An Interview with Dorothea Lasky

By Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Let's start with AWE:  How did this book come about? How long have you been working on these poems?

AWE came about as an accumulation of about 4-5 years of writing poems.  Originally, a few of the poems were in a manuscript called Elephants and Other Endeavors, which was my M.F.A. thesis at UMass-Amherst.  Over the years, I tried and tried to get my first book published and because of this the book went through several iterations, the last one of which is AWE.  I call the book AWE because of a class I once took in college in which we studied Coleridge's poem "Kubla Kahn: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment." My teacher told us that the purpose of this poem was to convey awe.  I have never forgotten my teacher telling me this and I often think about the magnitude of reverence that is in the best poetry.  Anyway, I always want my poems to be reverent to something greater than they could ever be. 

Who are some of your primary influences—either dead or contemporary?

I assume you mean primary poetry influences, right?  In terms of influences other than poetry, I have had many as I am highly influenced by other art forms (in many ways more so than by poetry itself), such as visual art, music, and picturebooks, and other types of non-aesthetic-based writing.  Also, I love fiction, too.  In terms of poetry influences, it is hard to answer your question of influences in a plural sense, as I feel that there has been one singular influence in my life as a poet—Sylvia Plath.  No one book has ever cut into me like the experience of reading Ariel when I was in the 10th grade.  I had always written poems as a child, but reading her book as an adolescent gave an adult form to my poems that no other poet ever has again.  I keep looking for someone to top her, but no one ever comes close to her importance for me and my poetry.  Even today, she is a never-ending source of inspiration.

That being said, there are many other poets who have influenced me greatly, especially so in the last 5 years, such as H.D., Mary Jo Bang, William Blake, Bernadette Mayer, Catullus, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Medbh McGuckian, Joseph Ceravolo, Marina Tsvetaeva, John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, and lots of others. Also, meeting so many wonderful and generous poets in the M.F.A. program I went to has influenced me in ways I probably can’t ever explain. Knowing a poet for real, while reading his or her work, influences a person in a very profound way. That’s the beauty of M.F.A. programs, I think.

I'm surprised that Plath is number one—but it's starting to make sense (my favorite from Ariel is "The Detective"; I love that poem!) especially given the seriousness or gravity that undergirds the whimsy of your poems.  I don't know if that's an awkward description, but are you ever forced to describe your work?  Can you?

I love that poem, too!  My favorite poem by her is "The Moon and the Yew Tree." 

I am so glad that you noticed the seriousness of my own poems and how they might be influenced by Plath.  I am very serious when I write a poem (sometimes it surprises me when people find my poems funny) and I think it is hard to know if my own inner seriousness was attracted to Plath's initially or if she has added an "undergird" to me as you said.  I do know that she is powerful, very powerful––quite possibly the most powerful poet I have ever encountered.  And I also know that I am very concerned with how power occurs in a poem and so through every word I write, I try to infuse it with the kind of power she displays.  People sometimes talk about how really good poems don't waste a single word.  I think this is true, but I think about this more so in terms of purpose.  Plath was a poet who truly understood the purpose of things, and this gave her her power.  I would like to take just a little smidgen––just one tiny little smidgen––of her power with me always when I write a poem.

It is hard for me to describe my work from my own angle, as you noted.  I can say that I do think your description of competing forces is correct––that there is a tension between strains of whimsy and gravity, a kind of simultaneous caring and not caring feeling when one encounters my poems.  This feeling has been carefully worked with and molded during the time I have been writing.  At my core, I am an extremely sensitive, melodramatic, hopeless romantic.  Inside me is the cheesiest movie that has ever been written and so this is always inside my writing voice, too.  But early on, I learned that this sad sappy voice needed to turn and change to make beautiful poems, so for a long while I became very concerned with translating my romantic instincts into something other, something farther away than romance.  And for a long time, my poems were playing the undercurrent of romance, which probably produced poems during that time that were quite whimsical, almost a scientific kind of whimsy.  Eventually though, in the past few years, I have begun to become more concerned with communicating––really communicating––with readers, so I have worked hard to write poems that are more accessible, (might use more everyday language and that sort of thing), in an attempt to sum up humanity's many voices and give voice to what is often unspoken.  So, I guess within my poems there are three distinct layers of being, three individuals that one might encounter: a romantic, a scientist, and a humanitarian.  But I guess since that they are all me, it is hard, really hard, for me to fully describe them. 

Your description of your own work (your own interiority, purpose, personalities, development) is wonderful to learn about.  Sometimes I think the most naive questions yield totally unexpected, surprising answers.  I'm thinking of an undergraduate student (my friend Christian told me this story) who asks John Ashbery in a classroom visit what it was like to know Frank O'Hara—a question that yielded this fully generous, descriptive, beautiful answer—if only I was there for that!  A question, though, so obvious, that we wouldn't think to ask it. So, let me turn back and get more naive: What do you say to folks who point out that nobody reads poetry anymore, that it's all just obscure or inaccessible to an average person?

