Sep 29, 2011

Dora Malech - Author Interview: Poet

What kinds of poetry, including songs, did you experience as a child and teenager, and did you have some favourites?

As a child, my mother was always singing to me and with me; she immersed me in the “folk tradition” or “oral tradition,” though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Ballads like “Barbara Allen” or “Danny Boy,” spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Mary Don’t You Weep,” and “Go Down Moses,” and protest songs like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” became an integral part of my consciousness. So did Doo-Wop, Motown, Soul, Rock and Roll; all the music we’d now call “Oldies.” I listened to all of my mother’s vinyl records and the songs she sang, and absorbed their rhythms, rhymes, and energy. I also loved poems with a strong rhythmic pull and more than a little bit of melodrama; I remember loving “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes as a child.

As a teenager, my poetry tastes began to pull in two directions; on the page, I loved the spare intensity of Mark Strand poems like “Keeping Things Whole” and Jim Carroll poems like “Blood Bridge,” but I was also moved by the verbal density and energy of the Slam / Performance poetry of artists like Saul Williams.

Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?

I think that my childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a huge influence on how I write poetry now, though it has taken me a while to realize it. I loved rhyme and rhythm in poetry and lyrics as a child, but my teachers were quick to dismiss rhyme and meter as old-fashioned and obsolete, something to be studied, but not emulated. I remember being ten years old, and I showed a rhyming poem I wrote to a teacher, who told me that rhyming poetry was “doggerel,” and I should try writing a “serious” poem. I bought into the false dichotomy of “traditional verse vs. free verse” for a long time, but as a young adult studying and writing poetry in earnest, I began to see verse as a conversation, not an insurmountable divide, between tradition and innovation. Revisiting Shakespeare, I found wildness and subversion. Reexamining modern and contemporary poets, I found echoes of the ancestors. This deeper investment and investigation into the craft and history of poetry has allowed me to return to my roots, reveling in the rhythms and linguistic music that captivated me as a child.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

It’s hard for me to focus on one, since there are so many voices that are important to me (Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Frost, Bishop, Berryman… the list goes on and on). I suppose I’ll stop at John Berryman, just for the sake of time, and for his connection to my previous answer. Berryman “inhabits uncertainties” in a way that never fails to astound me; his poems are wild and of his moment, but they are also in constant conversation with the tradition, and with Shakespeare in particular. They are finely wrought but also raw. They explore persona while feeling deeply personal. They are challenging; they are delicious in the mouth and ears; they are often funny; they break my heart.

How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?

What I love about poetry is that it resists summarization. I joke with my writing students that a “summary” of a poem has to be the poem itself, just typed up in smaller print, perhaps. When I write a poem, it means that language as we use it in politics, the media, academia, and everyday discourse has failed me. I go to poetry to explore the contradictions and uncertainties that are plastered over by language-as-usual. All this said, I’ll sum up my poem “The Kisser” by saying that it’s something of a meditation on the pleasures and betrayals of language and bodies.

How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?

I suppose it will appeal to some and not others. That’s just fine. I would hope that there would be some pleasure in the sounds and rhythms, the physicality of the language. I would hope that the poem might create a charged space in which a reader could do his or her own thinking and feeling.

Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?

It’s a one-stanza poem:

The Kisser

As in, in the, of course. The body knew
the drill by now. Was are we there yet and then
never been so, then so long. Heart tied
with twine, with shorthairs, trip wires—whispered that bind.
Drew the short straw, scared herself apart
to spit-sweet shards and into time that counted
backwards from two lips ago. Said done
is done and is between me and those teeth.
Some little story about dignity.
We’re there yet. Said trussed me. Body the white flag,
body the pulley. Hoist up and sang to beat
the heart back down again—stick-stone, stick-stone.

How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?

The poem is the poem is the poem!

Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?

I suppose I’d describe most of my poetry as lyric poetry, though I think that, like the false dichotomy between traditional and free verse I described earlier, poetry doesn’t fall neatly into these sorts of categories. There are narrative elements in many of my poems, but I think that music and image and thought and feeling are the primary catalysts for my poems.

Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?

Yes, I give readings reasonably often. The size of the audience varies with the venue; smaller gatherings at bookshops or bars, larger gatherings at universities. I love it when someone who hasn’t been to a poetry reading before enjoys the experience; I enjoy hearing which poems “reached” an audience, since it’s often not the ones I’d expect.

Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?

I write poems as individual poems, and I let a collection form in an organic way. I like to find the themes, threads, and patterns that connect the poems in a collection together, but (so far) I’ve never wanted to force those connections or write poems that couldn’t stand alone.

 Author website: http://www.doramalech.com/

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