Core Memories: Sara Lupita Olivares
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Sara Lupita Olivares.
Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Field Things (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She lives, teaches, and writes in the midwest. You can find her at saralupitaolivares.com.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
There is a distancing that has felt present in poetry for me and an ability for it to help me to somewhat see beyond circumstance. Early on I remember writing a poem that felt and sounded different than anything I had previously made. I felt like part of myself had woken up that was not concerned with a response or in being understood, but that it was there in its own clearness, and it felt untouchable. I keep thinking of James Wright’s “The Jewel,” so maybe this was my jewel moment. I became curious about poetry as a form of art and as a means of saying. It wasn’t until I was taking classes (I think for journalism) that I realized that everything else that I was studying lacked the vibrancy and magic that I found in poetry, and I knew I wanted to make a life around it.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
I know the feeling present within this moment and this is a sense that I maintain space for within my poetry, teaching, and in my life overall. I don’t think I knew that my love for an art like poetry could overlap into other areas of my life and I am always grateful for this. In thinking about my family and my experiences as a student and as a poet, I know that there has often been a quality of silence and a discomfort in being heard or seen. This moment showed the importance in protecting this feeling over shaping my work to be accessible by notions of narrative or style that may seem imposed. My early connections to poetry taught me to see and hear myself and to be perceptive to the layers that are present in how to convey this. I want this for others, and it is a generational shift that I work to be mindful of.