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Poetic Profile

Sabine Macher (Cole Swensen, translator)

An Email Interview in English with Sabine Macher:

1) What is poetry (and its role) to you in the context of the world today?

Today is a room with three gray doors and the window obstructed so that less sun will come in, because the room is in palermo and the month is July the day is the 14th and I don't remember how you write this correctly  in English, I think the th after the number is wrong, but : "the day is fourteen" sounds even wronger, wronger will be stronger, hopefully, so, I look into the computer's so called windows, the computer sun does not heat up the room, my writing not being fictional the poets invited me to their gruesome territory, I don’t remember what gruesome means, next to gruselig in my brain, a German word from grimm's tales enclosing fear, terror and shivering pleasure. 
 
 

2) What is the significance of the fragment for you in poetry?

Usually, when everything is in one piece, in the order it was written, it is so boring that I split the block into little pieces  to be able to read them. Then I mix in an order that each book invents, always having a random element to begin with.

I would like to be able to quit this fragmentary-obsessionalism, but up to now, it has been the only way to make things readable, if it were to a whole cow, it would have to be cut smaller to become as edible, and each piece of the cow will then clearly appear, becoming more than the cow as a whole.

The montage is like cooking, a further step to making writing digestible.
 
 

3) How do you feel your own work is exploring new territory?

I don't t feel able to do something so noble and thrilling. Rather than exploring newfoundlands in literature, I experience things for myself, writing, and hope that others will experience other things for themselves when reading.

The most difficult task is to read and be read; I find it easier to write and I think I'm not the only one, at least in what concerns writers.

When reading, I do sometimes feel that the author I'm reading is "exploring new territory" for me, but not in an absolute way, I think that in poetry, as in geography, all territories have been found, but some stay inhabited because of their severe conditions.
 
 

4) What are some of your influences as a writer? Have international poets and writers been important to you, or primarily ones writing in and from the French tradition? (In short, is international exchange between poets important, in your opinion, and how or why (not)?)

Even though this is as stupid as impossible, I don't (want to) know who influenced me as a writer.
I started feeling an authentic way of (clumsily, but) writing in French, which is not my first language, because I am less aware of the tradition and culture in this language (rather than in German, which is my first language)

In French, the first writer that I fell in love with was Marguerite Duras.

I was also, and am still, very charmed by Sei Shônagon, a Japanese lady in the imperial court in the eleventh century in Japan. She wrote one book, called the "pillow book", sadly abused in the same-titled film by Peter Greenaway.

For some time Andy Warhol's From A to B and back again kept close to me in my rooms, parts of it, in fact two pages.

I have not yet been able to join the Emily Dickinson parish, but I like to look at her in the photograph that seems to be the only one to be shown, in a black dress. Similar landscape with Virginia Woolf.

In German I read many poets, Brecht, Benn, Rilke, Kafka, Aichinger, Hoffmansthal, Bachmann, but that would be 'the non-international part'.

 

5) Where does a poem come from for you- what gets you started and moving into a poem?

Maybe not a poem, but something often starts with a word, a small phrase, that I want to write, and, having been wandering around in the apartment doing things, gives me a reason to rest.
 
 

6) Many interviews in France discuss the nature of poetry versus prose. Do you see these two as separate? Do you feel that you use elements of prose or fiction in your poetry?  If so, how and why?
 
I don't feel concerned by this dividing or defining discussion. For personal reasons that I partly ignore, I try to stay in a non-theoretical space in writing.
 

the l notebook by Sabine Macher

Translated by Cole Swensen

it’s gotten cold again

it’s the day before Easter

the computer lights up

the yellow rose is in front of me

everyone in the house is quiet                           

the hosts and the guests

i think of the person i was thinking of when i bought this notebook yellow outside red within

of the shadow around his eyes

the shadow in his mouth

i don’t know his hands very well

i’m on the mezzanine with a daisy in an eggcup

i turn the first page of the l notebook

there are notebooks for everything

the left hand is poised the fingers fanned out

a fingernail holds down the page

the index is curved over to keep it company

i don’t make any record of the time or date

we’ll go swimming in the ocean some time

walk out into the foam

today the time changes to daylight savings and it’s cold here in westphalia

notebook of l of absence

the carpet stretches out in front of me

my feet touch the ground without walking

my legs at right angles

i wait for the house to calm down before calling

words of l

i think of him walking

i don’t move

near the lamp

the second page is thicker than the first

the yellow rose looks like it’s going to wilt before it blooms

it got too hot on this side of the window

the moth outside near it is cold

every evening i watch the ends of the dead leaves with their wrinkled folds full of sparkling particles

i don’t know what plant they fell from

we’d be sparkling and lovers

what to do

i drink tea from a glass

the sun warms my chest and my eyelids

my arms relax in their orange sleeves

the bubbles along the side of the glass come together when i tip it to drink

love is love

day breaks behind the low wall

i write small

close to a blur

the bird sings

i don’t see it

i don’t know what color its feathers are

whether its eggs are speckled brown or golden tan

the teapot that i put into a niche has a shadow

i don’t write to him

it’s too early

first I’ve got to write to the paper

to the ink

birds with long beaks

to judge by the depth of the holes in the butter

have eaten the paris butter and the eurowings bread

the wings of europa in the beaks of villeneuve-lez-avignons

i’m in my socks in my new office

i have folds in my face in the little mirror

around my chin and around the laugh lines that make an oval from the wings of my nose to the beginning of my chin

