Interview with Sarah Kortemeier on Ganbatte — November 15, 2019
Sarah Kortemeier is the recipient of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press for her debut collection, Ganbatte. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Science, both from The University of Arizona. Currently she serves as Library Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Sarah lives in Tucson with her husband, two rescue dogs, and lots of light.
Christopher Nelson: I love how lucidly these poems show an identity affected by place—how what we normally take for granted about ourselves is seen anew when we travel into different cultures. How did these poems come about?
Sarah Kortemeier: “Identity affected by place”: you’ve really captured what I was trying to do, in these poems and in my life at the time, so thank you! These poems are pretty autobiographical—I’ve collapsed chronologies and changed names, but the poems in Ganbatte reflect my experiences as a young adult, at a time when I was bending most of my energy toward seeing the world. After college I was fortunate to be accepted to two international work exchange programs, the Intermenno Trainee Program and the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, so I spent a good chunk of my twenties as an expat: I was a dishwasher and au pair for a year in Germany, then an assistant middle school English teacher for three years in rural Japan. These poems are largely rooted in my memory of those years. My travel experience is still at the center of my identity, as a human and as a poet. Travel helped me ask bigger questions. When a young American visits Auschwitz and Hiroshima, what does that mean? What do we carry forward? How does that change us? I want to note, too, that the kinds of journeys I was taking in my twenties were a privilege. I didn't have much ready cash when I was on the road, but I did have a certain amount of freedom (from family obligations, debt, etc.), which made working my way around the world more possible. So I am grateful for those opportunities, and I think a lot about how to pay that experience forward. When the world has changed us, how do we pay that debt—how do we change the world to make it better? Neither I nor my poems know the answers to these questions, but we’re trying to process them anyway.
Nelson: The delights, confusions, and particularities of languages are prominent in your book—curse words in German, homophones in Japanese. It is a cosmopolitan book in its geography—expansive and outward looking—, but in its voice it is very intimate, private even, like diary writing. Can you talk about that contrast or tension?
Kortemeier: There’s a lot of intellectual challenge inherent in travel, and I probably feel this most acutely when trying to learn a new language. It takes such intense concentration, especially in the early stages. But what I’m also trying to get across here is the intensity of the emotional experience of travel, and I think poetry is an ideal vehicle for this. You can combine the external images of “newness” with the inner monologue very concisely. Travel, living abroad, and language acquisition are all very outward-facing activities, but they require enormous reserves of personal resilience. One of my goals for the book is to convey what culture shock is actually like: it’s fundamentally, existentially disorienting. Your identity changes when you lose what’s familiar, and your personality gets almost completely stripped away if you don’t have language. Think about trying to get to know a new set of coworkers, but never being able to make a joke. Think about how you might feel if someone in the kitchen asks you to do something really routine like fetch an onion, but you don’t know that word, and all you can say is “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” It was hard for me to feel as stupid as I did in the early days in Germany and in Japan. (The memory of that feeling will never leave me. If you ever want to see me in a towering, incandescent rage, make a comment about how someone “just needs to learn English” in my presence.) But persisting through that, learning the word for onion, and doing my actual job next time I was asked, was an unbelievable confidence-builder. I got through that and now I can do anything. So I think the tension you’ve identified is very real, and I’m so pleased that it’s coming through in the book. “Expanding your world view” is a very lofty-sounding goal, and it's so worth pursuing, but that expansion does not come about without discomfort and self-examination. That’s what’s driving the intimacy in these poems.
Nelson: Your experiences in the work exchange programs were different from tourism certainly, but you write about several tourist experiences: visiting Anne Frank’s house, Stonehenge, hiking mount Fuji with a throng of people, etc. Do you distinguish between travel and tourism? I think of your poem “Tourist,” which has a great moment halfway through: “But sometimes the postcards are sort / of true.” And is learning the language—or attempting to—a key for having a more immersive, authentic experience?
