The striking poetry of Jeffrey Skinner and Sarah Gorham make them at once similar and different. Their shared experiences of marriage and family inevitably invite comparisons between their poetry. Gorham’s poetry is smoothly articulated, with a surprisingly tough underside despite the elegance of her delicate wording. Her language holds back just where it needs to, meticulously compressing her lines down with each essential word. She writes about the coming together of separate lives through marriage, motherhood, and addictions within the family. Skinner deals with similar issues, but he focuses more on the condition and state of rising and falling. His poetry is often bittersweet. It has a skepticism and wry sense of humor, which enables him to approach the subject of mortality in an insightful and deep way. He also approaches the themes of poetry as art, the workplace and the working lifestyle with a raw sense of the absurd. Although Skinner and Gorham are different poets with distinct voices, parallels exist in their subtly effortless and unmartyred descriptions of the human tragedies that lie beneath the surface of everyday life.

Skinner is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. He has published four books of poetry—Late Stars, A Guide to Forgetting (a National Poetry Series selection), The Company of Heaven, and Gender Studies—and has appeared regularly in The Kenyon Review, The Nation and The New Yorker. He has published The Night Lifted Us and Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction and Deliverance (1997) with Gorham. Skinner has received numerous grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997 he was the Poet-in-Residence at the Frost House and, in 2002, he was the Poet-in-Residence at the James Merrill House with Gorham.

Gorham is editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books which she founded in 1994. She has published three books of poetry—Don’t Go Back to Sleep, The Tension Zone, and The Cure—and her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, which earned her the Carolyn Kizer Award (1991). She has received grants and fellowships from the Kentucky State Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Delaware State Arts Council, the Connecticut Commission on Arts, Yaddo, and MacPowell. She and Skinner, and their two daughters, Laura and Bonnie, live in Louisville, Kentucky.

Kenyon Review Associate Emma Bellamy interviewed Skinner and Gorham when they visited Kenyon College to read their poetry.

The Kenyon Review: As a couple composed of two professional poets, do you attempt to keep the professional facet of your work separate from the personal aspects that inspire it, or do you find yourselves regularly competing, cooperating, and critiquing each other’s work?

Jeffrey Skinner: It’s a little bit of each actually. It turned out to be ninety-nine percent a blessing that we’re both poets. We were worried about that at the beginning, but when you fall in love, you fall in love. It’s turned out that we’ve become each other’s best readers, so we have a built-in editor in our marriage. You need that badly as a poet to keep yourself in line, to make sure that you’re not delusional about your own work. We’re both good readers, so that part of it is terrific. Also the fact that the trials, tribulations, and joys of being a poet, of being a writer in America, which is not a high profile occupation, aren’t understood by everybody, but if you have a poet, they do understand. So we can share the parts of that.

Sarah Gorham: Well, I think it’s hard to separate the professional and the personal especially in the kind of work that we do. So it’s all integrated one way or another. We’ve also known each other for twenty-three years. Over that period of time our careers have risen and fallen, risen and fallen. We’ve realized there’s a cycle to our careers, so the competition is not anywhere near as keen as it might be. But the main thing is that has never really stood in the way of our marriage and our relationship as poets. I think that we critique each other’s work, we support each other’s work, and we encourage and reassure each other when things are not so great. So it’s a much more productive relationship both professionally and personally.

KR: You were both Writers-in-Residence at the James Merrill House and I’ve read Sarah describing it as a very idyllic environment. Do you find it easier to write when you are in a time and place where you are expected to do only that, or does better creative inspiration come to you in the unplanned, unstructured moments of everyday life?

