Bad Daughter Stakes New Ground for Poet

An exclusive Authorlink interview
with Sarah Gorham

By Ellen Birkett Morris
July 2012

Like many poets Sarah Gorham started young writing the requisite abstract, romantic "where is my love" poetry before honing her craft through study and discovering what she had to say at the hands of life.

Her fourth book of poetry, Bad Daughter, is a sharply observed look at women behaving well and badly, which is, in turns, both prickly and beautiful.

Her transformation as a poet began at Antioch College where she pursued independent study with Heather McHugh and participated in an advanced poetry workshop with Ira Sadoff.

"I grew more as a poet in three months than I had in ten years," said Gorham.

Students in Sadoff's workshop were required to write three poems a week and read and respond to five poetry collections a week.

Like several students in the class, Gorham went straight from Antioch to University of Iowa's MFA program. She described the program as "highly competitive" and was in a group of students that included poets Jorie Graham and Rita Dove and fiction writer Jane Smiley.

Gorham, who was 21 at the time and felt young and inarticulate compared to other students said the program was nevertheless a "good segue to adult life."

"I wrote and hung onto 10 or 12 poems. My thesis was titled Common Territory and it was just that. Nothing new there," noted Gorham.

While at Iowa, Gorham published poems in major journals including Ploughshares, The Nation and Antaeus.

Like many young poets, Gorham found herself imitating the work of writers she admired including Sadoff, Louise Glück and Tess Gallagher.

"I found myself writing in a male "persona" because that is what felt comfortable at the time. It was five or six years before I began to write in my own voice," said Gorham.

She said a turning point for her was having children. She published her first book at 34. Her second book, The Tension Zone, published seven years later, was selected for the Four Way Books Award in Poetry from an anonymous pile of manuscripts by her former teacher Heather McHugh.

"After having kids, there was no way I could pretend I was a man writing poems. I began to develop my own identity as a poet, which came to fruition in my 40s, as I was pushing my language and reading more widely," said Gorham.

Her third book, The Cure, blended Gorham's interest in form, specifically the sonnet, and family themes, as represented in a series of poems titled "The Family Afterward".

" 'The Family Afterward' deals with the alcoholism in our family. Those poems were where I began to be honest about what I felt and what the kids had to say on the subject. I considered the series an accomplishment, because it also moved the obviously autobiographical to the level of art," said Gorham.

Bad Daughter, according to Gorham, deals with "three generations of women and their interchangeable roles: mother, daughter, and granddaughter, exploring in particular their bad behavior across the years."

The book includes poems that touch on religion through satiric Episcopal prayers, which she was quick to point out "doesn't mean that I don't pray or believe in God."

"The book mines the tension between our destructive tendencies that are gradually re-channeled as we grow up and become mature individuals. That said, I'm 58 and I still hear voices whispering to me 'Go on, pull that baby's hair.' It's still there," said Gorham.

She deliberately took risks with these poems, pushing herself to "be as eccentric as I could" and "break out of old patterns of soft comparison and uninspired imagery."

"I think the poems are more complex and layered, as a result" said Gorham.

She advises poets to "aim for restlessness. Never be satisfied when you have a solid set of poems, put them away and start something new. Allow wildness into your writing; a wildness centered in language and feeling."

One exercise she uses to stretch herself is "negative inversion", where she takes a short poem and writes the opposite of each line in a column next to the original line. "It gets you started with new material, forced by the 'translation'. The poem gains meaning and purpose as you go along and finally abandon the original poem."

When developing a collection, she suggests poets work with friends and teachers to sort the good work from the bad and seek an arrangement of the work that forms a narrative arc, starting in one place and ending up in another.

"Make something happen in the course of the book."

In March 1994, Gorham founded Sarabande Books, Inc. a small press devoted to the publication of poetry, short fiction, and essay. Gorham serves as President and Editor-in-Chief.

In that role she looks for work that has a strong voice, original language with eccentricity or charm.

"After that I look for depth, heart, and urgency. What is the reason this poem had to be written?" asked Gorham.

With four books of poetry under her belt, Gorham has found herself drawn to the essay. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled Study in Perfect.

Sarah Gorham is a poet, essayist, and publisher. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978 and her BA in 1976 from Antioch College. She has written four collections of poetry. Her second, The Tension Zone (1996), won the 1994 Four Way Books Award in Poetry, judged by Heather McHugh.

Gorham's poems have been published widely in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, where she won the Carolyn Kizer Award.

Her essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, AGNI, AGNI Online, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Poets & Writers, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Real Simple, and Arts & Letters.