Interview: Forrest Gander

Poet, novelist, essayist, and prolific translator Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, California. The landscapes of Mexico, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert find their place in several books of his poetry, including his most recent, Be With (New Directions, 2018). He has translated poetry from Spain and Latin America, bringing the work of such writers as Pablo Neruda and Raúl Zurita to new audiences. Gander has also written two novels, The Trace (New Directions, 2014) and As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and received numerous awards in recognition of his writing. He formerly was on the faculty at Brown University. We caught up with him shortly after the 2016 publication of Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, which Gander edited for New Directions Press.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

This is such a fascinating work, Alice Iris Red Horse. You’ve worked with a lot of translations—how was it different working with one where the script is different, when you’re dealing not just with a different language, but different characters?

Forrest Gander:

Gozo Yoshimasu is a completely unique writer. In a way he is moving poetry into a beyond of writing, into a kind of performance. And he uses Korean Hangul and Chinese characters, as well as three different kinds of Japanese scripts plus French, English, and a colored system of writing kanji. In a way, he’s making available to us a whole new way of reading. You can’t read this book like you would an ordinary book.

TFR:

It was very interesting—as an editor, you weren’t just looking at the different pieces but also you had the different translators. It seemed there were also different styles within the translations.

Gander:

That’s right, because his work is so unique and because it’s so open-ended in many ways. The sort of failures of earlier translations of Gozo have been that they flattened out his work a lot. Right now, we’re suddenly availed of a new generation of Japanese translators. And I was in contact with a lot of them and thought the best way to present his work would not be to have a single voice but to have people approaching his work from different directions. Because the book is as much about what translation is, how one would translate this, as it is about the particular translation.

TFR:

Did you always have the idea to have the translators’ notes as part of the book? That was fascinating. Reading how they approached the task of translation was so interesting.

Gander:

It’s just as interesting and sometimes as interesting as the poetry itself because it opens up all of the layers like the night-blooming cereus. Gozo is like the poet of the night-blooming cereus where there’s a flower inside a flower inside a flower. And the translators are able to talk about how they deal with subtleties of trying to bring some of that out, including homophonic play and typographic play that work in Asian languages that don’t work in English at all. In other words, they had to ask, How do you deal with that as an English-language translator?

TFR:

In some places, I noticed they chose to keep some of the katakana and hiragana and kanji. And in others they wrote in Roman characters. There was one poem where the type was in orange and then it said “mikon” [referring to a visual symbol, logo, icon, or avatar]. And I wasn’t certain how much of that was because of how it was laid out in the original or a choice in the translation?

Gander:

It’s trying not to just stuff the strangeness and the fabulousness of the multi-lingual original into a shoe of conventional English language. And so, looking for ways to expand the notion of translation sometimes by including both languages. And Gozo uses symbols that he makes up also that we have to translate or choose to keep the same.

TFR:

I wanted to kind of call my friends in Japan and be like, “I want you to go read the original and then I want you to go read the translations and then I want your feedback. ”

[laughter]

Gander:

But no two people, who read the original, even in Japanese, will have the same reading of his work.

This is part of the ethics of his work. I think of him as a very ethical writer and one who’s concerned with letting other voices speak through his work. He’s always giving credit to where he’s heard information or what came out of a dialogue or who he’s engaging. There’s that sense that he doesn’t want to dominate the performance or interrogation of, in many cases, absence—he’s going to places where people disappeared in Fukushima and trying to make contact with spirits. He’s very influenced by shamanism, by Okinawan shamanism and the notion that we can cross borders of language of the living and the dead, of the spirit world and the daily world.

TFR:

It different than a lot of poetry that one encounters in that it was so worldly—he mentioned so many places he’d been and people that he had met, along with the incorporation of different languages. Very centered in Japan but also very worldly.

Gander:

It’s super worldly. He’s really an international poet. That’s also an aspect of, I think, his ethics—to constantly sort of open up. He gave up—like our own poet Robert Creeley did—the sense of the poem as a beautiful, polished, finished thing. And his poetry is instead an inquiry that continues to question and that doesn’t have a certain closure.

TFR:

This range of languages was new for you, but you have worked on Spanish translations a lot. Do you speak and read Spanish fluently?

