An Interview with Jennifer Sperry Steinorth

"We should not wait until we are given permission to make art. We should not 'stay in our lane'. The idea that you have to begin a practice as a kid and devote your whole life to it is ridiculous."

I (Nora) had the great luck of getting to know Jennifer Sperry Steinorth and her work over the course of a bitter January at the Vermont Studio Center back in 2017. I remember her poetry studio there as one bursting with creations in a variety of forms—she was truly multimodal, even before her book-length graphic work Her Read came out in 2021. In Her Read, Jennifer uses erasure and her original art and graphics to transform Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, a book with no mention of women artists, into something new.

Amaris and I were happy to talk with Jennifer about her thoughts on graphic poetry, the Image and Text community, and more.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did you start making graphic poetry? 

Before I was a writer I was a dancer, came close to making a profession of it.  And from a young age my mother taught me to sew. I also loved to draw, and to act, all manner of art-making, really; I would have pursued these in high school if all available hours hadn't been devoted to dance. My senior year, at a fine arts high school in Michigan, in an English class taught by the brilliant Howard Hintz, I read my first graphic novel--Art Spiegelman's Maus. That was the year Maus won a Pulitzer.  What a way to enter the world of graphic narratives! That work has influenced and inspired me in countless ways, but I never felt compelled to create in that genre, I think because I have almost never felt compelled to write a novel--more drawn to lyric poetry than narrative, more to song than to story. Music, which is also, maybe, the engine of my first devotion, dance.  

The first graphic poems I made are concrete poems. I am not sure that you would consider these graphic poems, for there are no hand drawn lines, no color, no marks that are not typed letters--but the arrangement of words on the page comport a visual image which contributes to its "meaning". The first I recall making--maybe 2009 or 2010--came to me standing at the helm of a sailboat--a place at which I was not at ease. The poem arose out of the realization that the physical sensitivity one must have to a ship's wheel, amid modulation of wind and waves, was very much like the muscular finesse one must have centering a lump of clay on a potter's wheel.  Both acts are about wheels concerned with vessels, but in one we are like gods spinning a lump of earth into its own hemisphere, then opening it like a door into a room that becomes a bowl, a goblet, a vase--  and in the other we are subject to the gods, humming along in a fragile craft, tearing through the sea. A poem is also a vessel, but the poem that came, though "concrete" was not in the shape of a vessel, but of the uncontainable sea, the black words like the white caps, tossing in the void of the page. The language was making an argument, a plea, for my vessel, our vessels, to hold, for holding, even as the image was emulating the dissipating sea.  The visual component is subtle but I think its argument is essential to the poem; something I think is important to all visual poems: that the image and the words be intrinsically entangled.  

We love Her Read, your very creative reimagining of Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art. Could you tell us about making this book-length graphic work? 

When I began Her Read I did not intend to create a graphic work. I planned to make an erasure using correction fluid as the dominant "writing" instrument. But I was not sure I was making something that was at all publishable let alone publishable as a visual artifact. Many erasurists transcribe the words they lift from their source texts into word docs, arranging the language into lines that look like traditional poetry; I thought that might be something I needed to do to make the poetry work, or for logistical reasons. There are not many presses that will print a book of poetry composed of over 200 full color images. If you've seen my book, you know, I got incredibly lucky with Texas Review Press. 

But so one day at Vermont Studio Center, when I was just 50 or 60 pages into erasing this 266 page book--

a book which, I should say, is a survey of art from prehistory to the modern age in which not one female artist is mentioned--and I should add, by erasure I mean, that I used correction fluid to obscure most of the author's words, leaving legible only those words I wish the reader to ingest, words I imagine voiced by millennium of buried women artists, so that from the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, come instead the voices of the women who stories were told only by said men or not at all-- 

I was meeting with a visual artist, a young woman, we were sharing our work, and as she was sitting there with my fledgling book in her lap, turning the crusty, Wite Out pages, she looked up with surprise and said, Jen, this is art! 

