When we mail out each issue to contributors, we encourage them to let us know if they’d like to expand the context for their work in our pages, via our blog. For Issue 15.2, we’ve heard from several writers; the latest is Sophie Klahr, who’s interested in explaining the impetus behind her two poems in our pages, both from a series titled Like Nebraska. Here’s what she had to say about them:
Sophie Klahr: There is something to be said for looking out the window and trying to write what is there. Four years ago, I looked out of a window in my room in a Motel 6. This was in Colorado, a small rural town that seemed more a scattering of houses than a town, ill equipped to hold travelers. Only three cars in the parking lot, an abandoned restaurant in the lot beside the motel. My room was situated in the back of the building. It was entirely quiet. When I looked out the window of my room, I saw a fenced-in field, and a horse in that field. And beyond those fields, more fields, and mountains, and Nebraska. Looking out that window is where Like Nebraska began in my head.
A few days later, the poems started as an exercise. I was reading Frank Stanford and had decided to read nothing but Frank Stanford for an entire month. I was caught by simile after simile and gave myself an exercise—one poem a day, beginning with a simile. It’s not my usual fashion to write with a type of prompt. But at the time, I was falling out of love with someone and into love with another. I was distracted, couldn’t sleep. Simile was structure. Stanford was dependable in his mystery. I was living for a second month in rural Nebraska. There was much to see, to listen to. I wrote a poem about being where I was, every day for a month.
Two months in Nebraska turned into four, then six and a half, then fifteen bright spots of time over five years. In between my scattered months of life in Nebraska, there was life in one part of California or another, life in Pennsylvania, life in Texas. I got a storage unit. I stopped having a permanent address. Life elsewhere became what was in between life in Nebraska.
The opening poem of Like Nebraska—[“She leans like a ladder”], one of the two that appears in this issue—sprung from the afternoon I looked outside that window of a Motel 6. But there are a little over two dozen poems in the sequence, most others published or forthcoming across ten different publications. In a way, it feels as if pieces of a living being have been scattered, each part able to still breathe and speak, but the full body itself remains unseen by any reader other than me. Some day they will come together. For now, the pieces live alone, I hope, with you.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016). Her work appears in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Blackbird, AGNI, and other publications. She has no permanent residence.
(To read more great poetry from Issue 15.2, you can buy copies of the issue in our online store, including the digital version, which is just $5.)
