(Image by Shary Boyle)

INTERVIEW WITH MAGGIE DUBRIS

Poet Ali Liebegott took an epic road trip across America. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. She interviewed female writers — mainly poets — along the way. In previous installments of the series, she introduced the trip, spoke with Maggie Nelson,  Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and others. Here is her interview with Maggie Dubris:

I first discovered Maggie Dubris in 1998 when a friend gave me her 59-page prose poem, Willie World, largely drawn from her experience being a 911 paramedic in New York City.  The slim chapbook, with cover art from David Wojnarowicz, an x-ray of an anatomical heart with an arrow through it, became an instant favorite of mine.  Dubris later published Skels (Soft Skull), Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow) and most recently In the Dust Zone (Centre-Ville Books) illustrated by Scott Gillis. We spoke in her East Village apartment. –Ali Liebegott 

The Believer: I want to talk to you about your sign on the door of the apartment coming in.  Why is this the Ezra Pound Apartment Complex?

Maggie Dubris: Years ago me and my friend, the poet Elinor Nauen, and my friend Rachel, went to Ocean Beach, and there was someone selling signs like, “The Hansen’s House”, it was so suburban and I thought we should give our apartment building a name. We thought, well who was sort of crazy and might’ve lived in our building, who else? Ezra Pound.

BLVR:  That’s so excellent.  I love New York so much. What is the city’s effect on you as a writer?

MD: It’s been huge for me because I didn’t go to high school here. I moved here right after and I had this idea in my head—I wanna be a New York poet. That was my total goal.  I thought I was going to make a living as a New York poet somehow (laughs) but at that time you didn’t need that much money, it was the 70’s—you could move in and if you couldn’t pay the rent you just got another apartment.  They didn’t ask for a bank account they just wanted the rent for a month or two and then you got your new apartment and it was 80 bucks a month so I moved here.

BLVR:  Where did you move from?

MD:  Michigan. But New York is really my home. I came here and did what I dreamed of, which was to meet Ted Berrigan and be a poet but then, of course, I discovered you couldn’t make money being a poet.  So I had to get a job and such.  It had a huge impact.  I feel like I pretty much grew up here and grew up on the ambulance and grew up in my neighborhoods that I lived in and if anything shaped me it was New York.  

BLVR: I am very interested in the question of work—as a writer what do we do, and I know for years you drove the ambulance.  Can you talk about how that fit in with your life?  I know your book Willie World uses some of that material. 

MD: Yeah. I felt the paramedic thing worked really well because I personally don’t believe I could live with my own thoughts 24/7. I need to be torn out of myself and I need something like the ambulance to do it. So it was great. I felt like I got material—not medical material but material like I could go into people’s lives and talk to people I never would’ve talked to and get to know a scene I never would’ve gotten to know—like a midnight street scene, which, as a woman, is no place for you—there aren’t that many places for men either but definitely not for a woman in that scene.  You could be a whore or that’s about it.

BLVR:  Did you always work graveyard?

MD:  I did for most of my time.  I started out working four to twelve and then I went to day shift and then, for 15 years, I was on midnights—7pm-7am. I would write at work. A medic was a good job when I had it. I had insurance, which made it easier for me to be a poet because I didn’t have to worry.  You can’t make money at poetry.  But you can try.  And that ruins a lot of poetry to try and make money at it. Now I’m doing two things.  I’m doing hypnosis, which I love and I’m working with little kids in a cancer hospital doing martial arts.

BLVR:  As a woman writer who was looking for other models of women who’d written longer poems it was such a miracle to find Willie World. It was a very, very important book for me growing up as a writer. I love the fact that at that time there were only 500 copies and with those chances I could still find it. 

MD:  You know, for years I couldn’t get it published. And then I met Richard Hell.  I didn’t know him as a Rock n’ Roller.  I only knew him as a writer.  He was in charge of the Poetry Project or one of the reading series and he asked me to read and I’m not sure where he heard about me but I read from Willie World and he really liked it.  He said, “Can I have a section for CUZ?” And then in ‘97 or so, he called me and said, “Hey I’m thinking about starting this press and if you give me Willie World I’ll do it, and then I gave him a re-written one and he called me up and said, “You ruined it.”  I was like, “Oh, I did not.”  But he was right. And I had a hard copy.  I didn’t even have it in my computer anymore the way it was and I re-typed it in and gave it to him and he put it out.  That led to a lot of good things for me.  It led to Black Sparrow.  For being only 500 copies and he gave me 100 so 400 copies he got distributed it opened up my world so much.

BLVR:  When did you first think of yourself as a writer in the world? 

MD:  Out in the world?  I guess I started when I was in 9th grade. I was totally depressed and I had no idea what I wanted, but I didn’t want what I was seeing. I knew I wanted to somehow be creative and I had this secret idea that I could write poetry. And then in 10th grade, I got into a poetry class with Andrew Carrigan, who is a great poet. I wasn’t doing particularly well in school, but I went in and turned in a poem and I had this hope that it was good but I didn’t think it was that good and he Xeroxed it and said, this is great, you should be a poet.  So I went home that day thinking I’m a poet and I’m going to be a poet.  And that was really my idea so in 10th grade I had this picture of myself, “I’m a poet.” And that was my identity for ages.

BLVR: It’s so crazy how much power a single person could have in another person’s life.  Like a teacher.  What if they hadn’t Xeroxed the poem?