they recite too many lines here

it gags the silence

dinner every night at a table of ten

then a walk through the dark to the pay phone

spring veiled

my trousers are too light

the sun reaches into the alcove into my lashes               

a rectangle of sun lies on the white bedspread

the orange is eaten

i cut it into quarters

the pulp remains

flattened by my lips and teeth

attached to the skin

the bird came at dawn to eat the bread and butter i put out for him right at the spot where he stole it yesterday

the stone feels hard against my back

the rectangle of sun falls across the notebook and the fingers of the left hand holding it

the right hand holds the pen                                                                              

the pen crosses the lozenge of the thumb and index diagonally

invisibly supported by the middle finger

placed on the ring finger

because of the play of the sun i can see the entire ridge of my nose lit up and even the arc of my eye

one foot is cold

one foot is lukewarm

i’m folded into the alcove                                                         

in the evening the birds sing in the cloister’s cypress

the l notebook and the b notebook

i am nun of the love of birds

the little finger

then the flank of the hand

lie on the sunday blue cloth of my summer wool trousers

a man’s garment woven of long-lasting thread

these trousers will be around long after i am and whoever they belonged to before is perhaps now buried in another pair of trousers           

olivier toin was buried with his hat

the big hat that graced his head when the radiation made all its blondness fall

he told me: without love i live happily

the nearness of death had taken its place

it fulfilled him

i’m at the very little window in my niche

i fart out the strawberries more gorgeous than good

i slept in the single bed without leaving a dent

i look at the stones in the wall

a doorway through which one could have left has been bricked over

i’ve got a lot of keys for someone in a cell

my lover packs his love sack

we’re going over to the other side of the wall

i count the banknotes that my mother counted before she gave them to me

as her mother had done before her

i put them away

my hair has a red tinge next to the carthusian rose

i’ve got to get out of here

i’ll do it tomorrow                                                                                                                                

the sky is in the wind with the hale-bopp comet a croatian told me in german

i balance the white bowl on my right knee which touches my left knee

the lover is coming

will come this evening

my foot is next to the plank on which i sit parallel to the little window which i open facing the niche where i put the teapot and the sheet music to i’m a disaster

the people on the teapot are there

the man and the woman

each one emerges from a separate door in the tent or domed building

behind them in a cup the cloth held by a steel ring holds the tea

the sun reflecting off the paper in the l notebook blinds me

i lean my knees and head in to stay within the shadow of the wall

my left eye watering dazzled

in the shower

a saltpeter grasshopper

a grey house cricket

hopped onto my towel

maybe the white attracted it and the adventure

the croatian man told me about a nun near dubrovnik who’d been bricked up in a tower basement after she’d set fire to the convent

the sea at high tide coming up to her waist

for nine years

which is how long it took this torment to kill her

i wonder if the low tide covered her feet

if limpets attached themselves to her legs

right where they thin down just above the ankle

clarissa

l like the lemon yellow spider that i brought into my room with the rose

i’m writing on the toilet seats of monks

how many monks might have defecated here thinking of god

i think of them

i’m sitting right next to a hole

i checked

it’s right in the middle of the plank

the plank is new

the seat below it is stone

a circle cut from a slab

it must have been cold on the rear end

the shit once down in the hole

i don’t know how they got it out of the room

the sun reaches just to the edge of the wall outside

every day it gets to the room a little later

it seems like spring to me

a few hours before my escape

i know and my two accomplices know

the spider had to hurry to get into the wall

i took two photos

i say goodbye to the oregano i give my rose to the estruscan princess

i hear the clunk of the stones in the road outside

i look out of the sheet-of-paper-sized window

the pen i’m moving transcribes the atmosphere into signs

doing nothing

love’s arms are ribbons

love’s legs are tubes

the trunk trembles

i write like the writer who’s here

i’d like to see v’s lips moving around the pearl of his teeth

they’re not all still pearly and one tooth is missing

it’s this missing that distinguishes him from his ancestors

l notebook and b notebook

my pen’s ink’s bed

it bleeds into this sheet though it didn’t into the page before

perhaps because i just gave it a bath

i washed my hair conditioned it in the cloister

a train waits tomorrow and the berries

whatever you’ve touched is lifeless and limp

i position myself in the patches of sun under the windows

i follow them as they move along

in the end you won’t be able to tell how much time passed between the passages in l

if love can be written

under the dim lamp

with the music of the refrigerator

an ambulance passes

maybe the police

they guard us

the guns of the very young called to the capital to watch over us

truce between love and journal

a child’s slippers under the sofa

glass fish in the water

you can come and go

i consider the weave of the carpet worn in places

i think the word inkwell

i’m going into the inkwell

i don’t have one

such a small notebook on the end of my thigh

in front of the knee

i’m on the white of a bath towel to avoid sitting on the beige and ochre shag carpet

there’s no more tea in the tall cup

there’s some butter left on a small plate

i took two photos

one of my legs surrounded by postcards

the other of the teapot and an aluminum pitcher of hot water against a wall

i stay in the silver light after the photo

the window across from my window is part of the same building

from the elevator i walk in a square turning left three times to get to my room in the fourth corner

in baseball that’s called a home run

i sleep alone here

the wind on the balcony is there like the middle of winter