Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Throughout the many years I lived full-time in Buenos Aires, there was a sense of an inevitable return to my husband’s country — where we’d lived previously — at some future point that hung over us; I was experiencing saudade or desiderium for Argentina before ever leaving. I had written a poem, ‘Quemadero, or Farewell to a Husband’s Homeland’ against that return and wanted to further probe these feelings for this land I was living on. The ghazal, with its associations with love and longing and its repetition (“the ritual of obsession”, as artist Richard Serra has it), seemed the ideal form with which to attempt this.
https://www.apjpoetry.org/quemadero-farewell-sophie-segura
Around this time, I read Angel Nafis’s Ghazal for Becoming Your Own,which is such a great, empowering poem. I had come to be in Buenos Aires through my husband’s work but now I was endeavouring to put on record my own individual connection to the place, my deep attachment to it, and to declare it home regardless of what had brought me there or might take me away.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90977/ghazal-for-becoming-your-own-country
It was my first attempt at writing a ghazal and the refrain was clear to me from the beginning. I knew I wanted to explore aspects of the history of Buenos Aires and beyond, the region’s associations with silver. The Río de la Plata (literally, ‘river of silver’), such an intrinsic part of the history and identity of Buenos Aires, runs through the poem, though it is never identified by its modern name.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was in a café near my home in Palermo, Buenos Aires. (I used to walk my youngest child around in a stroller until he fell asleep and then write in one of the many local cafés.) It was Spring, which is a really beautiful time of year in the city. I carried the poem around for some months and made final edits on a visit to my parents’ house in Dublin, where I’d rooted out the coin and hide belts of the first line – my first contact with Argentina, as a girl — from my childhood bedroom.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? September 2018.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) As the couplets are self-contained, rather than a clear progression of drafts of the whole poem I mostly have pages of barely legible notes fighting for space with the couplets that emerged from these. There was a little reshuffling, but the poem was pretty close to its final form by the time I committed it to a Word document.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I cut the following couplet from the poem:
Easy to miss: the odourless flight of love,
jingle of a pocketful of Tyrian silver.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I’m not sure what a reader might take from this poem. Perhaps they might identify with the experience of topophilia or of finding one’s place in the world. Ultimately, I think the reader, in bearing witness to this declaration of love and claiming of place as my own, is doing more giving than receiving.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? There are a couple of parts: the fifth couplet refers to Argentina’s Disappeared, some of whom were thrown from death flights into the Río de la Plata, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. I have a very visceral reaction to this chapter of Argentinian history, perhaps even more so since becoming a mother myself.
In the final couplet the act of naming ‘home’ — regardless of origin, of others’ opinions, of where I might find myself in the world — was important; I had hoped it might be self-fulfilling. These lines have taken on even more significance for me in the last year: my family and I did, in fact, return to my husband’s homeland, with the intention of living between the two countries, but five weeks after arriving the pandemic hit and turned those plans upside down.
Has this poem been published before? And if so, where? It was published in April 2020, in Magma 76 – Resistencia, edited by Leo Boix and Nathalie Teitler.
https://leonardoboix.wixsite.com/poetry
https://www.facebook.com/nathalie.teitler
Sophie Segura was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Magma, The Rumpus, American Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. A Pushcart nominee, Sophie has also been shortlisted for Ireland’s Doolin Writers prize. She lives with her husband and two children between Buenos Aires and the mountains outside Madrid.
Website: https://sophiesegura.com
Email: sophiesegura@outlook.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yonderlywagon
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