Stitching Images

Sarah Dickenson Snyder

1.

This is something my sister

could have created, the way

she sews fabric to other fabric,

laces gold thread into what she unveils,

often a flower blooming, too—everything

in her place home-made, made in her home,

a space of weaving worlds.

2.

Or it could be a diagram in a fourth grade

science book where I learned about our tilting

planet pulled by gravity, that invisible power

I could never feel, always worried about falling

off a spinning globe orbiting a star we call a sun,

our marbled moon following us—everything stitched

together and woven in a galaxy by an unseen force.

3.

Is everything a circle? I have always seen years

as circles, a calendar pulling the last month back to the first,

that final curve of October leading us to December

and a new January. The circles get smaller and tighter,

as we age—babies born on the horizon of a widening turn

then sliding into smaller rings, the time it takes to orbit

another kind of quickening toward stillness,

the last spin more like an end mark, a small dot

I could lift, find what’s buried there.

Maybe the last moment is uncovering

what we were always hungry for,

maybe I’ll find I wanted less.

Interview by C. VanWinkle

Tell me what you responded to. Can you describe it for me?

Yeah, it looked like a really interesting kind of fabric collage that somebody had created. It actually looked hand-stitched, the whole thing. So it was a really beautiful, almost Venn diagram of circles. Some of them are fabric, and then it was gold thread for one circle and the actual fabric of the circles had circles in them too. So that was kind of cool.

I always start at my journal. It’s a blank-paged journal, so the pages just look like that. And it’s handmade. What I always do with my journals, I always find some way to separate the page. So I’ll do it sometimes with paint, you know, sometimes with an image. Then I always compose in these columns just because I’m attracted to poetry. When I saw the image, I put a timer on and I gave myself like 7 to 10 minutes to just write whatever I think about when I look at it. I did that probably five or six times over the course of the two days that I did it, and then I just came up with these three sections of it.

Why did you settle on three? It could have been two or four.

I love threes. I don’t know. I like things in threes. I had a poetry teacher who told me once that when you’re doing a series, it’s better if you do it in threes. Three seems to be the best number.

I noticed you had circles on your journal, too. Do circles already have a significance for you?

Yes. The third thing I wrote is everything is a circle and that I’ve always seen years as circles. Even the word ‘calendar’ feels like a circle to me. You know, the wedding ring is symbolic of this unending love. I’m a hospice volunteer and I’ve always felt, you know, in watching people exit the world... I have two children. It feels so similar to me to birth, it feels very circular. Everything seems kind of circular to me.

Your piece is sort of a wild ride. It starts somewhere tangible and homey, you mentioned your sister and we’re talking about fiber arts. And by the end, we’ve traveled through space and time and the circle of life. It was a long journey for just the length of the piece. How does that fit with the rest of your poetry? Is that representative of how you work?

Yes. Yes. This sounds really almost oxymoronic, but I write to find surprise. I always start in my journal. That’s where the “magic happens”, you know, that’s where I’ll let myself make leaps. It’s almost like my pen seems to pull me in a place that I didn’t know where I was going. I want to be at the end of a piece and be surprised where I ended up. I ordered these in the way that you’re saying: I just wanted to go from the fabric, to what the fabric made me think of, to what writing and circles and things make me think of. I tried to stay with the piece.

If you think about where you were when you started this piece, is the finished product the piece you set out to make?

No!

How so?

Oh, specifically in the last six years since I retired, I’ve just been immersed in writing really since then. I mean, I obviously wrote a ton before, but never just said “I’m a writer, this is what I’m doing.” And I’ve never ever approached a piece with any knowledge of what’s going to happen at the end. Like, never. It’s funny because I’ve never had a “commissioned poem” or something like that, where somebody says, “Would you write a poem about this?” But for a piece like this, I’ve found that I just really love working with this sort of writing. Because the point of it for me is to look at something and let that pull me to some place I didn’t know. That’s interesting. It’s always like I’m writing and then I’m like, Ooo! that’s cool!

Is there anything else about your piece that I didn’t ask you about?

I have to say a surprise for me was that middle stanza. When I looked at that piece, you know, my first thought was about my sister, who’s amazing with fabric. But then how it looked on the page really pulled me so distinctively to a science textbook. You know? The most surprising part to me was how much it looked like a diagram that I could have opened up in an old-fashioned book.

Do you have any advice for someone else participating in this project?

I think the only advice I would give is just to have fun with it. And to not be constrained by having to censor anything. You know, send your censor far away and just go write. Write what you see. You know, I’ve taken some art classes and my painting teacher would say, “Just paint what you see.” Don’t paint what you want to see, or paint what you think is there. Literally look at it. For instance, I remember I was painting something, and the person that I was looking at was tilted, so the eyes were different distances from the nose. And my teacher said, “They are. Paint that.” When you’re looking at that angle, they’re completely different. Don’t make it what you want it to be, make it what it is. I’ve always thought of that as a really good analogy for writing, too. Write what’s inside. Write what’s coming out. Don’t try and censor it.

Yeah. I think most people who aren’t visual artists think of learning to be as something you do with your hands, but more of it is just learning how to actually see what you’re looking at.

Right, and to trust your eyes. To trust that they’re giving you something that’s true. Actually, in poetry, it doesn’t necessarily have to be accurate, but it has to be true. It’s got to come from a place of truth as opposed to, “Stick to the facts ma’am.” I mean, facts are cool. I love reading a poem where I learn something, some kind of cool fact about something. But also, you know, I technically might lie in some of my poems about biographical events my family, but I am actually telling the truth. You know what I mean? What is beyond the page is actually true. It may not be accurate, but it’s true.

Call Number: C44VA | C47PP.snySti

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com