KARAN

I love your expression of the body & sexuality — that you do not shy away from mentioning diarrhea, masturbation, cunnilingus, edging, foreskin, all in the same poem. The visceral and candid exploration of the body in these poems stands out as both a site of autonomy and a space of conflict. There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. “my body is not who i am / . . . but this / body is the only / tool with which i might / connect with others.” I can see all these elements in your poems, of course, but the body seems to be at the center. What is it about writing about the body that appeals to you?

sterling-elizabeth

Thank you for this question, Karan, and for believing in and publishing my poems! I’m so happy to be chatting with you about writing. It’s true that I love to write about the body, but I also feel like this is partly because I am constantly confronted with my own body. As a fat, disabled, trans person who defies gender categories, the world around me never lets me forget the fact of my body. In that sense, the body is very much a site of conflict — and in the context of that conflict, I’m also reaching for autonomy. 

A lot of these poems are from my manuscript in progress, PSYCHO-SEXUAL, in which the problem of the body drives the speaker — who looks a lot like me — to despair, to wildness, to extremes. One of the ways this speaker ends up trying to solve the fact that her body is such a conflicted site is through body modifications, like piercings or tattoos. 

I’ve also often reached for body mods. As a trans person, hormone replacement therapy (which I regard as a kind of body mod) offered me a path to change, but I couldn’t pick and choose the changes I wanted. I had to accept changes I felt ambivalent about, or even didn’t expect, to receive the ones I did want from HRT.  Traditional body mods are much more targeted and precise, customizable. There are a lot of things I can’t choose about my body, but with a piercing, I can say exactly where I want the hole to go, how big I want it. With a tattoo, I get to choose. Like body mods, writing the body is another way to make my own precise choices.

KARAN

I’m almost never interested in this question, but I’d love to know your writing process. Would you take the poem “porn” for instance, and trace us an outline of its journey? How did the poem arrive to you? What were your thoughts and ideas? How much do you care about line-breaks? How do you end your poems? 

sterling-elizabeth

“porn” developed very in the moment. The idea for the first sentence struck me, and each thought seemed to lead directly to the next. It felt very natural and organic to write, and it probably felt this way because I wrote the first draft in one sitting, pretty much in the order the thoughts in the poem appear now. My relationship to porn — as a consumer — was something I’d been thinking about a lot when I wrote this,  so many of the thoughts were close to the surface, waiting to be put into writing.

The first draft of “porn” was a prose block, which I went back into and added line breaks. In choosing where to break lines, I tend to focus on creating surprise and multiplying meaning. For example, in the third to last line of “porn,” I want it to be able to be read as me having “over 100” problems, as well as “over 100 / porn tabs open.” After I added the line breaks, I ran it by some friends, who offered a few line/word level edits.

I’ve always had multiple modes of composition though, which have changed over time. One of the modes which has stuck with me the longest has been ekphrasis, especially after movies. When I first started writing ekphrastic poems, I would try very hard to stay in the world of the art I was responding to, but more recently, my ekphrastic poems have been taking visual or symbolic/thematic cues from movies to tell my own stories. “after Civil War (2024)” is one of these poems where I repurposed imagery from the film to tell a different story. 

KARAN

Autofiction seems to be a realm you’re really comfortable with. Correct me if I’m wrong, of course. It seems as if you’ve found a comfort in writing about the self that many poets feel hard to embrace — we hide behind language and abstractions, whereas in your poems I find an absolute embracing of vulnerability.  “i want to be a little more sober. to be fertile enough for nic to knock me up.” I’d love to know your thoughts on autofiction, about writing about the self? Is there any other kind of writing?

sterling-elizabeth

There’s a lot of vulnerability in writing about my self, even discomfort. Others have described my personal sharing, in life as well as in writing, as self-assured. The way it feels to me is that most of myself is looking the other way, while the part that feels compelled to share does so. That to fully acknowledge my openness would overwhelm some other part of me. It is true that the speaker of my poems is regularly indistinguishable from myself. Similarly to how I write my body, writing my self allows me to push back against a world that tells me to hide that self, to be ashamed. 

If there are other kinds of writing, I’m not drawn to them. All writing reveals something of the self, even if it’s something as small as that a particular self fears vulnerability, fears being seen. When I first got serious about poetry, I tried to write mostly about other people, other things, but of course these early poems revealed more about myself than their subjects. Since then, I’ve found there’s power in explicitly deciding to reveal one’s self, even if it’s just to one’s self. Of course, these poems have a wider audience than just myself, but I think the core motivation in their composition has been to put down my thoughts and narratives about my own life, so that I can more fully understand my relationship with myself.

KARAN

Despite the deeply personal space your poems are coming from, I can’t help but sense a rich politics behind them? The politics of the body, queer politics, and politics of rebellion and defiance. What are your thoughts on political poems? Are all poems political?

sterling-elizabeth

Like I believe that all writing reveals something about one’s self, I believe that all writing also reveals something of one’s politics. I don’t really believe in “apolitical” poems. My poetry is political. George Orwell writes that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” and I find that quite convincing.

KARAN

I’m also really interested in humor, especially dark humor, and satire, and more so when it’s intertwined with sincere sadness. All your poems embody this sincere sadness, but there’s also so much humor here and irreverence. You are giving the finger to the ones who think there are only certain subjects that are worthy of poems. Is humor important to you? What is its place in poetry?

sterling-elizabeth

Humor is so important to me! I think it can be a way to show lightheartedness and love, and also a way to cope with the traumas of life. I get a lot of my ideas about humor in poetry from Chen Chen — the idea that “serious poetry” is not a serious label, that humor can be a way to speak truth to power. On a recent re-read of a manuscript I’m working on, I was surprised by how sad most of the poems were — I remembered their poignancy as being in their humor, but it actually existed in the hurting, too. Too much of one or the other can make poetry a little flat. A good joke doesn’t hide or weaponize the pain of life but honors it. 

KARAN

Will you talk to me about birds, please? What is it that appeals to you about them? I, of course, love birds, and would love to be a bird too. But I feel like your desire to be a bird trumps mine. I’d love to hear more about it.

sterling-elizabeth

I really got into birds in 2020, when I was living near Los Angeles for a month. The house had a view of the mountains, and I would see so many birds soaring around and wonder what they were. I had a lot of unstructured time, so I ordered a pair of binoculars and started spending a lot of that time watching the birds. While I was living there, I was also dealing with some fairly acute transphobia. The time I spent watching the birds was a reprieve. Because these were happening at the same time, I came to think about birds as “a kind of transfemme.” I couldn’t divorce myself from the transness that made me a target, so I imagined it in another way. My transness was a bird. It was up there, in the air, free.