"A Prayer I’ve Forgotten the Words to:" An Interview With Sara Tracey

Sara Tracey is a poet and teacher in Chicago, Illinois. Her chapbook, Flood Year, was released by dancing girl press in September 2009.  Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Laurel Review, Arsenic Lobster, Hiram Poetry Review, and Harpur Palate. She is a regular performer in The Chicago Poetry Brothel.

Her poem "Spring Flood" appears in Issue Twenty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about her work.  Enjoy!

1. How did you go about writing “Spring Flood”?

This poem is a product of my first year living in Chicago, but it actually took a few years to find its shape. It started as part of a much longer prose piece, organized by season, that narrated my moving to the city and all the inherent troubles that caused for this small town girl. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a prose writer (though I love the prose poem and lyric essays) and the piece was an utter failure. I started dismantling it, and “Spring Flood” emerged. The other seasons are still lingering in my files, but I don’t think anything will ever come of them.

2. You use a lot of wonderfully specific images in this poem, from the “chalk dust / and Hennessey” to the “Church bells / and lilac blossoms.” These things feel very much like a list of items, something you might find in a scavenger hunt.  Yet, the last image, the fogged up windows only letting the speaker see the color of the brick, evokes the exact opposite of the other images—something blurred.  Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with images and how you think they work?

Thanks! I love the idea of this poem being the product of a scavenger hunt! I tend to think of it—and many of my poems—as a verbal collage or scrap book, a collection of images or impressions that have kind of latched themselves to my memory somehow. When I’m writing, I try to choose the images that are most likely to evoke the emotions of the experience that inspired the poem. I want my readers to feel what I was feeling, even if they don’t know exactly what’s happening.

In that sense, the fogged up windows and the brick walls beyond them are meant to represent a lack of clarity and focus. When I first moved to the city, I found myself constantly in a state of sensory overload. Everything was unfamiliar, and one street corner blended into the next. The relationship that inspired this poem was deceptively clear to me—but the world around it was completely blurred.

3. I found the lines “How could I stop / laughing? At some point, the spell will break” to be where the poem stops and turns.  Could you talk about how you got to this part of the poem?

Ah, the challenge of being a semi-confessional poet. How much to share? This moment in the poem was dictated more by experience than craft, though you’re right that it marks a turn in the piece. The first half of the poem is about finding joy in an unexpected place. The second half of the poem is about the aftermath, or what happens when “the spell” breaks.

4. I read in your bio that you have a chapbook called Flood Year.  Floods seem to be pretty important to you. What draws you to them?

This is a really interesting question for me because I actually never thought about it before. I’ve been caught in a few floods (nothing too bad, thankfully), but I think the two you mention are the only ones that have made it into poems (no, wait, I just remembered a third). What I do know is that weather is one of my obsessions—especially rain. Remember that Garbage song, “Only Happy When It Rains”? That’s my anthem. This winter, everyone’s been complaining about the unseasonably warm weather and I’m like, “What, it’s raining in January? Let’s go jump in puddles!” Seriously, though, I love it when the world outside mimics what’s going on inside, and in this case, the deluge of spring rain and melting snow (it was one of Chicago’s snowiest winters in decades) felt hugely symbolic to me. I remember going home one morning and getting soaked by a passing car while waiting for the bus. Chicago likes to kick you when you’re down, and one of the ways it does that is with the weather.

5. What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?  The thing that you’re most excited to read? 

I just finished Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which was lovely and haunting. After reading tons of literary criticism and modernist poetry for my PhD exams, I’ve just wanted to read fiction the last couple of months. But I’m looking forward to picking up contemporary poetry again, and have a huge list of recently published or soon to be released books that I want to read. Off the top of my head: Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, Amanda Auchter’s The Glass Crib, Roger Reeves’ King Me. The list goes on.

6. What other writings are you working on right now? 

I’m playing around with a couple of projects right now, trying to decide if and how they fit together, and which of them might become my dissertation. One is about a mobster’s wife in the 1940’s, another is about a young man (I’m calling him The Musician right now, but that may not last) traveling in Italy, and the third is inspired by my dabbling in roller derby and is really interested in the body and its fragility/resilience. Then there are, of course, poems that spring up out of no where and don’t seem to fit clearly in any of those categories. I also just finished revamping my first book manuscript (where “Spring Flood” finds its home) and will be getting it out into the world soon, I hope.