Dorine Jennette interview

[Mark Bilbrey]

Well, hot damn. We may be working on a book here. Dorine, your generosity abounds with loving-kindness. It also bounds. Like a diligent and athletically blessed animal. THANK YOU.  

Students, you make me hope I never get a better job than this. I am pleased.

Dorine, one thing we talked about in class is the way the voice in your poems sometimes wants something so much, but the poem, in its wisdom, just won't let you have it. Well, we didn't say that exactly, but I was thinking it and we said something along those lines. I suppose I'm thinking of the speaker in "Marriage Song in the Desert" wanting the beauty and tenderness and sensuousness of love and sex, but the poem refusing to let go of its harsh surroundings, its hard edges, its "red steel plates"--the deadly beautiful desert. Or the speaker of "Basta Cosi" demanding in no uncertain terms "a real old-fashioned / love song" complete with "moonrise over the Mediterranean" and hair-stroking and humming and honeyed compliments--and yet the poem is ultimately transparent in its desperation, in its understanding that comfort is only comfort when there's some reason comfort is required, that the words will "clot and finally fail." I swear that sweet ending--"and you asking me please / to keep humming that old song // because I am so good at it / and so beautiful / and such a comfort to you"--is dripping with a rage or a sadness that the much harsher words at the beginning of the poem never had. It's a powerful poem in that way--when the poem arrives, when we get what we wished for, it's not what we expected.

I divided "voice" and "poem," as if they're separate entities. How do you imagine these kinds of wrestling matches playing out? Are you wrestling with yourself or with the poem? How does the poem help you locate and deal with--wrestle with--the difference between what we desire and what is? Why can't we seem to make even something as little as a poem conform to our ideals, our desires? (Or is it that we COULD, but then we wouldn't believe in it anymore?)

On a separate note, everyone should check out an earlier version of that poem: http://www.coconutpoetry.org/preston1.htm. Here, the theoretical argument on poetics is more explicit, but that argument undergoes the same tempering as the more general impulse I mentioned above--it becomes complicated and almost undermined in a really rich way. That goes back to something I was wondering much earlier about your dedication to the romantic lyric and simultaneous employment of approaches that are sometimes much more post-modern. Your feet are planted firmly in the romantic tradition--and that's an informed and well-considered choice, not an accident--yet your understanding of modern and post-modern theory and practice informs your work, too, I think. Are you, then, part of the "Hybrid" tradition Cole Swensen describes in *American Hybrid*?

[Mark Bilbrey]

Geez, I didn't mean for that to be so long--sorry. I'm going to have a helluva time editing this down. Feel free to just cover your eyes, put your finger on a random sentence, and respond to only that sentence, ignoring the rest.

[Colin flanigan]

Although everyone else's questions have already put anything I could have asked to horrible, hiding-under-the-kitchen-table style shame, but I know tat I'll regret it if I don't at least try to participate in this fascinating discussion - so, here goes.

Dorine,
First off, I've really enjoyed diving into your book Urchin to Follow and can already tell that I will be returning to it after the class is finished.
With that said, I wanted to ask you a little bit how imagery works for you in your head. I'll get a little more specific and make my question twofold, here:
I generally try to write with a similar strategy to the "headfirst, associative romp” previously described, which generally leads me in all sorts of directions - most often to something that I like, and then into a state of deep insecurity where I question over and over wether or not I'm entirely narcissistic or just have bad taste in poetry (my own). Likely both. Anyhow, I'd like to probe your mind about how you arrive at acceptance with the first draft of a poem - what your "litmus test" is, as it were, for knowing when a poem should be either discarded or set aside to be refined later? And secondly, I see both from this interview and the poetry I've read so far that you have a distinct appreciation for imagery rich with associations. How do you go about deciding what imagery properly serves the purpose of the poem you are working on - that is, what imagery is too obvious or too vague, what imagery is vague/obvious enough?

Thank you very much, and sorry if my questions are very broad - I'm something of a novice at this whole "poetry" game myself.