Kortemeier: Living in a place is different from passing through a place, certainly (I’ve done quite a bit of both). I wouldn’t call one experience “more authentic” than another, though; that’s not my place to decide. When I’m resident in a place I hang with other residents, which is an education in daily gratitude. Folks all over the world have shown me so much grace and kindness as I grappled with, and made a lot of mistakes in, new languages and customs. When I’m backpacking I often hang with other backpackers, and we’ll share advice, rides, food. I treasure all the relationships I’ve made through travel. Language learning is a special part of it, but connecting with people is the end goal for me. There are obvious problems with tourism in certain times and places—overcrowding, damage to fragile ecosystems, and so on. But I do think we can learn a lot from tourism if we go about it thoughtfully, and if we are intentional about where we are spending our time and our money. Tourism is like education, work, anything else: you get out what you put in. The sense of newness in all the details persists across travel experiences, I think. It’s very easy to develop a habit of openness and curiosity when traveling—what I’ve heard called “beginner’s mind” in meditation practice. It’s my favorite mental state. Sometimes you look up and it hits you: my god, I’m standing in the middle of an actual postcard. Sometimes you’re in the grocery store and you just cannot read the labels, so you get a snack from 7-Eleven and call it dinner. The range of experience is wide. I think we have to learn everything we can when we travel, no matter how long we’re able to stay.
Nelson: You mentioned earlier your visit to Auschwitz. I appreciate your tone in those poems—how you are candid about being unable to arrive at some great insight about the experience, how you didn’t come away with answers to share. Was there an impulse for you to try to find an “aha moment”? Did you have to resist the idea that poets should have answers?
Kortemeier: I was really young when I took that trip to Auschwitz. I felt a compulsion then to avoid trying to come up with “answers” out of a sense of deep grief and deep humility. And to be honest, I still feel very young and very callow in the presence of that history. I don’t always resist meaning-making in poetry, but I do resist it in the face of genocide. You and I are artists born in a different time and place, and we shouldn’t try to usurp the voices of the people who suffered there. We can, however, attempt to contribute to the ongoing project of memory. Those poems try to convey what it’s like to be there, now, after the horror has emanated from that place and left us with a terrifying silence. What do we carry forward from that? That’s a question I think everyone must answer for themselves.
Nelson: Thank you for saying that. I think that’s a beautifully ethical position. Your treatment of your visits to Auschwitz and Hiroshima has me thinking about metonymy. You focus on small details of massive atrocities: the charred lunchbox of the Japanese schoolgirl, the tenth bale of human hair left behind in a death-camp warehouse. To treat Auschwitz and Hiroshima metaphorically would require you to say “this is that,” or “this is like that.” Given your aim to “resist meaning-making … in the face of genocide,” metonymy seems the right decision. The charred lunchbox is a fact; you’ve placed it in a poem, but its meaning will depend largely upon what the reader chooses to do with that image. Am I making sense? And do you agree?
Kortemeier: Completely. The use of metonymy is very deliberate, and it comes directly out of some of the conversations we had in Jane Miller’s craft classes at the University of Arizona—the ethical implications of metaphor and metonymy, how metaphor fails when we look at the cataclysms of the Second World War in particular. The bombing of Hiroshima is not like anything in our everyday experience. The images that remain, however, speak for themselves and for the larger tragedy. I personally have trouble grasping the scope of the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the tangible objects bring it back to the individual human life. That’s not the whole truth, but it’s an entry point, I think. That’s my goal for the reader: that those factual details (the charred lunchbox, the bales of human hair) serve as entry points, imaginatively, emotionally, intellectually.
Nelson: Can you talk about the poem “Fleißig,” especially in the context of metonymy? I love its complexity—how it depends upon a word that doesn’t have an exact English equivalent, how it catalogs such various things that our sense of the word is both broadened and undone, how—somehow—it accrues to be as much about the perceiver as the perceived.
Kortemeier: Yes, definitely. Words without exact English equivalents are really interesting points of dissonance, I think. That poem started with a list—of everything the word “fleißig” implies—and then the list took over, and I found myself attempting to catalog the sensory overload you experience in the midst of a new language and a new place. Looking at that poem through the lens of metonymy, I think the list as a whole stands in for that experience; the images flash by, but they also accumulate until we are hurled to a stop in front of that bale of human hair. We have to stop and confront ourselves, once we arrive at Auschwitz.
Nelson: As an editor of a poetry journal, I read a lot of poems—an endless flow of poems, which is a joy, mostly. And while I’ve always had a fondness for brief poems, those in which language and image are maximally compressed, my admiration for a successful short poem has only grown with time. It’s difficult to write a good one. I find “平安 [heian]” to be such a poem. What are your aesthetic and/or stylistic considerations when writing a short poem?