MD:  I know.  What if I hadn’t gotten his class?  What if I’d gotten someone else’s class who thought poetry should rhyme?  I would’ve ended up a drug addict if Andrew Carrigan hadn’t been there.  Because I just didn’t see a way out.

BLVR:  The trip I’m taking right now ends at Emily Dickinson’s house. And I like to ask everyone I’m interviewing, do you remember the first time you read or heard Emily Dickinson? 

MD:  You know I must’ve read her before I decided to put her into my novel.  But I’m not sure, really.  I didn’t have any patience with that kind of poetry but then I wanted to put a woman in and she was weird enough that she could fit in my novel so I started reading her and because I was older I felt like I got her.  She’s not my favorite poet.  But I felt like she’s a poet who sees smaller and smaller until it blows up.  And that is really interesting.  She lived in sort of a small world and yet she exploded it.

BLVR:  Have you been to her home?

MD:  No.

BLVR:  It’s pretty cool actually, in Amherst.  It’s just really interesting to look out the window you know she must’ve been looking out when she was writing those poems. Have you ever made any literary pilgrimages?

MD:  Yes. I went to Père Lachaise. I was looking forBaudelaire’s grave and we met this Frenchman and he said, “Are you looking for Jim Morrison?” and we said, “No, we’re looking for Baudelaire.”  Even though I wanted to see Jim Morrison too.  He was so happy to find people who weren’t looking for Jim Morrison that he took us to Baudelaire’s grave.  You know these people are real but to actually see the place they’re buried is so strange.  If you can see someone’s grave you’re not their contemporary but you’re in their time in a certain way.  Like we can’t see Homer’s grave.  We can’t see Sappho’s grave.  We don’t know where they’re buried.  We don’t even know what they looked like.  But Baudelaire—we’re contemporary enough we can go to his grave or Emily Dickinson—you can sit in her chair.  It’s interesting because it expands your idea of who’s your contemporary.

BLVR: I know you write in different forms and I see that you paint and I know you do music—you’re a Renaissance lady.

MD: A dilettante.

BLVR: Can you describe any kind of psychic differences you would need for poetry versus more prose things.

MD:  Sure.  Poetry is tactile almost and it comes in the same place as music does for me—it feels like it was already there, and I’m carving it out.  Even Willie World, which was very much my experience, felt like the words already existed and there were only certain right words and I had to smooth them out and get them to be this kind of river, I guess.  I feel that way about music too.  If I want to right a tune I kind of just unfocus my eyes.  Whereas prose, it’s not like that at all.  It’s like the words and the story aren’t there. The words serve the story, and the story is difficult for me to get to.  Whereas poetry is easy.  And I can’t tell what’s right in prose.  I love prose.  That’s what I read mainly but it doesn’t come as naturally at all as poetry.

BLVR: Do you miss driving the ambulance?

MD: Sure.  But I miss the driving more than anything.  You know I miss being in that world.  And I don’t know.  If I hadn’t gotten sick, if the Trade Center hadn’t happened would I still be there?  I don’t know. Like how long do you do the same thing kind of thing even if it’s a really fun thing—not fun like ha ha but really absorbing, really engaging—it’s still the same thing.  So I don’t know if I would still be there.

BLVR: Were you working on the ambulance when 9/11 hit?

MD: I was not at work.  But everyone who was a paramedic ended up down there. At a certain point they just called people in.  So what happened was, I was here, and it came through the radio, and I was talking to my partner who lived in Brooklyn Heights. We were both like we shouldn’t go down there—then the second one went in and we both thought, it’s going to be a total nightmare down there as a paramedic. And then the Tower collapsed and my partner called me right when that happened and he said, “We gotta go, our friends are all dead.”  So he came to pick me up and went to Bellevue thinking there’d be some kind of organization there. It was chaos! There was no organization there. So we just got in an ambulance with these guys who are all covered in dust and went down there and ended up south of the south tower with a bunch of firemen and basically no equipment.  We broke into an ambulance just to get equipment and my story is also a lot of paramedics story—if you had an ambulance when the Towers fell you lost it.  So people were basically down there with nothing not knowing what was going on.

BLVR: So when you were down there as a paramedic you knew that the towers collapsed because of the planes?

MD:  We thought they’d gotten blown up and I didn’t know where they were.  Like I heard on the radio, “Oh my God, it’s all disappearing.” So when we got there, there was just nothing there but dust and big dark brown-red clouds. And I didn’t know if it had just fallen over, like tipped over and landed on some people or on some blocks.  We didn’t know if there were bombs in there.  If it was a bomb they often put one bomb one place or have a diversion first and then blow it up.  So is that what happened, the planes went in and then there was bombs in the planes and then everyone got drawn in and BAM. So such massive confusion plus your memories were fucked with—mine were, because I was there and then when I came out—what I actually experienced, which was all disjunct and discombobulated and I lost huge chunks of time.  And then there was this narrative on TV that was different from what I experienced and then there was all this strangeness about millions of people coming in from all over the country and offering everyone massages and I was only down there the 11th and I felt like everyone’s dead there’s no question, there’s no reason to be here and I was there until 8 and I was talking to some supervisor and I said, “Should I stay?” and he said, “Why stay, there’s no one alive in here,” And I was like, “Yeah you’re right.  I’m going home.”

BLVR: So was the digging for bodies a performance?