Gander:

I do, yes.

TFR:

How is that different when you’re working in a language that you know more intimately?

Gander:

I studied Japanese, but all of my Japanese translations and my work in Japan has been with a fantastic co-translator named Kyoko Yoshida. In Spanish, on the other hand, my translations are solo. The most recent book of Spanish-language translations I’ve done is Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems. The Neruda Foundation discovered these poems that had never been seen in these boxes, folded away, written on menus, and they were published in Latin America and in Spain. And I read about them them and thought, Oh, they’re just squeezing the last juices out of that great grape. And then I saw the poems, and they’re great. He’s just such a great poet, and the poems are fantastic.

Even in Spanish, though, each engagement is really different, too. I’ve done a lot of Mexican translations and translations from the Spanish of Spain and Bolivia and Chile. And each country and area has a completely different dialect and completely different sort of secret words. One of the hardest poems to translate was the shortest one in here, and it was based on an old vernacular for abalone. Abalone in the ’50s in Chile by the sea were often called “orejas del mar,” little ears of the sea.

So Neruda’s got this poem to his wife’s ear that starts to seem to be about cooking his wife’s ear and it’s just this sort of mix between the abalone and his wife’s ear, and it took a lot, it took somebody’s grandmother to tell me, “Wait, I remember… ”

[laughter]

TFR:

Have you spent time in each of the countries that the poetry that you’re translating is rooted in?

Gander:

It’s absolutely necessary. Going to Bolivia to translate Jaime Sáenz was absolutely necessary. Seeing the territory that he lived in, the references that are so common in his books. And the same with Neruda. I spent a lot of time in Chile.

TFR:

Do you find yourself translating not just the language but the culture?

Gander:

You have to translate the culture. The culture is in the language.

TFR:

How do you find it to be both a translator and a poet yourself? Is there something that is fulfilled both in translation and writing your own work, and how are those two things different? How do you carve out space for both?

Gander:

I know some writers and translators who can do both at one time. And lots of writers who multi-task and do multiple manuscripts, but I need close focus on one thing. So when I am working on translations I can’t be working on my own writing and vice versa. But I’ve never felt it as a loss because when I come back to my writing I’ve learned things from the translation—new image repertoires, new ways of using syntax, new particular lexical phrases—that end up feeding my own work. So, though it takes time away, it gives to me and makes me, I think, a deeper poet in English, my own language.

TFR:

So you find that you can see some influences and impacts when you come back to your own work from what you’ve been translating?

Gander:

Absolutamente. [laughter]

TFR:

I happened to stumble across actually a podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, in which you recommended a poem for the newly elected President Obama (“Poems for President Obama”). You said in that interview, “The election of the President is a kind of wedding with the people.” If you were asked now to come up with a poem for the new president, would you participate in that exercise again?

Gander:

That would be hopeless right now. I know it seems less of a wedding with the people right now than something very unsettling. And I’m afraid Trump would be disinclined to read any poem whatsoever, but if I had to, for him, I’d say, “Donald, start with Whitman.” [chuckle] The sense of inclusivity, the sense of men and women being involved equally. The sense in which Whitman was looking critically at the slave auctions and his political generosity, his care for soldiers who’d been hospitalized… All of that.

Fantastic empathy I think makes anyone a bigger person. And that’s what I think poetry and art can do. They articulate things that we haven’t completely articulated for ourselves that expand what it means to be human.

TFR:

Yes. I came across your poem “Ligature” and in one line it says, “The man writes, I’m not given a subject but I’m given to my subject.” Do you find that to be something you still feel?

Gander:

I think the great poets are given a subject. For instance, someone like the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita—in his early twenties he’s arrested by the Pinochet dictatorship and tortured, and during a period of a few years thousands of people, hundreds who he knows, disappear. They’re killed, and they’re chopped up and dropped into the mouths of volcanoes and the sea. Something like that happens to you and what else are you going to write about? You’ve been given a subject matter that you can’t ever look away from. [Akira] Kurosawa has that nice line, “Don’t look away, never look away.” And sometimes the great subject materials are inevitable I think.

