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/



Lily Brown - Author Interview: Poet

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

When I was a child, my mother and I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses at night before bed. My mother had memorized the poem “Where Go the Boats” when she was a kid, so that poem is most prominent in my memory.

In terms of music, I remember listening and singing along to The Monkeys with my dad and my sister when we did the dishes after dinner at night. And I remember listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA with my mom. My mother had a huge LP collection, so I used to rifle through her records and listen to whatever looked interesting.

When I was a teenager, I gravitated towards poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. My guess is the overt emotion in some of their poetry appealed to my teenage sensibilities.

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

Yes. As a child, the first poem I ever wrote was entitled “The Sea,” and was basically just a meditation on loving the sound of waves. The Stevenson poems I gravitated towards the most were about watery locations and subjects. And in terms of other poets I read, those poets became part of my own process of maturation as a writer. This is not to say that I’m somehow fully matured now—I’m not—but rather that different writers become models at different times in one’s life. Plath and Sexton were valuable to me as a high school student. I’m sure I imitated them stylistically at that time. Later, I loved Frank O’Hara, and I imitated the unique voice of his poems. Still later, I became obsessed with Wallace Stevens and many of the poems in my first book bear that obsession. What I’m reading now will probably influence the poems I write in six months, and so on. But what’s interesting about influence, I think, is that one’s own work becomes a space in which the ghosts of all of these poets and their poems reside. Even if I no longer go to Sylvia Plath when I feel like writing, her work is somewhere in the background when I pick up a pen, and the same goes for other writers I consider to be influences.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

In the last couple of years, I’ve read a lot of Emily Dickinson. I admire her work for the ambiguity of her syntax; for the metaphorical combination of concrete language and abstract concepts; and for certain formal qualities of her work, such as the much-discussed dash. I love the last stanza of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

The concrete “Plank” in the concept of “Reason” calls up any number of possible referents—a coffin, a house, or a gangplank—while the final “then” surrounded on either side by the dash offers us two semantic possibilities: either the speaker finished knowing at the moment she “dropped down, and down,” or the speaker finished knowing, and then something else happened that the reader is not privy to. I love that the last line effectively undoes the idea it declares.

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

The poem “Backpedaling for Statements,” which appears in my book Rust or Go Missing, is an amalgamation of a number of conversations, and is a record of where the mind goes when considering all of these different conversations. So the poem includes not only reflection on multiple conversations, but also the present moment (the moment of composition) when the speaker looks out a window and reflects on how a window frames a natural scene, and then what world that framing creates. In this way, the speaker creates a corresponding visual analogue to the way conversations can lead to verbal posturing, internal meditation, and finally in the poem, an improvisational voice—a voice that experiments with sound and speech in the space of the poem.

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

I hope the poem creates a space where a reader might find herself taking pleasure in the way words feel in the mouth. I hope the poem sends a reader away thinking in some way (however slanted or abstracted) about natural spaces in the context of architectural constructs, or thinking about how the landscape around us (natural, conversational, visual) directs our eyes and, in turn, our thoughts. But most of all, I want a reader to find her own meaning in the words of the poem, and I hope the poem leaves space for the reader to do that.

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

From “Backpedaling for Statements”:

She says the book can’t feel the smart
of tumble and hit. But here, in the office,
window cases mini-landscape. Window cut
by brown rulers, run through and across
the grass. Now a world—impression
of groundcover and tree with sunlight.

She says the book can’t feel
but I’m inside. The book has many
minds. She wants to know the climate
of the room where I last wrote.
Was it the living room? Was it the staircase,
the memory of a staircase? I make a lie
of the absolute, space like a reflection
that never changes.

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

This opening section of the poem introduces the idea of conversation as a space where various kinds of framing occur, and the speaker introduces the visual analogue of a window framing the exterior world.

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

I would describe my poetry as thought-driven. The poem is a record of the mind thinking, and of all of the movement and variety that can arise in the course of thought (i.e. memory, sensory data, the place where the writing takes place, what day it is, who’s around, whether the dog jumps on me, etc.).

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

I read my poetry aloud when I give public readings. Audiences vary for these events from a few people to maybe a couple of hundred (at a big conference, for example). It’s hard to gauge the response of an audience, as it completely varies from group to group. I don’t think my poems are very funny, but once in a while I feel gratified if someone laughs at a moment that has some dark humor to it. I suppose the responses of different audiences can be characterized most accurately by their variety.

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

I don’t usually write groups of poems to form collections, but the poems are connected regardless. The poems in my most recent collection are connected by an interest in the relationship between humans and the natural world, by ideas about the photographic image and the poetic image, and by relationships between people and how people treat each other in both public and private spaces and situations.

Author website: http://www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/AuthorBook/Brown.html