Cosmic Tantrum opens on incantation: “If in place of a mentor you had a hostile mirror” begins the dedication, signaling to a particular audience with open arms. Welcome, dear readers who identify with the dutiful student, the overworked assistant, the eldest daughter. This vulnerable rush is the first crack into the playful, often ironic frame that drives Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut collection.
Cosmic Tantrum is invested in the child who did not get to be a child, invested in the adult who remains one—for better or for worse. Rogers blends sympathy for Charlie Brown with hypnotic riffs on writing prompts, always letting fun live alongside something harder. The anxiety of monstrosity follows Rogers’s speakers throughout, finding deflection and absolution in successfully funny poems, a rare and difficult delight. Lines like “Write about your early fear of transforming into a brat, the worst monster” live inside facetiously titled poems like “UNIVERSALLY RELATABLE WRITING PROMPTS, PART 1.” This push-and-pull of vulnerability and deflection guide Cosmic Tantrum; it made sense to find echoes of Rogers’s poetic in our conversation. Over Zoom, we discussed how everything from work to astrology to memes to passive-aggressive cues find their way into our writing. Like her poems, she was charismatic, a generosity attached to every story—that expert blend of silly and vulnerable. In recounting personal experiences, she paraphrased a line in “ARS POETICA WITH NEED AND WILD CATS;” I was struck, when re-reading the poem in full later, by the transformation of a feeling she achieved in the simplicity of her line. It goes, “Are you cold? somebody / used to ask, a statement and request. They were, // and I should offer remedy.” I do not need a dictionary definition nor history lesson in the concept of “guess culture”—Rogers’s work illustrates the the tension of the phenomena elegantly. My favorite poems capture the mundane, lifting them towards immortality; Cosmic Tantrum makes immortal ugly feelings and dirty houses, with a warmth and cleverness to make them worthy of our attention.
Summer Farah: Could you tell me how the book came together? At what stage did the various connective threads—fairytales, therapy, and on—start talking to each other?
Sarah Lyn Rogers: This is its reborn version. I wrote a version of the collection 6 or 8 years ago—there was no theme for it, it was just…the first forty poems I wrote! What connected them was this mood of restraint, or withholding. When I was a baby poet, I really admired Marianne Moore for being able to say the thing without saying the thing. And so I had a whole collection of poems where, haha! I dropped one little piece of info, see if you can pick it up. I reached a point where I realized I wasn’t very interested in almost any of the poems anymore. They didn’t have any energy for me, except for the trances and the meditations. So, I kept those ones on the back burner and kind of threw everything else away. It was around this time that I watched the documentary Grey Gardens for the first time, and I was obsessed. Not only because of the squalor these former wealthy socialite women are living in, but the way that they talk to each other—this sort of obsessive push-pull thing. Their power dynamic intrigued me. So, not thinking about a collection at this point, I started writing a series of Grey Gardens poems. I came up with the collection title, Cosmic Tantrum, because I felt like I was going through one. It felt like I was fated to end up in one of the worst jobs I could possibly have for my mental health and well-being, which was being an executive assistant. It felt like this domino effect, like all these things had conspired to put me in this pretty triggering position of having to be of service to people who have power over you and you have to be very intimate with them. The tantrum component is me going through my Saturn return and realizing Oh, I’m sort of complicit in my suffering. [Cosmic Tantrum] didn’t match the old version, but the title had so much energy and charge around it, I thought: there’s something there. That’s when the concept of the local beast emerged—a series of fake newspaper headline poems about the “local beast,” a being who’s just existing but bothering other people by inhabiting their space. They were funny and bizarre and they had this sort of cryptic, absurdist energy that I was moving toward. Once those were in the mix, the collection really started to be fun to me.
SF: Your poems have a lot of humor in them, which is hard to pull off. They’re funny! Especially “Guided Meditation with Mean Voice,” with its opening line “Oh, so we’re doing this again.” How do you see humor as a poetic tool?
