"Poems Sound like the Voice I Have:" Three Questions for Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham's poetry emerges out of the darkness.Souvankham Thammavongsa’s third poetry collection, Light, will launch this Thursday at 6 p.m. at the Supermarket. Souvankham has her work featured in Puritan XX. In anticipation of her launch, we asked her a few things about emotion, craft and art.Town Crier: On the website for the short film based on Found, you’ve claimed, “I do not like feelings and I don’t think I should burden anyone with mine.” Yet the content of that book was very much full of feelings. Now the focus is on light, but feelings, and personal history, are not absent. In the writing process, how did focusing on light affect your ability to approach or avoid emotion?Souvankham Thammavongsa: It’s their feeling they feel not mine. Now, I had to feel it first and know that feeling first but in their reading the feeling that takes place, that happens to them is theirs. I think personal history is always there whether I want it to be or not. Why does it matter to me to use both “shape” and “shapes” to describe water? Won’t one just do? What place do I have in the world that would make me notice how great and wide the difference a single letter can make? What thing happened in my life that such a small thing could be of such concern? I know that answer personally in my own life and as a reader you know it’s a concern—you don’t need to know my feelings to get it, but I do.When I say that I don’t like feelings I don’t mean there shouldn’t be any feelings. I just mean they get in the way of my own thinking and I have to stop and deal with them before writing about them. Otherwise the best word at the time might be: whaaaaaaaaa. That doesn’t sound like thinking. It’s just raw display and I’m not interested in doing that.You’re right. Found is full of feelings but those feelings don’t carry the work. The writing does. Maybe feelings drive the writing but it doesn’t carry it. The feelings are there the way life is in the ocean. You know it’s there but you don’t need to go in to survey each thing. Now, one of the problems with Light was using the word light. The word carries so many feelings, not just to me but to anyone who has ever used it or seen it. It works like a grid on a sheet of paper but it’s the actual writing there that has to stand out.TC: There are exceptions to this, such as your Puritan Poems, but a lot of your work is very spare. You use so much space and silence that the reader is surprised at your ability to form full thoughts and/or images out of your poems. You would think such sparseness would give added weight to each word, and it does. Yet they come off as feather-light, somehow expansive enough to provide meaning, but at the same time delicate. They’re light as a feather, but then they can knock the reader cold. The same effect is present when you read: very soft spoken, but riveting. What influenced that approach? In composition, is it more a matter of using words sparingly in the initial writing, or cutting afterwards?ST: It’s like that fight scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies. A person can demonstrate their fancy sword skills for a couple of minutes to me or I can take out what I have and use it. It’s what I’ve got. When I write I don’t think of cutting or being spare. I think: does that sound like me? Would I say that? Does it get the job done? I try to make my poems sound like the voice I have. I wouldn’t call what I do “delicate,” but I understand why it would be thought of that way. I think what I do is harsh and cruel. If “delicate” best describes them, then they are--but like thorns.TC: Agnes Martin was an inspiration for this book. In her paintings, the grid-like lines hardly seem to constitute a subject matter, and instead blend almost into the background. This theme also runs throughout the book–what might you see from a distance, close up, what's a trick of a light, what changes because of one's relative position.  How did her work inform Light? Did you attempt to translate that to the page, and if so, how (you can also just write about what drew you to Martin)?ST: What I like about her work is how close it all is to being nothing. That proximity to nothing, that closeness to nothing and to not be that—a thing happened and whatever that thing was that happened made it what it is and what that is is hers alone. She knows personally what she does requires discipline and rigour and study but she also had the confidence and the openness and the humour to say, “It’s nothing but lines. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”Souvankham Thammavongsa won the 2004 ReLit Prize for her first poetry book, Small Arguments. Pedlar Press will release her new collection, Light, in September 2013.