Interview: Sally Ashton, On Listening to Mars
 
The Mackinaw: Tell us something about your writing journey and how prose poetry became a part of it.

Sally Ashton: I began what could be described as a serious pursuit of poetry after my youngest of three children entered elementary school. Both time and attention are fraught with little ones underfoot, so I hadn’t done much writing during that period. After subsequently finishing a long-abandoned BA in English/Creative Writing minor as a “returning student,” I jumped next into the MFA program at Bennington Writing Seminars. There I had the privilege of working with David Lehman, editor of Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present which, coincidentally, he was putting together during the time I was his student. So that’s where and when I was exposed to prose poetry more broadly. At Bennington, I was introduced to a variety of ideas and approaches by my other faculty, student colleagues, as well as the wide variety of amazing guest lecturers brought to campus. Alice Notley was one of these writers, and while I don’t recall the title of her lecture, I’ve never forgotten her startling-to-me assertion that formal line break is essentially a patriarchal structure. I don’t know if I can defend that, but it definitely gave me incentive to play more freely with line and specifically with the prose poem form. 

For you, what is the definition of a prose poem?

Sally Ashton: While a prose poem forfeits artificial line break, it fully embraces all other poetic devices and, importantly, the nature of a poem itself—illusive as that might be to pin down. While people at times criticize some lineated poems as being just prose chopped into lines, so too a prose poem isn’t simply a lineated poem with line break removed. With three short forms currently being written—prose poem, flash fiction, lyric memoir—it’s pretty easy to get into the weeds with definitions, and of course genre boundaries blur. I love blurring them myself! But I do lay out my own strategies in parsing these short forms as an editor for DMQ Review in this column.
 
Mystery, musicality, image, the ability to leap beyond the “really happened” to discover something the poet doesn’t already know, as well as a degree of playfulness or indeterminacy are some hallmarks I’d name, as well as what I discuss in my DMQ column as the writer’s essential loyalties. With fiction—what happens next; with nonfiction—what actually happened. In this comparison I’d say it’s the what-might-happen in the prose poem itself. Maybe a speculative nature.

For you, how does a prose poem come to be born? Tell us about your writing process.

Sally Ashton: I’m somewhat of a collagist in terms of process in general, drawing from my own observations recorded in my journal, whether as found fragments, fully formed free writes exploring some train of thought, recordings of dreams, or formal poem exercises such as, I’m going to write a sonnet today. I’m often working between the prose line and lineation early on, settling on one or the other somewhere in the editing process when I get a good sense of where the poem is headed and what is required. Does the poem suggest a sculpted line that slows or speeds the reader and makes good use of the end words and creative tension of a line break, or is it better served in the flow of an also-sculpted prose line, working with rhythm, concision, omissions, punctuation, sentence lengths, and mystery of the not-yet known. 
 
I was thinking of an example I could give you, and I thought of something I’ve recently noticed in my journal, several dreams to do with drowning. I might then begin a poem, “In which I dream of drowning,” which actually sounds intriguing to me, something I might very well go ahead and write. So, that’s process in action I guess.  
 
I try to read and write as much as I can, the secret to any successful work. While I don’t follow a particular routine at the moment, I always write first drafts by hand and I do love writing in the morning. Or all day long when I get the opportunity. I also, teach, edit an online journal, advise grad students, among other writing projects, so it seems I’m always juggling.

Listening to Mars moves back and forth between poetry with line breaks and prose poetry. Tell us something about that dialogue. How do you choose whether a poem becomes a prose poem?
 
Sally Ashton: I will add that some of the pieces in Listening to Mars blur genre, much as I used all three short forms without differentiation in my previous collection, The Behaviour of Clocks. I make use of and enjoy the ambiguity around genre. Otherwise, I think my earlier answers about definition and process address my ongoing dialogue fairly well.
 
However the dialogue between poems within the collection comes out of some personal sensibility around which poem speaks to which when ordering the manuscript, and maybe somewhat the sense of breath or space needed between denser pieces, whether that denseness or lightness is topical, linguistic, or visual—the appearance on the page. One thing that poetry can take advantage of is white space as a metering device, something at work in the free-line style of prose poems that appear throughout the collection.

The title poem, “Listening to Mars,” is a lined poem, but its essence is the central theme of the collection. Can you talk to us about the meaning of this poem and how it guides the ideas in your book?

Sally Ashton: Thanks for noticing the poem’s thematic centrality, though of course as the eponymous poem, it could be a natural assumption. And the poem does appear at roughly the midpoint of the book, in Section III, or the third act as I think of it. I actually tried taking the poem out of line breaks at one point to create a prose poem because I felt I visually needed one there and philosophically wished it was a prose poem. However, I just didn’t like the poem's pacing as well without line breaks, especially with all of the subject swerves in the piece and its sort of intellectual meandering. It is one long sentence, which was a fun compositional constraint, and in the end the line breaks felt essential.
 
I’d written the poem prior to the pandemic and before most of the poems in the collection. As such it reflects my ongoing fascination with the cosmos and astrophysics, and as a complete novice at that!
 
The book’s loose narrative arc begins as a pandemic log. The first two sections attempt to recreate the shocks to “normal” before times life of that experience, a surreal journey of lockdown, social distancing, the displacement of time, and increasing social fractures. 
 
As our daily lives grew smaller, we became intimate watchers of the mundane world, what we could see from our windows, and of course view on our screens. As a poem, “Listening to Mars” marks the shift for the speaker from the myopic perspective of lockdown, a contraction, played out against the simultaneous Mars missions and expanding views into our immense Universe. 

