Q&A with Sarah Stern

  

 

 

Sarah Stern is the author of the new poetry collection Dear Letters in the Red Box. Her other collections include We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune. She lives in New York City.

 

Q: How was the title of your new poetry collection chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I chose the title Dear Letters in the Red Box because I feel it is one of the main themes of the book. It’s also the title of a poem in this collection.

 

Through recently discovered letters and writings, I explore my parents' years in Paris between 1946 and 1951. My parents met in New York City, eloped, and shortly thereafter moved to Paris. My mother, a refugee from Germany, returned to Europe. My father, an American, began medical school at the Sorbonne. Neither knew French, but they learned quickly.

 

Many of the poems in this collection respond to the reverberations of those seminal years. Others speak to the present. In the eight sections of Dear Letters in the Red Box, the poems talk to each other through time, hopefully heightening their connections.

 

“Dear Letters in the Red Box” is a poem to the letters—an epistolary poem of sorts. This poem has snippets of the actual letters within it as well as my interruptions, and the title is a play on that, that the letters are dear to me as well.

 

Q: How does your family history factor into your poetry?

 

A: My family history figures very large in my poetry. My parents’ stories, especially my mother’s, are in my poems directly or by innuendo. Her escape from Nazi Germany and her efforts to become an American run through my poems.

 

In the poem, “Current Parties with Heddy,” there’s a line that feels relevant to your question: I was at a tea party/ in a foreign land. My mother’s stories of survival and new beginnings echo in today’s fraught times. I often wonder what my mother would have said if she were alive today.

 

My father’s life also ran parallel with the trauma and radical change of the last century and the beginning of the 21st.

 

Their time in Paris right after the war and the sense that I got from them, that the world was beginning anew, was mesmerizing to me. I try to understand it or examine that hope and the aftermath of that in my work.

 

Q: The poet Katrinka Moore said of the collection, “Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term ‘interbeing’ to describe the deep connectiveness of all things. Reading Dear Letters in the Red Box, I feel how Sarah Stern internalizes that concept in her poems.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m so happy and humbled that Katrinka Moore felt the “interbeing” in my poetry. I do feel that all things are connected as well. I never thought to write a poem with that idea specifically, but I feel it deeply, and I’m thrilled that it comes through.

 

For me, the idea of holiness is also associated to the connectiveness of all things. How could it not be? And poets and maybe all artists are trying to name that.

 

Q: Many of the poems are set in the New York City area--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Yes, so many of my poems take place in New York City, and I feel lucky to live here. Many of the poems may start in my city, but then end up somewhere else. Setting helps me ground the poem, but sometimes it will only be a jumping-off point to another place completely.

 

The natural world so inspires me, and it is often in these places that I start to write from. Like so many, I’m in love with our National Parks and just being there brings me to another place in my writing. I love to travel as well and use my photos as placeholders for new work.

 

Q: What are you working on now?
 

A: I’m working on new poems that I would love to get back to after getting the word out about Dear Letters in the Red Box. I’m excited to start on a new collection—it will take time, of course—but I look forward to that process. A new project to start in April—National Poetry Month!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Thank you for having me back a second time on your blog. I appreciate it! Also if readers would like to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon that would be great. Thank you again!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sarah Stern.