The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

When Poetry Intersects with Chronic Illness: An Interview with Sandy Longhorn

Sandy Longhorn’s Louise Bogan Award winning collection, The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, reads more like a story than a poetry collection. Her world-building flourishes with a landscape of the body and the soul that seems to have gleaned from the current day a concern with how our physical health reverberates in our emotional well-being. This is timelier than ever. In this interview, Lisa Ronan engages Longhorn in conversation about her lush colloquial baroque, teaching, and how she came to poetry.

LR: Before we dive into the details of this wonderful collection, tell us about yourself. How did you come to poetry?

SL: I have been writing, like most writers, since I was a small child. It was a place to go to express myself. When I was an undergraduate, I completed an honors thesis at the college of St Benedict’s. There were three genres: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. That is when I realized I was primarily a poet. 

I chose not to go to immediately into graduate school. I worked in book selling and publishing for seven years. When I had come to the end of my rope there, I needed to find a way to sustain this avenue of creative expression. That is when I went back to graduate school. My first book, Blood Almanac, is about 75% of my master’s thesis. Then, in 2013, Jacar Press published my collection, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, about my coming of age in Northeast Iowa in an agricultural culture that is very patriarchal and what that was like.

After I had written those books, something weird happened. The poems of Alchemy of My Mortal Form were all written between August 2011 and mid-2012. It was unlike anything else I have ever written because, besides the few poems at the beginning and at the end, it is all personae. It was the first time in my life I felt like a fiction writer because I had a character that was telling a story. I was using what Maryann Saman calls contemporary Baroque language, and it had a single speaker. In the meantime, at graduate school I discovered I loved being in the classroom, so I spent a dozen years teaching English composition, intro to college writing, and creative writing. In the spring of 2015, I started a tenured track position teaching creative writing and am currently starting my tenth year here.

LR: Is there a connection between what you want your student to understand in your teaching and what you want your readers to take away from your writing?

SL: I am teaching a graduate level course this semester on literary citizenship and professional issues. The opening question is “why do you write, why are you here, and what is your goal?”

At the root of that is what brings us to the page. For me it was the great teachers who introduced me to what then was contemporary poetry – it was Plath and Sexton, it was the eighties. Then I went to college and had amazing instructors who introduced me to living, breathing poets. I was able to read the work of and meet Joy Harjo, Li-Young Lee, and Lucille Clifton in my time as an undergraduate.

When I read a poem and it takes the top of my head off—because that is what Emily Dickinson says, it's how you know it is a poem— there are those poems where you learn something about the world, but also you learn something about yourself. It might be something about how you can continue to exist in a world that is grinding you down. It might be “what do I do with the pain that has happened in life?” It could also be joyful things and gratefulness. Feeling seen in that way was vital to me as a young person and continues to be important to me today. Having that inner frisson of feeling “this person understands me, this person I am reading on the page has lived through something I have lived through” I think is important for all of us.

I write to share what I have experienced because I hope someone reading it will feel seen, feel a connection in that same way. When I talk to my students about the power of poetry, it is because –this is true for me as a reader and a writer–we can pack so much into a small space and short time. As poets, we have the opportunity to reach other people. What I hope for my students is that they will find somebody in whose work they feel seen. I teach diverse voices in poems for that reason.

LR: You say that in poetry, we have the “opportunity to pack so much into a small space.”

SL: Yes. When you talk about creative writing, there is leeway to do avant-garde things with short stories or non-fiction, but poetry lends itself to making a leap in logic or getting to a point without the chronological order you might like in narrative.

LR: That brings us to the book. The organization and structure are unique. As you said, the structure leans into narrative while still being a poetry collection.

SL: Yes, the book is unusual because the poems appear in the order I wrote them. When I submitted the manuscript, the “General Orders” were at the end of the book in an appendix, but the editor asked they be put first. She thought they introduced the book, and I agreed. 

The first poem I wrote was “Fevers of a Minor Fire.”  A big influence for me, at the time, was Lucie Brock-Broido, so The Master Letters was heavy in my mind.

My first two books were written in this plain language and Midwestern voice which was authentic to me and my childhood, but in this book, I got to break free and get into the lushness of language. I did that through a speaker that was fevered, so I could break out of the need to strip all the adjectives and notions of being plain-spoken.

