The Shore Interview #41: Martha Silano

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: In your poem, “Possible Diagnosis,” the speaker poses several questions ranging from, “What’s that stone, that one stone edging / toward the edge?,” to the one word, “God?” But the poem rejects resolving these questions outright, its unresolved nature even hinted at in its tercet form. Can you speak to how the act of questioning informs your work and why it seemed essential to this piece in particular?

MS: I guess I was asking questions—some that cannot be answered—because the speaker is grappling with finding out she very likely has a terminal illness. It sure seemed to me like the right time to ask unresolvable questions! I do write a lot of poems in tercets. I hadn’t really thought about why that is, but perhaps it’s to up the unresolvable. I do have a soft spot for poems made up entirely of questions—what a feat to pull that off. In this poem, maybe I ask questions because I’d been asked so many by doctors, including MRI technicians, laryngologists and finally neurologists, on the way toward a diagnosis. Maybe I was tired of being asked so many questions about my symptoms. I do often ask questions in my poems—I mostly rely on intuition and the cadence of the line when it comes to whether to phrase something as question versus a statement. In this poem I was very much focused on, instead of providing the reader with what actually happened, trying to say things with bizarre and arresting images. I hope I was able to pull that off.

EF: The speaker describes people in interesting ways: a friend as a “dictator of snow,” the mother as a “cheerer-upper,” even the speaker as a “witch.” When writing, do you think there is particular potential in explicitly assigning or naming roles for people to play in poems?

MS: I do not usually give people roles in poems. I am not sure exactly why I decided to do that in this particular poem. In all honesty, I don’t recall a lot about the making of this poem, except that I recall it came to me rather quickly, and it required minimal editing. It was more like a taking dictation situation.

EF: I was fascinated by the image of the “spotted towhee” in the final stanza. It functions as a hinge between the speaker carrying “cloth napkins” “down to their home / in a living room drawer” and the spider epiphany at the end. In such a personal and interpersonal poem, what drew you to nature, or the exterior world, in bringing equilibrium to destabilizing possibilities?

MS: I brought in the spotted towhee because I’d seen one earlier that week, “making a ruckus in dead leaves.” I guess the word dead was no accident, but at the time it felt like I was simply sharing a recently witnessed image. I almost always put at least one bird in my poems—I love birds and derive so much pleasure from them. The leaves are dead, though, and a spider is being crushed…or maybe it will be spared.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

MS: I love 32 Poems, DIAGRAM, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, Sixth Finch, ONE ART, Image, The Shore and so many more.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

MS: I feel like Kelli Russell Agodon’s “Devotion for a Cosmo That Can’t Contain Us” and Ronda
Piszk Broatch’s “Writing a Poem with a Glass of Wine or Two, and Three Pieces of Chocolate” are in conversation with one another. I love how both of these poems run on playfulness, inventiveness and originality on the subject of love. In Agodon’s poem, gorgeous and apt images, such as “radiant as the nebula / starlings we fell in love with” pair well with Broach’s attention to the cosmic in “Time doesn’t mean anything to you, but you’re all about / gravity, and space is your natural environment.” It’s not easy to write about romantic love, but Agodon and Broach make it look easy…and do it spectacularly well.

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Martha Silano is a poet living with a diagnosis of ALS. Her most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry series, among others. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.