[Dorine Jennette]

Hi Colin,

Thanks for jumping in! To answer your question about drafting and images: It is definitely helpful to think about litmus tests, and I start applying them many drafts down the line. My litmus test for a *first* draft  is--I don’t have one. I count on a first-draft to be excruciatingly bad. In *Bird by Bird*, Anne Lamott talks about living in fear of being hit by a bus when she has a new draft in hand, because of paranoid fantasies that the people who come to clean out her place after her death will find the first draft, see how bad it is, and conclude that she threw herself in front of the bus out of despair that she had lost her talent. And that’s how bad my first-drafts are, too. There are people in the world whose first drafts are good, but let’s agree together to despise them, OK?

If you are not yet feeling liberated to write utter dreck, as I do--and many people do feel obligated to write well quickly when they begin, so you are not alone in that at all--then I really recommend the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter of Lamott’s *Bird by Bird.* So freeing!  Read it once, read it twice--lather, rinse, repeat! I don’t apply my should-we-let-it-live test to a piece until I’ve been working with it for a while, until I’ve found out what it is. At that point, if it needs to be killed, or cut up for parts, well, I’m not as attached to it as I was at the first-draft stage, thus it’s easier to just keep what was good from it for the boneyard. Make sense?

My litmus tests for an image, when I do start applying tests, depend on the piece in progress, but speaking generally, my list might include:
--Is this image sufficiently concrete?
--Is it fresh? Or have I seen it too many times before?
--Is it physically clear?
--Is it tonally in keeping with what I want this moment in the poem to do, emotionally?
--Is it conceptually in keeping with what I want this moment in the poem to do, philosophically?
--Is it musically in keeping with the line?
--Is it aesthetically in keeping with what the rest of the poem is doing, or should it find a new home in a new piece somewhere else?
If anyone wants to point out whatever I’m forgetting to put in this list and ask about that, please feel free . . .

If you’re feeling uncertain as to how to answer these questions when you’re looking at a draft, the only thing to do is read more. Then write more. Don’t worry, you’ll develop an ear as you go!

Mark, I’ve been considering your gorgeous questions, and I think I've come round to an articulable response (I've been drafting in my brain!). I'm off to deal with a couple of the day's administrative details, then I'll check back in.More ss More soon, and others please feel free to join the convo in the meantime .. .  More soon!

[Dorine Jennette]