I was confused. I said, well, poetry is art. She said, no, no. This is Art, you are making Visual Art. This is an Art Book. And she got on her computer and started pulling up examples of art books. Then she pointed to some lines I'd inked in over the correction fluid and asked me about them. They were mostly lines to clarify my intentions for the reader, for example, when I wanted them to read in two different directions at once, or other possibilities I'd seen which required directives via mark-making. I may have also drawn a little sketch or two-- there's a bird cage with a flown bird that appeared early on. Marks I felt compelled to make, but also felt self-conscious about because I was not an artist, I was writer. I didn't want to step out of my lane, into someone else's domain, especially there, at Vermont Studio Center, among all these highly trained and skilled artists. So for an artist there to point to my work and say You are making art. Look at these marks. Make more marks. That permission at that moment was a big deal. It swung the door wide open. Eventually my instruments expanded from correction fluid and black ink, to colored inks, scalpel, needle and thread, florist tissues, and so forth.

If you read the book sequentially as intended--you may notice that as the book progresses more liberties are taken with the alteration of the text; I see this evolution as indicative of the increasing agency of the speaker over the culture that would subdue her. It is also me, the poet, learning to manipulate the text, discovering what is possible, how to make what I've been given to make. 

Of course, we should not wait until we are given permission to make art. We should not "stay in our lane". The idea that you have to begin a practice as a kid and devote your whole life to it is ridiculous. Whatever life we live we bring with us into art making; whenever we begin, we bring all we have experienced to bear. And aren't the most experienced among us trying to get back to "beginner's mind".  Or as poet & essayist Ross Gay says, to unknow ourselves.    

Do you think visual poetry creates a different community than that of "traditional" poetry or comics? What's it like having a foot in both worlds?

For a long time while making Her Read, and before that, I didn't have much in the way of community to support visual poetry explorations. And though we're experiencing a boom in visual poetry, erasure and other interdisciplinary, hybrid or otherwise experimental poetries there is still disdain for it in many poetry communities.  So in the beginning, although I knew there were people doing work at the intersection of image and text, I didn't know how to find and/or connect with them. Also, as a working parent juggling/struggling to make ends meet, just finding time to make, let alone find or create a community is hard. As I began to publish in this vein, and as I've attended more conferences it's been easier to find people. And this has been such a boon. And it's been great to see the work proliferating and expanding-- so much invention! Sadly, for me, conversations are still fewer and farther between than I'd like (see aforementioned note on juggling/struggling to make ends meet). I've heard talk of a conference for work at the intersection of Image + Text and I really hope that comes to pass, both to strengthen and expand the community--to increase exposure and access-- and to deepen and expand scholarship.  

I also love to teach this work and have been fortunate to give a number of lectures and workshops. This is lovely because it fosters conversation and helps people find each other; I meet people this way, which I love, but also, people inside the communities I visit find each other, and can then form little communities. I love this.  

What are you working on now?

A big, long term project I'm working on is a biography of C.D. Wright, one of our great American poets and a hero of mine. I've spent the last year interviewing her friends and family and visiting her papers at Yale where I was fortunate to receive a Beinecke Fellowship. I'm a year or so into this and have a loooong way yet to go.

I'm working on some essays at the intersection of personal essay and craft, and my third poetry collection which is forthcoming in 2025. I think there will be some visual poems in that collection.  

More in the graphic poetry realm, there's an ekphrastic collaboration with visual artist Jenny Walton, who I met at Vermont Studio Center back in 2017 called OK Cupid: Little Songs and Look Book. In this collaboration contemporary sonnets are paired with portraits from Walton's stunning series: Match/Enemy. The series includes over 200 watercolor iterations of the profile pics of men Walton was matched with on the online dating service OK Cupid, specifically men who elected to omit or obscure their faces. In my sonnets, an omniscient narrator regards an imaginary woman surveying potential suitors. The collaboration explores truth-in-advertising, contemporary portraiture in the digital age, male gaze, female gaze, intimacy and aversion. I think this work is close to completion, but you know how it is with creative projects! They have their own timeline! 

Check out Jennifer’s website for her work, news, and events!