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Interview: Joy Harjo

In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?

Joy Harjo:

I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.

TFR:

Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .

Harjo:

Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.

TFR:

Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?

Harjo:

I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.

TFR:

I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?

Harjo:

I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.

TFR:

So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?

Harjo:

Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.

TFR:

How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?

Harjo:

I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.

TFR:

When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?

Harjo:

I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]

TFR:

Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?

[laughter]

Harjo:

Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.

TFR:

Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?

Harjo:

Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.

TFR:

There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?

Harjo:

History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.

TFR:

Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?

Harjo:

I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.

TFR:

Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?

Harjo:

I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.

TFR:

You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?

Harjo:

Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]

TFR:

Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?

Harjo:

Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]

TFR:

Yes, yes, yes.

Harjo:

But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.

TFR:

So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?

Harjo:

I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.

TFR:

Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?

Harjo:

I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .

TFR:

Yeah. [laughter]

Harjo:

Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.

TFR:

Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?

Harjo:

It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.

TFR:

Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?

Harjo:

I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.

[laughter]

We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.

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Interview: Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky’s works of poetry include Sadness and Happiness (Princeton University Press, 1975), The Want Bone, (Ecco Press, 1990), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus, 1996), and Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus 2007). He has also published prose, including the books Poetry and the World (Ecco Press, 1988), The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Farrar, Straus ,1998), Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Life of David (Schoken, 2005). He has edited many anthologies, among them Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology (Norton, 2000), co-edited with Maggie Dietz, which grew out of the project he directed as US Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. This project invited Americans from all walks of life to name their favorite poems and to both record those poems for the audio archives of the Library of Congress and to capture their own reflections on why a particular poem called to them. Few contemporary poets have had as visible a presence as Robert Pinsky—he has appeared on both The Colbert Report and on an episode of The Simpsons. Yet, though his work and presence in popular culture have often had exalted status, his most recent book of poetry, At the Foundling Hospital, manages to delicately balance the universal and the personal, taking the reader from civilization’s battles to the side of a friend’s hospital bed. The poems reach out and take in both humanity’s sweep and what it means to be, simply, an individual human. Please also see our review of At the Foundling Hospital.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:
One of the things that struck me on reading At the Foundling Hospital is how often you took elements that didn’t have obvious links and connected them. For example, in your poem “Cunning and Greed,” you have David Copperfield and the collapse of bee colonies. Do you find these combinations come to you organically or do you find yourself gathering them together before you put pen to paper?

Robert Pinsky:
One of the nicest compliments I ever received from my wife was about something I made with my hands. She said, “I love your patshke imagination.” Patshke is a Yiddish word that sort of means patting something together. I’ve never been good at learning everything about anything. I don’t have a scholarly mind, but I do have a kind of oddball mind. I enjoy finding similarities in things that aren’t similar. For me poetry, compared to a long, naturalistic novel, is very good at making lightning moves. I sometimes say prose is like wading. You move through the medium slowly. You see things down at your toes. Poetry is like ice skating. So, you can move through a lot of territory very quickly. I get bored very, very easily, much more easily than most people, which is why I like poetry.

TFR:
You’ve also presented your poetry in non-traditional ways beyond simply on the page or read aloud. You often perform with musicians.

Pinsky:
I love working with jazz musicians, yes.

TFR:
When you’ve worked with jazz musicians, were you usually choosing the poem you wanted to read based on the piece of music or was the piece of music pared with the poem as the starting point?

Pinsky:
None of the above. We improvise, and it’s based on sound. I hope it’s not me reciting to music. I try to make my voice like a horn. The pianist I’ve done a couple CDs with, Laurence Hobgood keeps the poem text on the desk of the piano and looks at it like you’d look at a musical score, and I try hard to listen to him, and he listens to me. Sometimes we might have a rough plan, a set of chord changes. I started out as a musician. I don’t speak musician fluently, but I know enough of it to be able to discuss with Lawrence what we’re doing. It isn’t basing music on the words. It’s not songwriting. It isn’t basing songs on words, or words on music. It’s making music together.

TFR:
How do you find the audience reacts to that collaboration?