MD: I think psychologically people may have needed it, initially.  But I think it should’ve been stopped—that’s my opinion.  Because people ended up really badly injured because they were down there for weeks and months and even if you thought someone was alive for the first three or four days, it was very obvious after a week to anyone, no one’s living in this burning hot thing that’s there and yet they still sent people down there to dig.  So I feel like people should’ve been stopped.

BLVR: Selfishly I felt like it was probably really great I wasn’t living here when that happened because my tender psyche could barely handle it in Providence, Rhode Island.

MD: It was truly horrible.  For my entire life that will be one of the pivotal events and not in a good way.  Ultimately, you make sense of it and you’re like, Okay I was here, it was a historical event and I was actually a participant in it and as a poet it’s my job to write.  Like you can’t not write about it.  I finished Dust Zone about six years after the Trade Center so it took me that long to get past everything that was phony into something that I feel actually represents my experience.  I don’t know how much it represents anyone else.  But I feel like it really got to the heart of what, for me, that time was.

BLVR: I think about this a lot because I still haven’t finished my book that revolves around the media of 9/11 and it’s been nine years.  I always feel as a writer I’m dealing with stuff that happened ten years before anyway so it will be interesting to see how literature that came out right after 9/11 varies from work that gestated awhile. What’s your advice to people writing today in this non-1970’s New York?

MD: If I was talking to someone who was young who was just starting out, go to college for something other than writing.  Like don’t go to writing school.  Go for science or something that’s really interesting and then write about that.  That would be my advice to them.  Do you know Murat Nemet-Nejat?  He’s a Persian poet but he lives in the states and he had a workshop at St. Mark’s and he said to us, “Well, the nice thing about being a poet is you’re making bread that no one wants to buy so you can make it as salty as you’d like.”  So when I think of that, that’s when I’ve written my best stuff.  There’s no stakes in poetry. The best poets have not made their livings off it and possibly weren’t even acknowledged much in their lifetimes except for maybe other poets or a few people.  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t change that they were great.  When I read something I know if it’s great or not.  It doesn’t matter who wrote it and it doesn’t matter who else likes it.  To me that’s an inherent quality and if people want to be poets that’s what I would go for.  Go as hard and deep as you can into your own vision and make it pop into the world and shape it and make it exactly you—and what you’re seeing.  Make it into a solid thing.  Then just put it out and don’t worry if people like it and don’t try to adjust it for anyone.  If they don’t like it, it doesn’t change it.  That’s my advice.

BLVR: I love your advice. We shape our whole lives around being able to write despite that there’s virtually zero cash and prizes. To me it’s constantly perplexing what sacrifices we do for this thing. 

MD: Right. And when I look at my life I wouldn’t pick any other life. 

Road Trip

(image by Shary Boyle)

INTERVIEW WITH DORIANNE LAUX

Poet Ali Liebegott took an epic road trip across America. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. She interviewed female writers — mainly poets — along the way. In previous instalments of the series, she introduced the trip, spoke with Maggie Nelson,  Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and others. Here is her interview with Dorianne Laux:

I discovered Dorianne Laux’s poetry shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 1991 to be a poet myself. I was twenty supporting myself as a waitress and went to a reading she was doing with Kim Addonizio. I was immediately drawn in by her poems depicting the working class. Laux was reading from her very first book, Awake. I interviewed her in her home in Raleigh, North Carolina in October of 2010 where she lives with her husband, the poet Joe Millar. This is an excerpt from our interview. - Ali Liebegott

I.

THE BELIEVER: Do you remember the first Emily Dickinson poem you ever read?

DORIANNE LAUX: I’m sure one of the first was the carriage, death is like a… I can’t remember how old I was. It could have been as late as when I went to Mills College. And I didn’t like her. I always thought, Well this is too easy. It’s like a kid’s poem. Or conversely, This is too hard. I can’t figure this out. And then I was at the University of Oregon ten years ago now, and I had been made head of the program — and don’t ever become head of any kind of program — and I was completely isolated. I had this huge office. The phone was constantly ringing. I had to write memos. And I could not get back to my poetry. One day I was in my office eating my little sack lunch, feeling like a business woman dressed up in my fucking mauve blouse, trying to be cool, and I just started crying. I thought, Where am I? Why am I here? I hate this. I want to be a waitress again. I’ve lost my poetry. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. All I’m doing is dealing with bullshit. So I went on the Poetry Daily website thinking maybe I’ll just read a poem. That’ll make me feel better. And on that particular day they had an Emily Dickinson poem. I opened it up and read,

There is a pain—so utter—

It swallows substance up—

and I just collapsed. I said, “Emily, thank you. You know my pain, honey.” I was also going through a tough time. There had been a couple deaths. I suddenly got how soulful she was and how she could get such passion and longing and feeling into so few lines.

BLVR: Have you been to her home?

DL: I’ve never been to Amherst. I want to go. I did go to her garden in the botanical gardens in the Bronx. They did a lovely job. Her dress was there and her things were around and as you walked through the garden there were all of her poems on little plaques. You could go into a reconstruction of her house: her writing room and her bedroom and then her reconstructed garden, so you could see all the flowers she planted.

AL: What kind of pilgrimages have you gone on?

