This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elena Macdonald: I loved SAPPHO TERROR so much. I have been really into ekphrasis recently, so having that be such an important part of the book was really special to me, and I’d love to hear about the practice of the second section.
Maura Modeya: That process stemmed from dealing with insomnia, a pretty intense spout of it, and there was a period of time where I kept waking up at 3 AM, and I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep until 6 AM. And so I started projecting Sappho fragments onto my apartment walls, using Anne Carson’s translation of If Not, Winter. And every time I would wake up at 3 AM, I would use my projector, show the fragments, and then take a notebook and lie in my bed and write, or I would move through the projections with my body, and then notice how a word would go across my face or across my body in some way, and have that just, be the foundation for for writing my own fragments and delirium log.
EM: Something that I was drawn to in both of the sections was the use of the “I” and the “you,” and I would love to hear how they differ from section to section.
MM: The “I” and the “you,” to me, make this intimate space that I’m consistently interested in coming back to. The space between the two, what I’ll call characters, and the relationship between them shifts based on their surrounding contexts. So in the first section, the title poem, “Sappho Terror,” the “I” and the “you” have this intimate space that’s situated in more of a domestic bedroom intimacy setting with the backdrop of violence just outside, where violence is either taking place actively, or it just took place. The coordinates of time inform the intensity of intimacy that’s created between the “you” and the “I.” I would say that the “you” and the “I” oscillate between the private space and the public space. Sometimes the intimacy exists in public, and sometimes it exists in private. I feel the tension and danger in each space, it has a different texture. The “you” in the second section never directly addresses the reader, and if it does, it’s more of a side glance, and no one would be quite sure if they were being involved in the “you” or not. And then the “I” is more stripped down in the first section. It’s going out into the night. The “I” holds these stronger positions, or the character of “I” is more of a fixed sign. And then the “you” kind of gets stripped down, as the sections go, and then it accumulates into something that can hold more directness or hold more details and context. The “you” is just as much of a dreamer inside the delirium in the text.
EM: I was getting a lot of the tension. I also saw a lot of desire manifesting, and I was curious about how desire plays throughout SAPPHO TERROR.
MM: Yes, thank you for that question. There’s a transition that is captured in the book that’s a personal lesson about desire, and to talk about desire in the book, I would first talk about what my relationship to desire started out as. I was socialized growing up to always think about how I was being desired. And it was very focused on the external towards the internal, that was the flow of desire. Out there inward. I think that’s very common to think about the appeal and desirability of one’s body in this culture and in return, I never considered what I desired until much later. The speaker in SAPPHO TERROR records this surge and discovery of desire, and how it becomes a life force. It encompasses what I call “the force of the yearn,” and “sapphic lust space,” which I write about in a review of Sophia Dahlin’s book, Glove Money. But it’s not only speaking to desire as the erotic sense but a desire for a future, for metabolization of violence, on each scale personal or state violence and the desire to possess oneself. And SAPPHO TERROR records the transition that the speaker makes to have desire start internally, then radiate externally, an inverse of what it started out as.
EM: That’s really beautiful, and I love the “force of the yearn” and “sapphic lust space.” I also loved Glove Money.
MM: Yeah. The works are definitely in conversation with each other.
EM: Absolutely, absolutely. In thinking about desire, you mentioned also the desire persisting through violence, and there was a moment that I found deeply poignant, “What do you call it when you are met with a violence when you are a citizen and you are made to watch? And what do you call it when you are met with not a whisper, not a father, but with gore?” And I’d love to hear about that moment and how it impacts the work as a whole.
MM: This section speaks to the perpetual state violence and the military-industrial complex, which situates the title poem, “Sappho Terror.” I chose to write it in the present tense, stripped of its specificity, to have the poem live in the war violence that is so cyclical. My father worked for the state, and we haven’t had a relationship for a long time. This line scrapes the outline of that wound, noting my internal conflict with how state violence personally tore something and someone from me, not through death, but in the repercussions of someone being trained by the state for 20+ years. That has an effect on my familial social fabric in ways I’m still trying to understand. I was also speaking to the American government’s tradition, involvement in, and funding of genocidal violence. I’m interested in how writing, mostly in the present tense, has the capability to speak of the past, and the past patterns, while also bringing the past into the present with us onto the page. While writing in the present tense, we simultaneously predict the future, because of what we observed in the past. So this line speaks to the impact of grappling with the violence that happens out of any one person’s control and how I navigate it as a poet, perhaps in this very naive desire for it not to repeat, yet knowing that it will.
EM: I have another line that I was also really intrigued by: “Sabotage as remedy, as human, as recoup.” And it’s one that I kept coming back to, because I was just deeply intrigued.
