Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan: I have the honor of having you, a Yale and Columbia educated poet, as my poetry professor here at Stony Brook Southampton. How did you come to call SBS home?
Julie Sheehan: Short answer? I got pregnant. Long answer? I had been living in New York City with my then husband when we lost our apartment but gained a child. That combination said, “Leave the city” pretty loudly. Off we went to live full time in the Hamptons, an adjustment, at least for me, but one that was definitely the right choice. I taught at any number of nearby and not-so-nearby colleges and universities before landing a full time appointment at Southampton. I could not be happier. As I like to joke, there is only one job on the East End of Long Island for which I am even remotely qualified, and I have it.
TNM: I have Thaw, Orient Point, and Bar Book in my personal collection. Can you shed some light on the process, the labor, of creating these works?
JS: Each had its own peculiarities. Thaw was my thesis for my MFA at Columbia. Bar Book was a seven-year saga of teaching myself how to handle all that prose (not easy for such as us, right?) and build a book-length narrative structure (not easy for anybody, I’m guessing.) And Orient Point was what I wrote between bouts of Bar Book. I ended up publishing it after I had started Bar Book but well before I finished it.
TNM: You have been the recipient of several awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry, the Whiting Writers Award, the Barnard Women Poets Prize, the Paris Review Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. Can you share with us how winning those awards changed your writing?
JS: I do not think that awards change your writing. They shouldn’t change your writing. What they do instead is give you money to live on, and credibility. They have impact on your publishing prospects, but what you have to say – and therefore, why you write poems – isn’t up for negotiation or subject to the judgment of committees. My guess is that if you tried to write “for” the prize givers, you’d never get an award.
TNM: The Poetry Foundation writes, “Sheehan’s poems often feature long lines similar to those of Walt Whitman, and she has cited Whitman as an influence in the past. She also writes in traditional forms, including the sonnet and ghazal.” Which do you prefer to write in: free verse or form?
JS: I love both. I choose one over the other based on the demands of the material I am handling. Sometimes I start with notes, and always for longer poems. Many of these poems have found text associated with them, and the text sets the tone. Other times, as I shape the material, I will notice tendencies in the language that suggest forms – there are lots of sonic repetitions, for example, which might indicate a rhyme scheme, or an argument begins to emerge, which suggests the sonnet. Still other times, I know the form will fit with what I am trying to say, and I will set out to write in it, though every once in a while, I am wrong about the fit, and must abandon the form.
TNM: I had the pleasure of hosting an event out in Greenport a few years ago, where I first heard you read your Hate Poem. The first stanza follows: “I hate you truly. Truly I do./Everything about me hates everything about you./The flick of my wrist hates you./The way I hold my pencil hates you./The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped/in the jaws of a moray eel hates you./Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.” What was the genesis of this poem?
JS: It came out of the simple observation that hate and love have a lot in common. Take those [above] lines and substitute the word “love” for “hate” and you’ll see what I mean. They’ll sound like sappy lyrics to a pop song.
TNM: What advice do you have for the young woman who wants to make poetry her life’s passion?
JS: I have no advice for the passionate. If poetry is their passion, they will write poems. Nothing I say could make any difference. If they want their poems to be better, then there’s plenty of advice they could take: read stuff, practice, take a workshop, join a writer’s group. Mostly read. At the beginning, it is usually the magic of another poet who gets you writing, in response. Harold Bloom got this one right: all poems are correspondences on some level with other poems. It’s one big happy conversation, and even though a number of the participants are long dead, we poets can work with that.