BLVR: When I was on an Edna St. Vincent Millay kick, I went to her place in New York. She had this skinny little apartment in New York, five floors. It’s for sale right now. It’s only a mil. I want to go to her place near Woodstock, New York — the Millay Colony. She’s another one I discovered late. I just didn’t grow up with these poets. I was working class. I had heard of her in the way of: you can’t not know her name. In her pictures, she looked very prim and proper and I thought, “Nah.” Then one day Joe [Millar] was looking for a poem, and he was sure it was an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, and he read me, Assault, and I whispered what the fuck is that. Read that again. I went crazy when I heard that poem, just crazy! Then I got crazy about Edna St. Vincent Millay and read her biography, Savage Beauty. It’s an incredible read.

BLVR: When was the first time you thought of yourself as a poet and writer?

DL: I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that’s something someone else has to call you. It’s like bragging. Even though we were working class, growing up, my mom had been classically educated at the French convent school in Maine and French was her second language. She played piano. We were very unusual on our block. Here we were living in military housing, and for some time in Quonset huts which are basically tin cans set down in dirt, but then we really moved up and got to military housing, which had stucco falling off the wall but it was way better than a tin can, especially in San Diego where it can get real hot. While we were growing up she decided she wanted to become a nurse and went back to school. She’d bring home these biology textbooks, plus she took the general courses. We had a lot of books and music around. She read the poets of the day: Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, e. e. Cummings, but she also read the novels of the day which I liked much more than the poetry. And so I read The Arrangement at twelve—I thought I can’t believe people are even alive after living lies like this, it’s crazy—so I was always interested in reading and the whole notion of the imagination and where it could take you.

I started writing at twelve and should have started a novel, which is what I really loved, but I think because I was surrounded by so much music I felt instinctively that it had to be a poem because it had to be like music. So I started writing these rhymed poems. I did that for years until my daughter was born, then I thought, Someday I’m going to have to be something other than a waitress. Maybe I should go back to school. But I know I’m essentially lazy and I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do. And I thought, I’ve always written. I’ll go back to school and become an editor or a journalist. So I started taking writing classes and they included poetry as part of a comp class and my teacher said, You should be a poet, so I took her at her word and started focusing on it, and later I took a night class from Steven Kowit in San Diego, and that’s when I really started becoming serious and reading the world poets and contemporary American poetry and said, Wow there’s this whole world out there. Because at the time all I knew was what I’d been raised on. All males. All dead. All white. That was another reason I would never think of myself as a poet, there were no models. I thought, That’s poetry. What I’m doing is just fucking writing in my spare time, but when I started taking classes I realized there were all these wonderful women poets and people writing of all colors.

I still didn’t think of myself as a poet. My teacher started encouraging me to do poetry readings and publish in local magazines. But I still thought, This is just a fun thing and I really need to get to work to do something else because I’m certainly not going to make any money, and that was really clear. So I never thought of it as anything other than, This is great. But eventually I started publishing here and there. Then I moved up to San Francisco and actually published a book. And you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. That was not something I thought would ever happen.

BLVR: I read your first book, Awake. You signed it. It had that great cover.

DL: Walker Evans’ Nova Scotia. Which is great because that’s my family history. Even then I would have hesitated to call myself a poet. Although it got easier as time went on and I published a second book. I think part of it is, I do admire true poets so much, I feel like somehow I’m a fraud. Like that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem or that Emily Dickinson poem… I feel I have never and will never write something that’s up to that level, that’s that good. It’s just like, No, I’m not a poet. They are. Part of it is that. The other part is that pretentious thing—I don’t want to be thought of a poet. And I say I’m a teacher, not a professor. I don’t have a PhD.

BLVR: Do you have a set of go-to writers that you read that ground you as you’re working?

DL: Sharon Olds was a huge influence. When I first read her poems in community college, the world was broken open for me. I was like, Wow. You can write about your family and your kids? I had no idea you could do that. Carolyn Forché was huge. She wrote with such beauty and precision. She knows how to withhold, while Sharon was all over the place. I loved the two contrasting styles. I worked to try and get both of those going. And then Pablo Neruda. My teacher was great because he introduced us to the world poets: Nicanor Parra and Miguel Hernandez. Lucille Clifton was huge. Yusef Komunyaka. CK Williams. I could go on and on. I would try to imitate them, take what they were doing, and allow myself to find that voice, that way, that style. I don’t think there’s a poet I haven’t been influenced by, but they were probably the two biggest: Sharon Olds and Carolyn Forché. There was something about their opposite stances stylistically, which I wanted somehow to be able to join. 

II.

BLVR: If you had a choice to make out with Emily Dickinson or Rilke who would you choose?

DL: Well, making out with Rilke you would think of angels, and in some ways, Edna, that kind of Savage Beauty, this toughness but with angel wings… what could be better? Emily embodies that same thing but kind of from the opposite end. She’s got that delicacy. It’s like a spider web, delicate but tough. Try to get out of that! Sexy, right? A delicate toughness. That’s what I’m drawn to in poetry — those opposing forces. A true romantic set against the toughness of life, like Neruda. Where there’s an exuberance and an anger. Anyone that encompasses both wholes, I tend to love, and want to kiss.

BLVR: So Neruda or Edna St. Vincent Millay?

