Achanzar, Helene

Sgro, Sarah

English

eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi)

Yalobusha Review Volume 30 Article 7 Winter 2020 Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah Sgro Sarah Sgro Helene Achanzar Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/yr Recommended Citation Sgro, Sarah and Achanzar, Helene (2020) "Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah Sgro," Yalobusha Review: Vol. 30 , Article 7. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/yr/vol30/iss1/7 This Poetry is brought to you for free and open access by eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yalobusha Review by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. POSSIBILITY IS A KINKA Conversation with Sarah SgroPhoto by Sarah SgroSarah Sgro is the author of the full-length collection If The Future Is A Fetish(YesYes Books 2019) and the chapbook Without Them I Am Still A Mother (Letter[r] Press 2017). Sgro earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippiand is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, where she studies waste inrelation to gender and futurity. Her work appears in BOAAT, Anomaly,Cosmonauts Avenue, DREGINALD, The Offing, and other journals.Helene Achanzar is a senior editor of Yalobusha Review.1Sgro and Achanzar: Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah SgroPublished by eGrove,HA: Congratulations on your first book! To begin, If the Future is a Fetish startswith a list of things the book’s singular speaker accepts into, holds within, andrejects from the body. What is it about the body’s thresholds that captivates you?SS: The opening excerpt frames the body’s thresholds as an ever-shifting matterof agency. I’m obsessed with the extent to which we can control what enters,exits, and remains within the body, its memory. The first list, which explores the“things I don’t allow inside,” portrays the body at its most agentic, flexing itspower to reject what tries to trespass: no nitrates, no one who misspells myname. Still, fear and sensitivity live within ostensible authority — do I stop myright hand from slipping in because I don’t want to touch myself, or because I’mafraid to? To say that I “allow” things to remain inside is also fraught: to whatextent can I discipline the flow of juices, humors, blood and bile? Maybe I letformer lovers stay because I know they’ll never disappear. These paradoxes feelconsistent with the book’s larger fluctuations between artifice andvulnerability, both of which are always intertwined. There’s so much I wish tobanish, that I claim to have banished, which continues to churn. HA: The book’s larger fluctuations also concern children in the collection. In thisbook you are pregnant with prescription drugs, pregnant with salted nuts. Youwant a child born from the moon and from your mouth, yet you eat a child as alight snack. You declare, “I want to have my child & eat her too.” Some of theseideas are oppositional upon first read but the connections between theseconditions feel taut. How would you describe the relationship among them?SS: My interest in corporeal agency also extends to the processes of pregnancyand being birthed. Your body is filled with someone, or you spill from someoneelse’s body, with differing degrees of control. Relatedly, I’m always thinkingabout Julia Kristeva’s approach to birth as an abject “revolt of being” whichthreatens the binary between self and other–how the child is both part of youand matter that is terrifying in its newness, exposing how the body spills.I find myself continually writing against a stable self, in this collection and morerecent work; the speaker becomes her memory and its contents, pregnant withher trauma and the names of former lovers. In some ways, birthing a physicalchild represents an antidote to unwanted impregnation. It’s a choice whichcrafts a future that can promise to repair the past. Simultaneously, as I hope thecollection suggests, this is an impossible expectation–first, because time isn’t soconveniently linear, and second, because the child is not a voiceless clone. The2Yalobusha Review, Vol. 30 [], Art. 7https://egrove.olemiss.edu/yr/vol30/iss1/7speaker’s relationship to pregnancy slips in the same way that the self slips,continually encountering unstable paradoxes. There are many contradictorydesires which seem to promise safety in their own way: to ingest, to expel, tonourish, to refuse. HA: One of the ways I see the rejection of a stable self in these poems is throughthe recurring characters, which are really just initials, and which might really justbe extensions of a singular speaker. These initials (J, A, M, X) stand in for thenames of former lovers, but to a certain extent, they act as projections of a self.For example, “J’s body is no copy of my body” and “A’s other woman wears mymenstrual coat.” That these characters are so loosely formed, having little thattethers them to a world beyond the speaker, feels meaningful. Can you expand onthis idea?SS: I’m interested in your reading of these letters as being tethered to thespeaker’s world alone. Initially, I worry about what that does to theirindependence as potential characters in the collection (however amorphous),but you’re right that unstable identity applies to J, A, M, and X as individual andcollective constructs. When writing these poems, I had loose past loverpersonalities associated with each letter — J: the high school boyfriend. A: thecurrent partner. M: the one night stand (perhaps most fluid in itsrepresentation). X: the speaker’s first queer love and lover. But, as categoriesdo, these designations certainly fail and fluctuate throughout, both intentionallyand unintentionally. To some extent, they are doomed modes of organizing themess of the past, which re-muddles itself with each re-telling. I never thought ofthem as physical extensions of the speaker, but that seems like a generativedescription of how memory manifests. HA: The final poem ends the collection sharing the same concern as the book’stitle: the conditional if. What should readers take away about the concept ofpossibility? What, if anything, can these poems tell us about the future?SS: I think of this collection as living in a conditional tense without resolution, amap of ifs that rarely lead to thens. In some ways, this approach entails arejection of causality and even teleology. To stay in the “if” and resist the “then”is to always introduce possibility and to never quite arrive. I’m drawn to thishighly queer mode of time, which is deeply indebted to Jose Esteban Munoz’sCruising Utopia. Queerness thrives as an “if”, a not-yet-thereness whichstretches beyond a fraught present (and collectively traumatic past).3Sgro and Achanzar: Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah SgroPublished by eGrove,When I think of the future as a fetish, I think of the future’s carnal allure aspotentially utopian corrective. Possibility is a kink! Simultaneously, I think offetishes as talismans or objects of worship; the future, which can never quite begrasped, is a somewhat inanimate construct onto which we project dreams,fears, desires. And amidst this all, the future is subversively animate in its ownright; it offers so much, but promises nothing.In many ways, the speaker concludes the collection by clinging to a reparativevision of the future (“I will reassemble…if they leave, I let them”). For anyonewho has experienced trauma, this faith is essential for survival. But within thisconviction lies a knowing rejection of any certain “then.” Whatever this booksays about the future, I think, relies on an anti-logic of “if” which urgentlyembraces the future’s potential while resisting the finality of closure.4Yalobusha Review, Vol. 30 [], Art. 7https://egrove.olemiss.edu/yr/vol30/iss1/7

Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah Sgro

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Possibility is a Kink: A Conversation with Sarah Sgro

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