Interview with poet Catherine Clark-Sayles - Kirsten | Learn English at EnglishCafe

Below is an interview with Englishcafe member AuntCat.  She is a doctor and a poet with a new book out, One Breath published by Tebot Bach Press  ( http://www.tebotbach.org ).   I had the pleasure of interviewing her for the Marin Poetry Center Newsletter. I love to hear from writers and poets and linguists and language learners about their personal histories.

What life experiences created your love of language?

___________________________________________________________________

Interview with Catherine Clark-Sayles  

(by Kirsten Jones Neff for Marin Poetry Center)

After medical school and twenty years as a geriatrics physician, Dr. Catherine Clark-Sayles rediscovered her childhood love of poetry.  Her debut collection, One Breath, was recently published by Tebot Bach press.   

MPC: How did you begin to write poetry?

CCS: I wrote as a child and loved poetry and although people kept pushing me in the direction of writing, I thought, “No, I’m going to be a scientist.  And being a scientist is not compatible with writing poetry.”  So I went off to medical school and it was very much science- and evidence-based and there was almost an active process of divorcing you from your feelings.  You weren’t supposed to have emotions and if you did they weren’t in any way supposed to come to the surface – because then you would have lost your objectivity.   

In the last 20 years people began to recognize that by doing that, we were divorcing ourselves from an important part of healing.  There’s been an explosion of medical humanities programs around the world, and I believe that’s in response to the pure science, trying to rebalance… my going to poetry was a way of rebalancing.

Dr. Rachael Naomi Remen (writer and co-founder of Commonweal Cancer center) was added onto a Medical Society weekend getaway up in Sonoma sixteen, seventeen years ago.  It was a weekend full of business.  You know, how to negotiate with billers, what’s the best computer software…they kind of stuck her in there at the end and she got up and started reading poems written by patients dying of cancer…I’m just sitting there, tears rolling down my face. I can’t get up and leave, I’m in the middle of the room, snuffling, I’ve got no tissue.  Then the guy who organized stood up and said “Okay, that’s it, everyone can go now” and I thought, Wait! I’ve got to process this.  So I went home and started writing some poems.  As a mark of my intention to start writing, on that New Years Day I went to the bookstore and got Ariel (by Sylvia Plath) – which may have been a really bad choice for New Years day, but as long as it marked the intention, that was all that was important.  I’m big on symbols.  

MPC:  What is it about poetry for you?

CCS:  The tremendous emotional content. The grief. I get very close to my patients.  They’ve been with me a long time and they die.  My poems are poems of love and grief and loss.  To me, the poetry helps me to stay in touch with that and to also take it make something positive of it.  When I was in training fairly traumatic things would happen and there wasn’t a mechanism to address them with anyone.  I was in an army training program, there weren’t any women staff and we weren’t encourage to talk about what happened.  Some of the poems in my book allowed me to go back and discuss some of those big issues.   

In a class once Margaret Kaufman gave an assigment that we were supposed to write poems based on the Ten Commandmaments and mine was Thou Shalt Not Kill.  Out of that came a whole series about wrestling with people dying – people asking me to help them, people who were going to die no matter what I did, those kinds of things.

MPC: How do you write?   

CCS: I typically start with free write.  Just sit down and write about something and I’ll just sit there and write for ten or fifteen minutes and then I may go back and start to shape it into a poem or I may let it sit.  Sometimes when I want to write and I don’t have any great ideas I’ll go back to my journals and pull out a line or two and start working on it.

Lately I’ve been working on form.  I’ve always had a goal to write a sonnet that followed the rules and that was a good poem.  That was some bar that I set for myself.  So I’ve been working on that a little bit more.  When I first started writing everything sounded like bad Tennyson.  I like to work in form sometimes because the puzzle-making of form keeps my left brain very occupied so some my right brain can slip through these kind of weird things.

MPC:Do you read your work out loud?

CCS: Yes, not only do I read my own work out loud, but I like to read others peoples’ poems out loud as well.  I was reading C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining and it was making no sense to me, and I wasn’t getting anything out of it.  I started reading it out loud and it’s really got something to it.  It pulled me in and was hitting me at a different level and although I didn’t undertand it entirely I was getting a strong emotional effect from it.

MPC:  How did the deer on the roadside poem, Invocation, come about?

CCS: That was my response to 9-11.  It was right after 9-11 and there was this deer lying  hit by the side of the road and the line came to me “The deer at the roadside hurts me” and it went from there.  That sense that we’re all vulnerable and the cosmic unfairness of being sacrificed for something that we’ll never even understand.  I’d been watching everything and I finally said, I’ve got to turn the television off.  It was ramping up the anxiety, the sense of vulnerability and fear and I think the poem was my way of saying I’m not going to live in fear.

MPC: Poetry as the anti-venom to fear?

CCS: Some of these are that.  I had to rework the center section of my book.  People told me it was took dark and too medical, so I went back and put in a few lighter poems, a few more ecstatic, lift-off moments that would lighten it up, not quite so heavy.  Some of the poems are me talking directly to my patients.  Translation is one of those poems.  I realized sometimes people are bargaining with me as if somehow I’ve got the power, you know, the power to give them another year or two of life.  I wish I could but in reality in the grand scheme of life and death I don’t have a lot of power.  No doctor does. A lot of time my role, especially dealing with very elderly people at the end of their lives, is to be a cheerleader and an advocate, sometimes just a witness to their struggle.  A lot of these poems are ways of bearing witness to the struggle.

MPC: Do you have a favorite poem in your book?

CCS: Scars was the first that really got that layering of meaning.  It’s about the tragedy that we’re separated by a common language.  That we can talk to each other and think we know what each other means, but really we don’t.  That yearning for connection and the recognition that it will always be a little imperfect.

MPC: Some of your poems seem to be about the struggle to balance giving and taking.  Is writing more giving or taking for you?

CCS: I love that feeling of creation.  That moment when you feel like you’ve created something wonderful.  And the next morning it may look like “Oh there’s some major problems here,”  but for that moment when you think you’ve really got it down, that really gives me a lot

MPC:  It must feel good to have published this book.

CCS:  Yeah. I’m trying to figure out marketing and something tells me that I’m going to do much better online than anything else if I really want to get it out into the world.  But, yeah, standing there holding a book.  As a military kid we moved, and I was allow to carry around as many books as would fit on three bookshelves.  In a sense that was kindof family I was carrying with me, and I feel like I’ve written myself into the family.

SCARS

We lie side by side, through the longest night

The radio whispers deep and dreamless sleep.  

Your fingers read my body Braille, stop each time  

At the ridge of scar sketched across my flesh.  

As the absent tooth draws the tongue, my fingers find  

The thin line stretched from your hip to thigh.  

After years proud flesh settles into silver seams

And the memory of pain is not pain itself.

I remember a street deeply muffled in cold

And the luminous glow of stars on snow,  

The soft crunch of one man walking alone,  

Each foot breaking the frozen skin of snow.  

In your dark streets shine wet cobblestones,  

You think of a street narrowed by twisted stone,  

Where a distant lamp spills a smudge of light  

And the silent stars above are dimmed.  

We lie scar to scar, your curve fits mine  

As if there is no space for memory or pain.  

Your street is not my street, your scar not mine  

But we agree to live as if they were the same.  

– Catharine Clark-Sayles