Sharon Wang is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis' MFA program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pomegranate and Anti-. She currently lives in Queens, NY.
Her poem "Lullaby" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Sharon Wang speaks with interviewer Amber Cook about dichotomies, hauntings, and David Foster Wallace.
1. Why did you decide to write this poem as a lullaby? What characteristics seem inherently lullaby-esque to you?
Actually I wrote the whole poem before tackling the title! I am really terrible with titles. I think I thought that “Lullaby” might match the cadence of the poem. Previously, my working titles were “Elegy” and “Ode.”
2. Even though the title of your poem suggests a soothing, nighttime song, the poem, especially towards the end, carries dark undertones with lines like: “A silver guillotine falls beneath the lids,” “ashes, ashes,” and “And you are here and you are gone.” I really love this pairing. What did you hope to achieve with this combination?
I don’t think I was consciously thinking about that juxtaposition as I was working. I’d been sitting in a bookstore in Seattle reading the David Foster Wallace short story “Forever Overhead,” which was actually the first piece of fiction I’d read of his and a piece that is extremely different, in tone and in form, from the rest of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I had this weirdest feeling while reading it that he was “pretending.” Not actually pretending, but showing to the reader what else he could do. And in my strange semi-entranced semi-deluded state I felt that he was pretending to be a writer like me rather than a writer like him, only he was much better at it than I was.
I’d resisted reading him for years for the truly terrible reason that I’d associated liking him with “being a certain kind of person,” and it turned out that I felt great solidarity with him, both in that story and in the others in that book. So this was an intense experience. I then went home with the cadences of that story stuck in my head, and I ended up free-writing a very preliminary draft of “Lullaby.” Later it changed a lot (many of the lines were switched in with others from my vaster collection of notes) but the structure and the mix of the cadence and the darkness remained.
It’s a poem about things that haunt me (existential crisis, or more precisely, “existential knowledge”) and it began as a subconscious analogical translation of DFW. Now that I look at it, it’s kind of an unfortunate rip-off! I stole a lot from him. There are even small structural similarities, particularly in the dichotomy between the static formal/tonal elements and the thematic exploration of time’s relentless undercurrent, as evidenced by the repetition, which uses music to push the narrative/lyric forward while not really letting the reader move linearly. In the DFW story, there’s a sort of central eradication enforced by moving and not moving at the same time. There’s an odd kind of suspension that forces emphasis on the present moment but doesn’t tell you how to attribute meaning to it. The whole thing’s very addressee-and-narrator-effacing, or perhaps human-effacing. Time is over before the story’s even begun. It’s difficult to be a human in that world, and yet there is a certain amount of tenderness. But I’ve gotten away from myself by talking about that story and not my poem, which I wrote perhaps as a way to re-inhabit the feelings I had when I was reading the story. And it’s highly possible I’m projecting things into my poem that only I can see, which would be a relief on some level!
3. The repetition of “here” works really effectively in pacing the poem. Do you turn to repetition frequently in your work?
I think I used to much more than I do now. I typically pay a lot of attention to the sonic aspects of my work, maybe even relying on them as a crutch to bring a cohesion to images or leaps of logic that a reader might not initially buy as being of one piece, but I’ve recently also become more aware of how creating an overly sonically fluid piece can actually feel too “heavy” or “too much”—the way you might not want to keep eating pieces of rich chocolate cake because it begins to lose a little something. (Although I have days when I want to.)
I’ve also always been interested in syntactical repetitions and how the building up/ breaking down of those structures creates meaning in a poem.
4. What’s one book that you think every writer should read?
So many! Maybe His Dark Materials.
5. What projects are you currently working on? Does “Lullaby” fit into any of them?
“Lullaby” is in a manuscript I completed last fall (Practice in the Shadow Room). I like the feeling of finishing something and getting to mentally set it aside, although that’s had weird consequences—I’ve actually tried to go back and make changes recently and found that it’s been completely blocked off and lives in a different compartment of my brain, much to my relief and dismay.
For better or for worse, I tend to think in terms of landscapes of meaning (sequences, books), rather than individual pieces, and it’s very nice (read: truly terrifying) to be discovering new territory (read: procrastinating wildly) for now.