We featured an excerpt from Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015) in February. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University and currently teaches writing outside of Chicago. Confluence is her debut full-length collection of poetry. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and Sandy’s first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. She won Second Prize in Prick of the Spindle’s 2014 Poetry Open and her poems and prose appear in South Dakota Review, Blackbird, Southwest Review, The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.
Readers will have a tough time arguing that your new collection could be titled anything but Confluence, as that is the central idea that is woven through these poems. I’m interested in the origin of your ideas about the intersections of the subjects you choose to write about. What is it that interests you in these meeting points?
Sandra Marchetti
Great question, Jenn. Also, thanks so much for having me here. Once I had a few drafts of the book under my belt, I brainstormed title choices with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. I guess that gives you an idea of the time lapse between coming up with the title and the book as a published artifact (!). That evening we came up with a healthy list of 10-15, and I still have that list saved as a virtual sticky note on my laptop. Some of those choices ended up as lines or titles of individual poems in the book, and one became the title of my chapbook published before Confluence, which contained many Confluence poems, The Canopy. All this to say, at the time I just really liked the sound of it. If you look through the book, you’ll see I love the verb “slip” and use it often. Isn’t that what a confluence is? A slippage? I wanted the motifs of the book to slip swim in and out of each other. The two themes that seem confluent are the love of landscape and the love of the human “you,” or other. One book that showed me how to do this was Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook, In the Arbor. I wanted my book to exist within dualities: the interior and the exterior. And two other spheres, perhaps, the Midwest and the region where I wrote much of the book, Washington, D.C. And perhaps one other duality: the single speaker and the romantically loved one. The book chronicles my idea of reunion with the Midwestern landscape, where I came back to live after many years, and with the beloved. Like a confluence, two rivers meet that haven’t met before, but it still feels like a reunion because the commingling is organic, and was destined, geographically in some way. I hoped to portray in the book. The final commingling is mentioned in the last poem of the book, “One Secret”: the “sound and meaning” of poems, how both are needed to make sense of things.
I’m so glad you mentioned the “sound” of a poem and how it creates meaning because your poems are so well-crafted sonically. How do you put your ideas into sound? Which grows from the other?
Thanks for that compliment, Jenn. I do pay special attention to sound. In other interviews I’ve said that sound sometimes comes before image in my drafting process. I’ve mentioned that a sound will set me writing to begin with, and it will often be something heard in the atmosphere (I do draft outside quite often). Upon further reflection however, I’m not sure this is completely true. The more accurate answer is that one line, or fragment of a line, will come to mind and a sound in it–a particular vowel, slant rhyme, or alliteration naturally present–will set me off like a clock, ticking through the rest of the poem looking for sounds and images to ping off the first one. Most always the first line stays in the poem, or a version of it will. I’m not one to “grease the wheels” in the first few lines of my poems. Words and phrases are often cropped out of my pieces, but more often from the middle of a draft. Usually once I’m set writing, I’ve finally found something worth fascinating over. That doesn’t mean sound comes together well in each draft. The rhymes and rhythms are nascent, or can be clichéd and/or clunky. Sometimes I re-use sound schemes I’ve used previously just to get the draft down and then revise later. I do have a sound-mapping process that I take many poems through, where I circle and relate repeated sounds and rhymes that work with each other, scan the poem, and count up the frequency of parts of speech in my poems. I mostly look for lots of active verbs, and repeated patterns of vocalization. I like to see vocalized patterns progress and evolve through a piece. I also look for symmetry in my pieces (number of lines, types of stanzas, palindrome/other formal effects) as I often strive for those.
How often do these patterns, this symmetry, surprise you? Do yo
u find you also tend to write about patterns and symmetry? Is this how you experience the world?
I wouldn’t say that the patterns surprise me, or that symmetry in my poems surprises me, because I do consciously craft it, brick by brick. I’m obsessed with refrains and enjoy finding rhythms and sounds that match the content of my poems. Free verse often doesn’t pay attention to symmetry or the aesthetics of the shape of a poem and its sound in the same way that my poems, which are mostly metrical and/or formal, do. However, I do write about patterns quite a bit–the flying “V” of birds makes it into many of my poems, the Rothko-like separation of sea/earth and sky seems to present itself. I write about tiny compartments of life, whether inside rooms or outside the walls. I fixate on the world as a set of boxes, and write what appears within those boxes at times. Hopefully, those small squares translate into something like a bigger truth, or a suggestion of beauty. This is how I experience the world, as I am detail-oriented, and a perfectionist (most writers are, right?). I have a tendency to look away from obvious, such as the petals of a splayed peony, and more toward the muted–the ants that circle over the peony’s unopened buds.
“Three Questions” originated with our video series “In Place” and was so popular we decided to expand it. Writers have the option of having their interviews conducted via email, phone, or video. If you have a question you’d love to ask a writer, let us know. If you are a published author and would like to participate, drop us a note.
