In her debut poetry collection Sugar Work, Katie Marya envisions America as a land of libidinal excess. It is Las Vegas, fried chicken, “Material Girl,” Atlanta strip clubs, and the cocaine that fueled her father. This freedom to embrace excess in our culture can be startling, perhaps overwhelming. Marya relates, in her title poem, how fraught it can feel just to eat a slice of cake, something her mother ate with relish. “I thought there was no / safe amount of sugar / so I took none.” In her imagination, Marya’s parents assume an epic quality because of the excess of their lifestyles. She writes of father, “Not here / but in the streets / lost in the animal—/ your life cracking / in the Atlanta sun.” Throughout Sugar Work, Marya asks how we might build a healthy relationship with pleasure. But hers is not a puritanical plea for restraint or against the pursuit of pleasure. Rather, she embraces nuance: pleasure, while stultifying, is also satisfying, comforting, holy, even.
I talked with Marya over Zoom to discuss Louise Glück, drummers, grief, sonnet writing, and Spaghetti-Os.
Jason Chen: You’re currently finishing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Do you consider yourself a scholar as much as you are an artist?
Katie Marya: No, but I want to. I think I think like a scholar. I don’t know if I do the work like a scholar. I just figured out in my fifth year maybe what research actually is, so I’m working on a second book project, and it will be very research-heavy, and that research really excites me because the question is so big, and so there’s a lot of freedom to explore this topic that I need to understand so that I can write this book. But the comprehensive exams where I’m confined to a time period, and I have to study—I don’t know. I’m studying Louise Glück and Lucille Clifton, and I have a lot to say about their work, but when I get down to the nitty gritty and am saying it in an essay, I still sort of inhabit this weird, performative voice. I think because I’m just a first-gen college student and am afraid of a big bad wizard telling me I’m dumb. But when I can do research that serves the art and not just a scholarly paper, then yes, I’m a good scholar.
JC: You mentioned Louise Glück. I think that’s a fantastic way to segue into our conversation because she’s the first page of your book. What do you get from Glück? How does she inspire you?
KM: I mean, I think she’s just brutal. I first read her when I was getting my MFA, and one of my professors had recommended The Wild Iris to me as a study in persona and form. I was just floored by that book because it’s structured around the monk’s spiritual day, even though it really has nothing to do with that. It felt like a book that was godless and full of god at the same time, and I think that was the only way I could get on board with spirituality. There’s something bleak about her that feels good to me. I also think she was a white woman who was writing about white femininity maybe unconsciously, because she never brings up race in her work. But at least as a woman—and I think as a white woman—there was so much of her work around female desire that felt real to me and suffocating and limiting, and I think I look to her to identify that bleakness so that I could write through it, maybe in a different way being a younger generation than her. Now I’m getting to a point where I’m like, Okay, I’m going to stop reading Louise Glück because it’s devastating and I’ve read it so much. I read Glück and I’m like, My soul is empty, and that is its pure form. And then I’m like, Wait a second! There has to be another mode of existing! She’s just the master of the short line. She’s also the master of colloquial language—I think that really mattered to me. That as austere as she is, the words are simple and plain, and I think that drives a lot of people to her.
JC: You mention the descriptors “bleak,” “brutal,” “empty.” I think to other poets, those are actually exciting words, but to readers who are new to poetry, how would you explain the appeal of that’s brutal and bleak and empty?
KM: I was just having a conversation with one of my dearest friends about Carl Sagan. We were in Colorado on this beautiful hike, and we were talking about how when someone dies, people say all kinds of things, especially about the afterlife. In the South, there’s even this obsession with the afterlife. Like, “Oh, was he saved. Did he make it into heaven?” And all the flowery things people say—none of it feels true to me. It feels like an offense to my existence, that need for explanation amid what’s ultimately pretty unexplainable. I think the bleakness, the attraction to what’s bleak, is a kind of honesty that has no illusions about what’s really going on, and what can I make from that place. Can I make joy from that place? Versus the illusion of whatever we want to believe, religion, or life, and beauty. That draws me to Glück because I feel like I’m getting someone who’s not pulling any punches on me.
JC: You’re mentioning spirituality—death, the afterlife, godlessness, god. Where are you right now in your spiritual journey?
KM: That’s such a good question. Going back to the idea of bleakness, I think especially as a woman, finding things that are pleasurable to me has been a journey because we live in this culture that continuously pushes women to just perform for men, or perform for other people. So if I can start with that raw, bleak state, then maybe I’ll actually be able to identify what’s pleasurable to me, and not just accept whatever received narrative about my life that I’m being offered or that I’m offering myself. I’m interested in being very much on earth in a way that offers pleasure and receives pleasure. And not happy. I’m pretty uninterested in happiness. I don’t know. I could be convinced.