DL: Oh, Edna! Come on. Have you read about her life? She was a crazy fucking woman. Thousands of people came to her readings. She was on every magazine cover. You have no idea that this woman was as big as she was until you read Savage Beauty. You think, how could she be forgotten? Edna owned New York. She walked down the street and people followed her. And she was like Emily Dickinson. Very petite. This incredible red hair. Just a cloud of red hair. Beautiful woman. But tiny. And she had this huge voice. She’d get up on stage and people were mesmerized. Now people don’t even know who she is. She’s not anthologized much. I have a little movie about her which was made in Canada. I just watch it over and over. In the movie they show home movies of her, but they’re silent. The first time I saw her move my heart stopped. There’s something about a human body in motion.

III.

BLVR: Do you have a moment in your writing career that you’re most proud of? Or even a book you feel most proud of?

DL: Well, the very first time I published a poem was a huge thing. My first book was delivered to my house, and nobody was home except me. I just sat there looking at the box. Then opening it and seeing my name. The second book was almost as exciting. I remember the first time I ever had a poem published in APR [American Poetry Review]. I cut it out and put it in a frame. I’d walk by and genuflect in front of it. Then I went to the Napa Valley Poetry Festival where I met Carolyn Forché. I couldn’t even breathe sitting next to her. She might as well have been a movie star. And she was looking at me like, What the hell is your problem? I didn’t know what to say to the woman. I think it’s good for young poets to have heroes. I also think it’s important for you to know they’re just people that go to the store and get in family fights. But I also think there’s something about that true admiration and respect for what they’ve done in their lives, because the reason people achieve fame—rock stars, movie stars, whatever—what’s underneath all the bullshit of it, is that they have, on some level, allowed you believe you are not alone on the earth, that there is someone who knows some part of you — again, the subterranean, transgressive, weird, fucked up, secret part of you that you thought nobody knew until you saw that movie or read that poem or novel or saw that sculpture or painting. Van Gogh would be a rock star. You look at his eyes know what it is to be human. I hope I’m always able to feel stunned, and that I’m in the company of people that can create art in a way I admire.

BLVR: Do you have any advice for writers in the world today?

DL: Oh, man. If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with? And keep reminding yourself to return to that original impulse. The genius of your particular work resides in that first time you picked up a pen and said I’ve got to say something. I think that can get lost very easily—jobs and awards, being published in APR. All that’s great, but is that why I started writing? No, that’s butter. That’s something else. The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart. And I wouldn’t have gotten through that without a friend. If I hadn’t been able to talk with myself, with respect, as a whole human being, who had a mind and heart and desires, a goodness, a desire to be good—you know, all of those things, I think, are the original impulse when we sit down and write. I’m not the only person in the world who is suffering. I’m trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices. Emily Dickinson writes to me and I write back. Yes, Emily, there is a pain so utter, it swallows substance up. Yes. Thank you. And here is my cry back to you. And if you can take yourself back into that place, you can write forever, because that’s an endless repository. We’re all writing out of a wound, and that’s where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We’re singing back to those who’ve been wounded. And that’s all of us. We’re not special. Everyone’s been wounded. That’s why they respond. Bob Dylan—he’s singing out of a wound. And everyone goes, Yeah Bob. We get it. We’ve been there. If I was going to give anything as ridiculously pretentious as advice—once again, I’m a kid that grew up in a Quonset hut, I give advice to no one—it’s to return to the original impulse. Or at least work to constantly remind yourself that that’s where you started, and that’s where you want to end up.

Interview with Rae Armantrout

This is the fifth stop on poet Ali Liebegott’s pilgrimage across America to the Emily Dickinson house. Along the way, she interviewed female writers and poets, including Maggie Nelson, Amy Gerstler, Claudia Rankine and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. Here is interview #5, with Rae Armantrout:

“I interviewed language poet Rae Armantrout in her home in San Diego, California shortly after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Versed. We first met in 2003 when I was an adjunct at University of California San Diego in 2003 and was a professor there. Some of her other books include: Extremities, The Invention of Hunger, Precedence, Necromance, Veil: New and Selected Poems, Up to Speed, Next Life, Versed, and Money Shot.” - Ali Liebegott

I.

BLVR: Can you remember the first time you ever read an Emily Dickinson poem?

RA: When I was a kid my mother got me an encyclopedia for children. It was called Childcraft and it had two volumes dedicated to poetry for children and for some bizarre reason it had an Emily Dickinson poem in it. Although her poetry is hardly for children. (laughs) It’s about autumn and it starts, “the morns are meeker now” and it ends with “I’ll put a trinket on.” The leaves are changing and the seasons are changing and she’s going to try and match nature. Obviously the word trinket implies all you can do to match nature is pathetic and ineffectual. Or at least that’s how I take it. So that’s the first time I read an Emily Dickinson poem. She still surprises me, which is what I like best in a poet, really. She puts words together that you’ve never seen together before and never will see together again.

BLVR: It’s interesting how many people I’ve visited have been able to automatically remember that first Emily Dickinson experience.

RA: I remember first reading, A narrow fellow in the grass. Well, you’ve probably never seen narrow fellow together before and never will again. Of course she’s talking about a snake. She defamiliarizes that so immediately and gives you a creepy feeling right from the beginning. She’s so bold in the attitudes that she takes toward God for instance. In that time of revival meetings and tents and evangelical religion all around her she remained skeptical, engaged with religious thought but skeptical and challenging. She sort of throws out questions that challenge God. The end of that one famous poem where she says The Brain is just the weight of God – you imagine God in one hand and the brain in the other, which is already a bizarre idea. And they will differ — if they do — As Syllable from Sound —. So is God in the brain? Is the brain God? That’s kind of a radical question to be asking if you’re a nineteenth-century woman. And then the difference between syllable and sound is so subtle. She doesn’t make it between word and sound. It’s syllable and sound. It’s the smallest unit. She’s a great thinker with a bold imagination and the most daring and unusual way with words I’ve ever encountered. Usually when I read a poet who is good, I kinda go, Damn I wish I’d done that or that’s good but I could do that. I get rivalrous. But with Emily Dickinson, I go, I give up. (laughs)

BLVR: Have you been to her home?