Mark,

I like your idea of wrestling or grappling to describe what the voice and the poem are doing, because these verbs figure voice and poem as physical entities in intimate contact. They have a both-together-and-separate-ness in this way of speaking that I find pleasing. And then we’ve got another pair in our conversation, the desired and the one doing the desiring, the one speaking the poem and the one spoken to or about, who may be farther apart from each other (or not), but who are in some kind of tension that involves a physical, sensual element. What to do with all of this? How to arrange the players?
   Well, Emily Dickinson has a great line somewhere: “Heaven is what I cannot reach--“ Her meaning is wonderfully double (at least), because this line means: 1) I cannot reach something that I want so much I refer to it as Heaven, and also 2) anything I cannot reach, by virtue of being unreachable, becomes so desirable to me that I call it Heaven. Or some mix of both of these experiences. I keep this line in mind whenever I consider desire in artistic expression. Notice, by the way, how that dash at the end of the line becomes almost a graphic, drawn expression of the speaker's extended arm--anyway, even though some of the ideas in that line are familiar, the line encapsulates them in a fresh, portable way, so I keep it handy in my brain.
   We’re familiar, I think, with gross old phrases like the “thrill of the chase” to describe the pursuit of seduction, but there are smarter ways of having that conversation about the pursuing lover. I’ve been revisiting Anne Carson’s *Eros the Bittersweet*, and Carson talks accessibly but richly about how the beloved is always retreating, always turning away. This doesn’t have to be because someone is playing coy. It can just be because it’s impossible to really know any other person, impossible to truly enter someone else’s experience. There are plenty of interesting discussions of self/other boundaries throughout twentieth-century and contemporary literary theory, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, religious studies, blah blah blah. But it's the big problem, right? There are limits to togetherness, limits to understanding. Thus the beloved is always departing, even if only accidentally.
   So, desire involves distance. That’s a given. And though I cannot presume to speak for anyone else’s experience of desire and writing, I can say that for me, the poem *becomes* the object of desire that replaces whatever desire the poem is about. Thus my artistic desire is seldom thwarted, because I trust that if I can’t make the poem work today, I’ll be able to tomorrow. I seem to have infinite faith--this is dangerous, isn’t it?--I have infinite faith in my ability to get smarter, to get smart enough to make the poem work later, if not today. For today, I can always go on to another draft, something I already have the chops for. Thus, like Anne Lamott, I live only in fear of untimely bus accidents or--dear God, wasn’t Roland Barthes run over by a laundry truck? Like seriously, no kidding? Oh dear, that makes this example much less funny. And Frank O’Hara was hit by a freaking dune buggy or something, right? Uh-oh, this is totally igniting my superstitious side. Now I’m afraid I’ll be killed by a comical vehicle. But seriously, I am convinced that with enough time, I can finish anything--but of course one will not have enough time. Donald Hall puts it crisply in *Life Work*: “Death is an inducement to get done what you can.” That's another quote I keep at the top of my brain. So the only thing thwarting my desires, poem wise, is the certainty of death. Ahem.
        I guess I do have to be aware of the possibility that poems I find satisfying today, I'll think are terrible tomorrow. When I think about some of the aesthetic arguments I made in my MFA classes--and I mean with volume and pounding of conference tables--I rather hope the floor will open up and swallow me. Because I said some stupid, stupid crap. But one cannot think about this too much, or one can no longer participate in conversation. I couldn't be talking to you now if I hadn't accepted in advance the possibility that I might later find my remarks embarrassingly lame. Such is life. Dignity is overrated. That's what I'm trying to believe. 
   But truly, on a daily basis, assuming the absence of runaway trucks full of rodeo clowns, once the poem is in motion, the very fact that the poem is moving toward its goal keeps me satisfied. The poem’s desired form is always receding, but the poem is always moving toward it.

OK, time to tackle the lyric tradition! Back with a new post soon . . .

[Mark Bilbrey]

Wow.

You're giving better answers in this conversation than I gave for my comprehensive exams. You just made me wish I had been talking to you instead of reading Levinas and Buber and Derrida and Celan all that time.

Damn.

[Dorine Jennette]

    Mark, if I am making more sense than usual, it’s because you are asking me questions that allow me to ride my pet hobbyhorses from my comps and my dissertation, and I thank you! It’s nice to feed my favorite ideas some carrots. 

    Speaking of which, digging into these questions about the nature of the lyric you have raised: Am I part of the "Hybrid" tradition Cole Swensen describes in *American Hybrid*? God, I hope so. I really hope one of those cool, cool kids is going to pass me a smoke in the washroom someday. Not that I smoke. But you know what I mean.

    What if we approach the question of the Romantic lyric, the Po-Mo lyric, and the mixing of the two (or four, or six) this way . . .

    Let’s say for purposes of discussion there are two basic models of the lyric poem:

    Lyric Poem A offers the cri-de-coeur-style outpouring of one individual in a moment of crisis or encounter with the sublime, articulating the intensity of the experience in vivid, compressed images that defy chronology. For example, a memory from twenty years before the moment of the poem may co-occupy the poem’s present-moment space. Perhaps a present moment has brought up an old memory for the speaker, so the past and present are interacting in a powerful way, and that’s what the poem is about. It is the nature of trauma to stop time, and also the nature of powerful encounters with the sublime to stop time, so within these altered states of consciousness, multiple layers of time and consciousness--the daily world and the dream world--easily coexist. It’s these powerful altered, non-daily states of awareness, with their special powers of bending time and space, that this kind of lyric often attempts to express. Language-wise, let’s borrow from Marjorie Perloff (in Poetics of Indeterminacy, maybe?) and from Tony Hoagland (I think the essay is called “Polka Dots, Stripes, and Plaids” or similar in Real Sofistakashun), and call the way we use words in such a poem a “pointing” system. In a “pointing” system or words, when I say “cow,” I mean a four-legged ungulate who makes milk and cheese.