平安 [heian]
Japanese. Peace.
An old man calligraphing as the rain blows through an unclosed window to freckle his untouched tea. On the page in front of him, the character echoes: under the flat surface of old grief, a roof. Under the roof, a woman.
Kortemeier:I’ve been profoundly influenced by the poetic traditions of Japan, though I’ve been wary of trying to write much in the traditional Japanese short forms. I know just enough about haiku to know how much allusive wordplay I am missing when I read them. So on one hand, I feel rather unprepared to try to tackle haiku in English; on the other, there is such an attempt in the book (the poem “秋 [aki]” is a haiku). The translations of Japanese short forms have their own beauty, and I’ve admired those translations since I first started reading poetry. There’s a Jane Hirshfield translation of Izumi Shikibu’s “Although the wind…” that is one of the poems I carry with me, close to the heart. I love the way the image does all the heavy lifting in the great Japanese short poems. There’s such a wealth of loneliness and ambiguity and human emotion in those images. So when I write a short poem, it usually rests on an image I find particularly evocative. “平安 [heian]” is an interesting example. I wrote this book in a variety of modes, and I tried all kinds of experiments to get to the heart of the material. This poem is one of the few successful versions of one such experiment—I was attempting to use the meanings of the radicals within kanji characters to, first, define the word, and also to expand on the kanji’s English definition. In the word “heian,” the first character means “even, level,” and sometimes “the surface of water”; the second character has two radicals, a “roof” on top and a “woman” below. I derived a central image in my mind from that, and then simply let the image do the work as a poem. Unfortunately this technique wasn’t all that successful with a lot of the Japanese words I tried to write about, but when it did work, I was grateful.
Nelson: One of my favorite poems in the book is “Inheritance.” In the middle of the book—where we think we know what the poems are about and what you’re doing stylistically—there is a gorgeously strange poem about fathers. I’m not suggesting the book isn’t unified, for it clearly is; but there are poems that surprise in their unexpectedness of subject and tone. I’m reminded also of “Surveillance,” a brief poem that turns the experience of the traveler into a meditation on intimacy, both personal and—I’ll venture—cosmic: the notion of being watched by invisible forces beyond our perception and, perhaps, beyond our understanding. I think of certain indigenous aesthetics in which the perfect pattern or structure is complicated with a small “flaw” so that attention—“spirit”—doesn’t get trapped. A little trapdoor for Chaos to come and go. This is my circuitous way to ask you about the formal arrangement of the poems into a book and those that sort of sit outside the expected trajectory.
Kortemeier: Well put. Because the book is autobiographical, and because it’s also trying to engage with history and with the world, I’ve tried to pull off a certain amount of zooming in and out with the arrangement of poems. There are poems that center my experience as a human more explicitly, and then there are poems that place more emphasis on documentation, witnessing. Hopefully the human doing the witnessing is always there on the page. So some of the variances you’re spotting here can be attributed to my rejection of the idea that there is such a thing as unbiased observation. I’ve attempted to be as transparent as I can about both my observations and my humanity in these poems. I do think of the few “non-travel” poems in the book as incredibly necessary in terms of re-focusing attention—that’s a really lovely reading, thank you. I might liken the inclusion of those poems to the way a hit of salt on top of a dish rivets the attention and brings all the other underlying flavors to the fore. In terms of “Inheritance” and “Surveillance,” those are two pieces that get at the core of my personal desire to travel, though they aren’t about travel at all. Readers will certainly find different resonances in these poems, but from my perspective, they were both written out of a desire to affirm that what we do on this earth matters. My most deep-seated fear is in those poems: what is my life worth? Will it matter that I was here? And so both “Surveillance” and “Inheritance” bring that very intimate, very private desire/fear out into the open. I started roaming around the world because I wanted to do something vivid with my life; that’s where those poems find their roots.
Nelson: You are the library director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, which, for readers who haven’t been, is one of the richest, largest collections of poetry in the United States. How has being immersed in that environment for years influenced your reading and writing?