JS: I don’t know anything about an unplanned, unstructured everyday life [Sarah laughs]. My life is—I think both of our lives are—very structured. Being a professor, I have more time that is unstructured, but it’s generally absorbed by my duties as a teacher. One of the reasons I went into teaching is because I have the summer off. The time that we had at the Merrill House was extremely productive, and we love that. We love those times when we get some sabbatical, some time off, that we can spend devoted to writing because you need a chance to clear the mind and the spirit of the everyday. The everyday is inspiration, but I find it personally hard to write out of that inspiration because it’s too busy and my mind is cluttered with things. The wiping away and the emptying is a necessary part of writing for me. We do look forward to that. But I think that real writers will write no matter what. I don’t think they should be forced, if they can help it, to write out of extreme difficulty. I don’t like the idea that writers have to suffer to do their art. All human beings have to suffer and, therefore, they have access to their art. We look forward to those times away. They’re very productive and they’re wonderful. We get to do what we truly do.

SG: Well, we’ve had several retreats of sorts. At Yaddo for two months, where we met. We went back five years later and the year after that we went to the Frost place and the Stonington House as well. I think that in the long run the material that I produced at those places was not necessarily better than what I produce every day, getting up at 6:30 in the morning and writing for an hour and a half before I went to work. What was different was that I had the kind of meditative time and space to be able to read voraciously. You know, you read one thing and you see something exploited there and you follow that tributary to another source. That kind of time and relaxation is just nonexistent in my normal life. I’m lucky if I can read for twenty minutes before I go to sleep at night, that’s not manuscripts, that’s books. That’s what I really value in those retreats.

KR: What experiences or people whom you’ve encountered in life have had the greatest impact on your writing and why?

JS: That’s a good question. [pause] I would say that they come from very different places. In terms of my life as a writer and my models for being a poet in America—and I think a poet needs those physical models, those people that you can say “That looks like something I could be or do”—I had two teachers. Dick Allen in Connecticut and then Phil Levine in graduate school showed me that it was possible to be a male poet in the United States at this particular time and live a decent and more exciting and productive life, both interior and exterior. Those were important people to me. But I also treasure the people who’ve helped me on the way. There have been a lot of people who have helped me from the very beginning and who encouraged me.

I also remember the people who I worked with when I was not in teaching, when I was not in the academy, when I was just in regular day-to-day jobs. Frank Dunn and Ray Mancini, there’s a bunch of guys I know, and women, who I’ve worked with in laboring jobs, in working-class jobs, and they were inspiration to me too, just to know that there wasn’t one type of person, that everybody has a spirit that’s valuable. That everybody has a life that’s interesting. This is hard to articulate, but you ask a difficult question, that if I thought more about it I might give a different answer. But there are those two or three different types of people: the models, the encouragers, and, then, the people that I treasure because they were just contemporaries. Victor Hugo used to say that we should love each other just because we live at the same time. I always found that very poignant. Even Emma and Jeff and Sarah live at the same time, so there we have a special relationship, more special than those people who lived in another century. I think that there’s some truth to that. But the people who I lived with and worked with before I got in the academy were important.

SG: I would have to say that my mentor, Ira Sadoff at Antioch College, was the one person who made a huge difference in my poetry career. He was a very demanding teacher. He led a workshop in advanced poetry writing and took mercy on me because I was a good student, and accepted me into this workshop even though I was a terrible poet at the time. He required of us three poems a week, reading five collections of poetry and responding to them individually. It was very demanding, I can’t even imagine keeping up with that kind of course load right now. What it did is force me to take risks, force me to move much faster than I would normally move. It was a turning point, and then I went on to graduate school. But he was very nurturing and very demanding and that combination was perfect for my work and also just threw a lot of books at me.

Then in graduate school I had a kind of lukewarm experience. I think I basically learned how to write the proper graduate program poem, the MFA poem, which is competent and not terribly earth-shattering. But then I left graduate school and I swam around for about five years trying to find my voice, because, previous to that, I had been writing in the persona of a man. I would actually sit down, pretend I was a man, and write a poem in the voice of a man. I think that was a way of modeling myself after the writers who surrounded me, most of whom were male. There were a couple of women who I read. But, once I had children, once I was married and had children, it became false. I had to figure out where my voice was, where my center was. I think that the rest of my life has been a journey toward that, just sort of fleshing out what my unique voice is. I think I’ve definitely arrived, at about the age of forty. I’d have to say those were two important experiences for me; one was my mentor and the other one was having children, which sounds really corny. But it forced me to separate and to keep alive my professional life as opposed to having kids, which forces you to squash your ego flat. [laughs] So there’s a matter of strong will and perseverance. I’d have to say that’s probably it.

