Natasha Sajé

Natasha Saje

Natasha Sajé hails from Munich, Germany, but grew up in New York City and Northern New Jersey. At the crossroads of different cultures, she has followed an atypical yet multi-faceted path before entering academics. In 1994, her first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (University of Pittsburgh Press) garnered the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. A decade passed before Bend, her second collection of poems, came into being. Published by Tupelo Press, it was awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Now an Associate Professor at Westminister College, Sajé also teaches graduate poetry writing at the Vermont College. A frequent traveler, she continues to keep her passion for cooking alive, and a hunger to discover new adventures in life. Visit Natasha Sajé’s website.

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Would you agree that the European culture and influences play a vital role in your writing? Are you attached to German culture and nuances, for instance?

Even though I think in English now, my European birth, parents and travels have helped make me who I am, and I sought out those connections by living in France, Germany, and Switzerland after college, as well as spending a semester in Slovenia on a Fulbright recently. One never loses the sense of being a refugee, I think—which involves, simultaneously, gratitude for the new home country and an ability to see it (including its flaws) from the outside. Perhaps the “doubleness” made me a writer; I know that tends to be true for others, too.

ISBN-10: 193219503

These days, it’s not easy for me to read German, although I still speak it. I’ve maintained an ease with French, perhaps because of the cognates, or the syntax. Each country has its charms and quirks; once, in Stuttgart, when I was attempting to cross a street against the light, another pedestrian reached out an arm to stop me, despite the fact that there was no traffic. That wouldn’t happen in France, or the U.S. of course.

You exhibit a variety of approaches (both formal and experimental) towards verse and form, particularly evident in Bend. Can you speak more about your poetic voice?

My first connection to poetry came through the sound and through figurative language. I love metaphor and metonymy! I really didn’t understand form until I started teaching it—after my first book was published. Today, I believe that all poets are formalists, language poets and conceptual poets—it’s just a matter of degree. For me, the degree has intensified in all three categories—I like to see how far I can push them, and still make out of them a satisfying art object.

What is your Achilles heel as a poet?

It’s my desire to have things neat and tied up, to control them, to have a rhetorical purpose, to know what I’m doing and why.

The process of writing a poem is antithetical to knowing what its outcome and purpose is.

As one with strong analytical instincts and a critical eye, what sort of poetry aesthetics attract you easily?

I love reading all kinds of poetry—and dislike the idea of poetic camps. Some contemporary poets whose work I admire: Heather McHugh, Frank Bidart, Paul Muldoon, Kamau Brathwaite, D.A. Powell, Mary Syzbist, Charles Simic, Kevin McFadden, Mark Yakich, Anne Carson, Durs Grunbein, Carl Phillips, Caroline Bergvall, Wanda Coleman, Robert Hass, Wislawa Szymborska, Erin Moure, William Olsen—I could go on and on.

I love a poem that I have to reread in order to figure out how it works, a poem that haunts me in some way.

“There’s not much correlation between the quality of a book
and whether it gets reviewed, gets prizes, or sells.”

Any specific example?

I’d say C.D. Wright’s small book of love poems, Tremble, was a revelation for me. It helped me understand that form can be part of content, and the ways in which other literary forms can be appropriated by poetry. Her prose poem “In Gardening” was the inspiration for my poem, “Song of the Cook.” As it turned out, you wouldn’t notice the parentage—my poem is in distinct lines—so I didn’t include an epigraph or note.

Tremble is out of print, although some of the poems are included in Wright’s Selected Poems. Let me rant a bit: there’s not much correlation between the quality of a book and whether it gets reviewed, gets prizes, or sells.

How has your writing life shifted from Red Under the Skin and Bend, and ever since then?

I never want to repeat myself.

In terms of critical writing, I’m almost finished with a book called Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory. The book was spurred by a question asked of me during an MLA job interview: does my Ph.D. make any difference in the way I teach creative writing?

ISBN-10: 0822955458

At the time, I didn’t have a good answer, but the book is an extended answer. Yes, it does make a difference, a philosophical one. I can see why the author is dead, and still work to craft poems! Seriously, I enjoy reading well-written theory as much as I enjoy reading anything else.

What proves to hinder you most in terms of poetry creation these days?

Only time. My teaching and administrative responsibilities are heavy, and I’m conscientious about them.

Some may categorize you as a “university poet”. What are your thoughts? How has a dense university life informed your artistic progress?

I admit it, I’m institutionalized, I’m a house cat. Perhaps it’s related to my previous answer about needing things tied up, about needing a framework through which to understand things. On the other hand, I love academia—it’s not the ivory tower, it’s a piece of the real world and one where I feel at home. I thank the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland for that—for teaching me the rules, and helping me appreciate rather than chafe against them.

Also by Natasha Saje, Alibi

I love research and I love teaching, especially the students in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. They are grateful to learn, and I am grateful to teach them because I in turn have learned so much from them.

Learning from your students in Vermont?

Yes…Part of their work is writing critical essays on writers that interest them, and some of these writers are new to me. Sometimes my students’ work causes me to reassess a particular writer, or to think about the literary landscape in a new way. The questions that arise in our correspondence are the ones that I try to answer in my essays on poetry.

