<\/span><\/p>\n

JS: What’s next, artistically, for you?<\/b><\/p>\n

SG:<\/b> I just finished a new manuscript, which I sent to Black Ocean, the press that absorbed my previous press Gramma\u2019s catalogue (which includes my most recent book, <\/span>Ugly Time<\/span><\/i>) when they closed down. I\u2019ve been teaching a bit and want to teach way more! I love it. I just pitched a few classes to Hugo House, and ideally at some point I\u2019d love to teach a class or two a quarter at Cornish, UW, or Central. I\u2019ve been looking into how to make that happen. I also teach one-on-one writing lessons, so if you\u2019re reading this and are interested, get in touch with me through my website! For those of you who have taken my classes, I\u2019m sorry to say the price of the class no longer includes unlimited Jell-o shots, as I stopped drinking a year ago, but there will probably still be candy. Also, I like to write at least a couple of essays or reviews a month, and at the moment I have nowhere to publish them, so I\u2019m looking for a publication to freelance regularly for. Oh, and I turned my blog, the <\/span>Pedestretarian<\/span><\/a>, a series of reviews of food found on the ground, into an Instagram, and I may either find a publication that will publish the reviews as a regular column, or start my own little printed publication. I\u2019m also working on a book of essays.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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