Dorianne Laux

by

Geraldine Cannon Becker

The Aroostook Review Editor-in-Chief interviews prize-winning poet Dorianne Laux

AR: Would you talk to us about living in Maine? Do you have any favorite places you’d like to mention? What do you miss about living in Maine? What is the best thing about being where you are now?

DL: I was born in Augusta, Maine in 1952, during the burdensome month of January. I can’t comprehend that kind of cold. I wrote a poem that tries to imagine it in my first book, Awake, called “Augusta”. My father worked at the S & H Card Factory and my mother had attended a Catholic Convent school. She left my father and two brothers when I was around 2 years old so I have no real memories of Maine, though I returned in the summer of 1994 to give a reading, research my roots, and visit my brother’s grave, something I had always wanted to do. I remember walking across the Water Street Bridge and looking back toward the brick hospital where I was born. It was a sobering moment, to see the actual structure that housed my body as it entered the frozen world, to apprehend the landscape, smell the trees, listen to the river, for the first time, again. I went to the little house where I spent my first years and just stood on the road and looked at it in wonder. But the most important moment for me was finding my brother’s headstone. I wrote a poem about that experience as well, in my latest book, Facts about the Moon.

I grew up in San Diego, California, spent a few years in L.A. and a year in Juneau, Alaska, and then moved to the Bay Area where I lived for 15 years. Up until last year I lived in Eugene, Oregon. I recently moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. The best thing about living in Raleigh is my job. I’m grateful to I have a job at a time when so many are out of work. We’re still exploring. Last summer we traveled to Burns, NC and saw the Smokey Mountains for the first time, shrouded in mist. We hope to make it to the Outer Banks this summer. Right now, North Carolina is in its glory; flowers and trees are in bloom and blood-red cardinals flash between the green canopies. We have a red cedar in our back yard, huge, maybe 60 or 70 feet tall. Its branches house many forms of life, and the tree is a stopover for owls and hawks. As summer comes on, so do the cicadas, and fireflies or lightning bugs—I’m not sure if the difference is physical or colloquial as both these insects are new to me. Sitting on my screened in porch watching the bugs flicker above the yard as the cicada drone is a kind of heaven.

AR: Would you tell us about your current projects? What are you working on right now?. I enjoyed seeing the broadsides your students created on Facebook. You could talk about that, too, if you like.

DL: I’m always working on new poems, and old poems, revising, revisiting. I have a new chapbook coming out at the end of summer from Red Dragonfly Press called Dark Charms. I’ll send some of those. They are experiments in end rhyme-- loose, somewhat silly, and fun.

Yes, my student’s broadsides!! I make this a part of every class I teach. My students read a book of contemporary poetry, choose a poem from the collection to memorize and recite to the class, and make a broadside of their chosen poem to present. The broadsides are amazing as you can see. They put a lot of work into it and many could be museum pieces. They range from the ingeniously simple to the incredibly complex. All are profoundly moving and beautiful. The photographs I take don’t do them justice. The visual element helps the students to really see the poem, and understand more deeply how each word counts. Making the broadside aids in the memorization of the poem as well. I tell them that their bodies are vessels for poetry. It’s exciting to watch them fill themselves up with image, metaphor, rhyme, rhythm and the music of language. I think of each student as a message in a bottle. Who knows what shore they will wash up on just when someone else needs what they have to say?

AR: People seem to want to know what writers have on their bedside table. What book(s) are you currently reading? What would you like to read again? Do you have book(s) that you find yourself reaching for again and again? Would you discuss influences on your writing?

DL: Right this minute, Jack Gilbert’s new book of poems, The Dance Most of All, with a moon on the cover! I just re-read Susan Yuzna’s Her Slender Dress, Barbara Ras, Bite Every Sorrow, and because my students make presentations on all my favorite books, I’m always re-listening to poems I love or rediscovering a poem from a book I hadn’t paid as much attention to. All those poems have influenced my poems, and often, when reading them again, I see how much I’ve lifted. I hear echoes, hauntings, in my own work. I’ve also just memorized "Assault" by Edna St. Vincent Millay and am now onto Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale." I can only hope those poems will influence me!

I just finished a book about the rats in New York City by Richard Sullivan which was, in addition to an education on rats, a fine history of the development of New York City. I just finished reading a story I came across while clicking around on the web looking at the history of charm bracelets. The story is called “The Inkpot Monkey” by John Connolly. It’s about a writer who has writer’s block, and is included in an anthology of stories called Like a Charm, edited by Karin Slaughter. I’m also in the middle of novel by my science fiction colleague here at NCSU, John Kessel, called Good News from Outer Space. A most recent story of his just won the Nebula Award. My reading life is eclectic. I will read almost anything. Really anything.

