I decided it was a good time to interview poet Sara Letourneau, as this accomplished poet and New England Club Poetry member has her debut poetry collection out-- titled " Wild Gardens." And it seems that "Wild Gardens" is an apt label for her book---because there is nothing 'tame' about her work. It is a collection that drills deep, and goes beyond what you see--to what it means--a full-faced exploration.
"Wild Gardens" is your debut poetry collection. When did you feel confident enough to pen a first book? Were you encouraged by people in your community? Did you set a certain standard for yourself?
It wasn't so much about being confident enough to write a debut poetry collection. Rather, for a long time, I was focused on writing individual poems, revising them, and submitting them for publication. By the time I'd written enough poems and had enough published for a full-length collection, the milestone had sort of snuck up on me. My boyfriend, Jim, who keeps track of all my poems in an Excel spreadsheet, had a better "bird's eye view" of my work being ready than I did!
After that, I knew getting a book published was the next step. That ended up being a longer process than I anticipated. In fact, almost 2 years passed from the time I started submitting the first version of Wild Gardens to the time I finally sent it to Kelsay Books, who ended up publishing the book.
Because it was such a long process, I definitely needed help staying encouraged and positive, and my community was a big help with that. At the beginning, that community was small: my boyfriend; the other poets in my Poetic Inklings group, Carmen Barefield and Amanda Davis; a couple of close friends who frequently read or gave feedback on my work; and writer friends online who I'd met in various places.
Once I launched the Pour Me a Poem open mic with Wayne-Daniel Berard, that community grew exponentially. So by the time Wild Gardens was accepted for publication (and then published), so many more people were cheering for me, and that was amazing.
Your poems are set on the shores of Cape Cod, the lava fields of Iceland, etc... How did you pick your terrain to be the subject of your poetry? What spoke to you?
I'm a believer that "the poem chooses the poet." Ideas for new poems come to me; I don't go hunting for them. So I can't say I consciously picked the terrain that's often the subject of poems in Wild Gardens. But I do know why I ended up writing about those places.
I grew up loving Cape Cod. My parents vacationed there before I was born, and I ended up celebrating my first five birthdays in Chatham. And since my family continued vacationing there well into my teenage years, I found my own reasons for wanting to come back to the Cape. I love the ocean and beaches, the parks and different ways of interacting with wildlife there, the charming downtown areas of Chatham and other towns, the myriad hydrangeas in full bloom during the summer, and the calmer, more peaceful vibe it has compared to mainland Massachusetts.
My parents and my brother now live on the Cape, so that gives me even more incentive to visit it now. In short, it holds so many beautiful memories for me, and I keep being amazed by its quiet yet ever-present natural beauty.
Iceland, on the other hand, was the first country I visited outside the US. (And for a writing retreat, no less!) Talk about being amazed by natural beauty! Reykjavik is an incredible city, and while I highly recommend spending a few days there if you go yourself, the countryside is what floors me every time. The mountains, the waterfalls, the geothermals - these and other places contribute to an environment that's wilder, more breathtaking, and unlike anything else I've seen in the world. Iceland captured my imagination and heart in ways that can now be best described by some of the poems in Wild Gardens.
In your poem "Origin Story of Cape Cod," you go well beyond the tourist view, and slip into the marrow of its creation. Cape Cod takes on a sense of profundity—that we may not realize as we are spreading tanning lotion on ourselves-- while sitting on its ancient beaches. Your take?
Yes, Cape Cod is more than just a summer tourist spot. It has a history that's richer than we may be aware of, and not just on a social or "human civilization" level. I was visiting the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, and during the exhibit on the Cape's geologic history, this very idea struck me.
A place is more than just the benches where we sit, the trees and animals that inhabit it, the structures we've built there, and the stories we've created on its soil. I think we often forget that the planet Earth is billions of years old. Its landscape, climate, and wildlife have disappeared, been reborn, and evolved so much over time. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the places where we now live, work, and play didn't look the way they do now. This left me imagining what Cape Cod would have been thinking, feeling, and observing if it was a character, and if it had the voice to describe what its "birthing" or creation process was like.
F.S. Fitzgerald wrote, "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." You chose 2:00 a.m. as your dark night--in the poem "2:00 AM." Do you think during these hours we are stripped naked, and for a little while the artifice that protects us from the concept of 'nothingness' is gone-- and we see things in a sharp, cutting, clarity?
