Courtesy of Sally Ball.
Sally Ball is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Hold Sway. She’s a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Arizona State University. She also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and she’s the associate director of Four Way Books. Zócalo’s poetry curator for August, Ball chatted with us in the green room about writing as imitation, spelt bread, and the poet Louise Bogan.
Other than the poets you curated for us, who are you currently reading?
Two Elisas! One is Elisa Gonzalez’s Grand Tour. And then, a book of essays called Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert.
What’s your advice for people who are interested in writing poetry but don’t know how to start?
The best thing to do is to read around—read poems on websites, in books, in literary magazines, or wherever—until you find one that you like, and then take its first line and write a new poem with the same first line. That’s an easy way to start because you have something you already like the sound of, the feel of in your mind. All writers imitate and steal from other writers. I think imitation is just a part of every writer’s experience and how they teach themselves how lines work, how sentences work, how all the different parts of a poem work.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I always imagined being a teacher. I had a little teacher’s roll book with all my students’ names. When I was really little, my grandfather had a dairy farm in upstate New York and, on the farm, there was a game called “School” that was akin to “Chutes and Ladders.” But it had beautiful Art Deco drawings. And I was sort of taken with these wispy model teachers and the beautiful board design. I suspect this glamorous thing, and the Little House on the Prairie books, were the seeds.
What’s your favorite food to cook?
I have become a person who bakes her own bread. I did this because there was an excellent bakery in Coolidge, Arizona, and they made a spelt bread that was especially delicious, but they folded. I could not go back to loaves of squishy bread in plastic bags. So, I became a weekly baker of crusty spelt bread.
How do you procrastinate?
It sort of depends on what level of procrastination we’re talking about. I have four jobs! I teach at ASU. I work with Four Way Books. I teach for Warren Wilson. And then I write poems. I can definitely get into a cycle where I rotate between the different email accounts for those different parts of my life, thinking, “Well, I better check this and deal with that, then I’d better check this and deal with this, and then—” That’s a loop when I’m more or less being “productive.” But also… not.
There’s the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But I’m curious: Which book covers from Four Way Books are your favorites?
All the covers are so beautiful—our cover designs have won awards, and we have a couple of different folks doing it right now. Our director Ryan Murphy was the designer for a long time, and he’s so good. Still, if I had to pick:
You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey.
You Darling Thing by Monica Ferrell.
The Raving Fortune by Noelle Kocot.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
I am such a bad singer that people flee the room, so I have actually never done karaoke. But I was recently at a karaoke event where I realized that maybe it would be okay if I was part of a group of karaoke singers. So at least now I’m on the lookout for a song.
What was the last thing that inspired you?
I just got back from the Warren Wilson program, and being among those writers who participate in that community is incredibly inspiring. It’s very serious down there, in terms of depth of commitment and depth of thought, and it’s also a very loving and fun community. Everybody is just generous and serious.
Who’s one person, dead or alive, that you would want to grab drinks with?
Louise Bogan. She’s a poet without a period: she falls outside of the major modernists, but neither is she exactly after-modern or postmodern. She’s sort of alone without a school or a large contextual group, and she writes these intense lyric poems. Some of them are rhymed verse, some of them are free verse. Some of them are wickedly funny or sad-funny. “At midnight tears / Run into your ears” is a complete poem [“Solitary Observation Brought Back From a Sojourn in Hell”]. And some of the poems are just heart-wrenchingly sad. Her memoir Journey Around My Room talks about the loss of her marriage and trying to forge her way as a woman artist at a time when that was not especially easy and often thwarted. Always savvy and funny and wry.