There’s a Poem for That: Sue Sorensen + Acutely Life

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about Acutely Life and how it came to be?

Sue Sorensen: This is my first poetry collection, although I’ve been writing poems for 50 years. The first few decades were the usual free-verse explorations of my very special intense feelings and the misery of being me – and unsurprisingly my poetry career didn’t go anywhere fast. (I did other stuff – became a professor, wrote a novel. I wasn’t just moping and prodding my feelings.)

So then I decided to write a bunch of poems about characters instead of about my own life. It was revelatory. Sometimes I chose real people (Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, jazz pianist Bill Evans), and sometimes characters in artworks or literature. Occasionally I would riff on lines of someone else’s work, or mess around with found poetry (in a gardening book, for instance). Writing these character poems or art-work poems has been a great experience. And some of these poems, ultimately, end up being a commentary on my own life anyway, so my younger, self-absorbed self is vindicated.

ALU: What has been your most unlikely source of writing inspiration?

Sue Sorensen: I was surprised to find myself writing a series of poems that were initiated by a few lines from a book (Versions of Pygmalion) by J. Hillis Miller, an American academic and deconstructionist. This is definitely not my usual sort of inspiration, but there was a mesmerizing beauty to some of the utterances in his essay and I couldn’t help building on top of them. Similarly, I can’t begin to tell you why I was suddenly writing a series of poems about Freud. I’ve never studied psychology and I’m not particularly keen on many of Freud’s theories. But I visited his home in London a few years ago, and it was an absurdly evocative place. And I just became fascinated despite myself.

ALU: Are there poetry collections you can’t get out of your head years later? Tell us about them.

Sue Sorensen: I love anything by Gerard Manley Hopkins and my suite of poems about Mary, the mother of Jesus, uses a fantastic Hopkins poem about her as a kind of skeleton that I make into a new body. Of recent Canadian collections I like Catherine Hunter’s St. Boniface Elegies and Margaret Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House a lot. Also Kayla Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On. But possibly my favourite Canadian poet is John K. Samson, who is mostly a lyricist, and a very fine one.

ALU: What did you learn while writing your collection?

Sue Sorensen: I learned a lot of things. I learned that it’s probably better to consider the lives and works of others than obsess about yourself – and you’ll encounter enough wisdom about yourself along the way. I learned (or relearned) that when I’m torn up inside, poems have to come out, and I may not feel better afterward, but I might be able to get some sleep. I learned to trust the poem, to tell me if it wanted to be a prose poem or an unrhymed sonnet, or to tell me when it was finished. I try not to boss my poems around, but as much as possible to let them be.

ALU: If you were to set your collection to a soundtrack, what song is at the top of the listing?

Sue Sorensen: Music was significant in the composition of Acutely Life. The writing of my longest suite of poems, about Bill Evans, was accompanied by many, many albums of his jazz compositions. There are other jazz influences here – I love Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker. I probably listened to a lot of Radiohead and Talking Heads during the time of writing the book, and also my punk heroes like Bob Mould and X. I have a poem about Mick Jagger that is scored with the Rolling Stones song “Wild Horses” and my James Bond poem, “Unsuitable Role Model,” should of course be accompanied by one of those famous Bond theme tunes. (I’m particularly fond of “Skyfall” and “Live and Let Die.”)