The thing about "2:00 a.m." is that it's about the speaker's experience with insomnia induced by anxiety and overthinking. I've experienced this level of anxiety many times in the past, though not for a couple of years at this point. So this poem isn't exactly philosophizing about the dark night of the soul. Rather, it shows an almost literal "dark night of the soul": the experience of someone living with such intense fear and anxiety that they can't sleep, perhaps for nights on end.
When you experience such an acute form of anxiety that it leads to insomnia, yes, it can feel like you are stripped naked, in front of no one except yourself. But it's almost impossible to see things clearly, because the thoughts that wrapped you into that vortex can sometimes be irrational and unjustified.
That being said, the experience shared in the poem is based on my own. Someone else's experience with anxiety-induced insomnia could be very different. But I hope that the common ground those readers can find with this poem is how terrifying and out-of-control those sleepless nights can be.
As for why I chose "2:00 a.m." as the title, I recall often turning over to look at the clock on those nights and finding it was roughly around that time.
You are a writing coach. How objective can you be about your own work?
It's so hard to be objective about your work, even when you work in this field and help other writers! Sometimes I discover how a poem needs to grow and be revised on my own. But most of the time, I share poems with my Poetic Inklings and (more recently) Orion Continued poetry groups, along with one other critique partner, and the perspectives and suggestions they offer are often things I might never have found on my own.
Why should we read your book?
Wild Gardens offers one reminder after another of how crucial and meaningful it is for us to pay attention to what's around us and be grateful for the surprises, the everyday, the wonders of our world, miracles big and small. If readers need or want more reminders of these things, then they're bound to appreciate reading this book.
It wasn't so much about being confident enough to write a debut poetry collection. Rather, for a long time, I was focused on writing individual poems, revising them, and submitting them for publication. By the time I'd written enough poems and had enough published for a full-length collection, the milestone had sort of snuck up on me. My boyfriend, Jim, who keeps track of all my poems in an Excel spreadsheet, had a better "bird's eye view" of my work being ready than I did!
After that, I knew getting a book published was the next step. That ended up being a longer process than I anticipated. In fact, almost 2 years passed from the time I started submitting the first version of Wild Gardens to the time I finally sent it to Kelsay Books, who ended up publishing the book.
Because it was such a long process, I definitely needed help staying encouraged and positive, and my community was a big help with that. At the beginning, that community was small: my boyfriend; the other poets in my Poetic Inklings group, Carmen Barefield and Amanda Davis; a couple of close friends who frequently read or gave feedback on my work; and writer friends online who I'd met in various places.
Once I launched the Pour Me a Poem open mic with Wayne-Daniel Berard, that community grew exponentially. So by the time Wild Gardens was accepted for publication (and then published), so many more people were cheering for me, and that was amazing.
Your poems are set on the shores of Cape Cod, the lava fields of Iceland, etc... How did you pick your terrain to be the subject of your poetry? What spoke to you?
I'm a believer that "the poem chooses the poet." Ideas for new poems come to me; I don't go hunting for them. So I can't say I consciously picked the terrain that's often the subject of poems in Wild Gardens. But I do know why I ended up writing about those places.
I grew up loving Cape Cod. My parents vacationed there before I was born, and I ended up celebrating my first five birthdays in Chatham. And since my family continued vacationing there well into my teenage years, I found my own reasons for wanting to come back to the Cape. I love the ocean and beaches, the parks and different ways of interacting with wildlife there, the charming downtown areas of Chatham and other towns, the myriad hydrangeas in full bloom during the summer, and the calmer, more peaceful vibe it has compared to mainland Massachusetts.
My parents and my brother now live on the Cape, so that gives me even more incentive to visit it now. In short, it holds so many beautiful memories for me, and I keep being amazed by its quiet yet ever-present natural beauty.
Iceland, on the other hand, was the first country I visited outside the US. (And for a writing retreat, no less!) Talk about being amazed by natural beauty! Reykjavik is an incredible city, and while I highly recommend spending a few days there if you go yourself, the countryside is what floors me every time. The mountains, the waterfalls, the geothermals - these and other places contribute to an environment that's wilder, more breathtaking, and unlike anything else I've seen in the world. Iceland captured my imagination and heart in ways that can now be best described by some of the poems in Wild Gardens.
