above/ground press author spotlight #28 : Sarah Burgoyne

POETRY MONTH! celebrating her five titles published through above/ground press,

Sarah Burgoyne is the author of Because the Sun (Coach House: 2021), Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016) and Mechanophilia (Anvil: 2023), an infinite collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao.

Burgoyne is the author of five titles with above/ground press: A Precarious Life on the Sea (2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (2020), the collaborative WHERE FORTH ART THOUGH (with Susan Burgoyne; 2020), AN ACCURATE CIGARETTE: Poetry & Prompts (2026) and the collaborative Take Cover Everyone (with Clara Yeager; 2026).

You’ve published five chapbooks so far with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? Were these titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

I love the pleasing size and length of the chapbook. It’s like the novella of poetry collections. Tim Lilburn, whom I mention in my latest chapbook with above/ground, An Accurate Cigarette, was the first poetry teacher I had who suggested to his students that we get away from the individual poem and submit our work in sequences. That opened a whole world of composition for me, one that literary journals don’t usually accept as they often look for stand-alone poems. I think in many ways I didn’t really return to the stand-alone poem, so the chapbook allows for that conversant, resonant quality to exist. Perhaps in that case I am only ever composing in chapbooks. That being said, I like how isolating a unit of a larger project can also create meaning that wouldn’t otherwise be there. When you asked for a chapbook, I didn’t immediately think of “prompts” as an accompaniment, though many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are prompt-driven.

What is it about working prompts that appeals? Is it purely a way to stretch the muscles?

They are fun! I think stretching is a good metaphor... you can venture outside of your typical range. My friend Hilary Bergen who is a dancer and a scholar (and with whom I often collaborate), was describing contemporary dance theory to me once and how the idea is to see how many points in space around your body you can reach and touch. I had never seen the body or the space around my body in this way. I think prompts do something similar... they re-map one’s perceptions. Not all prompts are of the same quality, however. And nor do they always work... in fact, I like to use the word “experiments” to gently include the likelihood of failure (not a bad thing). My favourite prompt is Bernadette Mayer’s [add link]: “Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not.”

Through working prompts and collaborations, do you see the bulk of your writing practice as one attempting to explore, to expand what might be possible?

Certainly. I love to explore, to play, to break rules. I think “expansion of the possible” is a very poetic way of putting it, especially in an age where reliance on technologies that are propelled by pastiche and mediocrity are bandied about euphemistically as “tools.” What else could we possibly want to do but “expand the possible” as poets, thinkers, beings?

I’m curious how chapbook-length works potentially get shifted into full-length manuscripts. Are they pulled apart and expanded, or set side-by-side as potential sections? And is there a difference at all in how you approach building a chapbook and building a full-length collection? Is it simply a matter of scale, or is it something else, something other?

Hmm... these questions imply that my writing is in some way orderly. I’ve never managed to write anything in an orderly fashion. I think I just make myself available to poetry (to use John Cage’s metaphor) and then after a while see if any patterns emerge from what’s been put down—while also not worrying so much about the pattern, since everything is connected simply by the fact that I wrote it. I’ve done the thing where you print out all the pages and line them up on the floor. I recommend this for the stunning visual effect! (Aha! I am a writer!) But never has that helped me in the slightest and it often feels like a huge waste. I am turning more and more to writing by hand in notebooks of greater and greater proportions, and am enjoying the ability to not reorder anything or even revise very much. More importantly, perhaps, I’ve started to carve out more room for contemplation... so much comes together in a space of utter boredom. It’s like magic. I need to be bored for a good long while before any project finally tells me what it wants to be. And the final “organizational principle” is one of constellation, rather than chronology. (It’s random and made-up but a picture emerges, and any other picture could have).

I was charmed by the chapbook-length collaboration you did with your mother, WHERE FORTH ART THOUGH. How did that project come about, and what do you think the project allowed or provided? Had you collaborated on anything prior to this, whether your mother or anyone else? What do you think you learned through that particular process?

