Wonderful interview with Edwidge Danticat.

MH: What can women writers, whether established or emerging, do to help women achieve recognition and success in this field? What are you doing?

 

ED: Well, if you have a big hammer, don’t use it to squash another woman writer…

I’ve been thinking about how to persuade you to go, immediately, and read E.J. Levy’s Love, In Theory (University of Georgia Press, 2012: winner of the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award).

Here’s what I’ve got, since the book is failed by superlatives (and I’m looking you dead in the eye, here):

I want you to read this.

It speaks for itself, and it speaks right to you, cell by cell, with empathy and humor and the deep relief of large intelligence about language, about us, and about how far intelligence will and won’t get us in matters of love.

It’s sharp and funny and compassionate and wise and many other things that the more I say them the more I just want to say: “Look, if I’ve ever steered you right, just listen to me and read this right now.”

This is the real, outrageously beautiful thing. These sentences invite you in and don’t let go. You will laugh, empathize, recoil, grieve, laugh again, resonate, and be fed.

Go. Read.

I’ll be over here making quilts of her language.

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Lori Desrosiers new book of poems, The Philosopher’s Daughter, is available from Salmon Poetry.

Her chapbook, Three Vanities, was published in 2009 by Pudding House. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, BigCityLit, Concise Delights, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The New Verse News, Common Ground Review, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practices in Poetry, and many more. She has an MFA in Poetry from New England College.

Lori is editor and publisher of Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry. NRR treasures and advances the narrative form as few journals do, and Lori’s broader, tireless support of a vibrant poetry scene in New England is well known & cherished.

I bought The Philosopher’s Daughter (finally) at AWP this year, and had the chance to talk with her about it: consider yourself introduced to Lori and the book, and enjoy!

Jessamyn:

One of the things I like so much in your writing is the light touch that creeps into the poems, the turning toward humor and celebration of the absurd. This can become a cop-out if it’s avoidance or cowardice, but in your work, it’s woven powerfully with difficult losses and complex emotional realities.

“A Dog’s Day” is a perfect example of that weaving:

.

“That day we visited our father, sick with brain cancer,

her was barely able to speak.

.

We walked with him in the woods,

his yellow mutt Hector bounding alongside. …”

.

The final line of the poem is devastating, funny, and tender all at once.

What’s your writing and revision process with these kinds of layered-mood poems?

Lori:

Maybe it’s the way I was raised. My parents were children during the Great Depression and especially my mother’s family dealt with trauma through humor, and still does. The funny stuff comes to me first, and I find myself crafting a poem around it. The poem about walking with my father was a true story. It happened just the way I wrote it. I remember arguing with my brother in the car, letting out a long sigh together, then laughing. In our family, pain and anger are tethered to humor and tenderness.

 Jessamyn:

The images of family are so secure in these poems, even as loss is both imminent and immanent. In “Looking at Bees,” “In the Croton Woods 1965,” “’59 Olds” there is a sense of innocence hurtling toward loss “faster than a red dwarf swell/sudden as a supernova burst” (“Star Cancer”).

There are also vivid and complex portraits of people and places past (“Womanly Ways,” “Blanche Remembers,” “Mom at 16″), and then some have a striking, sharp darkness inside the light voice (“From the Porch,” “The World is Flat,” “Wedding,” “Drunk”) –

 

“…The way you look at me sometimes.
Bridges crumble in your eyes.
Cold and blue with drips of water rushing into grates.”

(“Some Answers”)

 

 

Amidst these darker poems, there’s something very gentle, so present in the memorable line “eiderdown’s the measure of her heart” ( – “Room with Feathers”).

There’s tremendous sense of solitude and yearning in the poem “Call.”

And in the structure of the book, the reader is moved through these changes easily.

What was your thinking in structuring the manuscript as you did?

Lori:

It’s interesting how when we order a manuscript, sometimes it is hard to find the string that holds the poetry together so that it creates an arc. I spent a good deal of time with these poems.