KR: What writers have influenced you most and why?

SG: I studied with Louise Glück and she was one of the four or five women publishing then whom I admired. She has been my influence for the last . . . I don’t know . . . for the first maybe ten or fifteen years of my life she was the major influence. I wrote very concrete, dense poems with not a lot of relaxation and I have gradually begun to break away from that impulse. I would have to say that more recently, not that I’m influenced by them, but I adore Anne Carson, I’ve read everything she’s written. I adore the Eastern European poets; I love their sharp, jagged surreality. I’m also influenced by theology; I read a lot of C. S Lewis, a lot of Emerson. I love Emerson; I always go back to him. His essays are complete poems. I read a lot of fiction and lyric nonfiction.

JS: I have been influenced by everything I’ve read, particularly things I love, starting with the Mowgli stories of Kipling, Sherlock Holmes, then Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. I love those stories. In poetry though, T. S Eliot has always been my touchstone, has always been one that I go back and back and back to, and he never disappoints. He always seems to have more to tell me. I do go back, particularly to the Four Quartets, over and over again, although I read all of the corpuses, it’s not so large that one can’t do that. I always find that there’s everything I need to know about prosody and about the turn of the language except for the contemporary idiom, which is where I come in, since poetry has to be renewed. So I love Eliot. I’m particularly fond of the moderns actually. I love Yeats, I love Hardy. In contemporary poets I love Merwin and Louise Glück has always been a very strong model for me. I don’t know how much I am influenced by her or others, but I know that—

SG: Tate.

JS: James Tate somewhat, but I think I come at Tate through the Eastern Europeans who I also love. There’s a thing called Poet of the Month and they’ve asked me to write something in there, you can find it on the web actually, in that I say that I would like to be the love child of an Eastern European poet and Dylan Thomas. I’d like to write with the philosophical ease and scope and long view that the Eastern Europeans have but in a way as if it’s seen by a drunken Welshman.

KR: You jointly compiled and edited Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance in 1997. In the foreword you talk about how alcoholism is a large, oversimplified problem in America which people avoid discussing. What else prompted you to gather these various stories about alcoholism?

SG: Well, we’re a family in which alcoholism has had a considerable impact. There’s another influence for you, another experience that has caused us to both turn towards in our writing. Jeffrey quit drinking ten years ago, eleven years ago?

JS: 1990, almost fifteen years ago.

SG: Right. His father was an alcoholic and quit drinking. Jeffrey was an alcoholic and quit drinking. The family lived with the affects of alcoholism and fortunately came out on the other side far stronger for it. So the subject was obviously dear and near to us. It’s far reaching; it appears in a lot of people’s homes. We always wanted to be able to collect the poems that dealt with it in various ways. It’s an interesting subject because most people do not want to admit they have a problem. There’s a secretive element to it that gets transferred to the poetry. Many poems in that anthology overtly discuss the subject, there are a few poets who do that, and others approach it obliquely. It’s the nature of the subject matter. We just wanted to collect and edit a book that would have an impact on people’s lives and also some reassurance. We figured it would do well since ten percent of the population is alcoholic and then there are all those family members affected by it. It did do well. We had lots of people come up to us, privately of course, who said they were happy to receive the book, happy to read it, glad that it was there.