I think that these folks might be misinterpreting what is going on in poetry today on a basic level.  By saying that nobody reads poetry anymore, these people are deeply underestimating who the real poets are and that they are, in fact, reading poetry.  Real poets are real people, average people, who are dramatically connected to poetry.  No poetry is too obscure or inaccessible for them and they read it all voraciously.  And they aren't nobody.  There are a lot of them around.   I would think that these people also might be mistaken into thinking that the general public (I guess I mean non-poets) doesn't read a lot of poetry because it is too obscure or inaccessible and that poetry should work to be more accessible.  Poetry shouldn't concern itself with such nonsense.  Poetry should just concentrate on being good.  A lot of non-poets aren't reading poetry today because a lot of what gets published is bad poetry.  Non-poets aren't stupid.  They know when poetry is bad, just like poets do.

Let me ask another sort of naive question. My sense is that the ways in which AWE dispenses with what normally gets called "craft" is its power: its loquaciousness, its passion, its gargantuan leaps, and the myriad worlds it creates are all qualities that I love about it.  The poems in AWE aren't afraid to be talky, to wander, to stumble, and to be painfully serious, overt, wacky, and passionate all at once—something rare in poetry.

But there's a jab in the Publisher's Weekly review of your book; the anonymous reviewer says, "tired stream-of-consciousness musings bog down much of this work." A few things: How do you deal, as a writer, with this type of criticism?  What role should criticism play, with regard to contemporary writing?  Does this type of review change or challenge you? Further, what advice do you have for younger poets who have a first book forthcoming?

It is interesting (and very flattering!) that you mention this loquaciousness, as I think that my poems get their power because they—like me—are unafraid.  My poems are unafraid of what others might think of them, because they are real and they live in the real world.  Reality has a certain element of loquaciousness, because reality itself is unafraid to show itself.  Reality takes a risk in that it can't not take one.   I think a lot about reality and its relationship to language and language expression, and the braveness of the real and natural worlds.

I am also glad that you paired this question with a mention of the Publisher's Weekly review.  That particular jab (now I will give away that I am not always so unafraid of what others think of me) really haunted me when I first read it.  I was not expecting the jab, as I didn't even know about the review until our friend, Noah, called me to read it to me without reading it first.  I got very somber after I heard it and have thought a lot about what the reviewer was saying.  The sentiment itself I think has some weight.  My poems are supported by much of what one might call stream-of-consciousness (although, knowing how I write the poems themselves, I would never call the wanderings stream-of-consciousness).  But if you are looking for poems without real world gestures—poems that make a large and dramatic nod toward the way real memory works––then my poems probably aren't for you and so this jab makes sense.  Anyway, I guess my answer to your question demonstrates that criticism has the ability to change me or that I am always open (possibly too open) for it to. I think it is a strange balancing act for a poet to not be deaf to criticism, but to not let others take you off your correct path.

One time I went and heard the filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, give a talk and someone from the audience asked him if he ever had people in the room with him when he edited his films, to which he replied empathetically “No!” The person asked why and he said, quite simply, “Because I would listen to them.” I think this is a lot like the role of poetry criticism today. I think it is good to listen to the important messages it can convey, but I don’t think critics should be allowed in the editing room.

In answer to your other, related question, I think criticism plays—like it or not—an extremely important role in contemporary poetry and contemporary poetry consumption.  I think that criticism is part of the opinion-maker system that gets us to read the great poets among us (or in some cases, obscures them from us).  I don't think that this always translates into the reality that there is a real conversation going on in poetry criticism today. I think there are a lot of half-conversations going on on the surface through criticism and a lot of underground spreading of the grand word.  I think criticism shapes this underground spreading of the grand word, but it is not the full template for it.  I do think it is a shame, however, that criticism isn't more often than not more than a formula.

What advice do I have for younger poets who have a first book of poems forthcoming?  I would tell them just to be excited and enjoy the magic. People pooh-pooh the idea of magic, but all great processes that humans can’t fully understand can be called magical.  How books affect the world is a very magical process and younger poets should appreciate that as much as they possibly can, lest they become too cynical too soon in their careers. (Although I would suggest to them to never fully become cynical ever, no matter how much they begin to think they know.)

What’s your idea of a good time?