SLR: There’s something generous about humor. You have to be able to understand what another person will expect based on what you’ve already said, and then be able to subvert that. That maps really well onto poetry because you build your own container—it follows its own rules. Poetry has basically punchlines, but they’re the turn or the volta. It’s like, you thought this was going this way? I’m going to change it up on you. Humor could be another poetic form, you know, maybe it doesn’t have the same gravitas or credibility as other poetic forms, but I find it useful, and I think a poetry collection that wasn’t in any way funny wouldn’t be true to my life. Humor is how I cope with everything.
SF: I want to go back what you said about a sense of complicity, or responsibility in your own life. A lot of this collection is engaged with the image of the child, the “eldest daughter” in particular. The dedication, especially, is a beautiful affirmation of childishness, as well as the word “tantrum.” Can you speak to the oscillation between responsibility and childishness in your narrators?
SLR: I’m definitely writing this collection for parentified children. It’s a paradox—you’re a young person who is asked to take care of people who should be taking care of you. It’s like this upside-down world where big expectations are placed on you. There’s something very sad, and very silly, about, you know, having been a child who wasn’t exactly a child, dealing with adults who are maybe not exactly adults—maybe it’s your parent, maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s the worst roommate you’ve ever had. The sense of responsibility is very connected to indirect communication. I don’t know how much you’ve heard before about “ask culture” versus “guess culture.”
SF: No, what is it?
SLR: Some people’s families are taught that when you want something, you directly ask for it. Can you pick me up after school? Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t. I have this going on. You’ll have to ask somebody else to pick you up. But some families have more of a “guess” culture, where they’ll indirectly say things so that you can’t tell them no. An example in the collection is in “ARS POETICA WITH NEED AND WILD CATS” someone asks—are you cold? And that means “I would like you to turn up the thermostat for me.” So there’s this You confused with me. Guess what I want and need and provide it for me without me having to say what it is. I’m not asking requests that can get denied, I’m admitting the request, I’m emanating the request. And you should receive it. Yeah—so that’s sort of been my experience with the world, guessing what other people want and need. That definitely was at play in my family of origin. It has played out at work, it has played out in friendships—it’s a very exhausting way to be.
SF: Do you feel like that gestural sort of upbringing—then working through the way that’s harmed you—shifted your poetics? I’m thinking about the first draft of the book you mentioned, “say the thing without saying the thing,” to the way it exists now.
SLR: I do. There’s this sort of this feedback loop where the epiphanies I have in my writing teach me how to live, which teach me how to have different epiphanies in my writing. Even the fact that the collection is very online, it’s sort of crass, it’s got these jokes in it—it’s not exactly announcing itself as a respectable poetry collection. And I definitely think that has been important for me as a person who has invested in feeling respectable, or at least not being a problem, not attracting the wrong kind of attention. The collection is able to exist in the world in the way that it does because of these insights, pushing me towards showing up in the world more the way that I want to. But I still think the collection is braver than I am. So it’s a process.
SF: That’s true for a lot of us, I think. Speaking of online, there are a lot of internet-isms and poems that are totally located in that online space. What is your relationship to being online—how does it affect your poetics and how you move in writing spaces?
SLR: I’m a very online person. I don’t post as much as I lurk, but it’s a way for me to be a fly on the wall. It’s sort of like the fantasy of being able to get inside people’s head. I love the rhythms of internet speech, but memes seep into the back of my mind—that rhythm or those word choices inform what I think is funny and what I think is profound. There’s a succinct way that the biggest tweets manage, like poetry, to compress really complicated ideas into just a few words, but in surprising combinations. Like, I think dril is a powerful poet. It’s like, I have all these different short, silly voices to draw on when I’m when I’m making my own work.
SF: I wanted to talk about Grey Gardens. It’s not something I’d watched, just heard of—I realized it was a documentary over the course of reading your book. I find the way you talk about it, especially in “Genre Study,” to be so compelling in considering genre—the way you position it as a fairy tale, then the repetition of fairy tales throughout the collection in other ways. Do you feel like there’s a relationship between poetry and documentary film? How do you feel those relationships function as you’re writing about a documentary?
