An Interview with Dean Rader |
What was your first experience with poetry? I grew up in a farm town in Oklahoma and my parents didn't graduate from college. I didn't come from a very bookish household. I didn't go to a very good school. But, from a young age, I was a reader and I was a writer. Even in high school, I wanted to be a journalist and was writing for my hometown’s newspaper. I remember being assigned a poem to write about during my senior year of high school. It was a Robert Frost poem—I don't remember which poem it was—but I remember reading it and remember thinking, in the middle of basketball practice, I've got it. I was running down the court and was like Oh my god. That poem wasn't about that. That poem is actually doing this. I went to college still thinking I was going to be a journalist and took a standard American literature survey course. I wasn't even an English major yet, and our assignment was to read through an American poetry anthology. I opened up the book and saw a W.S. Merwin poem on one side and a James Wright poem on the other page. And I remember thinking I'd been tricked. Like This can't be poetry. It's too cool. I remember the sensation of the room receding. I felt utterly transported. And I wondered if I could ever make someone feel the way these poems just made me feel. So I wrote down Merwin and Wright’s names, went to the library, and went on a deep dive for more of their work. And I discovered that both had translated Pablo Neruda. So I wrote down Pablo Neruda. Then I found that James Wright had translated Georg Trakl. So I wrote down Georg Trakl. I kept seeing connections—and I've been obsessed with this kind of lineage ever since: one poet talking to another poet and sort of making their poetry a part of that other poet's life. I'm really intrigued by that. We were lucky enough to publish your poem "Meditation on Circulation" in our very first issue. Based on an artwork by Cy Twombly, this ekphrastic poem explores the ineffable. How does structure, sprawl, and punctuation in this poem lend to this theme of questioning & uncertainty? I think you just answered it better than I could. Yes—all of that. I was really interested in Twombly's "Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus)" at the Menil. There are panels where Twombly writes lines from Catullus and Rilke into the painting. I started thinking about when he made the decision to write out a Rilke poem onto a canvas. It’s from a perfectly good book with nice typewritten font, and Twombly chose to write it out in long-hand in his scribble—making it even harder to read—and including it on a canvas that's talking about Catullus. Again—connections. I was interested in the legibility and inscrutability. What is Twombly doing with the poem, to the poem—and what does he want the poem to do? One of the things that is interesting about Twombly—and about abstract art and contemporary poetry—is its relative inscrutability. Like, non-poets just don't think they get contemporary poetry, right? To them, it's inscrutable and hard to understand and abstract. So I was just riveted by what it means for Twombly to write out a poem on a canvas. Is he writing or drawing? What does it do to a poem to de-font it—to make it more embodied through the scrawl of the hand? I saw this Twombly project as kind of ekphrasis but also as inter-text. In "Meditation on Circulation," I was trying to make readers feel the way they might if they were looking at Twombly's “Catullus.” In addition to your poetry, you are also known for your reviews as well as your study of film and art. How do the visual arts inspire your writing? Although my degrees are in comparative literature, I did some art history in graduate school. I was interested in writing about film and painting. I'm always really jealous of painters. Because you go into a museum and you feel the art immediately. You don't have to worry about what a work "means." I'm jealous of that immediacy. Whereas in a poem—even a short one—you have to read it, and it takes time, and then you worry Did I get that wrong? You never have to worry about getting a Rothko wrong, and I'm jealous of that. But also: I always think of my poems as visual texts. I mean, I know they're in language and that they have to make sense, but I think of them visually and aurally. I want a poem to be pleasing to the eye—I want readers to look at it and think That is put together well. And then I want their ears to come alive. How do you stay inspired to write? Do you have a strict daily writing practice? It depends on what I'm writing. I write a lot of essays. Victoria Chang and I have this collaborative poetry review column so, if we have a deadline, or if I have an essay deadline, my journalism background makes it so that I never miss it. If I have a prose deadline, I write every day. I can’t write poems every day, though. I only write if there's a problem I want to solve or if there's a line that comes into my head—one that won't leave my head until I write it down. For me, writing poetry is either problem-based or language-based and, through writing, those things resolve. With the Cy Twombly project, I was actually working on a different book, and then my father died. My father was a very interesting guy. He and I had different paths. He always lived in small-town Oklahoma, where he was mayor of our hometown, a bail-bondsman, and professional gambler—but, overall, this unbelievable community-oriented guy. When he died, my sister and I found boxes and boxes of plaques and thank-you pins—all these accolades that he had saved, all this service. We knew that he had done a lot but hadn’t known just how much he'd done over the course of our lives. I became obsessed with the idea of what makes a life. I also became obsessed with his choice: to be someone so outward-looking within a small sphere. It is a choice that's so different from mine: I am very inward-looking in this great world of poetry where we're all sort of anonymous. I was so struck by that. And, almost immediately after that visit, I went to a Twombly exhibit in New York. It was a retrospective of his drawings—his entire career—and, again, I thought: What makes a life? And I was just mesmerized, thinking about my dad: about contribution, about what matters and what gets remembered. And I went home and wrote a poem about Twombly and my dad, and then I just kept going back to Twombly pieces. For two years, it was an obsession. I just couldn't stop trying to solve the problem of Twombly. You talked about "mapping": how you found Neruda through Wright and Merwin. Do you think that encountering the Twombly exhibition so soon after your father's death really made them feel interactive? Maybe, yeah! I have been obsessed with Twombly for a long time. I even took a road-trip to the Menil during graduate school to go see his work. But yes: I think seeing his exhibition at that particular moment pushed me over the edge. I’m interested in reading my father through the lens of Twombly—or reading Twombly through the lens of my father. Or, with “Catullus,” reading Rilke through the lens of Twombly. Like, what would Rilke think about Twombly? What advice do you have for writers hoping to publish their first collection? My first collection came out when I was forty. I probably worked on my first book for twelve years. I was sort of a perfectionist. I really thought You only have one chance for a first book. I wanted it to be good. It was 2008 when I realized I had published plenty of poems—enough for a collection. And I was like It's time. So I looked at all of my poems and I thought there were some good ones. I liked how they felt but thought there were some gaps. I spent the next year writing poems that seemed to connect the threads. At a writer’s residency, I remember pushing all the furniture against the walls and I laid out every poem on the floor. I stood on the bed for hours and just looked at the poems. I knew there were connections between them, but I couldn't figure out what they were. Then on the second day, it hit me—what the title could be, how it could be organized, and how the poems could talk to each other. I spent the rest of the time cutting and pasting and moving things around. I think I work slowly. I guess my advice is to trust your instinct. If your being tells you that you aren't there yet and your book isn't there yet, you're probably not there yet. If it tells you that you are, then you probably are. ⋆ |
Dean Rader recently completed a book of poems that enter into conversation with the work of Cy Twombly (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2022). He also has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indigenous studies, and visual culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial Award for a First Book of Poems, and won the 2010 Writer's League of Texas Poetry Prize. His next book, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013. His most recent solo project is Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Rader is a professor in The Department of English and in the Honors College at the University of San Francisco, where he has won the University's Distinguished Research Award and the College of Arts & Sciences' Dean's Scholar Award, as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of Collegiate Scholars.
Marissa Ahmadkhani's writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including poets.org, which awarded her the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015, 2017, and 2022. Currently, she teaches composition at the university-level and serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.