The Poetry Center Interviews Sandra Simonds

The University of Arizona Poetry Center interviews Sandra Simonds, whose latest book is Orlando (Wave Books, 2018); Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) is forthcoming. Asks Jon Riccio: "There are double Sandras—pre-millennium diarist and contemporary poet. How does each navigate the 'Orlando' narrative? Who is the doppelgänger?" From her response:

Sandra Simonds: Thank you, Jon, for noticing the doubling in Orlando, and reading my work with such sensitivity and sharing your own writing with me. A two-part book is like a scale—too much on one side, and the balance of the book gets thrown off, too much on the other and the same thing happens so this might be of interest to people thinking about craft.

I wrote Orlando in real time, so the poem functions as a kind of document. I was working through a bad love affair which, in retrospect, was brief and, in itself, not very remarkable. But that more superficial story was the conduit for the deeper story. Orlando was written during the process of a separation from a long-term relationship / domestic violence situation, one where I was literally dragged around my own house by the neck. I wanted to write a book that connected the past, the present, and the possibility of a future, even in the midst of these terrors, terrors that I hid from almost everyone. Because trauma has a way of fracturing narrative, is often marked by dissociation, composed of so much time and space where there is no story, or there is a story but no one believes the story, Orlando was a feminist way of challenging that.

I’ve heard writers refer to their early diaries as “embarrassing.” Placing some of my diary entries verbatim into Orlando made me feel vulnerable and raw but somehow turning them into art, sculpting them into something “useful,” gave me a sense of control and made them feel important in ways I could never have imagined when I wrote them, so even what one might call “bad” writing didn’t, ultimately, seem so bad.

The doppelgängers, the people who “go twice,” which is what that word literally means, are different aspects, forms, reformulations of the self, represented by different time periods of my life, people, half people, ghosts, visions, dreams, nightmares, ideas, feelings, who are trying to find their way...

Find the full interview at the Poetry Center.