Friday - September 25, 2020 - From our archives: an excerpt from our interview with Angela Sundstrom - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.

The excerpt below is from our interview with Angela Sundstrom, which appeared in Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.

Sundstrom’s poem, “The Beginning before the Beginning,” presented below, also appears within the issue. The physicality of the poem caught our attention first; can you feel desire “walking along the shore at night / swell[ing] with box proximity and distance,” or can you see it as “the color of milk / [and] the forest’s green after the storm”?

- Portrait by Alexandra Bildsoe

____________________

The Beginning before the Beginning

In the niche of a movie theater
desire moves like a volt.
It begins in the pelvic floor,
its hot kernel stoked
into extremities.
Desire hunts in the woods,
climbs the radio tower,
propels forward, gives no choice.
A priori;
it resides within itself.
Desire is needy, demands a lack
in order to operate,
requires the possibility of not being fulfilled.
It walks alone along the shore at night,
swells with both proximity and distance,
worships at the altar of the forbidden,
plays in a tableau of the taboo.
It’s robin’s egg blue, strung through.
Desire darkens and expands,
unravels and reforms of its own accord.
Desire is a still life,
translucent green grapes,
a solitary, pale orange,
the curvature of a peach,
absence.
Desire is a venomous muse,
resplendent in not-knowing,
what is almost revealed, but cannot yet be seen.
The image at its conception,
the moment before creation begins.
It is the color of milk,
the forest’s green after storm,
slash of birch bark
against an expansively skeletal sky,
a structure begging for collapse.

_____________

Interviewers: What do you find yourself drifting toward, in your writing?

Angela: There’s something ephemeral, even to me, about how I approach what I’m writing. I think I can answer this question by going in a linear fashion. My chapbook has a lot of older material, so it’s been interesting to write new material and to try and synthesize them. A lot of my older writing has to do with myth. I have a few poems that are very image-based, but more so I’ve researched myths - Cantabrian mythology or Greek mythology - I love the language, imagery and symbolism of myths.

I’ve used the research as a jumping off point in a lot of my poetry. Some was drawn from my personal and internal world, but I think it’s been much more so catalyzed by the external. Whereas now, I think I’m more personal, but the tone is similar.

A few people that I knew died in close proximity to each other in 2018 and that affected my poetry. There’s a lot of death in my writing in general, but in particular, a lot of the chapbook has myth poems that deal with death.

I have a poem called “What is Grief?” and I also wrote poems while specifically thinking about the individuals who had died. I have poems in the book that specifically deal with desire, including “The Beginning before the Beginning.” I think I went into it wanting to write poems about the people I knew who had passed away, but then other things came out.

Sometimes I don’t even know what the poem will be about before it happens. Sometimes, I just write notes and something pops into my head and I’ll say, I could have a poem about this. Then other times ––– and this is true with “The Beginning before the Beginning” ––– it will be more conscious.

With that one I was reading Anne Carson’s new translation of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” and it triggered a thought or a line. It just came to me. It was one of those much more muse-like writing experiences ––– you feel really excited and alive with the language and the content.

So, since you had asked what I have been drifting towards in my writing. One part of the answer would be death. Since I was young I remember being fascinated with exploring mortality. I remember discovering Baudelaire when I was in high school. He’s quite dark, and I remember learning about the romanticism around death in the Symbolists’ poetry. I loved that when I was young. I remember really loving The Flowers of Evil.

Interviewers: Were you reading these poems in the graveyard?

Angela: That’s funny. I did not hang out in the graveyard, but I wanted to. I went to an all-girls prep school and I was definitely the only really gothy person. Some of my friends . . . we liked the same music and they would sometimes dress in goth fashion, but it was definitely a part of my overall persona for a lot of high school. There were all kinds of weird rumors about me. Someone said they saw me hailing Satan or performing witchcraft on my roof.

Interviewers: Was that true?

Angela: No. I’ve never been on my roof. It was in the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs.

Interviewers: The suburbs of?

Angela: Detroit. Specifically, West Bloom- field. Metro Detroit is a sprawling mass. It’s huge. So you can drive through the suburbs for hours. Of course, there were some cooler towns in the suburbs, places that were more funky and artsy. There were used record shops. There was a goth fetish store called Noir Leather that I was obsessed with when I was in high school. I used to hang out there all the time.

Interviewers: What does that entail, hanging out there, rather than shopping there?

Angela: I’m trying to conjure a nineties mall movie. My mom would drop us off in a town called Royal Oak. In the late nineties Royal Oak was pretty funky. It had cool cafes and vintage stores, and it had Noir Leather, which also had gothy things as well as BDSM attire. Where my parents lived, it was much more homogenized; it didn’t have any quirky small businesses. So we would go to Royal Oak. I used to wear rhinestone dog collars and pieces like that.

Interviewers: Do you still have that attire, back home anywhere?

Angela: My mom does have an odd assortment of some of my clothing, which is kind of weird. I don’t think she has any of that stuff, but who knows. I think she has my prom dress. I remember seeing a dress I wore to a formal dance when I was fifteen. I know that I got it from one of the stores in Royal Oak. Red and black velvet, floor length. It looked really good with my braces. I just remember a photo . . . it’s so bad. I’m sure there’s a subReddit about outfits like that.

Donny: The Blunder Years.

Angela: Exactly. This would be perfect for that. I remember the photo my mom took. I was also in band, I played saxophone, and I was goth. I was not cool.

Interviewers: But, you were you?

Angela: I was me. I went to a dance with a boy in band who also played saxophone. He went to the all-boys school which was next to the all-girls school. Band practice was in the all- boys school, which was another level of terrifying for an adolescent girl.

But for the dance, I had this really goth dress on. I remember the photo my mom took because my face was white like a ghost because I didn’t really know how to put makeup on. I basically just put on white powder and had thick eyeliner and was smiling with my braces . . . it’s great.

Interviewers: Do you remember having a good night?

Angela: I don’t really remember. But Roy- al Oak, it was a cool and funky place, but no longer. I have friends still in Michigan, and when I go back I always say, “Let’s go to Royal Oak!” because Noir Leather is still open. But Royal Oak has become much more bougie, and it’s become a place where a lot of young, wealthy people move to, which is funny because that’s pretty antithetical to how I thought of it when I was young. There are a lot more high-rise apartments and upscale places. I’m really surprised that this goth fetish store is still in business. It’s been open since 1983.

Interviewers: So you’ve made it back there recently?

Angela: I haven’t. Every time I go back to Michigan I say I’m going to go, and then I don’t. I don’t have a license, so I would really have to ask my mom to drive me.

Interviewers: That could be a nice mother-daughter moment?

Angela: It would! It would be like, Mom, drive me to Royal Oak, like she did when I was thirteen.

Interviewers: Were you writing back then, when you were in high school?

Angela: Yes. I actually remember that I wrote a vignette about Noir Leather, something like, “The smell of the incense wafting when you entered the space.” God, I wish I could get my hands on that.

_________

Angela Sundstrom is a poet and writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Broad River Review, the Best American Poetry blog, and Time Out New York magazine, among others. She received her MFA from the New School. Angela is the founder and host of “Litost,” a reading and music series in Brooklyn.