RA: Peter Gizzi took me to it but it was closed. I saw it from the outside.

BLVR: Her bed is behind ropes. I was dying to lie on her bed. The thing that really got me was her window that you knew she looked out. They have a replica of her dress and she was so tiny. It took the breath out of me to be in her space.

II.

BLVR: Congratulations on all your awards, especially the Pulitzer. It’s really nice to see you be recognized on that level after all your books. I’ve been asking people about their biggest literary moments. I imagine winning the Pulitzer Prize is pretty big?

RA: that’s one of those difficult questions because it asks you to compare apples to oranges. Is being really happy with someone you love your biggest moment? That sounds sentimental. Or is winning a prize your biggest moment? Or is writing the poem that you really like and say, this is good, in your own mind – is that your biggest moment? Winning the Pulitzer was certainly a shock. I wasn’t looking for that at all. I’ve only recently become aware of awards because awards were not part of my poetry community. The Pulitzer was not on my radar. I was aware of the National Book Award. I was aware of the National Book Critic Circle Award but only because Mary Jo Bang had won it two or three years ago. I knew Harryette Mullen had been a finalist for the National Book Award. Those things were beginning to make awards seem possible to me. Before that I never even thought about them at all. It’s not like I was sitting around waiting to win the Pulitzer. I didn’t even know when it was awarded. Someone from UCSD [The University of California, San Diego, where she works] called from their communications office and she just assumed I knew because she had the reasonable expectation that someone from the Pulitzer Foundation would call you, but they don’t. They send you a snail mail letter.

BLVR: You’re kidding!

RA: But of course it goes out on Twitter and all the journalists are right on top of it so other people knew. Apparently, journalists had been calling UCSD to get my phone number. And so I get this call from Inga Christianson in the communications office and she says, “The press are going to want to talk to you.” And I had no idea what she was talking about. And I was like, Aabout what? Is my office on fire? I didn’t do it, promise. (laughs) And then she says, “You don’t know, do you?” And I said, “No.” So that’s how I found out.

BLVR: Wow.

RA: I was standing on the porch at that point and Chuck was out gardening and I started yelling, “Chuck, Chuck! Come here.” The tone in my voice was such that he thought something was wrong like I’d seen a rattlesnake or something. And he came running. Even then, I didn’t realize the level of publicity it brings down on you. I had TV crews in my house. I had a TV crew following me across campus. I felt like an animal in National Geographic, because the TV crew would say, “Just act natural.” So I would be carrying my stuff to class and they’d be a few feet away running alongside with a big camera. It was silly. I was invited to address the Chamber of Commerce to which I said no because they’re such a pig organization. I guess they thought I was a local woman of some prominence and they were having “women’s week”.

I had a rare cancer which still has not recurred but it was a very rare cancer and usually a deadly one—and I’ve been invited to address two medical schools. It’s partly because it’s cancer but mostly because of the prize because that makes me someone whose story suddenly matters, as if it wouldn’t matter otherwise. The second medical school is in Ann Arbor and there they have a clinic that specializes in my cancer and I didn’t even hear about that until I won the prize. The doctor called me because he’d heard me on NPR, and I guess he’s the kind of guy that listens to NPR even if it’s about poetry. And I read a couple poems that had to do with my feelings right after I was diagnosed and dealing with the medical system, and he liked them and he wanted me to come and address his students, so I’m going to do that. There have also been autograph hounds. People who are not interested in me at all but just want me to sign something. I got an index card in the mail from someone in Florida who said, “Please write a line of poetry on the front side and sign your name on the back.”

BLVR: Did you do it?

RA: I found it obnoxious but I did it because it was easy because he sent me a stamped envelope. I’ve had some requests like that that I haven’t answered. Someone sent me a piece of lined paper with photographs of me pasted all over both sides of it and there was only a little room left and they wanted me to sign on the little room left.

BLVR: What city was that from?

RA: I can’t remember. But I did get a really crazy one from San Diego. This kind of scared me, actually, and was also very sad. This guy must’ve mistaken me for Mother Theresa and he said, “My mother has cancer and my sister has diabetes and we’re inviting you over for Mother’s Day,” and he was writing me like he was actually expecting me to show up there and if I did it would somehow have a good effect on his relatives.

BLVR: Oh my God.

RA: So I didn’t answer that one.

BLVR: It’s weird what people project onto others. But someone in Florida got an original line?

RA: Oh, I remember what was so obnoxious about that. His letter said, “I have not read your book because it’s not on my Kindle but would you please…?”

BLVR: Would you read poetry on a Kindle?

RA: I would rather not, but never say never. I guess if people are going to be reading on Kindle I would like my work to be available on Kindle, but I think it’s going to be a long time before experimental-type contemporary poetry ends up on Kindle. They do have Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

BLVR: I wonder if Emily Dickinson knew she would be on Kindle one day when she was sewing her little poems into books.