The poem is simultaneously grounded in the Earth and swept away into an alternate, alien reality, from an elephant’s toenails to winds on a distant planet. This reflects the ruptured experience of the pandemic itself, normal life displaced by what felt like science fiction. And “listening” suggests paying attention, waiting, trying to understand. This existential disjunction, space travel and global pandemic, two parallel journeys through two unknowns, is at the heart of what Listening to Mars explores. 

Was there a prose poem in the collection that was particularly challenging to write? Tell us about that struggle.

Sally Ashton: Hmmm. Flipping through the book, I don’t recall any particular poem being much more challenging than another. It often seems that the challenges are just different with each piece. There’s the inspiration, the first draft, then all the drafts that follow as a poem finds both its final shape and discovery. This is true for most poems I write, whatever the form. 
 
I’ve written at length about the ekphrastic poem, “Enumerating the Sublime,” for an essay in the forthcoming MadHat Press anthology, Dancing about Architecture. I did struggle to find the poem’s shape in response to a collage. What moved from an intended prose poem through various formal iterations, ended up being a concrete or shaped poem comprised of collaged phrases. So that was definitely a process and a big surprise to me. I’m so thankful to the handful of readers who said “no,” to those first attempts. I was working with a deadline, so I had the pressure to get it right, fast. And I had to let go of my initial expectation that the piece would be a prose poem.
 
The prose poem that I feel was most important to get right, to getting this collection grounded, the voice of it, is “This Was Also True.” Writing about grief if not horror, which is what the pandemic engendered on many different levels, while still in the midst of it required a degree of distance from my own emotional reactions. Finding that objective voice, a coldstance as Chekhov suggests, for conveying emotion, allowed me to look steadily at the very surreal events I was perceiving and render them in a way intended to make them immediate to the reader. Not having to wade through my emotions allows a reader to experience more fully their own.

Tell us about one or two prose poems that are favourites, or have special meaning for you. Can you share a little bit about that?
 
Sally Ashton: A poem I particularly like but don’t think reads that well aloud is the segmented “Questions While Watching Birds.” First, though it might not appear immediately to be a prose poem, I’ll explain why it is. I’m a great fan of the haibun, a traditional Japanese form that combines a prose section with a haiku, typically in that order. I love to experiment and decided I would both invert the structure—placing the haiku before the prose—and I would remix or at times isolate the haiku. So I found a lot of enjoyment in creating a new form, if you will. Or at least repurposing a formal structure.
 
This fresh approach allowed me a way to think about a not-fresh subject: birds and birdwatching. What else was there to do during those months of lockdown but to watch something wonderfully alive and free? As Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” and at least for me, birds brought bits of brightness each day. So the poem is able to move through likely familiar observations and reflections in a less-predictable fashion until it discovers its unexpected turn to the Milosz quote and the completion of the poem. Reading the poem brings me back to that window; how important windows became. How essential those small, ferocious, feathered lives.
 
While the “Quantum” series of poems sprinkled throughout the collection aren’t all prose poems, I enjoyed trying to wrap my head around quantum physics, that spooky science, as Einstein called it, that is impossible to explain though it is something that keeps not only the wheels of our technologies turning, but those of the cosmos. Science often uses metaphor to explain the abstract. I decided to do the same thing. Not as an explanation, but as an experience. The prose poem suits such speculation.

Did you watch the recent eclipse? Reflecting on the themes in your book, what did the experience mean to you? What did the collective excitement and fanfare say about the world?
 
Sally Ashton: I did make a point to get my eclipse glasses and watch what could be seen from where I live in northern California, a 35.7 % event, apparently. Somewhat like watching birds, sky-watching for celestial events took on even greater significance for me during the lockdown than it did in the before times. I already had noted the eclipse on my calendar. It hadn’t occurred to me to chase it, as many people do, to experience the totality, something I’ve never seen. But the week ahead of the eclipse was such a media circus, fodder for the insatiable news cycle, I could almost think I was making the mistake of a lifetime not to travel to see it.
 
Because I am tender toward our night skies, particularly the Moon, coming as it is under intense pressure from international lunar missions aiming to “harvest its riches,” I bring not only a sense of existential awe to an eclipse but an awareness, perhaps reverence, that each such event could be the last-of its kind. Not only for me, but for all of humankind, for our entire planet. Forever. Someday there will be the last eclipse we’ll ever see without human presence on the Moon. That’s a staggering thought. 
 
An eclipse is awesome as an astronomical occurrence as well as a human experience throughout history. Frankly, the media frenzy was a turn-off. It made me not want to see it and gave the whole event a distasteful, commercial feel that I tried to ignore as best I could because I really just wanted to enjoy watching the partial eclipse from my backyard lawn chair.
 
But I think the world is looking for any good news it can find, anything we can all celebrate. So, hooray for the eclipse!

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Resources

Great American Prose Poems, editor David Lehman
www.amazon.com/Great-American-Prose-Poems-Present/dp/0743243501

​The Behaviour of Clocks, by Sally Ashton
www.amazon.com/Behaviour-Clocks-Sally-Ashton/dp/1602260214

Dancing About Architecture, editors Cassandra Atherton and Oz Hardwick
www.amazon.com/Dancing-about-Architecture-Cassandra-Atherton/dp/1952335760

Sally Ashton. Photo courtesy of the author.