Sarah Venart, I Am The Big Heart

 

Albert County Breeder

It was years before I could walk back
to that doorway, figuratively hold

the post of your fallen porch
with its thousand green Mason jars

staring out towards the weathered barn.
On each window your dust

held the shapes of the cobwebs. Here
is your father coming out the kicked door.

Inside I’ve seen the hard-packed dirt
on your kitchen floor, ketchup caked

to the spoons, the bucket in the corner,
a.k.a. the winter toilet.

Outside we have more in common: bus shelter
for the wait at the end of the lane, broken-looking

crab apples, blue spruce, red pines,
tar shingles on the coop,

and the wild eyes in the animal
we brought to breed with your animal.

Montreal poet Sarah Venart’s second full-length poetry collection is I Am The Big Heart (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020), an exploration of empathy and moments small and large, writing a lyric of time and of heart. A follow-up to her full-length debut, Woodshedding (Brick Books, 2007), as well as her chapbook Neither Apple Nor Pear, Weder Apfel Noch Birne (Toronto ON: Junction Books, 2003), the poems in I Am The Big Heart are organized into five sections of poems—“The Big Heart,” “Still Full of Arrows,” “Flowers for All Occasions,” “The Heiress” and “Joy in the Cloisters.” These are poems of dark heartbreak, pulling at the threads to examine how it emerged, is constructed, or even how it all falls apart. “When they leave me with your body,” she writes, as part of “You Can’t Take It with You,” “I put my head / on the dark room of your chest.” As the poem “The Chauffeur” begins: “I look up and it’s time to go. All ambulance. I fetch / one daughter at daycare, the other at kindergarten, // though I’m too early. So I see the heartbreak— / class lights out, the children, even mine, // small heads laid out on desks waiting / for their signal of dismissal. Even so, we are let go.”

Part of what makes her notion of the “confessional mode” so compelling is the density and the slant of her narratives. Her lines wrap themselves around her subject with incredible precision, but never to obscure, even when she isn’t writing in a direct, straight line. Venart focuses on the minutiae, writing of domestic labour that predominantly falls on women; there is a coiled tension in her lyrics, which are quite different than the narrative stretches and comparatively-open sprawl of New York poet Rachel Zucker’s similar lyrics on mothering and domestic tensions. She writes on longing, desire and desperation; hard-won hope and the determinations of daily living. Venart writes on the largess of emotion, including how big an early crush on a neighbour boy feels in the chest. “Somewhere around fifteen,” she writes, as part of “I Believe You Still Have My Key,” “wit closed me // safely as a dress seam. Or fear. Same thing.” She also writes a suggestion of underlying, hidden violence and memory, such as the opening of “Against Confession,” that offers: “My daughter won’t remember me asking the dog to sit, and how— / plunk, in the scratched bit of garden between barnyard / and doorway—she obeyed instead. Her memory winds in other ways, / magnificently obscuring facts. When my sister visits, she says I’m the same / because I don’t remember what she swears she witnessed— / someone doing something to me in a bathroom long ago.” As she responds as part of a recent interview posted at the AllLitUp blog:

I wrote this for people who’ve maybe put aside something that is personally meaningful to do the mostly silent work of caring for others. This is of course meaningful as well, but it is not always easy to put aside what you want to do to be of service to others. My mother did this kind of silent service her entire life. I only really understood how much she put aside after I’d lost her. All women do this—to some degree in isolation—these commitments of enormous love. I hope readers feel less alone reading the book. 

Someone asked me, “Aren’t you worried about how your family will react to your poems?” And the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughters to not know the real me. And I love my children to hell and back, I’d die for them, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had moments when I’ve resented having lost something because of them. I want them to know I’m a human being. And that’s okay for others to know. If you write confessional poetry, if you love it, like I do, you have to be prepared to show this messiness. There is shame associated with confessional writing; some critics dismiss it as too broken or unstable or fragile—I think of Lowell’s line about watching “for love-cars” in “Skunk Hour,” that instability of not being able to look away from what we should not admit an interest in, that’s exactly what I don’t resist. I love what is incongruous and wrong. I don’t resist the poetics of what happens off camera, in the less Instagram-able moments. I make it my home. Anyone who wants to join me, I’m happy to be your den mother.