AR: When did you first start writing? I remember talking with you while we were smoking cigarettes on the balcony at the University of Arkansas—on a break from the workshop--about your mind being elsewhere while you were doing something basic like pumping gas. I’m sure Phillip Levine came up in our conversation, too. Didn’t he write an introduction for your first book of poems?

DL: I started writing when I was twelve years old and never really stopped. Eventually I found a workshop at a community college taught by the poet Steve Kowit who introduced me to contemporary American poetry as well as world poetry. I was a single mother at the time and worked as a waitress so night classes were my only option. And yes, while I worked I would think about poems I had read in class, as well as my own poems. I’d sneak off at break time and sit on the back stoop near the garbage cans and read the poems that had been assigned that week or write a poem from an exercise Steve had given the class. My co-workers always knew where to find me though they had no idea what I was doing. I suppose they thought me a bit odd. At home, the only time to write was after my daughter had gone to bed so I burned the lamp late, trying to keep up with the class. I loved it, so I made time for it. I later got a job at a gas station, on the night shift, perfect for reading and writing. I was the only one there so no interruptions, except the occasional night befuddled customer.

Phil Levine was and is a very important part of my life in poetry. He saw one of my poems in a small S.F. magazine called Five Fingers Review and wrote to me about the poems. He asked to see the manuscript for Awake, sent it out to a couple of presses for me, and it was accepted by BOA Editions. And yes, he offered to write the introduction. Aside from his generosity, he has taught me that poetry is hard work and you must treat it like a job, a job you love, to be sure, but a job. His longevity and continued excellence proves his word.

AR: What are your thoughts on prose poetry? Flash poetry? Contemporary poetry? I saw your Wordle on facebook, and had the impulse to go create one of my own. What are your thoughts on the variety of venues for sharing poetry that are available today? Our journal is, of course, an online journal, and many people are still skeptical about publishing work online. What are your thoughts on technological influences on poetry?

DL: I’ve begun to publish small prose pieces on-line, quite by accident. A lovely woman named Meg Pokrass from an on-line journal called SmokeLong Quarterly wrote and invited me to send her some short fiction. I don’t write short fiction, but she encouraged me to try my hand. Well, I did have a failed poem sitting around that I just couldn’t wrangle into shape, so I pulled it out of form and began to work on it like a story. I sent it to Meg and she did a fantastic job of editing the piece. She sent it to the other editors and they accepted it for ublication. Meg wrote me recently that the piece I wrote was listed on a site called Wig-Leaf, something I’m completely unfamiliar with, but it seems to be a long listing of the best shorts on the web. I’m way down on the list. I thought that would be the end of it, but then she wrote again and asked for more so I went back into my files and found another failed poem. This one, with Meg’s super fine editing skills, will be published in the next issue.

I love many of the new on-line journals. I just edited and hosted the Spring Issue of the Cortland Review, a web-based journal with a huge readership that publishes new poems by many of our best poets: Lucille Clifton, Gerald Stern, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Jane Hirshfield, the late Deborah Digges, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel, Charles Simic, Stephen Dunn, Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, Philip Levine, I could go on and on, as well as works by emerging writers. You can’t get much better than that. And those poets will gain a wider readership, a new and different readership, than what they’ve already established. There are many others out there every bit as good. It’s a new world and most of the time I enjoy growing right along with it.

I do love technology. I thought the Wordle thing was wonderful. Just plug in an existing poem and it randomly scrambles the words, color codes them, codes by size for how often they’re used, and comes up with this lovely art piece- a broadside of sorts. I printed mine out and framed it!

AR: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about? What about that broad theme of ours “Burdens and Boons” and how it pertains to poetry writing of today? What do you see as a burden or a boon when it comes to poetry?

DL: The burden of poetry is same- trying to communicate something intimate, eternal and mysterious using nothing but words on a page. It can’t be done, and yet poets have persisted for centuries, with no real recompense, and for little more than a handful of readers. It’s a labor of love and obsession, an intensive process with a product hardly anyone wants. But for those few that do want it, need it, love it, poetry’s a life-saver, a balm, a rare, wild bloom.

AR: Thank you for your time!  I'm sure our readers will enjoy your responses as much as I have.

DARK CHARMS

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:

burly summers and unslept nights in deep

lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.

Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,

the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,

the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail

no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.

The clear water we drank as thirsty children

still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then

we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.

The old tunes play and continue to move us

in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,

lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers,

to something inside us that longs to be named.

We name it the past and drag it behind us,

bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,

dreams of running, the keys to misplaced names.

THE BEATLES

I never really understood why the Beatles

broke up, the whole

Yoko Ono thing seemed an excuse

for something deeper.

Sure, she was an irritation

with her helium screech, her skimpy

leatherette skirts, those tinted ovoid glasses

that eclipsed half her face.

