Episode 9 – Interview with Sarah MacDonell
The Clock Tower Pub, January 25, 2017

We discuss Sarah’s chapbook “The Lithium Body” published by In/Words Press, her collaboration with American artist Evy Borkan, large and small geologies, the relationship with language, what it’s like working with editor, a.m. kozak. Sarah talks about the way the work is a safer space to think about the personal where people become characters and being mindful of their representation. Amanda talked about confessional poetry.

We discussed the long poem and poem sequences, Robert Kroetsch, Sandra Ridley, Sarah’s mentor Brent Armendinger, Brenda Hillman. Amanda talks about the anti-epic as a way of reclaiming the epic as a feminine space. Sarah talks about her new work, which deals with the performance of gender as sound. We talk about Sarah’s use of the second person and how it interrogates the characters and the weird, complicated and healing aspects of working metapoetically. Sarah discusses CA Conrad’s somatic rituals in “Ecodeviance” (Wave Books, 2014) and Amanda mentions the upcoming Occult Poetics Symposium in Montreal in February. Amanda asks about the role of the footnotes in the chapbook as poetic asides, which leads to the thought of a Greek chorus and multiple voices in a poem. Sarah talks about ways of disrupting the poem to force an intimacy. We discuss the collaboration with Evy Borkan.

In/Words Magazine and Press: https://inwordsmagazine.wordpress.com/

Evy Borkan: http://www.evyborkan.com/