The moment of rupture: a conversation with Phantasmagossip author Sara Mae

Out now from YesYes Books, Phantasmagossip is Sara Mae’s second poetry chapbook, following their 2018 Priestess of Tankinis. The collection brims with shape and movement, cycling through a host of visual and poetic forms to explore themes of past selves, of gender expansiveness, of the twin coils of discomfort and desire. Its line of inquiry is perhaps best expounded in its titular poem: “where there is expectation unfulfilled / there are ghosts & often on the verge of sleep I may see phantasmic material.”

In addition to writing poetry, Sara Mae is the lead singer of the Philadelphia-based band The Noisy, whose debut LP The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat released in 2024. Currently, they’re working on a second LP and a novel.

The poems of Phantasmagossip have clear thematic throughlines, from queer desire to self-presentation. Did you set out to explore these themes from the start? Or did you stumble onto those connective tissues in the process of writing?

A lot of the work comes from studying formal experimentation: of Tyehimba Jess, who wrote Olio, and Jericho Brown, who came up with this form called the duplex. And for me, the writing started as a practice in breaking form. In breaking received form. And naturally, a lot of stuff about the body came up. A lot of stuff about gender came up, about desire and desirability. Every poem started from a place, I think, of trying to break out of feeling trapped by expectations of desirability. Like breaking form was a practice in trying to envision myself in a different way.

The poems do feel like they’re calling attention to their form through the collection. Obviously, some of the poems have a literal shape, but even in the text, there’s a lot of fascination over the shape that the poem takes. How do you arrive at the shapes and forms of your poems?

With “Always Cut Flowers at an Angle,” I set out to mess with a sonnet, because I was looking at Diane Seuss’s book, frank: sonnets, and I was really inspired by what she’s able to do. How she was able to push the form. “Always Cut Flowers” was about an old relationship, and I feel like in what I had written, I had cast myself as a victim. Where the form breaks, and works itself out beyond a sonnet, is where it considers my own culpability, my own responsibility in the relationship. So a lot of times I would sit down and be like, I’m going to work in this form and see where it takes me. And what would come organically was the moment of rupture, how exactly I would break it.

A lot of times I would also free write, and then I would bring those lines to different forms I wanted to work with, and map onto those forms. It would naturally change what I was saying, or the point of arrival into the poem, so a new volta or turn would come up that I wasn’t expecting before. I feel like I hear poets talk a lot about how we sit down at the page to surprise ourselves, to discover something. That’s where the best poems come from. It’s not when you sit down and say, okay, this is what I’m going to do today. And so the form would often be the means for that discovery, that surprise.

Another formal conceit in the collection is the idea of the exquisite corpse, an old surrealist game where a group of people collectively assembles words and images. How did you first come upon the idea of the exquisite corpse, and what drew you to it as a recurring motif?

I’ve spent so much time thinking about what the exquisite corpse means because I was trying to write exquisite corpse poems in my undergrad program. It’s been a long time of like, what does it mean to write an exquisite corpse poem? In the most straightforward way, it’s supposed to be a poem that’s written by a lot of people. And obviously, I would bring poems that I would call exquisite corpses to workshops, and people would rightfully be like, this is not an exquisite corpse! Like, you wrote this!

The ones that landed in the collection were the ones about polyvocality or generational memory. I came to the form because I was watching my grandpa lose his memory. He had Alzheimer’s. And his own relationship with his conscious memory was very much like an exquisite corpse, because you repeat, you loop back over things, you don’t necessarily land at a logical place. When you’re navigating these really hard experiences on the page, trying to document difficult things that have happened, exquisite corpse actually is a great technology. Because you’re like, none of this makes sense. This is so difficult to make sense of.

I also want to touch on your work as a singer-songwriter with The Noisy. I’m curious about the relationship between your work in poetry and in songwriting. How do you know when an idea is a poem or when it’s a song?

I think I’m getting better at that. My process for poetry is so much more fine-tuned than my process for writing songs. I kind of have everything I need to write my poems, versus with songs, it’s a lot more collaborative, and the scope of what you can do feels a lot bigger. For instance, I’m working on a song right now, and I already know what I want the music video to look like, and I already know how I want the music to feel. I have a couple of chords. I know roughly what key it’s in, but I haven’t written the story of it yet. I just know what the hook is, and what the heart of the song is. I feel like I come to music with a specific feeling, and often a way more visual understanding of what I want it to be.

Versus, when I’m writing poems, I’ll start with a couple of really precise lines, or a really precise image. I can start a lot smaller and more intimate. Or it’s an experiment in form. So with music, you’re generating as much as possible, you’re generating melodies, you’re generating a far off vision of what you want. Poetry feels more precise. If I could compare them to birds, poetry is like, you’re a blue heron. You’re stalking really slowly through the water. And writing music is like you’re a robin. Running around, gathering a million things for your nest.

Featured image: Sara Mae's new poetry chapbook released this spring. (Photo courtesy of Sara Mae.)

Image description: Sara Mae in a light jacket and black top with white paper floral spirals over their chest. The photo is fuzzy, out of focus.