SLR: I don’t know that I can speak to poetry versus documentary in general, but this particular documentary is interesting because it’s really just capturing without commentary. There’s no backstory, no pulling together any historical documents about the women. Well, the backstory is that these women are cousins of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. And at one point, their house was condemned because of how poorly they were taking care of it. It happened because Big Edie, the mom, got divorced and seemingly couldn’t accept reality and wanted to continue to live in a giant house—this was in a time before women could have their own bank accounts. So, her sons meted out money to her, but it wasn’t enough to pay to maintain the facility. So Edie, and her loyal daughter Edie, lived alone in this house. Couldn’t pay for a garbage pickup, couldn’t pay for landscaping, et cetera. So the Hamptons community got them in trouble. When you do see the documentary, and you see the squalor that they live in, you’ll have to know that this is after the house was already condemned and after it was already cleaned up. The Maysels went to film another cousin of Jackie, but discovered the Edies and were like, oh my God, no, this is the real story. They don’t give any context, they simply arrive at the space and film these women going about their day-to-day routines. I think there is something so poetic about that. You arrive in the middle of a sort of perplexing situation where you’re like Something more is going on here than I’m seeing. Why am I being shown this? That’s part of why I like the documentary so much. It doesn’t explain, it just presents. So, there’s all this room for me, the viewer, to insert my own perspective, the way poems allow for, like it’s a room you can step into.
SF: I like that: “a room that you can step into.” You’ve spoken a little bit about your relationship to work as it ends up in your writing. We know each other firstly as editorial colleagues—in your poetry, where does that editorial instinct go?
SLR: Hmm. Yeah, it’s really hard for you to maintain the balance between editing other people’s work for pay so that I can live my life and include time for my own projects. Most of my writing time is not really writing: it’s walking my dog, it’s taking an iPhone note that I’ll think about for weeks or months. I really don’t have a lot of discipline when it comes to protecting my writing time. Parts of this collection were written around editorial work that I was doing. It was certainly easier when I was a new editorial assistant with a fantastic supervisor, Yuka Igarashi, who was very respectful about me as a human and an artist. That was such a gift. The nice thing about poems is they are so short and you can steal an afternoon and work on something for a couple of hours and then forget about it for a few weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes.
SF: Are there collections or other works that you consider mentor texts for Cosmic Tantrum?
Candace Wuehle’s collection, Death Industrial Complex, which is sort of a portrait of the photographer Francesca Woodman. It’s very spooky. It’s very occult. It’s definitely more lyric than narrative, which is not exactly my style. So it was something I wanted to lean towards. Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour. Definitely a stylistic and energetic inspiration is Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Victoria Chang is also an influence for me—Obit is not a direct influence, but there’s something I love about the facetious way she uses form, how she manages to often be funny in the midst of tragedy.
SF: References to the occult and spirituality occurs throughout the book. It’s fun to hear that some of that was inspired by the work you were engaging with while writing, but what’s your overall relationship to the spiritual, astrology, tarot?
SLR: I love all that stuff. Tarot is a big thing for me. I took a six-month tarot immersion course almost 10 years ago now, in 2016, with Jeff Hinshaw. He ran this school called Brooklyn Fools Tarot. We spent each week in one of the cards the major arcana. We would live one week as The Fool and think—what sort of fool things are happening in my life this week? Tarot was a game changer for me, because not every card seemed like a good card. But you learn to see them as archetypes that you pass through. You know, maybe you’re in a The Tower moment, where everything’s crumbling, but you remember that after The Tower comes The Star, when you have relief. You can pour water on the parched earth. I liked being able to read for myself and pull cards that were like, what do I think of this experience, versus what is it actually about? Basically, creating an exercise for myself where I would think: what am I lying to myself about? How could I be more honest about my motivations in this situation? I think I love tarot as somebody who loves narratives.
SF: That kind of self-reflexive questioning, digging into honesty and vulnerability—how does that impact how you approach writing?
SLR: I’m not interested in writing that stays on the surface of a feeling. I want to know the yucky underbelly of why somebody’s doing something. I think tarot can offer in life, and in writing, a respite from the idea that we need to be good saintly people all the time. There are ways we sort of try to dodge our own pain, or make other people carry it for us. I think if we can be really honest about that, in writing, the way we can when we’re reading [tarot] for ourselves, it can inspire other people to take ownership of their own more destructive impulses, so that they can change them.
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