JS: All of the above for me, plus a couple facts. One, I think there’s still a stigma attached to alcoholism and to addiction. At the same time there’s this weird glamorization of the artist as wildman, as drunk. I think that it’s a way of distancing people who are odd, different, a.k.a. artists in society, so that the normal population doesn’t really have to pay attention to them. If we can say that they’re drunks or they’re crazy, one doesn’t have to attend to the arts. That’s a slightly different problem. But one of the reasons I was interested in doing that book was the mythology that still surrounds artists, which is that you have to be kind of drunk and crazy to produce art. I didn’t want that to be true because for alcoholics and for addicts this is a life and death matter, it’s not a metaphysical matter. It’s a life and death matter. So to be sober and to still keep writing I had to understand that that was not true, that one could be a healthy and non-self-destructive person and still make good art. I wanted other people to know that too. I wanted to destroy that mythology. It was very popular and had a great currency in the time of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, even in the Beat poets. You still see students attracted to that mythology because there’s kind of a natural rebellion to students anyway. They want to react against convention, but it should not include addiction or alcoholism. I want students to know they do not have to be drinkers or crazy, self-destructive people in order to make art. They do not.

KR: You also talk in the Foreword about how drinking tries to fill an emptiness within a person’s soul, but that poetry can also fill this emptiness, that sometimes the writers who are alcoholics are surviving because they engage in poetry. Do you personally view poetry as your spiritually sustaining or healing outlet?

JS: Yeah, it’s soul food.

SG: Absolutely.

JS: Poetry’s soul food. If it has any function, that’s its function. It is to enlarge the soul and spirit. R. P. Blackmore said of Robert Lowell’s work, it enlarges the available stock of reality. I always liked that quote, just to think about it in terms of poetry in general. It increases the amount of reality we can have—to read poetry, to let it into us, to accept it as work of human creation and production.

SG: And that’s both in reading it and writing it.

KR: In your most recent poetry collections you have gathered poems with a wide range of themes. Is there any particular system or method which you use to group your collections together, giving them a cohesive shape through their themes and styles?

SG: I think we both write in very much the same way, which is we just write the next poem without a theme or particular, overarching idea in mind. But I think we each have obsessions as well. I’m obsessed for example with, or at least I see this cropping up in poems again and again, what I call in the title of my second book, The Tension Zone, which is a place where two different biomes, that’s an ecological term, overlap and create a new biome called an ecotome. That sort of fusion between two separate items and the order between them—how it switches and changes and fuses one into the other—has always been very interesting to me. I’ll approach it from a variety of ways. One is, I have a poem called “The Tension Zone” which specifically speaks to that. I have poems about blending into another person, where what you call your own, what you call his or hers changes. I’m writing a lyric essay right now on the Japanese ceramic form called “Neriage,” which is where you blend two different colors of clay into a pattern. I’m using that as a metaphor for a good marriage. That’s one of my obsessions. Polarity is part of that, and I’ve used a lot of Emerson’s essays toward that, reading them over and over again. Otherwise we just write what we want to write at the moment. I have a series of cup poems in the latest book, The Cure—one called “Spilled Cup,” another one called “Shared Cup,” another one called “Champagne Flute, Derby Glass.” I just wrote this series of poems on the idea of a cup. It was a very rich subject for me. It automatically led to the idea of alcoholism in the center section of a book called The Family Afterward. It’s the story of a family’s recovery from alcoholism. A couple of those—“Smashed Glass,” “Shot Glass,” and “Derby Glass”—are all within that section. It worked out very well that way. That’s where it is; we write the next poem and then we see how it fits together later.

JS: She’s pretty much covered it. I think people naturally in their lives go through stages and go through periods where one experience predominates and so arranges the psyche around that, or through that, experience. For you, people in college, that’s trying to figure out who you are, what you’re going to do with your life. That would be something that you would be unwise to avoid if you were writing poetry. That would be the prevailing subject. How you write about that is different in every case. I am for subject in poetry. I like the idea that we can write about something other than our own pure consciousness. Writing about our own consciousness moves our language and thought as we come in a sort of dominant mode. I think that that’s a trend that will stop when we get back to normal, to paying attention to the world as it is. Over the past six months my father died, and, before that, he was ill. That was heavy on my mind for years. The next book that I publish, which will come out next year, will reflect that. There’s a sort of automatic organization to books. You just have to see it, see what it is and stand back enough from the work to see “Oh, this book is about that. Let me take out the points that aren’t about that and arrange them in such a way that makes sense.”