My idea of a good time involves a strange combination of productivity, joy, safety, and love.  I love good times where there is some good outcome (like something is made or I can watch something, like a play) and where I can share things with people in a way that promotes beauty.  I am being sort of abstract, I guess.  Good times for me might include: a dinner party where I know and love everyone there, watching a play, feeding and giving love to dogs, painting pictures for someone I like a lot, dancing for hours and making up dance routines in the process, staying inside while it is raining outside on an afternoon in the Spring, thinking of the Romans and Greeks and reading old myths, kissing (I love kissing, but doesn't everyone?), swimming in an apartment pool while wearing a hot pink bathing suit (it has to be hot pink because I think hot pink is the perfect complement to swimming pool blue), dressing up and going to the movies––wait, do I have too many here? 

What poems do you know by heart?

Poems I know by heart include: Sylvia Plath's "Fever 103 degrees," Catullus 6 #48 most specifically Bernadette Mayer's translation, Wallace Stevens' "Gallant Chateau," Emily Dickinson's "Hope," Marina Tsvetaeva's "I know the truth," and Eric Baus' "Dearest Sister, I Wanted to Hear About Your Travels."

I loved your list—the mix of poems--and your list of pastimes, too.  Can I ask about other arts—what other arts feed into your work? You mentioned plays, dancing, painting. What are your un-literary influences?  Why did you decide to write poetry? Does any other art form -compete for your attention or focus?

I think at least 75% of my influences are unliterary and these compete for my attention and generally beat out my natural interest in poetry. I might sum it up by saying I am very visual, but this doesn't really sum it up at all. I spend a lot of time thinking about the visual/spatial composition of things and especially paintings. If I had any real talent in that area, I would be a painter, most specifically a children's book artist. My favorite activity of all time is to spend hours in an art museum. Also, I spend a lot of my time looking and listening to lots of things that I encounter in my everyday life, but I guess a lot of artists do that. I guess that I could say that I concentrate on life a lot––how life looks and sounds and that influences me a great deal. As well, I spend a lot of time listening to music, particularly pop music and I deeply internalize how sound is composed in songs. So, I guess you could say that I deeply study and internalize the visual and audial compositions of things and steal and recombine these compositions for my poems. I also really enjoy watching dancers and actors in plays, but I am not sure how this influences my poems. I know that one of my great dreams when I was little was to be an actress and dancer and I even took some classes at one point. Flashdance was (and still is) my favorite movie growing up, not only because it is an inspiring movie that tells the tale well of how your dreams can come true if you work hard enough, but also because the deepest dreams of a dancer are the best kinds of dreams in my estimation.

I never decided to write poetry. As cliché as it is to say, poetry found me. I just started writing one day when I was around 7 because I was sad late at night and couldn't sleep and I have never been able to stop since then. I love poetry because it has been with me for so long, but I don't know if I ever would have chosen it. There are many other lives I would have chosen if there wasn't something inevitable in the fact that I was made to be a poet.

Dottie, I'm wondering about what you think poetry can do for us. This is sort of abstract, but this response by Rae Armantrout has been haunting me. Here's part of her answer: [Present audiences for poetry] "want to identify with the speaker of the poem as one might identify with an action-figure. (That may show just how powerless people are feeling)…So here's my wish--I wish people would stop looking to poetry for confirmation of what they already feel (or wish they felt) and that they would instead rediscover 'negative capability.' Or, to put it another way, I wish that, in art and politics, people would seek a power other than that of voyeuristic identification." I'm enlivened by Armantrout's response, but I wanted to know what you thought too; to steal Tom Beckett's question: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

As much as I care about poetry, I sometimes struggle with what it can do for us, especially insomuch as this might assume a large notion of doing. I have a great faith in poetry to bring us beauty and knowledge, but I don't have any unfair expectations for poetry that it can save the world. (Although, of course, beauty and knowledge can save the world in that they change the world by changing the thinking about the world.)

I think poetry should do what it was meant to do—exist. And then the big things that need to be done—like saving the world, for instance—needs to be up to us as humans. We need poetry, but we need it like we need a tool. Poetry is our poetry hammer. And likewise, poetry is human, even as it is dead. And so I think poetry can connect us to our humanity if we bring the human back into it. I am interested in this Armantrout statement, as I think I know what she means (or at least can interpret what she means to support my own views). I think she is saying that poetry should bring in the superhuman—the everyhuman—and be the summation of all the voices that it can summate. Because in every person there is some power that can be brought—whether it be coaxed or triggered depending on the specific personality—into every poem. And when we only seek out "voyeuristic identification" in our poems, we only expect the smallest parts of humanity (its meaningless specifics) from them. And in that way, humanity becomes even more and more entrenched in meaninglessness when we identify with poems in these empty ways. To make meaning we need to value meaning and vice versa. It is a feedback loop.

My hopes for the future of poetry are that it keeps doing what it is doing, but well. My biggest hope is that poetry will become increasingly more valued in our society, so that we can create educational systems that cultivate situations that allow the young poets among us to write the next great poems.