Interview by Emily Chou
While I was compiling poems for VULGAR, “Tight Pants” was one that refused to leave my brain. Something about its incredible aural qualities and inviting voice cut through all the noise and I found myself coming back to the poem over and over. Hoping to learn a little more about this poem, I sat down with Daniel Sarah to ask them some questions about their process, and also how to find the perfect pair of tight pants.
Who have you been reading lately, or turning to for inspiration?
I just finished rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s endlessly great novel The Dispossessed, in part because I’m revising a novel of my own that’s in dialogue with it. And I’ve been reading non-fiction about Canada’s oil and gas industry and its role in climate catastrophe, also in part because I’m writing about that. Have been on a brief poetry-reading pause, though I’m still thinking about Jody Chan’s incredible ecosocialist chapbook all our futures.
In the original iteration of the poem (before PRISM‘s layout), the Frank O’Hara quote was much closer to the title, intentionally creating a lovely rhyme. There were a number of instances throughout the poem in which delightful turns of phrases also reveal a delicious sonic closeness. Can you talk a little bit about how you designed the rhythm and sounds of this poem?
Without a plan! Freewheeling! Trial and error intuitional fumbling towards the music most suited to a poem about the goodness of tight pants.
What drew me to this poem initially was just how snappy it was. It’s just got so much personality! How did you find the voice of this poem? Was it a process that involved a lot of editing and adjusting as the speaker took form, or was it a very quick and simple process?
The poem emerged pretty much whole, though I’ve tweaked it a bunch in the months since I wrote it. The poem’s tone is definitely in some sort of dialogue with the tone of Frank O’Hara’s work––as you mentioned, O’Hara provides the poem’s epigraph––and it may also owe a debt to James Tate, whose early poems (maybe the later ones too, but I remember the early ones) are full of a kind of casual urban sensuality with leaps into the surreal.
In These Unprecedented Times, what have you discovered about your artistic practice?
I’ve started writing and performing music again, something I hadn’t done in like a decade! Otherwise…well, I guess I’m feeling how imaginatively impoverishing it can be to lack the ability to share collective (especially political/organizing) spaces with others. Ideas are produced and refined socially, in my experience, so it feels a bit rough to lack those meeting places right now. Some online spaces can be decent substitutes, though.
Shopping for pants and jeans has got a reputation as being one of those things that most people dread doing. Do you have any advice on how to find the perfect pair of trousers?
Once I find a pair of pants I like, I wear them religiously until I can wear them no longer, i.e. until they dissolve into a heap of threads from overuse. So I don’t really have recent experiences of shopping for pants, and must default to the advice offered (sort of) by the poem: it’s nice when they’re tight. (But comfort matters too!!)
What are you working on at the moment? Where can we find you next?
I’m hopelessly scattered: working on the novel I mentioned, a poetry collection that should be out in 2022 if none of the current overlapping global crises interfere, a TV pilot (about the oil & gas industry), and recordings of songs that might eventually comprise an EP. And trying to support local political organizing, especially abolitionist organizing, if/when I can be useful there.
Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) lives in Toronto. Their recent writing appears in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, and Briarpatch Magazine.