This is your second piece to be published with Dulcet. Can you tell us about your poem “Tristesse” that was published in Issue1?

The poem “Tristesse” stems from the direct experience years ago of my losing a dear friend in an airplane accident when he was far too young to leave us. The friend who inspired the piece was a pure and beautiful person whom many loved. I surely did. My friend’s wife, an English teacher, used the word “tristesse” to let me know she heard my grief in another piece of mine that she read during her first holiday without him.

I think one of the most striking things about “From Jazz Fingerings 26/” is the form itself. First off, can you share more about the title?

I am presently at work on a book manuscript titled Jazz Fingerings. Each of the numbered pieces is composed of 21 lines, created while listening to new and traditional jazz. I often employ rules for myself when creating poems, sometimes setting a number of words or lines, and/or working in a set form, such as the pantoum, the villanelle, the haibun, the sonnet, or recently, the dulcet. 

Here’s the backstory for this poem and this collection-in-progress.  In July of 2024, I suffered a freak accident during an out-of-town trip, resulting in multiple breaks on the fingers of both hands. Extensive therapy was required (an unfamiliar circumstance for me, as I am lucky to have excellent health). During my recovery, my dear friends Kathy (K.S.) and Ernie Ernst (She, a tremendous visual poet and artist, and he, a highly accomplished musician) gifted me several jazz albums, including new and classic works. 

My extensive flute training took place between ages 10 and 23, and all the people in my sphere knew me mainly as a flutist. Like most woodwind players, I thought a good deal about fingerings for notes. Broken fingers and the gift of jazz music came together to give me the title Jazz Fingerings for the book. The manuscript is reasonably far along, with several of the pieces accepted for publication, including, to my delight, Dulcet.

This poem really epitomizes free verse poetry. The poem is comprised of these fragments of observation and insight—was your decision to forego conventional line breaks and stanzas a means of elevating the text? How do you see the interplay between language and form here?   

I’ll start with your question about foregoing conventional line breaks and stanzas. The short answer is yes, insofar as the experience of listening and absorbing needed to be continuous. As for elevating the text, that is for the reader to decide! 

There is a whisper of intimacy in jazz music that leads naturally to a higher level of understanding. In this poem, I seek to ease into what I am hearing in the music to engage with it as though the music itself were a person, and we together are rising. I’m speaking to and acknowledging the jazz I hear and giving back a cascade of imagery and suppositions. The piece is at once composed of pictures and of philosophical explorations. “No perhaps about it,” as the line states. There is an independent strength given here, and a mutuality as it occurs when minds gel together and go beyond themselves.

From this poem, the line “What needs to be lived again will rise,” really stands out to me. I think it speaks to this issue’s theme of “dusk to dawn”—the ideal of cycles, rebirth, and an inherent slant toward renewal. Can you talk about how you understand this line as it relates to those concepts?

I agree with you that the line you cite fits with the “dusk to dawn” theme. One hears that theme take different forms in this poem, from the first line acknowledging “the whispered wordless text alive and softly from each bell/alert,” then following through what this beginning leads to with image and idea. Toward the end of the piece, “This long time toned approximate young heat about to burst/with plum light in the unflowered case . . .filled with only velvet that caresses source code . . .” toward “the way kiss breath contains what will not be let go again until the piano folds” takes us to the idea of infinity. This is surely consistent with the issue’s theme, I think.

Congratulations on the publication of your most recent poetry collection, Permission to Relax. A few pages are available on the publisher’s website, so based on what I had access to, it seems that this “dusk to dawn” spirit really is a throughline in your writing. Can you share the general thesis statement of Permission to Relax, as well as how the “dusk to dawn” ethos may show up in that collection?

Thanks for this. I loved working with Geoffrey Gatza, the publisher and editor of BlazeVOX Books, whose meticulous attention and careful eye led to a great experience in bringing out the book. The title entails some degree of irony, especially in the question “Can an eraser be a dogma” as the deceptive yet true lightness recognizes angst in the difficult present. As you can see, the collection is by no means a celebration of mere vacation or pause. Rather, the gathering of poems seeks to build a way forward without sacrificing the truth, but getting it, knowing it, and living it. Never easy, but worth the only choice consciousness affords. There is indeed absolution in discovering and rediscovering life and what life might be. That, as you say, goes with “dusk to dawn.”

I want to turn to your relationship with music. You write, “The purpose of an evening edging into night. What only sound can find / its way into.” Do you think there are limits to poetry as a means of exploration, and is this limit where music picks up the slack?

My relationship with formal music performance is a complicated one. At some point in my early adulthood, I made a conscious decision to move over to poetry as my main art form. I remind myself that music lives in me, and speech and text are forms of music. I think in music, in fact. I listen to the music in others’ speech, and I hear different tonalities all the time. 

Poetry is inherently inspired by and yields both large sounds and very quiet phrases. Poetry is not limited to language per se. I’m sure you are familiar with sound poetry, in which orations involving syllables are performed. My dear friend and collaborator, poet Douglas Barbour, whom we lost not long ago, was a tremendous sound poet, who performed for years with Stephen Scobie, a fellow Canadian poet. 

In the early 2000s, I traipsed over into the visual poetry domain through my association with the Avant Collection at Ohio State University, founded and curated by Dr. John M. Bennett. I have created pieces individually and with others, including K.S. Ernst and John M. Bennett, with whom I have whole books as well as larger pieces that hang in galleries and collections. Some of my visual poetry takes the form of asemic work, which I have heard described as “writing you can’t read.” It offers abstraction, emphasizing the look and feel of what appears handwriting on the page or on three-dimensional objects. 

You rightly question whether I perceive a limit to what poetry can do, especially given my long association with music. Perhaps unexpectedly, I see no limit to poetry. I believe that poetry can do absolutely anything. It need not rely upon music to do its work.

Your perceptiveness and close attention to the world are so evident in your writing. I’d love to end by asking, why is poetry your medium of choice?

Thank you, Renee, for this characterization of my work. In high school, I was fortunate to have several smart teachers who demonstrated reverence for certain poets. This led to my discovery that I was meant to be a poet. At age 25, I met an even more brilliant educator, a wise guide who helped me complete my first whole poem, after my having struggled for years with fragments. She worked with me for more than 40 years. Once that first poem was accomplished, I could not stop writing, and I plan never to stop. I see poetry as infinite and the most extraordinary vehicle for learning the world and beyond. I write because I must, and I feel lucky to have poetry at the center of my life.

Read Sheila’s poem, “Jazz Fingerings 26/” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 2, coming this february.