                                  But come on, Hey Jude

was putting caviar on the table, not to mention

those glittering lines of cocaine. Beatle music

was paying for moats dug out with a fleet

of backhoes circling the stadium-sized perimeters

of four manicured estates. Why Don’t We

Do It In the Road was backing up traffic

around the amphitheaters of the industrial world.

Yoko’s avant-garde art projects and op-art

outfits were nothing against the shiploads of lucre

I’m Fixing a Hole and Here Comes the Sun

were bringing in.

                               So why did they do it?

They had wives, kids, ex-wives, mortgages,

thoroughbreds and waist-coated butlers, lithe

young assistants power lunching with publicists

in Paris, Rome. And they must have loved

one another almost as much as John

loved Yoko, brothers from the ghetto,

their shaggy heads touching

above the grand piano, their voices

straining toward perfect harmony.

                                     Maybe they arrived

at a place where nothing seemed real. A field

bigger than love or greed or jealousy.

An open space where nothing

is enough, where things are going to fall apart

no matter what.

CHER

I wanted to be Cher, tall

as a glass of iced tea,

her bony shoulders draped

with a curtain of dark hair

that plunged straight down,

the cut tips brushing

her non-existent butt.

I wanted to wear a lantern

for a hat, a cabbage, a piñata

and walk in thigh high boots

with six inch heels that buttoned

up the back. I wanted her

rouged cheek bones and her

throaty panache, her voice

of gravel and clover, the hokum

of her clothes: black fishnet

and pink pom-poms, frilled

halter tops, fringed bells

and her thin strip of waist

with the bullet hole navel.

Cher standing with her skinny arm

slung around Sonny’s thick neck,

posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,

The Leaning Tower of Piza,

The Great Wall of China,

The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling

for the camera with her crooked

teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun

bouncing off the bump on her nose.

Give me back the old Cher,

the gangly, imperfect girl

before the shaving knife

took her, before they shoved

pillows in her tits, injected

the lumpy gel into her lips.

Take me back to the woman

I wanted to be, stalwart

and silly, smart as her lion

tamer’s whip, my body a torch

stretched the length of the polished

piano, legs bent at the knee, hair

cascading down over Sonny’s blunt

fingers as he pummeled the keys,

singing in a sloppy alto

GOLD

Color of J.C. Penny’s jewelry, trinket

in a Cracker Jack box, color of roadside

weeds, candy wrapper in a gutter. Color

of streamers tied to the handlebars

of a rusty bike, color of rust on the bike’s

dented fender. Color of food stamps

and welfare checks, dirt swept

into the long hole of the missing board

on the back porch, the untended sore,

phlegm in the hotel toilet bowl. Color

of mold in the broken refrigerator, light

bulb hung over the dog-shredded screen,

color of curtainless kitchen windows

throbbing through the dark, underwear

stains, old bandages, knees of worn jeans,

filters of generic cigarettes, brand x

bottles of beer, lighter flints, matchheads,

dry leaves. Color

of blocks of cheese and government butter,

rolled oats, crust of white bread, bacon fat,

two fingers of oil shivering in the pan,

chicken wings dragged through cornmeal,

the three-legged cat, two hairs left

on the naked doll’s bald head, the spikes

in the iris of her rolling eyes, the bottoms

of unwashed feet, seals on divorce papers,

notices of default, ancient coat hangers, bingo

chips, the pawned topaz ring, lottery tickets,

mustard on a cracker, sulfur, factory lights

at night, hills of sawdust and shallow pans

of brake fluid, bees seething in a dead tree knot,

tinder in a box, pennies in a jar, coffee stained

teeth, a busted piano’s ivory keys, bed bugs, fleas,

algae scum simmering on a pond, the carp

floating beneath. Color

of the crane and chain of the wrecking ball

stranded in sun glare, the loud bell of the sun,

the clock-ticking stars, shade in the bathroom

stuck half-way down, rag rugs, lye soap, nicotine

slick in the groves of kitchen ashtrays, the worn

handles of soup ladles, tin roses

painted on the still born baby’s

shoebox cradle, brass tip

of the veteran ’s cane, Gold Bond powder

that eats sweat from the creases, A & D

ointment, Listerine, dirt roads, fool’s gold,

litter of kittens in the corn crib, tobacco spit,

strip of light under the closed door. Color

of unshaven stubble along the scar on a man’s

cheek, floor wax on a woman’s knees, bouillon

cubes in foil, the backs of flies in spider webs,

fishing line at sunset, honey in a bucket, dead

clover, color

of the edges of bargain basement

books dropped in the bin, dust rising in motes

onto the long tables in the public library

where the homeless come to sit in rows, heads

fallen on their folded arms like good school

children dreaming of sleep.