Pinsky:
It works so much in our favor because people are assuming they’re going to be embarrassed or bored. They are thinking, This guy is going to say poetry with music, and you can almost see the nervous panic in their faces. [Laughs.]

TFR:
As US Poet Laurette when you were working on the Favorite Poem Project [see web links below]—which invited Americans to name and record their favorite poem—you found readers that represented a diverse group of Americans. What did you find that was common among the readers, even if what they picked was unexpected?

Pinsky:
It was really the readers that were unexpected. It is very important to go to favoritepoem.org and to see that there are no poets, no literary critics, and no professors of poetry. You see a construction worker read lines of Walt Whitman and then talk about those lines very cogently. You see a Cambodian-American high school student in San Jose read a Langston Hughes poem, and she doesn’t mention that Langston Hughes was a black man. She relates the Langston Hughes poem to the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s regime. A US Marine with a Hispanic surname recites [William Butler] Yeats’ “Politics.”

It’s the only website I know that is actually about poetry in the sense that it’s not about poets, or smart things people say about poems. It’s about poetry in people’s lives.

TFR:
How do you think poetry is important to people’s lives, not just the act of writing it, but the act of reading and reciting it?

Pinsky:
It’s like answering the same question about cuisine as distinct from nutrition or lovemaking as distinct from procreation. I don’t know what the importance is. I don’t know why people like these things, but we seem to be an art-consuming animal. We don’t just walk around, we also dance. We don’t just talk, we also like to recite. If you have a tiny child, when you cradle it, it likes to be sung to. I’ve discovered an infant curls up in exactly the same way when you recite poetry as when you sing. It’s fundamental. It’s there. It’s a very basic part of human nature.

TFR:
Having published your first book of poetry in 1975 and your most recent book of poetry in 2016, do you think that your approach to assembling your pieces into a larger work has changed over time?

Pinsky:
Each book demands waiting for the physical materials to tell you what each poem is about and what the book is about. In the course of writing that book, At the Foundling Hospital, I had two or three friends die. That affected the subject of the foundling and culture. The foundling is taken into a culture it doesn’t particularly choose. It’s told you’re going to be a woman, you’re going to be Korean, you’re going to speak English, you’re going to be gay, you’re going to be subject to these diseases and have these immunities. The little child is just a squirmy little thing. It doesn’t know all that.

One of my friends was in a coma before he died. People sing to you when you are in a coma, they read, tell stories, tell jokes, and I found myself in the poem “In a Coma” trying to assemble the music, the news stories, the sports teams that he and I experienced when we were young. The sort of funerary or memorial aspect of the poem changed and was changed by the book’s project of talking about the foundling hospital and the infant foundlings and their growing up.

Identity is not the kind of fixed category that political discourse sometimes tries to make out of it. Culture is always mixed and fluid.

Favorite Poem Project Links:

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_FromSongofMyself.html

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_MinstrelMan.html

http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_Politics.html

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Interview: Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel is the author of How the Sky Fell (1996), Girl Soldier (1996), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999), Kinky (1997), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001), Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), and SCALD (University of Pittsburg Press), out in early 2017 after this interview was conducted. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013.

In this interview, we focus on Blowout, that rare poetic collection that expertly bridges the distance between the earthbound and the abstract. The pieces are utterly approachable but still manage to surprise in their perception. Duhamel distills decades into the moments that most inform the path from childhood love to the adult dismantling of those early aspirations, sparing no one, least of all herself, along the way. We are also happy to share three new poems by Denise Duhamel here on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

I just want to say that I enjoyed this book so much. I identified so much with what you said, which is so rare. Reading, you may think, that’s beautiful, but you don’t necessarily see yourself in other people’s work. But with so much of what you wrote, I thought, I have had that experience. When you were writing, did you have an idea that you would speak to that feeling, make those connections with readers?

Denise Duhamel:

No, in fact I thought, like anybody who goes through a divorce or bad breakup, that my situation was so particularly weird and worse than anyone else’s, kind of over-dramatic about it. I thought it was such like a midlife story, but love is love and being betrayed is being betrayed whether you’re seventeen or ninety-nine.

TFR:

I also wondered if you made a conscious choice to talk about things that were a little bit more every day, down to earth.