MM: Yeah, that goes hand-in-hand with the line before, or the later question of talking about the “poetics of disruption,” because that section is about wheat pasting. It’s about the act of sabotaging as an act towards aliveness. Even sabotaging one’s own thoughts or behaviors of obedience can be an act of disruption, an act towards cycle breaking. I was thinking about sabotage as a humanizing behavior in the context of obedience to the daily systems of violence around us. I’m also thinking about this quote from when I read Cruising Utopia, where there is this chapter about stickering campaigns in New York, and how stickering became this act of an invisible conversation happening in public. That’s how I think about wheat pasting. That’s how I was thinking about sabotage as it turns into a remedy, which in its way, holds a scrap of humanity. Wheatpasting can hold the language of sabotage and remedy in public, which when witnessed, in a way recuperates a part of oneself. Wheatpasting after the Club Q shooting was my action of devastation and witnessing, and that is something that, to me, language has a small power to convey, but it’s not the answer, it’s one gesture towards feeling right in oneself.
EM: I’d love to hear more about the “poetics of disruption” in general. I think that quote is so poignant, but I’d love to hear more about how it came to be.
MM: The “poetics of disruption” stemmed from the two somatic writing rituals that I practiced while I was writing the book. The first was created out of necessity from the my intense spurt of insomnia that recurs throughout my life, but with this particular one, projecting the Sappho fragments onto my apartment walls, constantly disrupting my own sleep, or this, internal force that’s beyond my control was this form of disruption. Writing at 3 AM for hours until I could possibly fall back asleep, that’s a very obvious form of disruption. Then to choose being the disruptor through wheat pasting, and I developed a relationship with disrupting the public visual field with language. And a lot of times, the language I chose came from the BURNITALLDOWN: The Anti-fascist Spellbook by the Yerba Mala Collective. And then it was my own language, as a form of grieving after the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, which was close to where I lived at the time, and ways to show solidarity with the encampments protesting the genocide on the university campuses where I lived. Those repeating practices became the foundation for what I call the poetics of disruption, where there’s these moments where disruption, we might usually think of it as a negative thing, or you know, going off the rails, but the poetics of disruption is a lens to develop a different sort of relationship with disruption, where it can be a giving force. My goal in the “poetics of disruption” was not to find answers necessarily, but to metabolize the inextricable link between intimacy and violence, and falling in love in a time of queer people getting hate-killed, loving in a time of genocidal violence. Not only was my sleep disrupted for so many reasons beyond my control, but then I practiced disruption, where the speaker becomes an agent of disruption.
EM: So many layers. I was also interested in the consumption that was kind of an undercurrent. There are the lines, “I want to be consumed, I want to disappear twice.” And that’s another one that I kept thinking about because I think having the desire to disappear twice just got in my brain thinking about what does it mean to be consumed, what does it mean to disappear?
MM: In that section, the speaker is very interested in the power of not restraining oneself anymore, not being so measured. The speaker is interested in full submission into the force of the yearn, or the sapphic lust space. It’s this point of decision where the speaker goes all into an intense feeling of trying to describe that feeling of going beyond oneself when in a relationship, it’s a catalyst to go beyond oneself into something bigger. It’s about pushing past that point of restraint. To be consumed is the self-prescription toward a larger than life experience. To disappear represents the frustration of both wanting to be an individual, and at the same time, to want to merge with something that can feel all consuming like a relationship with another person or entity.
EM: One of my last questions is gonna be about devotion because I saw so much devotion in the book: devotion to desire, to care, to practice, beyond that. So I’d love to hear about what the role of devotion is in SAPPHO TERROR?
MM: Devotion is definitely a driving force. I mean, as a poet, I’m very invested in understanding my internal sense of devotion and how it differs with the devotion I learned as a child in a religious setting. My mind is primed for devotion. It is how I’m wired, but in this particular context, I’m very interested in approaching that state of mind and channeling it towards something else. Devotion appears in many forms, and in SAPPHO TERROR, the speaker is devoted to love and devoted to relationship as this catalyst to a godlike-self. A more expanded version of living. Not to quote Anne Carson too much, but she writes about this in Eros, the Bittersweet. Is Sappho a deity replacement in my book? Perhaps. [Pauses.] How do I not just say devotion to being gay?
EM: I think that’s also allowed.
MM: Ha. Yes.
EM: I think that’s all allowed.
MM: Yeah, yeah. So maybe I’ll stop there, but yes, essentially channeling one form of devotion that was misaligned, or chosen for me, and then channeling it towards a devotion that I feel very suited for.
EM: My last question for you is going to be about what influenced the book and the making of the book. If there were any films, media, books, writers, etc, I’d love to hear what influenced the making of the book.
MM: Well, I mean, first and foremost If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s Sappho translation, but the catalyst point for that was CAConrad’s workshop, where they gave a spell to call Sappho in, not even to me directly, but to a friend of mine in the workshop for a heartbreak. A section was emotionally buoyed by the movie Bound. Then the other media I was consuming at the time was Kill Bill, Mulholland Drive, the 1992 Dracula, and Itty Bitty Titty Committee. Cruising Utopia, A Toast In the House of Friends, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Eros Bittersweet, As a Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story, To Love an Artist.
EM: Lovely.
Interview by Elena Macdonald
Elena Macdonald (they/she) is a lesbian writer from Northern Virginia. They are an editor for Aftertouch Magazine. Their work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Silly Goose Press. You can find more about Elena’s work at www.elenamacdonald.com.