The first poem arrived addressed “Dear Madam” because I was reading, as I said, the Master Letters. I was also reading Emily Dickinson’s collective letters. I have been a proud feminist all my life, so I was struck by Dickinson’s, Dear Master. Lucie Brock-Broido also has poems addressed, “Dear Master.” I thought, “No, my speaker is going to have a mentor who is a woman.” That’s how it became “Dear Madame.” Either this is a real person who has been the narrator’s mentor, or the narrator is evoking someone who can fulfill her need for a mentor figure. She has this complicated woman she “called mother by mistake.” There is a motherlessness to the speaker.

The closures with descriptors “Your Servant,” “Your Studious,” that is Lucie Brock-Broido, but I did not want to write a complete book of epistolary in diary entries or letters. I was conscious that some days the poems needed a traditional speaker in a free verse set up.

It was August, school was going to start again, I was teaching at community college, and I decided to write a poem every day for fourteen days. The day after I wrote this poem, I was casting about for what to write about. This speaker came back to me and had more to say. That became the title poem of the collection. That is where she explained her situation of being in the hospital; she started to address the doctors as “white coats.” The next day I sat down, and she had more to say. Her voice sustained me over the course of a year, and I had the manuscript done quickly after that.

In terms of structure, I am like the fiction writer who says the characters tell me what is going to happen in the story. For the first time, I didn’t have to think about which poems would go next to which.

LR: You talked about the very first poem, “Fevers of Minor Fire” and there not being a mother. The imagery of mother/daughter is a theme found throughout the collection highlighting women’s identities.

SL: There is a mentor in the poem and then there is “the woman I called mother by mistake;” they serve very different roles for the speaker. I was interested in how we as women seek out many different mothers. We look to the generation above us, and people we encounter take on maternal roles with us. There is something in the speaker that is seeking to fill the role of a mother; she does not have anyone in that role while she is at her most vulnerable.

LR: Even though your collection was written long before COVID, a description on the first page calls to mind a chemotherapy session which recalls how we were being necessarily managed during COVID.

SL: The book is looking at what happens to the mind when we are sick and institutionalized. Doctors treat her like a puzzle to solve, not like a full human being. What happens to our minds when there is no one around for us? It was the most extreme case possible to explore.

LR: The poems are about the fragility and resilience of the human body. This comes across in the closures: “Subservient, Refugee, Studious, Resilient.” The narrator’s condition did not have a linear progression though. Instead, it felt circular, spiraling upwards. 

SL: It is not a straight trajectory when you are sick. In a spiral, there is room for advances then setbacks. You rise up, but not quite, and try again.

LR: The topic seems even more pertinent now, so the book reads almost as prophetic.

SL: The book will be 10 years old this year. It means a lot to me that the book makes a connection with an audience, that it has an impact, and that people are reading it.

LR: Illness, medical treatment, and being handled by others surface in this collection. In another interview, you talked about how you were dealing with your father’s sickness. It was poignant that you also had a cat that was sick, and you said it was easier to obtain care for a pet. It brings about the conversation of healthcare. You did not dive into the political but stayed with the personal and introspective.

SL: I teach a class on political poetry; we write political poetry and read Carolyn Forche’s collection Against Forgetting with poetry of witness to frame political poetry. I agree that the political is personal, the personal is political. The most powerful political poems are steeped in the personal and report from the lived life in that moment. Those are the ones that stick with us. I did not think about writing political poems, but when I talked about themes at readings, I rallied around close examination of the medical industrial complex. At the time, I had never heard that phrase, since then I’ve heard it on NPR, CNN. It has become important to me to not vilify the medical industry but show the reality of it so there can be a nuanced conversation around why doctors act that way. People who had relatives who were doctors tried to defend their loved ones and say why they would be cold, or not get to know a patient on a personal level. There is room for these conversations. It is what I love about poetry; it sparks conversations around serious issues.

Order a copy of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form by Sandy Longhorn here.

Lisa Ronan holds a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is a postgraduate student in Literary Translation at Trinity College, Dublin. She is a submission reader and, recently, second editor for Trio House Press. She believes poetry connects us through our commonalities and, as Adrienne Rich wrote, that “The words are purposes. The words are maps.”