SG: In that way, editing at Sarabande—it’s hard to know what came first—has helped us edit our own collections. Or I guess we knew how to edit our own collections and that helped us edit Sarabande collections. I don’t know exactly.

JS: Well, they’re symbiotic.

SG: Yes, they are. So we have a good sense of how to shape a book and that’s helped over the years.

KR: On the subject of Sarabande, the name is very original. What does the name say about your philosophy as a publishing company?

SG: Good question. I have a perfect answer to that. We actually discovered the name “Sarabande” through a very plebian method. We searched indexes in musical dictionaries, bird dictionaries, astronomy dictionaries, and et cetera. We settled on that particular word because it was not taken by any of the other two million publishers there are. But then I did a little research into it. It’s a musical form. I discovered that it originated in the New World as an Aztec mating ritual. Basically it was a sex dance, almost the way birds approach each other during mating season. The male and female human beings did that in this dance. The Spaniards were entranced by it. They were blown away and they imported it, or exported it, to Spain, where it was promptly banned in 1583 under penalty of death. It disappeared out of sight for a while and then the Germans and the French and the English picked it up again and made it into a very stately, elegant dance with the kind of music that you hear now and play now on the piano in Bach’s suites, for example. But we loved this idea of an accomplished, professional, elegant, beautiful surface with a wild and deep underside. That is kind of the work that we look for. We want language that’s fresh, startling, amazing, but it has to have some heart to it. It has to have a depth of emotion to it. It can’t just be all skittering on the surface. That’s our philosophy and that’s what we look for in our books.

KR: How did you go about the whole process of starting a publishing company? What were the challenges? How did you balance them with the demands of your everyday life as a mother, a wife, and a writer?

SG: The first year and a half I was lucky enough to have the support of a benefactor who allowed me to spend that much time researching. Rather than starting the press right away I talked to people. I talked to other editors, other marketing directors, other distributors, and I really gained a lot of experience from that. So once we sat down to actually start the press and figure out how we were going to collect our books, I had a wealth of knowledge behind me. This doesn’t mean that we didn’t make any mistakes. For example, we applied for nonprofit status and were turned down, which was a blow. Then we reapplied with a good lawyer and got nonprofit status. I think that we were very careful about it, approaching it with diligence and a little bit of assertiveness, never being happy with the last success, always wanting to do the next thing a little bit better. That way we moved forward very rapidly and gained a national reputation within ten years, within five years really. Now we have grants from the NEA, from the Reader’s Digest Fund, and so on.

As far as how it fits into my life, I have a good schedule. I go to work at nine and come home at three, because after three I’m dead to the world anyway. I get up very early in the morning and do some writing before I go to work and then do six hours of intense Sarabandistic material. The girls were basically in school, on their own and pretty independent when we started Sarabande. It wasn’t like we had infants. We could not have done it at that point. I give my employees six weeks of vacation a year because they are all writers and I think they should continue in their writing careers. I don’t want to swallow up their writing lives with Sarabande. So I get six weeks of vacation, too. We use those to write. It’s a balancing game, but I always like to be doing more than one thing at a time anyway. I like to multitask.

JS: When we had the press at the beginning it was a busy life, but not any busier than any couple that has two kids. I would have to pick the kids up and take them to soccer games, or Sarah would take them to soccer games after work. We’d have to do all the lessons—the music lessons, the clubs, when they wanted to go roller-skating—there was all that carting around before they learned to drive that we shared. But that was the same as with any couple. We just had these interesting jobs. Sarah and I were lucky because it came at the right time.

KR: You’ve said before that you began Sarabande Books as an alternative to mainstream publishing, a way to foster writers of short stories and poetry in a smaller, more personalized environment. Now that Sarabande has been in business for almost ten years, do you think that you’ve achieved your goals?