And their work is often exciting—most of them are mature people who have had rich lives, and their work reflects their experiences. It’s gratifying as well to see how quickly they improve. For instance, if someone has already learned how to do surgery, practice law or teach elementary school, that way of learning can be applied more easily to the writing of poetry.

They often have very disciplined work habits. It’s a great joy to see them succeed in writing as they have in another realm.

Tell us more about your life outside the academics. You are a traveler and have had led different lives…

In between the years in higher education, I’ve had many other jobs, either office or food service.

I love(d) working as a waitress, which I did off and on between the ages of 22 and 40-something, first in the Swiss ski resort of Grindelwald. I worked as a secretary for Daimler Benz, and much later, for the Sterling Silversmith Guild of America, where I also wrote some promotional materials. That was a sweet irony, because since the age of 5, I’ve always loved silver. I had an American babysitter-surrogate grandmother who let me use and polish her silver. When she died and left me $300, I was 18, and wanted to buy a service for 12 of Chantilly, but my mother talked me out of it—what an 18-year-old needs isn’t sterling silver flatware, she said. Anyway, I developed something we called a “pattern personality test” to help brides choose their sterling pattern, and went to bridal shows with 128 sample forks!

It was working as a waitress, at the Washington Hilton, that I met my husband, who was a chef. He was born in Jamaica, but grew up in London. He had landed in the U.S. when the British Merchant Navy switched to container shipping, and he grew bored with the short port residencies that entailed. Looking back over our 30 years together, we’ve cooked, and eaten, a lot of great meals together. I love the way how each of us can take the most honest criticism—is hungry for it, in fact. That’s the only way you get better at anything, if you’re not willing to settle for merely an “OK”.

My specialty is baking, particularly cakes. I make European-style cakes and pastries, but give them a new twist in terms of ingredients. For example, I make a version of Cassata Siciliana, which is a dessert found all over Sicily. In Sicily, it consists of sponge cake filled with ricotta cheese flavored with candied fruit and chocolate, covered with marzipan and then glazed with fondant. I candy my own citrus rind, using Meyer lemons, tangerines and grapefruit, using as little sugar as possible. And I make my own marzipan, flavoring it with powdered green tea, which cuts the sweetness and adds a beautiful color. (That’s an idea I took from Rose Levy Beranbaum, whose Cake Bible is a wonderful book!) I also omit the fondant which is pure sugar.

Someday I plan to write a cookbook of my own—one with only healthful recipes. As an example, I use stevia powder instead of sugar as often as possible. Stevia is made from a plant whose leaves taste sweet that grows in the rain forest. It doesn’t raise one’s blood sugar because it merely tastes sweet. The Brazilian Indians have used it forever.

Are you venturing into new projects and possibilities?

The book I’m working on now is an abecedarius. It’s so much fun to write!

As with my second book I am pushing myself to write poems I don’t know how to write, learning to make them as I go, a process both pleasurable and difficult. The alphabet is my spur, particularly etymologies and words I am (initially) unfamiliar with. For instance, a poem spurred by “Y” uses the word “ytterbium,” a metal mined in Sweden, to become an elegy for a steelworker friend who died young. The letter “O” prompts a lyric on the U.S. dependence on imported oil; “R” is a rebus which includes symbols and drawings as well as words; “V” a meditation on veritas; Š (a letter from Slovenian) tries to convey the spirit of that country; “X” uses the story of two thieves crucified alongside Jesus Christ… Each poem demands ancillary reading from me as the search for words leads to a search for an understanding of history, science, philosophy, and linguistics.

I use groups of poems spurred by the same letter to create additional tension. For example, one of the “P” poems is a pantoum, while another is a prose poem questioning the link between the etymology of “peculiar” (L, pecu, cattle) and “the peculiar institution” of slavery in the U.S. Aural repetitions appear differently in each poem; for instance, in “F,” the first word of each line starts with “F,” and in “G,” words with “g” are at the ends of lines.

To give the reader relief from alliteration, some of the poems only suggest words beginning with that letter. For example, in “Z” each of the lines offers an image of a word beginning with “z.” Some of the poems take on a more traditional abecedarian form, each line beginning with a sequential letter of the alphabet — but with a difference: the line also ends with a word beginning with that letter. Should all this formal play seem rather tricky, I must say that each poem also has to cost me something emotionally, like a self-discovery.

“I am pushing myself to write poems
I don’t know how to write.”

Within the alphabet framework, I am finding it fun to allow the poems to argue with one another, as it were. My goal is for the reader to be surprised by each poem, as well as by the movement from poem to poem, yet also constructing the manuscript well.

Allowing the poems to argue with one another? That sounds interesting. Can you illustrate?

Well, if one poem is in a traditional form, the next poem can “undo” that form. Or, in terms of content, the first poem in the manuscript is titled “Anathema” which is my divorce from religion of any kind. Something no doubt spurred by living in Utah for ten years, where the state and the state religion of Mormonism are not separated. But the very last poem in the book, “Z”, is a poem that explores God and spirituality. Religion has very little to do with God, although the two are often confused. That’s what I mean by “poems that argue with one another.”

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Greta Aart previously edited for Emprise Review and now edits for Cerise Press.