Eventually, I found myself listening to them to see which poems spoke to one another. I ended up grouping them by people and place, pretty much. The mother and father poems are near one another, and the rest was more an organic process, letting the poems sing. I come from a musical background (I was a singer/songwriter before I was writing in earnest) and it has helped me listen to this music.

Jessamyn:

What poets do you read for comfort and camaraderie? Whose work feeds you?

Lori:

I love this question because it is not just which poets do I read, but who brings me comfort, who is my friend by the side of the bed at night. There are several poets I seem to return to again and again. Ruth Stone and Maxine Kumin are two of my go-to poets. Their humor and attention to nature and poetic detail is inspiring, and they are two of my poetry mothers. I have recently been spending time with new work by Dan Vera and Howard Faerstein, both of whom have that uncanny ability to combine humor and pathos in their work. I have a new favorite every week, so these are poets I’m thinking about right now.

If my spirit needs to dance, I reread Ilya Kaminsky’s “Dancing in Odessa” or stories in poetry by Susan Deer Cloud or Pam Uschuk. I think one reason I love editing Naugatuck River Review is it is full of poems which nourish whoever reads them. I’m always reading a new book of poems by my amazing friends, whose work surprises and inspires me. I also listen to music quite a lot, and it consistently inspires my writing.

You should read “My Barbaric Bitch of a Yawp” by Amy King now.

Any poet worth her salt knows that, generally speaking, you can do one of two things with language — You can use your words to reflect what society surrounds us with. You can represent the insipid mainstream culture and repeat it however prettily or dolled up you like. You can distract with pseudo-epiphanies or masturbate to empty language games until you’re living in a vacuum of your own making. Or you can be a creator, you can write the poetry that is not popular because you are saying things that don’t just comfort people and tell them that the way they’re living now is perfect and lovely and oh-so-right. You can either reflect or you can create, at great risk, to improve things, reveal complexities, point out those brilliant chinks in the mainstream armor of duality and western rigidity. You create to show that there is more to perceive, that change is always afoot, that you want to have a hand in what that change should do, that you can visualize a keener, more interesting and diverse world where the roles and lines and tasks relegated to “woman” and “man” are thinning fronts that can no longer support humanity’s advancement. These “confusing” “crazy” creations are often unpopular because they shake us up; the status quo resists because people aren’t accustomed to seeing in radical and as-yet-unfathomed ways, they can’t visualize themselves in the odd pictures such poets are making. We are afraid to imagine other ways of being on a planet dominated by wars, environmental destruction, and the luxury of ignorance. We hope that if we stay very still, don’t move, and speak clearly, nothing will come undone—and we’ll be safe.

…

So it is with feminism and poetry, which are movements, hand-in-hand progressions, the visualization of hope and the often-belittled notion of investing in improvement, even *gasp* looking for some moral imperative in context. Feminist poets do not invest substantial attention in that static image of a hairy angry bitch meant to shut us down and squelch our efforts and dry the ink of our pens; we are too busy moving and shaking shit up and asking people to become aware of and check the power structures we participate in and to give up certain power privileges so that we each might arrive at some semblance of equal footing with access to basic necessities and accesses and to share and to look at other aspects of our humanity that we have been told to repress because they’re too feminine. Feminist poets are putting pen to paper where and when it counts and challenging the very core notions of what it means to be human, literally, conceptually, and emotionally. If I blur and confound the line between one more “them versus us” modus operandi, then I’m doing my job and causing people to pause & reconsider the next actions they’ll take: to hit and kill and segregate, or to lean in, study, consider, smell, see, think and breathe shared air—and then act and react.

 

Seriously, go read it. It will feed you.

Happy to post this guest-blog/Next Big Thing Interview for fellow Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Series winner Margo Lemieux. You can pre-order her book here!

Margo is a painter and poet. She is also an associate professor of fine art at Lasell College, where she teaches painting, illustration, and writing. She is the author of several children’s books: this is her first poetry collection.

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