 

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Venart

Sarah Venart used to write under her initials, S.E., but screw that. Sarah’s writing has been published in Numero Cinq, Concrete and River, New Quarterly, Malahat Review, Fiddlehead, This Magazine, Prism International and on CBC Radio. She is the author two books: Neither Apple Nor Pear/Weder Apfel Noch Birne and Woodshedding. A new collection, I am the Big Heart, is coming out soon-ish. Sarah lives in Montreal and teaches at John Abbott College.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I thought it would change things more than it did.  I didn’t yet understand that I’m always going to be learning all over again with each manuscript.

2 - How did you come to poetry?

I didn’t.  It came to me.  First attempt was not successful (more on that later).  Second attempt came after grad school. I went to Banff for the fiction workshop but I spent all my time with the poets.  It felt like where I was supposed to be. And there is no greater cure for moodiness than finding the perfect line.

3 - How long does it take to start a manuscript? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

The first draft comes quickly, but after that it takes me forever. I will do anything rather than edit: run, grade essays, make regretful purchases, read gossip columnists....  I spend way too much time on Instagram.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you?

Usually it begins with something I see and want to describe.  This morning I was out running and I stepped on a bird and its guts made a soft pop sound.  So I got home and wrote that down.  It may become something.  Probably not, right?  No one wants to hear the sound of popping guts in a poem. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Not especially.  I’ve been told I seem at ease, but inside I’m a mess.  It’s hard to get up there!  And another thing: it means the world to me when a person from the audience says they liked a line or a word I used.  So when I go to readings, I try to give that to the poet who read.  We need to support each other.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

“Why in hell are you trying to describe this?  WTF does this mean?”: these are my theoretical queries as I’m writing.  Self-doubt isn’t pretty.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Thoughtfulness is important.  Subtext is important.  Writers need time to think— that’s part of my role.  Quiet time isn’t validated these days, I find.   But if you give me time to stare, I can give you, you know, a little slice of surprise and maybe beauty.  That’s satisfying.  But if you can’t respect that, I also helped a guy with two suitcases run to catch a bus to the airport this morning. He said “God Blesses You.”  I took him at his word.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Love it. It is essential. Brick Books has some wonderful editors” I salute them!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Marge Piercy told me to take myself more seriously.  I appreciated her toughness. I don’t think this manuscript would have been completed if not for her sharpness with me.  She also said to Mary Panke, a poet friend of mine: “It is worth saying things that might liberate others.” That’s a tall order that I think both Mary and I have tried to write towards.  Another piece of advice I like:  Childish Gambino says “Never run back to what broke you.”  That’s true.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

**See my writing day** 😊

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I take a nap; I go for a run; I leave the poem for a day or two; I flip through poetry books; I read the art reviews in The New Yorker; I dress the cat up in pyjamas. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Woodsmoke, hayseed, mildew, molasses and oats, warm manure.  I grew up on a farm.  I miss it every day.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Visual art.  Photography in particular. I love Sally Mann. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Today, specifically, I’m reading Kevin Young’s sonnets.  But Hieu Minh Nguyen’s sort of almost prose poems are…  just…  I have had him on repeat all summer: he’s one of the best poets out there right now. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I always feel inadequate around other poets.  They know more than I do, their literary reach is far greater than mine…. I feel like I’m always trying to catch up for the time writing fiction.  Self-doubt is my enemy, obviously. 

I’d like to write more prose poems.  I’d like to write more about my mother’s upbringing in Nova Scotia.  I’d like to edit and publish her poems and stories and her novel.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d like to have been a lawyer— that’s a little out there, but I think I could have gone to law school if someone had suggested that direction to me; I was sort of lost as a twenty-year old.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve always loved reading.  And when I was younger, I was forever writing down lines from books in a journal I kept, a kind of quote diary.  And then, Douglas Lochhead, the poet and a professor at Mount Allison, told me I should write.  I’m grateful to him.  He meant a lot to me.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great film was Swiss Army Man.  You have to see it and then go on Twitter tell me if you hate it or love it!  I won’t say another word!  Last great book was not what I am currently reading, I can tell you that.  I am reading The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule.  It’s research for a class I’m teaching this fall.  To temper that, I dip into the beautiful Collected Stories of Joy Williams. Now that is beauty.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m about to begin editing I am the Big Heart, which will be out in 2020.  It’s very exciting to begin this new chapter of my writing life.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d be back, so I’m thrilled.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;