RA: I think she knew she was great, in a defensive way maybe. She has so many poems like My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - and being a volcano exploding. All of these images of having power. I think she knew she had some great power inside of her that was bursting out.

BLVR: One of the things that people say the most about her is that she did the kind of writing that never happened before her and won’t happen again.

RA: Well, there’s not going to be Shakespeare again either or Bach or Einstein probably. But there might be other great things. Who knows. I think our culture works against it by forcing us all to be so busy. I mean, she wasn’t busy except in her own work. Most of us have to work two jobs or we’re distracted by all the different media outlets that there are. People don’t have any time for quiet and I suppose that works against the development of genius.

III.

BLVR: Would you talk a little bit about your process?

RA: I keep a blank book and I write down notes in it. The notes might be a sound bite, something I hear on TV or something I hear someone say at a café or school. A while ago I heard someone say, “I want to explore the post-hope zeitgeist,” and I put that in a poem. (laughs) Some things cannot be allowed to pass on unremarked. I keep the notes all the time and I try to take the book with me in my purse just in case. Then in the morning I look over my notes. I try to get up fairly early, I’m not a monk or anything, around 7:15, before Chuck does, and have my coffee and sit here with my notebook and see what occurs. I try to get a poem started when it is quiet.

BLVR: And do you write by hand?

RA: Yeah, to begin with, and then when a poem starts to come together I’ll go to the computer and mess around with it and change it.

BLVR: When you’re compiling a manuscript, how do you know when the book is done?

RA: That is a hard one. The last two times my editor made that decision for me. With my book Money Shot, my editor just wrote me and said, “Do you have a book?” and I said, “I have a manuscript. I didn’t know it was finished but maybe I could think of it that way.” I think that actually was a good time to stop it because that book was written during the worst part of the financial crisis/ripoff. Not that every poem in it is about that situation, but that is a motif that runs through it. I wrote it over the course of two years, so the work from that two years has a certain type of consistency that reflects that period.

In terms of Versed, I initially thought that Versed was one manuscript and Dark Matter was another. But Dark Matter wasn’t long enough to be even a short book of poetry, so I felt like I had to keep writing it. I had my surgery in 2006, so by the time I was in 2008, I was still writing Dark Matter, but to stay in the headspace of Dark Matter I had to keep believing I was going to die and at a certain point that became a burden.

The poems in the Dark Matter part, even the ones that aren’t directly about illness have a shadow of mortality on them somehow so I felt like I had to keep in that headspace and that was becoming oppressive. Then my editor stepped in again and said, “Why don’t we combine the two manuscripts into a book—divide the sections and then you’re through with it?” I said, that’s a good idea. So my editor, Suzanna Tamminen, was instrumental in helping me in my last two books. I’m not someone who plans my books in advance like some people do. The poems in my books, if they cohere as books, it’s only because they were written over a certain period of time and they have a certain kind of consistency, either because of what’s happening in my life or because of what’s happening in the world.

BLVR: You were talking before about your literary community—who are the poets you consistently go back to?

RA: It’s partly still my old friends. Ron Silliman I go to because of the level of attention he pays to what might seem like detail, and the way that he can kind of re-frame the ordinary through observation and bring out what’s peculiar about it. So I find that inspiring. And I love the sound of Fanny Howe’s work and the scope of her imagination. And Lyn Hejinian always amazes me, the way that she can move between the philosophical and the picaresque and even comic narrative. Those three among my old friends particularly. And there are some younger poets who I admire. Claudia Rankine is one. My work is nothing like hers but I admire it. Lately I have liked a poet in the Bay Area named Graham Foust who’s kind of a minimalist, and Monica Youn who is a young writer in New York. You probably won’t meet her but would like her book Ignatz. She’s writing in the voice of a Krazy Kat but it’s only obliquely related to the comic strip characters. It’s addressed to the unattainable beloved in the kind of romantic lyric poet kind of way, except the unattainable beloved is this kind of indifferent hurtful violent Ignatz mouse who abuses Krazy Kat. And neither one of the characters in the comic strip is assigned a gender by the way. And who are what Ignatz is changes all the time—it could be God, a lover, some kind of certainty. But Krazy Kat is always pursuing Ignatz. So that has interested me lately.

IV.

BLVR: Do you know the moment that you really thought of yourself as a writer?

RA: That took awhile, coming from San Diego, as you can imagine. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I knew that I wrote, but I didn’t know that you could be a living writer and that that could mean anything in the world until I transferred from San Diego State to Berkeley. Once I got to Berkeley, I took a class from Denise Levertov and she was the first living, published poet whom I’d ever met, and I met Ron Silliman and other young people who wanted to be poets and were very serious about it and believed they would be and it turned out were right.

BLVR: How old were you?

RA: Twenty-one, I guess.

BLVR: I know you’ve written essays. Would you ever write a novel?

RA: I wrote a memoir of growing up called True. But no, I would never write a novel. I realize there are all kinds of novels, but I don’t have much of a knack for plot. Maybe this just shows a lack of imagination, but to be a novelist you have to imagine what’s going to happen next to your characters, and I always stop there because I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I’m kind of stuck in the present. I don’t romanticize the past and I’m not very good at imagining the future. I mean, I imagine the future enough to worry about it. Every time I imagine the future it’s pretty dire. I like to read fiction but the idea of writing it just doesn’t much interest me.