Duhamel:

I had a friend say “When you write, you have God and a banana, and then there’s a whole world in between.” So, for me, the god, the abstractions, I’m not really interested in that much. I’m really more interested in the day to day and how we get through these things, and using pop culture or using our friends, or reading bad self-help books, whatever it is that get us through. I was more interested in that than a big statement.

TFR:

Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?

Duhamel:

Yes, absolutely. I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.

TFR:

I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?

Duhamel:

He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything. We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go.

TFR:

No.

Duhamel:

I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.

TFR:

I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.

Duhamel:

I gave a reading this morning with Catherine Bowman who had this wonderful poem about going through a divorce and then going back to etiquette books and Emily Post. Emily Post had this weird quote about how when a woman is going through a difficult time, like her husband leaves, the worst thing she can do is mention it because that’s not ladylike. But the realities of our everyday lives can be powerful and help us connect even if we think we’re the only ones going through it. If you put it out there it’s very possible that a lot of people will be nodding, oh yes, me too.

TFR:

I had wondered–since you had a poem talking about a new friend who wonders if you steal stories from people–whether you found that people are more concerned they will end up in your poetry, or more interested in ending up in your poetry.

Duhamel:

It’s very funny. Even though Blowout is very memoir-esqe, I think every time you try to write a poem you’re going towards a bigger truth than the truth of what happened on this day. You have to always be fabricating. In some ways people like to think they’re in the poems when they’re not or think, I can’t believe you wrote about me. And I think, no I wasn’t writing about you or vice versa.

TFR:

Are there certain poems you run by people prior to publication?

Duhamel:

Yes.

TFR:

Have you ever then not ended up publishing something based on someone’s reaction?

Duhamel:

No. It’s only if I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone, which is so female. I don’t think men think like this, but maybe they do. I would never want to intentionally hurt an innocent party. It’s my reaction to what happened. The people or villains in the poems have their own side of the story.

TFR:

You have a couple of poems in this collection where the speaker is much younger. What do you think it is about pre-adolescent love that lingers?

Duhamel:

Especially when you go through a divorce or a really bad breakup, you kind of have to ask yourself, it’s got to be me on some level. It feels like you have to at least investigate that, so I found myself going back to a boyfriend I had in kindergarten who I wanted to do things that he wouldn’t, or a painter that I knew on the lower East Side, and these patterns of disappointment. That was really fun to do actually.

TFR:

The fourth-grade boyfriend was good.

Duhamel:

Right? You finally get someone who really likes you and you just miss him for whatever reason.

TFR:

The book isn’t completely chronological but there does seem to be a lot of forward movement. Did you work in some purposeful chronology to the book?

Duhamel:

I did. I tried really hard because I didn’t write the poems in order. When you put a book together you’re just kind of culling from poems you’ve written over a span a time. “How It Will End” is the first poem, so you think it’s going to give away the ending, which it both does and doesn’t.

TFR:

You had mentioned in one of your poems becoming a Reverend of the Universal Life Church, which I did as well.

Duhamel:

All right. [Exchange of high fives.]

TFR:

You talk about it being appropriate, having been divorced, but I wondered if you thought being a poet also gave you a special ability as an officiant, someone who could produce ceremony.

Duhamel:

I didn’t think of it like that at the time. I was just doing it to help my niece who didn’t want a traditional religious wedding, so I said I would do it. I had another friend who had done this, and you did it. It seems like a poet thing to do. I have to say, it’s almost like you put on the cloak of that official and you get all this wisdom. One of the women at the wedding had just lost her sister and she was my age and her sister died of cancer and she was crying in the bathroom with her daughter and then the daughter said, “Talk to her, she’s a reverend.” And I thought, oh no, oh no, oh no, but I rose to the challenge, and I said your sister is with us now. Don’t ask me how I said that, but she was comforted. So, I think there are these roles that we can play. I don’t know if her sister was there or not, but I felt like I’m going to comfort her and I did since I’d taken on that role

TFR:

You have to wonder the reaction if the daughter had said, “Don’t worry, there’s a poet here.”

Duhamel:

That would be the best, if they said, “Go talk to a poet. They see the big picture.”

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Tag: Danielle Kessinger