In your poem "Origin Story of Cape Cod," you go well beyond the tourist view, and slip into the marrow of its creation. Cape Cod takes on a sense of profundity—that we may not realize as we are spreading tanning lotion on ourselves-- while sitting on its ancient beaches. Your take?
Yes, Cape Cod is more than just a summer tourist spot. It has a history that's richer than we may be aware of, and not just on a social or "human civilization" level. I was visiting the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, and during the exhibit on the Cape's geologic history, this very idea struck me.
A place is more than just the benches where we sit, the trees and animals that inhabit it, the structures we've built there, and the stories we've created on its soil. I think we often forget that the planet Earth is billions of years old. Its landscape, climate, and wildlife have disappeared, been reborn, and evolved so much over time. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the places where we now live, work, and play didn't look the way they do now. This left me imagining what Cape Cod would have been thinking, feeling, and observing if it was a character, and if it had the voice to describe what its "birthing" or creation process was like.
F.S. Fitzgerald wrote, "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." You chose 2AM as your dark night, in the poem "2AM." Do you think during these hours we are stripped naked, and for a little while the artifice that protects us from the concept of 'nothingness' is gone-- and we see things in a sharp, cutting, clarity?
The thing about "2:00 a.m." is that it's about the speaker's experience with insomnia induced by anxiety and overthinking. I've experienced this level of anxiety many times in the past, though not for a couple of years at this point. So this poem isn't exactly philosophizing about the dark night of the soul. Rather, it shows an almost literal "dark night of the soul": the experience of someone living with such intense fear and anxiety that they can't sleep, perhaps for nights on end.
When you experience such an acute form of anxiety that it leads to insomnia, yes, it can feel like you are stripped naked, in front of no one except yourself. But it's almost impossible to see things clearly, because the thoughts that wrapped you into that vortex can sometimes be irrational and unjustified.
That being said, the experience shared in the poem is based on my own. Someone else's experience with anxiety-induced insomnia could be very different. But I hope that the common ground those readers can find with this poem is how terrifying and out-of-control those sleepless nights can be.
As for why I chose "2:00 a.m." as the title, I recall often turning over to look at the clock on those nights and finding it was roughly around that time.
You are a writing coach. How objective can you be about your own work?
It's so hard to be objective about your work, even when you work in this field and help other writers! Sometimes I discover how a poem needs to grow and be revised on my own. But most of the time, I share poems with my Poetic Inklings and (more recently) Orion Continued poetry groups, along with one other critique partner, and the perspectives and suggestions they offer are often things I might never have found on my own.
Why should we read your book?
Wild Gardens offers one reminder after another of how crucial and meaningful it is for us to pay attention to what's around us and be grateful for the surprises, the everyday, the wonders of our world, miracles big and small. If readers need or want more reminders of these things, then they're bound to appreciate reading this book.
An Origin Story of Cape Cod
Let’s start at the beginning,
twenty-three thousand years ago.
Your parents were the earth and Laurentide,
an ice sheet stretching from the Arctic Ocean
all the way to what would later be known
as the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
If anyone had borne witness, they would have found
a cold crust of white as far as the eye could see.
This didn’t happen all at once, of course.
Patience is both virtue and necessary evil
when you need about five centuries to emerge.
But not once did you complain as, leisurely,
your more glacial parent retreated north.
In three lobes, it scraped over bedrock,
carving and molding you into moraines, kames,
and outwash plains as if with a sculptor’s tools
but no final design in mind.
In its wake, it strewed all manner
of rock debris over you—miles upon miles
of till, gravel, sand, and boulders hundreds of feet thick.
But you didn’t mind. You liked the way
the meltwater streams dressed you, how their deposits
filled your deltas and expanded west,
how leftover lumps of ice melted
and made jewellike kettle holes along your peninsula.
You even chose to bear your relict valleys,
your riverless battle scars, with pride.
You couldn’t fathom then
that, one day, you’d be robed in
pitch pines, marshes, and cranberry bogs
or called home by piping plovers, seals, and humans.
You didn’t even care about your name until
the Wampanoag and the Nauset called you Turtle Island
and the British colonists Cape Cod.
No. That long ago, your only care
was that you were born,
and to be born means to exist,
and to exist means boundless possibilities.
S.L.