BLVR: What about teaching? You’ve been a professor for over twenty years, right?

RA: Yeah.

BLVR: From the outside you seem like somebody who’s been able to manage the two lives really successfully. Do you have any thoughts on how teaching affects your life as a writer?

RA: This quarter I’m managing it less successfully. It seems to be eating me up more now that we have this MFA program. It’s only been about seven years that I’ve been a full professor. Before, I was just teaching in the way adjuncts do—sort of hopeless about ever having a good job, and that was okay in a way because Chuck was working and it gave me time to raise a kid right. Then I got a job and I’m very glad I did. But once you get the job you have to deal with the administrative parts. I think you just have to keep your identity focused on your writing and not become too engaged in becoming a player in the system. You have to carve out some space for yourself.

BLVR: I imagine when you were sick you were approaching a lot of things with a dire perspective. When you were compiling poems for Dark Matter, was the process any different, given that question of whether you were going to be alive or not?

RA: Partly. Before I went into surgery, I sent all the uncollected work I had to Wesleyan, just: if I die in surgery here it is. Because they told me there was some chance I could die in surgery because the tumor was very large and was near my heart and arteries. But I didn’t die. I did take time off. Even though I was having chemo there were some really sweet times in there. Chuck and I went to Costa Rica right after I finished the chemo, and while I was having it we went to Sedona. Not to be cured by crystals, but just because it’s a really beautiful place and I had never been. There was a sense of heightened experience or heightened reaction to the world, just because you don’t know how long you’re going to be in it.

Ironically, that doctor in Ann Arbor who got in touch with me – he said my tumor was not such a dangerous tumor, that it wasn’t a high grade tumor, as had been diagnosed originally. High grade means the cells are dividing and reproducing quickly. The first pathologist at UCSD had rated it a high grade tumor but this tumor board said it was quite a low-grade tumor. If I had known that to begin with I probably would not have felt as much like I was going to die, but then I might not have written Dark Matter. I don’t know, it’s a trade off.

V.

BLVR: Do you have any advice for writers in general? Because hopefully life is long, and I’m always struck when people I know get recognized, because writing can be such a solitary thing, and sometimes things like that can help you keep going.

RA: I didn’t experience The Pulitzer as an encouragement to my writing, but more as frightening because I felt like, “My God, they’re telling me I’m really good; now everything I do has to be really good. This thing that I’m writing in my journal right now. This doesn’t seem really good!” I think it put more internal pressure on me, which I had to kind of persist through. Anyway, it’s easy to give advice to beginning writers. What I usually say is read a lot in the genre you’re interested in. If you want to talk about people in mid-career, I think this is obvious and corny, but I think you have to do it for the love of it, not because you think you’re going to get famous or make money. It has to be giving you pleasure at the time you do it. Writing has to give you pleasure. And also, you need to have a writing community, and I know some people have that over the internet, although I don’t quite understand that. Best to have it in person too. I think my most intense friendships are with other writers, and that is a reward in itself and something to be nourished and valued.

BLVR: Since we’ve played Scrabble together before I feel comfortable asking you this. You have a choice to make out with Emily Dickinson or Rilke. Who do you choose?

RA: Okay. Wow. Emily Dickinson is the most interesting person to me in the world. We have to assume the other person wants to make out with you and you’re not foisting yourself on them?

BLVR: And assume they’re alive.

RA: So a. they’re alive and b. they’re not repulsed by you. Assuming that Emily Dickinson is sexually attracted to me, I would be fascinated to know what turns her on.

BLVR: Between Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf?

RA: I’m still sticking with Emily Dickinson.

BLVR: You’re a good person, Rae.

RA: I’m loyal.

BLVR: (laughs) The last question is the most existential. Feel free to not answer.

RA: As someone who just said she would make out with Emily Dickinson.

BLVR: I know. But I feel like I blow into town and ask people all these questions.

RA: Just don’t ask what sex act I would like to do with Emily Dickinson.

(laughter)

BLVR: No, no. This is PG-13. Do you have a spiritual practice?

RA: I think writing is my spiritual practice because it’s kind of meditative and puts you in touch with big questions. So I think that is how I meditate – with writing. My views on God—well, I have contradictory views on God or feelings about God. My thoughts on God are that we’re flies. How are we supposed to understand the meaning of the universe? We have a finite consciousness. I guess I have to say I’m agnostic because I don’t see how people could possibly comprehend God, if there was a God as Creator of the Universe. And secondly, I don’t understand the immortality of the soul because I can’t picture what it would be like to be conscious forever. All I can think of is boredom when I have that thought. Then I don’t see why in the Judeo-Christian tradition human souls are supposedly immortal, but chimpanzees, no. Buddhists don’t make that distinction. I guess if I were going to have a religion it would be Buddhism but I’m too lazy to sit on the floor cross-legged. Despite the fact that I’m pretty skeptical about a personal God, and the immortality of the soul—have you ever seen that footage of a bunch of chimpanzees by a waterfall and they’re looking at the waterfall and jumping up and down and it’s as if they’re doing it in response to the waterfall?

BLVR: No.

RA: I feel that way about the world. There’s a kind of sense that existence is amazing and wondrous and unbelievable. A feeling of worship is an appropriate response to it. So I sometimes have a feeling of worshipfulness, but I don’t really have any entity to worship.

BLVR: Do I have to Google “chimpanzees, waterfall”?

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Image credit: Shary Boyle