Kortemeier:It’s been so important to my reading and writing, and such a privilege. The Poetry Center has upwards of 50,000 volumes at this point—just a vast wealth of poetry, and the presence of that collection has influenced me so much. In graduate school I think I had a tendency to read somewhat narrowly, and very deeply: I spent a lot of time thinking about poems line by line, considering the moves poets can make. Now, as a poetry librarian, my reading is a lot speedier and a lot broader; serving on the library staff at the Center has been a second complete education in poetry. I have so many more examples in front of me now—this is how this poem succeeds, this is what this poet tried, this is what happened when a press looked outside the bound book and started investigating other vessels as containers for poetry. There are so many ways to experiment, so many ways to succeed. It feels wonderful to be in the presence of a collection like that—it gives you permission to try all kinds of things. Becoming a poetry librarian has really felt like coming home in one sense, and growing into my own professional skin in another. I love working in libraries so much, because we have a public duty to broaden the tent until we run out of room on the shelves. “For every book, its reader.” One of the great joys of being a poetry librarian in this moment, too, is the opportunity to amplify voices that have historically been silenced or suppressed. Librarians have chances to support careers by buying books, of course; we can connect writers and readers through our reference and readers advisory work; and we also have opportunities to exhibit different works formally and informally, shining a spotlight on all kinds of themes. I run the Poetry Center’s university classroom outreach, so I also get to teach poems frequently. I often read with an eye toward finding surprises for the students I work with: where can I find perspectives that might be new for them? It’s an incredible joy to watch a poem just floor a reader. I don’t always pull that off, but when I do, I know I’m in the right place and the right profession.
Nelson: Having just published a book, it would be understandable to want to lie fallow for a while, but two poems in Ganbatte, “Gretel” and “Hansel,” remind me of your fairytale poems that I’ve read some of. Can we close by talking about other writing projects or interests?
Kortemeier:Thanks so much for asking this! I do have a second manuscript I’ve been working on and shopping around for a while, and it sprang both from my abiding interest in fairy tales and from my reading in the Poetry Center’s collections. When I was a kid I read every one of the fairy tale collections my local public library had—in fact, most I checked out and read multiple times. I also read a great many novelizations of fairy tales—Robin McKinley being a favorite writer working in this vein. Then when I got to the University of Arizona, Kate Bernheimer’s teaching and creative work inspired me to really mine those fairy tales, and I started work on fairy-tale poems in a workshop she ran for the Poetry Center while I was still a student. So I had some lonely little fairy tale poems rattling around as I finished up Ganbatte, and indeed “Hansel” and “Gretel” both made it into that manuscript—the journeying theme seemed to resonate with the rest of the book. After I finished Ganbatte, I tried to be a good post-MFA writer, did all the things I was supposed to do, had a regular writing schedule and all that. And for two years, everything I wrote was terrible. I wrote exactly one piece in two years I was happy with—which you published in Issue 1. “Survival” about saved my sanity when I wrote it, so I’m glad you liked it too! I was really frustrated, and in the end I concluded that my earnest, disciplined efforts to be a Real Writer ™ after I’d finished my schooling weren’t working. I decided I was going to try to start to play again. Just experiment, take the pressure off, try things out with no expectation that I’d be writing a poem at the end of my writing sessions. Around this time, I happened to spot a then-new book in the Poetry Center library: Sonne From Ort, by Christian Hawkey and Uljana Wolf. They’d taken Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and made erasures of each poem in the original English and in facing-page German translation (Wolf is a German-speaking poet). Each poet erased each poem very differently. And I read it and I thought that erasure sounded like it might be fun to try, and would certainly take some pressure off me: I’d just have to find the surprises already buried in the page. Erasure, as many folks before me have observed, is a political act. I was really conscious of my positioning as a white American writer when I started erasing, so I adopted the comedy principle of “punching up” (that is, I wasn’t going to erase the words of anyone who occupied a position more marginalized or less powerful than my own). I lighted pretty quickly on the works of the Brothers Grimm as a fertile text for erasure. From there, my second book project just took off. I wrote the majority of it in a few months. I worked with the folk tales the Brothers Grimm collected as found texts, both in the original German and in English translation, and I’ve never had more fun writing than I did when I was wrapped up in that project. I’ve been lucky enough to place quite a few of the poems from that project in journals; you can see examples at The Feminist Wire, Slush Pile Magazine, and most recently at the Journal of Mennonite Writing. I haven’t had any nibbles on the manuscript as a whole yet, but I think we’ll get there. I rediscovered my joy in writing when I was writing this book. I think and hope it’ll find some joyful readers, eventually.