SG: Oh, yeah. I think that it’s only gotten worse since we founded Sarabande. In the mid-nineties, which was after the economic boom, the independent presses and mainstream houses were basically shutting their doors to poetry and short fiction. It was a really bleak outlook then. We were extremely important for people. The first year we ran our contest we got fifteen hundred poetry manuscripts and seven hundred and fifty fiction ones. The numbers have dropped a bit since then, but not much. It’s clear to us that there’s a drastic need for this. We have established ourselves and continue to remain devoted to this mission. We’ve had temptations to do a mystery book or something else, but that would be at the loss of another poetry or short fiction book. We’ve stuck to it and I think we have to stick to it. In the meantime, I think there have been other presses that have cropped up here and there. It’s a good period for writers of these two genres, not at the mainstream publishing houses, though.

We’ve published eighty collections. Out of those eighty collections, twenty-four of those writers got tenure-track teaching jobs, which is a result of publishing the first book. Fifteen have gone on to get agents who have marketed their books to mainstream houses. So we’ve served as a kind of launching pad for, at least, fiction writers. They’ve placed their books at Scribner or Random House or that kind of thing. Two of the books whose authors we started at our press, John Silver and Kate Walburt, are now National Book Award finalists, out of a list of four or five I think. So that’s very gratifying to us that we serve as this place to nurture and help along a new writer, give them a tremendous launch. They’re on their own after that. A lot of them come back to us because we treat them better than anybody else will. It’s really very rewarding.

KR: Where do you see or would you like to see Sarabande Books in ten years?

SG: A lot of people say “We’d like to be doing twenty books a year.” In ten years I would like to be doing basically the same thing. I would like to have a few more creative nonfiction books on our list. I’d like to have a few more big names. I’d like to be doing twelve books a year instead of ten, doing one every month, with the same staff. I love our staff; they’re like family to me. They’re all super-good. I’d like it to be easier to fundraise. I’d like to have a secure financial base for the press. We’d like to have an endowment. That would be great, but everybody wants an endowment.

KR: You obviously have some ties to Kenyon because your daughter goes here. How would you compare Kenyon as a place for young student writers to grow and get personalized attention to Sarabande Books for professional writers?

[SG laughs]

JS: That’s an interesting question. It’s sort of a different mission. The mission of Sarabande is to discover young writers, yes, but they have to be at a level of professionalism that you’re not going to find in college, generally speaking. They’re not college age, they’re beyond that. We have some authors who published their first book with us in their early thirties. I can’t think of any in their twenties who publish with us. Writing is one of those arts where people are lucky because they mature a little later. They don’t have to accomplish everything by the age of twenty-five. But with those young writers, we get them through the ropes of the first professional kinds of challenges. We are serious about helping them with that and really feel proud of the fact that we’re an enormous guide and mentor for those people we’ve published. That is similar to the college situation.

I teach, too, so I know that with my students, and at Kenyon I know, that it’s a very important thing to mentor students here, to guide them through the first wickets of thinking about the writing, of improving the writing, of focusing students’ ideas about whether this is what they really want to do or not, and giving them all the resources and the books and the intelligent teaching and support that they need in order to make those kinds of decisions. So it’s a little different mission. I would compare Kenyon favorably to that, because I think there’s a lot of care here, there’s a lot of interest in writing. One of the reasons Laura went here is that, historically, it’s a writing school. It’s a school that values the literary arts. Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, that whole crowd having been in residence here and taught here and established a reputation for Kenyon. It’s continued. It’s a great school for young writers.

SG: I would have to add to that and elaborate on one thing. Sarabande is an independent press, which means we don’t have a corporate entity telling us what to do, what to publish, and that kind of thing. We market chiefly to independent bookstores, though their numbers are dropping like crazy. What that independence means to me is that we can nurture writers. We have an old-fashioned relationship with writers. We can bring in some people who have a raw talent, who just don’t know how to punctuate or organize their material, and we do that. We spend a lot of time and lot of energy saving books for our writers. We also revive mid-career writers, people who have lost their publishers because they don’t sell enough. Sarabande will rediscover them, even after twenty-five years. That sort of one-to-one contact, that is so rare in the corporate world, ties us into what Kenyon likes to do, too.

Emma Bellamy is a student at Kenyon College where she volunteers as an associate for the Kenyon Review.