I’ve been in some pretty severe therapy for the last two years. I did a year of EMDR, and now I’m doing what’s called brainspotting, and I think my spirituality is actually really connected to therapy. And I’m really seeing results. A change in my habits. A change in the way I talk to myself. And I think that that feels spiritual because it makes me feel more grounded, more on earth, and not living all up in my head all the time. That’s about as spiritual as I get. I love to dance, and I love to be outside. Those feel like spiritual things. Dancing, and eating good food. Feeding people good food. But I don’t know if I believe in the heavens or a god that has a will for us. I mostly just believe in chaos.
JC: Do you think EDMR or brainspotting have left marks on your poems?
KM: Not yet. I started writing Sugar Work in 2014, and a lot happened specifically in the last three years, so they have left marks on the poems I’m working on now, certainly. When I read Sugar Work now, I can see how tightly wound I was, and how I needed to assert a level of control, and I think EMDR and brainspotting and just the things I’ve been through the last couple of years, my approach is different. I’m still very obsessed with a clean poem, whatever that means, but the way I write feels looser, I think I trust the process more, I’m a little tiny bit messier in the way I keep track of things, so that feels good.
JC: What does a looser poem look like to you?
KM: The poem “Exaltation,” which I wrote toward the end of when I was writing Sugar Work, is a hint at some of the future forms. But right now I’m very interested in a longer line. I’m very interested in sections without titles. I mean, I say that, but I’m also working on a sonnet crown that’s still tightly wound. I think I’m just more open to very different forms just sitting next to each other. At the same time, I have an obsession with clarity. I wanted my book to be accessible. I did not want someone to come to the page and be so baffled by an image that they couldn’t place it, and I think part of that is just my Southern hospitality. That’s how I was coming to Sugar Work, and I feel less attached to that now. I didn’t want to write a book where the reader felt smothered by my own didactic teacher-self. I think the more space for the reader the better, but I think I’m just learning to trust that a little bit more, and that makes sense. You have a first book, and then you settle down a little bit, and you’re not like, “Look at me! Look at me!”
The biggest thing that has shifted for me—and I guess I’ll share this now. This is my second interview for Sugar Work, so I’m still figuring out how to talk about my work, but my brother passed away, it will be three years ago in October, very suddenly of a Fentanyl overdose, and grief changes you. It just changes everything about you. So I think I’m slower at writing. I don’t really hammer out poems anymore, and certainly not the project I am working on, which is largely about my brother, so I think the root of everything I am saying is, I just experienced some really hard shit, and it calmed me down. It’s weird to say that I’m thankful for the grief. I’m not thankful for the grief in a suffering artist kind of way, but I am thankful that I’ve learned how to take care of myself so that I can make art. At the beginning of Sugar Work I’m not sure I knew yet how to really take care of myself.
JC: Do you think grief has made you cleaner or looser, as a poet?
KM: I think both. Definitely looser. Definitely more committed to my vision, even if I can’t fully see it yet. I trust more that I have this thing in my mind, and I’m going to work it out, and I’m committed to working it out. I think when you lose someone, when someone dies young, and you love them so much, and you have all this love that you need to put some place, which is what they say about grief. I feel like in every situation, as an artist now, I’m very quick to ask myself, What kind of patience would I have offered my brother, and am I offering that to myself? That feels very spiritual.
JC: Is every poem you write about a person?
KM: What an interesting question. Yeah, probably. Even if they’re not at the center. Everything about Sugar Work was about my mom, my dad. At the center there’s always a relationship. Weird.
JC: You mentioned you’re writing a crown of sonnets—are those also for someone?
KM: They’re morphing a lot, but they’re essentially persona poems about various drummers. I have an ode in there to Chris Dave, and to Karen Carpenter, and to J Dilla. Each one is either an ode to a drummer or I’m inhabiting the voice of a drummer.
JC: Do you go Elizabeth or Petrarchan?
KM: Elizabethan.
JC: Why do you think you’re drawn to that form?
KM: I don’t know. Maybe because I was really inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard. She has a crown of sonnets that are persona poems, and I feel like those are Elizabethan. But now I’m like, “Oh shit, what if they’re not?” But that was the main inspiration. That’s a book that I’ve read over and over again and love so much. So when I was thinking through this project, that was one thing I wanted to do.
JC: To end our interview, I’d like to ask you: What’s one small pleasure that our readers should experience today?
KM: I love that. I just think whatever food you’re eating, whether it’s Spaghetti-Os out of the can or the freshest most beautiful tomato, that you should just take a moment and be grateful for nourishment, even if that nourishment is filled with things that probably shouldn’t be in our bodies. A lot had to go into a can of Spaghetti-Os. I think just the sanctity of having a moment to eat and not taking that for granted is really important to me. I hope that the readers are enjoying whatever they’re munching on today.
