The Shore Interview #47: Mary C Sims

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: The title of “Stasis” primes the reader to think about stillness and/or equilibrium, but it is this very “and/or” in the meaning of the word “stasis” that the poem seems to be creating tension with. Its couplet form offers a sense of completion, while its varying line lengths and unconventional dialogue complicate that sense. Can you speak to the process of settling on this poem’s title and form and when you knew they were doing the work you wanted from them?

MCS: Oh, this is such a wonderful question! Thank you so much for asking it! Toward the end of my MFA, I started to lean toward couplet form when I wrote pieces intended to convey a set emotion, which was a deviation from my usual rebellion against form in general. I was afraid I would end up caged in or sacrifice something important to the poem to adhere to a set pattern, so I typically just avoided set form altogether, which left my poems either in one stanza or spread across the page accompanied by plus signs, extra space, or even brackets. But what I realized when I was writing “Stasis” was that I wanted a cage. I wanted the speaker and reader, trapped, having to stand and face the poem’s devastation without having a means of distancing from the main subject. To be able to look away from something is a privilege we don't realize we have until it's gone. For “Stasis,” a poem that not so much hinges on grief so much as it is consumed by it, I wanted the reader and speaker’s positions to blur as both of them can only see what they know and are bound by the sense of knowing there’s more they can’t see. As for the title, I tried to mirror that same sentiment of a fixed positionality dictated by one’s inability to look away from something because now, that event is in everything.

EF: “Inexorable” contains many surprising phrases like, “you walked / kitchen’s hilt” and “neighbors peel light” to state a few. What layers of meaning do you find lines like these emphasize and are there writers who have inspired this approach to language?

MCS: This is such a thoughtful question—thank you! In undergrad, my professor’s first suggestion was to always make our work more unexpected, to increase the tension or to keep a reader intrigued or to paint your own story better, and I ended up building my writing philosophy on that. I think it's a tactic that not only builds and prolongs tension within a poem by changing the readers sense of unreality, but it is also another way to accentuate poetry’s ability to explain the unexplainable. There's something so captivating about having defamiliarized something mundane such as a rain storm or an untidy room into swatches of unrelated images and to have someone else intrinsically understand what that image is, while coming away with a new vision or insight into it. For “Inexorable,” I actually wanted to convey the other side of what I intended for “Stasis” in that I had the speaker look away from their main subject the entire work. They paint their positionality from the outside of an otherwise suffocatingly intimate situation; they face small details or distractions or notations of even mundane activities like walking before they can reveal a source to themselves and even then, they are not looking at what they’ve revealed. The speaker moves, never slowing down but always speeding up, as if they cannot bear to be stuck with one conclusion alone because they are afraid of what they already know: it will haunt their life. Again, to face what you know means to understand that there is even more that you don’t and I found the opposition of the two speakers going through similar events but completely different reactions intriguing.

Poetry's ability to create languages indefinitely through association, intricate queues and other modes of artistic experimentation, make the craft something to return to. Some writers who wield this brilliantly are Brad Trumpfheller and Ocean Vuong. When I first discovered Trumpfheller in Adroit, I felt something click; their ability to weaponize the familiar into the almost disturbing unfamiliar entranced me. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a collection quicker in my life, which was a similar reaction to Vuong’s work as well. Not only was he one of the first poets I encountered, but his work felt electric in a way I couldn’t—and still cannot—pin down. I think his brilliant manipulation of language to craft images that feel both so far away and right at home, as if you didn’t know you were missing something until you are told you have been missing it, is a masterpiece.

EF: Although the two poems work beautifully on their own, I find they also lend themselves to being read together. There’s an opposition between the two titles, there are shared pivotal images of water, gods and a sustained undercurrent of loss for a “he,” plus a sense of exile from the speaker, particularly in the lines, “there’s no return / to return to,” or in opening dialogue, “No one gets twice.” How much do you consider this synergy when it comes to your own poems, whether in a project or appearing discreetly in journals, and what do you think readers could gain from reading across poems outside a poet’s intentional groupings?

MCS: I'm very fortunate that my writing derives from fixation. Whether it's an idea, specific word, or direct emotion, I go through a phase where I will produce work solely from that fixation, which usually results in about 6 to 8 poems, if I'm lucky. It's both very fortunate for grouping works and also very unfortunate for my kind poet friends who get to review what I have been interested in. Though I think synergy is something vital to keep in mind, I've found I'm more inclined to the chaos approach of diving between topics, emotions, and overall situations throughout my writing. Much as I try not to be a fickle writer, I have begun to accept that I am. I have to really be moved by something or have the desire to move someone else to produce something I would ever share. As both a reader and writer, I find it beneficial to read poems across and outside of a poet’s intentional grouping because it not only allows you a deeper insight into the poem but an exploration of the extent of a work, by which I mean how each piece of knowledge or art that we consume, create, or interact with, continues to build our understanding and perceptions as we continue to grow. I find synergy to be beneficial for longer pieces such as collections, as I am a very big fan of thematic collections and concept albums, my continuous obsession over artist Ethel Cain’s work and concept albums solidifies this, but I find that readers tend to gain more by venturing outside what they expect to encounter; it makes us have to reset and question and reevaluate ourselves outside of the routine and conceptions we can find ourselves moving within.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

MCS: I am always a huge fan of the journal Image. In undergrad, a writing club teacher sent me a link to a poem Image published and it is a poem I have bookmarked on every single electronic device I own and printed out on my wall. It’s Jennifer Atkinson “Canticle of the Penitent Magdalene” and I will never forget those final two stanzas: “Even so I dreamed the dream that Samson dreamed—honey oozed from a skull. / The taste? Like honey. I poured it into my palm and licked.”

I’ve been trying to read more archived work from journals as well so I’ve been venturing into older issues of Adroit, the Cortland Review and wildness, which wildness recently published some of Richard Siken’s latest work and I will forever be mesmerized by him and his ability to build worlds from individual poems, so I jumped right back in.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

MCS: Annie Przypyszny’s “Walking the Meditation Labyrinth in the Dog Park Near My Apartment” and Derek Chan’s “Future-Perfect” converse through a constant revisitation of the present through the lens of their perceived past and an understanding that they are the ones in control of its recollection. Both speakers revolve their narrations around a lacking of something that goes on to shape their understandings of themselves and their situations. For Chan’s poem, what shapes and reshapes the speaker is a notable absence of their subject and how the shape of the poem and the present surrounding it have been shaped by that: “I am carrying your absence / like a wet briefcase.” Both poets visit recollection with the idea that one’s understandings of the past are incomplete yet their effect is permanent in what we allow it to dictate. Przypyszny’s speaker goes on to navigate their present through redefinitions of understandings, realizing how their positionality dictates the extent of their own internal investigations: “I was wrong / about my own / linearity.”

Both poets bring discussions of memory, time and consequence to the forefront by presenting a doubling of their presents: that there is the present that exists how they know it (and therefore how they tell it) and a present that exists regardless.

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Mary C Sims is an MFA graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared in The Shore, wildness, Josephine Quarterly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly and more. Currently, she splits her time between working as an Assistant Editor, Journalist, Poetry Editor and Freelance Photographer when she is not, once again, traveling to visit her friends.