An Interview with Dorianne Laux,
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A few weeks ago, I reached out to poet Dorianne Laux over email and asked if she might be open to an interview. As a long-time admirer of her work, I was delighted when she agreed. Her collection Facts About the Moon is a cherished favorite of mine, and it was immensely powerful to read Laux’s responses to questions about her first experiences with poetry, her writing process, her prolific career, and the themes she finds herself returning to again and again. What was your first experience with poetry? When did a poem really strike you for the first time—and can you remember which poem it was? What was the context in which you wrote your first poem? Like so many of us, my first experience was Mother Goose. Then, a few of my mother’s poetry books: Frost, Sandberg, e.e. cummings. And, later, rock and roll lyrics. But the first time a poem struck me—by which I mean made me cry--was when my community college night class teacher, Steve Kowit, read Pablo Neruda’s “Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas (1948)” out loud in class. By the end of that poem about two exiled poets writing secret letters to each other, I was weeping. I whispered to myself that this was what I wanted to do with my poetry--I wanted to make people cry. I had written poems since the age of twelve, rhymed and metered, early poems of adolescence filled with abstract injustices. I wrote sappy love poems. Then I took this class and began reading poems from all over the world, poems by women poets about my same age, free verse narrative poems. I fell in love and studied them, memorized them, imitated them. The first “real” poem I wrote was in that class. Kowit had asked us to go somewhere and watch people and write about them. I was a 30-some-year-old single mother and had to go to the laundromat to wash our clothes so, while my daughter played on the dirty floors, I opened my notebook and wrote a poem about the laundromat. It’s in my first book, Awake, published in 1990, and has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, so it’s had a long life. How would you describe your writing process? Do you have a daily writing ritual? I’ve always written catch-as-catch-can: while my daughter was taking a nap or at school, standing in line at the bank, sitting in the car waiting for the school bell to ring. Early in the morning, late at night. And always the notes on scraps of paper. The first time I wrote daily was when I went away to a writer’s residency which was a kind of heaven/haven. Then, later, when I began working at a university and had summers off. These pandemic days I’ve been writing with two groups of poet friends, online on Sunday and Monday. It’s been a life-saver. The ritual for that is all of us catching up with each other, sharing a book we’re reading, then each of us throwing a few words into the pot--a phrase, a color, a song lyric--and all of us going away to write for 40 minutes and then coming back together to read. It’s fun, of course, and has staved off loneliness and isolation, but we’ve also all gotten some good poems out of it. I can’t imagine stopping ever, even if everything goes back to whatever "normal" was. Your writing is incredibly rich in its detail—lines like, “his wife’s / wide back, the curled blonde hairs / at the nape of her neck,” and “the last color / he would see but the sea-blue corona / of her eyes.” How does this kind of specificity function within your writing? I like specifics, details, the over-looked, the under-appreciated, the beauty in the ordinary. I like the way details create intimacy and give the eyes a gift. I would have loved to be a painter, or a sculptor, a photographer, or a movie maker. All those visual jobs are highly competitive and expensive. It was cheap to be a poet—a pen and paper, a few words, an imagination, a love of the world. It suited me. And I also loved music, would have loved to play an instrument but, again, expensive. Books were cheap and abundant and could be borrowed from a library, and the things of the world outside my window were freely available, twenty-four hours a day. And I could use all that rhythm and music inherent in language to write poems. I could paint portraits with words, I could use the language being spoken in the air around me, the clipped diction of a voice, a gesture, a look. I could do all this with my own eyes and my own hand, for nothing, for free. While poetry can be both fictional and autobiographical, much of your poems seem to be based on personal experience. Within your writing, how do you think about identity and persona? The joy of writing poetry is that, for a short time, I forget about who I am, even if I’m writing from memory or personal experience, the life of the poem is its own life, its own world, and I’m merely a nameless, bodiless visitor there, a human entity who writes the final word then rises back into myself and looks down at this stranger I’ve made. My personality does sneak in when I revise and begin asking questions, making changes, snipping and shaping—but I hope all that work is in service to the poem, and not to my ego. I do see that my poems represent a vision of a woman’s life, a working-class life, a member of a family, a daughter, a mother, a wife, and a citizen--and how could they not? I am my experiences. But I don’t have an agenda beyond writing the best poems I can write in the place and moment I’m in. How would you say your relationship with craft has evolved since you first began writing? Like any artist, you begin with the rudiments and work your way through them to get to the next level of accomplishment. Mostly, I read good poems and try to emulate the craft elements I can identify within them. I worked in form so much as a young person that I learned a lot about rhythm and rhyme and the effects that can be achieved. I focused on music and image because I loved the image and sound. I studied line breaks, asked a lot of questions, formed opinions--some I had to reassess poem after poem. I developed a relationship with craft, sculpting my poems into pleasing vessels, identifying when the beat was off etc., but also watching out for moments that didn’t feel true or real and finding new words--better words--that would say what I meant to say. Your poetry covers so much terrain thematically—grief, birth, death, family, and the complexities of human relationships, just to name a few. What themes do you find yourself repeatedly drawn to? Has your subject matter shifted over time? I think my early poems looked inward more than later poems, which look outward--more poems about the universe, the ocean, the natural world. But my obsessions are the same, yes: grief, birth, death, and family. I don’t think that will ever change. If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s more than good enough for me. It’s what we know, what we care about, and what lasts as it’s infinitely mysterious. You often utilize motif grounded in nature and the body—“Last summer’s / pot of parsley and mint, white roots / shooting like streamers through the cracks” and “a broken-off blade / of grass. Possible, unthinkable, / the cricket’s tiny back as I lie, / on the lawn in the dark.” What would you say is your most beloved motif? What symbols do you tend to circle back to? I love hands, bodies, people, objects and, yes, themes of brokenness, the stars, the moon, the ocean, crows, relationships, music. What’s most beloved? Life in all its forms, which leaves the field pretty much open. I know from another interview that Sharon Olds has been a big influence for you. What in particular are you drawn to in her work, and what other poets particularly resonate with you? Her honesty, her boldness, her clarity, her complexity, her whimsy, the depth and breadth of her vision, her looking and seeing, her way of saying. Other poets I love are too many to list here but a few are lucille clifton, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, C.K. Williams, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Rita Dove, Caroyn Forche, Joy Harjo, Marie Howe, Steven Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, and Mark Doty. My husband, Joseph Millar. My colleagues Eduardo C. Corral and Kwame Dawes. And so many of my friends and students. In a similar vein, what contemporary poets do you see your work in conversation with? All of them. Even the poems I don’t quite understand or respond to as strongly have something to offer, some way of speaking or being or seeing that I can learn from and admire. Even a line can inspire--an image, an idea, a rhythm or a voice. Anyone who dedicates a large portion of their life to poetry is worthy of my attention and respect. There are so few of us. What would you say poetry’s role is in the world? Has that role changed since you first began writing? I think poetry’s role has remained the same throughout history. It’s a place where we go to quietly meditate on our lives, to tell stories, to be reminded of what makes us human. Poetry has always been a reflection of our fears and dreams, our angers and sorrows, our joys and loves, our hopes and despairs. It asks us the questions we are afraid to ask, or don’t think to ask, or don’t know how to ask. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? It commiserates with us in our confusion; it approaches what’s confounding. We go to poetry for simplicity and complexity, for shape and sound, color and texture and taste. We go for the human touch. To be heard, to be seen, to be shouted at or whispered to. To wake us up and reintroduce us to our lives. |
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.
Marissa Ahmadkhani's work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of California, Irvine and serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.
Marissa Ahmadkhani's work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of California, Irvine and serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.