When I read Stephanie Staab’s poetry, I feel as if she’s leaning close to me, a sister or dear friend, telling me a story in low tones. Perhaps we’re each holding a glass of good red wine in our hands, or cups of coffee. Or maybe the poems are gifts from a stranger rather than a friend—the woman seated next to me on the train who turns out to offer fascinating conversation, all the more welcome for being unexpected, or a personal letter found on the sidewalk that offers a glimpse into the particulars of an unknown world.

I believe what creates this impression of delightful revelation in Staab’s poems is a sense of hushed and gentle urgency, as well as open acknowledgement of the reader-as-confessor in lines like “I understand the things you want me to tell you” and “I now sit down to tell you how I get along.” This, coupled with details offered like coins in the hand: “The cook raised her eyebrow” and “wool coats specked with snow.”

Read on for my conversation with Stephanie Staab in which we discuss desire, life as an expat poet, and the blessing and curse of a good memory. In addition to her poems from Issue 42, “Safety Coffin” and “The Innkeeper’s Wife,” we’ve included links to two additional recent poems by Staab in the conversation. Offer your ear now to this interesting stranger.

                                                                                —Sarah Rose Nordgren

Stephanie Staab is an American poet and translator living in the Black Forest. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Salamander, and Lake Effect among others. She is a staff poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her chapbook, Letterlocking, is available now from Alternating Current Press. Her second chapbook, Talking, was recently shortlisted for the 2024 New Delta Review chapbook contest.

Poems:

“Safety Coffin” (from 32 Poems #42)
“The Innkeeper’s Wife” (from 32 Poems #42)

Interview:

SRN: Stephanie, one of the aspects of your poems that first drew me in is how they seem preoccupied or saturated with a desire for connection with others. The speaker is often reaching out—through memory or imagination or communication—to one or more other people, but there’s a persistent sense that the desired connection is ultimately unattainable, that the various beloveds remain always one step removed. In other poems, the speaker is more interested in others’ ability or inability to make contact, such as the speaker’s deceased father in “Safety Coffin,” or the titular character in “The Innkeeper’s Wife.” Would you say that desire and connection/disconnection is one of your interests as a poet?

SAS: It’s funny that you specifically mention the word “desire.” I was recently talking to a poet friend and mentor (the brilliant Hannah V Warren) about how difficult it is for me to describe my own work. I usually say something self-deprecating like “Oh, I just write poems about boys I have crushes on.” She held up her hand and said “No. Don’t say that. Say you write about DESIRE.” Such a serious word, I’m a little afraid of it. I can’t deny it’s a favorite topic of mine, though. The adoration I have for certain people and moments startles me sometimes. For years I wasn’t writing poetry at all and it felt like I had nowhere to put that adoration. Now, I’m looking for it everywhere so I can write about it. I wrote a poem recently about the guy who sells roast chestnuts at the market here…

I think a large part of the connection/disconnection theme comes from the fact that I’ve lived outside the US, my home country, for more than a decade now. Long separations from people and places who are very meaningful to me have been a fact of my life. Poetry is my way of keeping things alive that have long since passed.

An unexpected kind of loneliness can arise from not speaking your native language with everyone around you. An expat friend of mine here said to me “I never thought what I would miss most about America is the small talk.” I often feel a hunger for little things people say in English. I have a lot of poems about offhand remarks people made to me years ago.

SRN: The idea of poetry being a way of “keeping things alive that have long since passed” makes me think of the penultimate line in your poem, “Every single one,” in which you write, “People are afraid of my memory and they should be.” The tone of that line is a complicated one, and in my reading it contains both humor and threat, similar to your poem “Letters to Friends and Enemies,” which, while in the form of a letter, operates almost as a wish or spell. Is poetry a secret weapon?

SAS: Yes, very secret. I have the feeling that when we speak to each other, people don’t listen very well and the words we’ve all said instantly disappear. But if I write something down in a poem and I know that someone has read it, I feel that they have heard me. It makes me feel powerful in a way I didn’t know before I started writing poetry.

I’ve been blessed (or cursed) with a good memory. I don’t think I could be a poet without it. In real life, I sometimes pretend that I don’t remember certain things people said or did from long ago because I don’t want to freak them out. In poems, though, I feel comfortable revealing all that.

SRN: Are there other ways that you think life as an expat impacts your poetry? For example, do you think being surrounded by the German language influences the language of your poems? Do you read much literature in German or do you stick to reading in English?

SAS: I try hard not to let the German in, actually. I’m always afraid that my English has already changed too much and people can hear the difference. I get frustrated when I hear myself phrasing something in a very German way. To make things even more complicated, I live in Germany but my partner is French. So on any given day, I could be speaking three different languages. Things get very confusing in my head. It feels like those three languages are fighting a battle to see which one can get out first.

I always think I should use more German and French in my poems, but so far it hasn’t come up often. I’m not sure why. I do read in German and French but the bulk of what I read is definitely in English. I try to keep myself surrounded by that language. Or, in another way, to observe it from afar.

I also love to read out loud with my partner both in English and French. We’ve read all the Little House on the Prairie books out loud in English. (Apparently, the TV series was a big hit in France, who knew?) And we are currently finishing up a volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s letters to Simone de Beauvoir in French. That sounds very pretentious, but I promise you the parts that interest me most are his descriptions of the little snacks he’s eating on the train and the petty fights he gets into with his roommates. Letters are a great source of “everyday life” inspiration for me. I think of poems as letters, too. I’m writing to you, I don’t expect a response, I just want to picture you reading it.

SRN: It’s interesting what you say about English, French, and German battling in your head for primacy. Just yesterday I was corresponding with a fiction writer friend of mine, and he was noting that for him, he’s learned that when there’s a tension in the voice or stance of a piece that he feels like he needs to resolve, that tension is the voice. In other words, the piece, the writing, is actually about that tension. So I wonder if on some level the struggle between the three languages, lifeworlds, cultures in your head might be a productive tension for your poems?

SAS: That feels true. I never thought much about America or American English when I was still living there but I have a different ear for it now. Especially if a new phrase enters the lexicon and suddenly it’s everywhere and I think “Where did that come from?” I remember a few years ago everyone starting using the phrase “getting in my head” to mean overthinking. It seems so mysterious to me, how these things take hold. I want to know the origins of it: Was it said on a television show? Was it something regional that just expanded across the country? It felt like everyone just started saying it one day as if we had always been saying it.

It makes me want to examine the roots of my own language. The words and turns of phrases I always come back to, they must have a meaning for me that I don’t consciously understand.

Maybe it’s a kind of homesickness or nostalgia, to come back to writing poetry at this point in my life. Like I need to speak my own language here in this place at this moment. It’s like I want to make it clear: I’m not one of you and I am fine with that.