I love any opportunity to talk about that chapbook. Collaborating with my mother was hilarious. She taught me and my sisters how to laugh. When she was in her twenties, her and a friend started “Clube d’Abbreve” (Abbreviation Club) and you will see traces of this club’s formidable contribution to the English language in that chapbook. Indeed, I just flipped open my copy to “plastic surge” (for plastic surgery). I always have one ear tuned to see what other members are floating about the world. My mother and I wrote that chapbook on a small island in British Columbia. We’d spend our days hiking and watching the ocean, and our nights writing and laughing. The chapbook was composed via an Oulipan exercise called “Exquisite Corpse” and then those poems were edited slightly for grammar. I’ve noticed some writers are just on the same wavelength, and it makes sense that you might be on the same creative wavelength as your mother. It’s easy for poets to be a little self-serious and she made sure there was no room for that at all in this chapbook. No way, Jose. (She also added a bunch of goofy rhymes).

Side note: I also have another collaboration with my friend Clara (who is 14) that you might be interested in....

Honestly, that sounds absolutely delightful. Have there been further thoughts around working with your mother? And what of this “infinite” collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao? The only other ongoing collaboration I can think of was the project Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour was working with Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy that resulted in two volumes—Continuations and Contuations 2—before Barbour died. How are you able to maintain the ongoingness of such a project?

Vi and I wrote for an hour a day together during the pandemic. We have four volumes of Mechanophilia and decided the project won’t end until one of us dies. We don’t have time to meet an hour a day anymore, and last time we worked on it, we made a sort of shift toward the visual. We would meet virtually, of course, (Vi is located in Iowa) on an online word processor. It’s fun having an infinite project... the process is much more valuable than the product. And it’s how we became friends.

Oddly, the Covid-era did seem an opportunity for many folk to reconsider where they were, and possibly change direction, starting new projects or simply attempting to approach what they did in a new way. How do these multiple prompts and collaborations, do you think, change the way you approach your own work? With all of these new tools, what have they been able to provide for your writing?

Victor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist, tried to discover the meaning of “literariness” with some friends. Why, say, is a recipe not considered “literary” but a poem is? And they eventually decided the key ingredient was defamiliarization—literary language makes the familiar seem strange again. I’ve also heard someone describe this as reenchantment. We can do this with words, yes, like Gertrude Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose”—but I also feel that la peste defamiliarized life for every person on the planet. For someone like me who was lucky enough to be able to work from home, I felt the need to defamiliarize my apartment, the rooms I inhabited that I no longer truly saw, and wrote a lengthy choose-you-own-adventure poem that took place in my house (published as Double House with Turret House Press). The pandemic was like a fast-track to defamiliarization. Collaborating with someone else is another fast-track. So are prompts, sometimes. I think it’s about perception. My therapist once told me we needed to “lift the heavy stone of my perception and turn it just a little before we set it down.” Even minor shifts are reenchanting.

How did your collaboration with Clara Yeager, Take Cover Everyone (2026), happen? I applaud you being able to convince a twelve-year-old to actually participate in such a thing (as the parent of a daughter the same age). What was that process like, and how different was it from working other projects?

We wrote that chapbook two years ago when Clara was twelve, and we have written two more since. All our titles are after lines Clara has in plays—the other two are Yes, Your Majesty and We’ve Lost Our Celebrity. Clara and I, and her delightful older brother Sam, have been good friends (and imaginative collaborators) since she was three years old. Somehow, we’ve just always been on the same wave-length, you know? No convincing was needed since we love to hang out and be creative. We put on the radio and eat lots of apples and just hunker down for three or four hours. Each chapbook is written in one sitting. It was different from other collaborations in that we discussed our “plot” beforehand (what trouble, exactly, our hero Seaward Unseaward found himself in) and I feel like Clara really took the lead on the tone and register of the chapbook. And we’d run with each other’s ideas, with glee. It was very “yes, and”... with a bunch of exclamation points. Oh! I should mention we wrote all three “exquisite corpse” style, where you write a line and a word on the following line, fold the page and pass it so the next person only sees the word and has to finish the line that way (adding another word below, folding, and so on). We did the covers that way too, but of course drawing, not writing, which I think is the original version of Exquisite Corpse. Clara is also an excellent artist. She’s just the best.