    Lyric Poem B is interested mostly in how words lead to other words. Lyric B is interested in the psychological, emotional, and linguistic effects of allowing the music of the line to lead the work, in allowing one word to lead to another according to the free association of sound, or etymology, or pun, maybe. Borrowing vocab from Perloff and Hoagland again, I might call this kind of lyric a “compositional” use of words, because in this case, when I say “cow,” I’m less interested in cheese than in how “cow” sounds cool following “corona” and before “cowl.” In a compositional system, one composes a poem akin to the way one would compose an abstract painting, splashing words at times more for their colors than for what real-life objects they can represent. In Lyric B, considering “cow,” “corona,” and “cowl” in a line, I’m more interested in how my mind can create new connections considering those words together than in the four-legged animal, the solar phenomenon, or the hood in or for themselves. And I don’t much care whether the associations those words create in a group relate to some specific lived experience of mine or not. I’m interested mostly in the *new* mental experience that putting those words in a group creates.

         Here's what I hope for in the hybrid third option: Lyric C: I would like to produce a Lyric that has allegiance to the pleasures of Lyric A, but also to the pleasures of Lyric B. I would like a Lyric C that has some identifiable relationship to lived experience, but that is equally interested in setting out from the lived experience under the poem to explore the linguistic experience within the poem, or spreading out from the poem. I would like a rhizomatic or fungal Lyric C--and I mean “fungal” in the best possible way. There are fungi that appear to be small on the surface, since the little mushrooms are all that’s immediately visible. But their rhizomatic networks run for hundreds of miles underground, so all the little mushrooms on top are in fact all the same mushroom. (If you find fungus unappealing, think of strawberries--they grow by rhizome also.) I would like Lyric C to operate like a giant fungus, seemingly small in its surface parts, and seemingly leaping over vast associative distances between those parts, yet in fact, on closer inspection, comfortably encompassing ideas and items in its capacious living space, all connected by real roots (and routes) through lived experience (lived by someone, if not me--I feel quite free to steal and make things up, and I hope you do, too.)

    “Basta Cosi” is a good example of me attempting this, because I’m trying to use a number of its words to mean multiple things at once, so that a network of possible meanings spreads out from each one. In that piece, when I say “List,” I mean lean/drift, and also make a list--which is a kind of very nondirective way of making a poem. By “mist,” I mean to also indicate “missed.” By “line in the sand,” I mean "Hey, here is the line in the sand, don’t cross it; I also mean “line in the sand” as in a line of poetry written in sand, i.e., not destined to last very long. (Which in my head, at least, is a Keats joke, as Keats wanted his epitaph to read “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”) So I mean for the conflicting desires of romance and a conflicting set of aesthetic desires and arguments to unfold in tandem. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but that's my goal!

All in all, I would like any particular line in Lyric C to oscillate between the pleasures of Lyric A and the pleasures of Lyric B, between words as they live in a "pointing system" and words as they live in a "compositional system." It's probably impossible to achieve, but I know that while I am working on it, I will not be bored. 

[Dana Roders]

Hi Dorine--

I, too, am jumping into this interview late, but I'm absolutely fascinated (and perhaps slightly overwhelmed) by what I've read so far! My name is Dana Roders, and I'm the Assistant Editor of Straylight as well as one of Mark's groupies. Your poems floor me in the sense that the images, although progressive and digressive and every sort of -gressive in between, make perfect, beautiful sense. That's clearly thanks to you--you have a talent for creating your own sense out of images that are otherwise disconnected. I'm intensely curious about your title choices. It seems to me that often, the titles represent a sort of spinal cord for the poems--while the images follow their own pattern, the titles serve to connect and sustain them. Typically, what comes first in your writing process? Chicken or egg?

Thank you so very much for your participation. Your work and your responses are fabulous.

[Mark Bilbrey]

And one final question:

Does poetry matter or is it just a dead frog for classroom necropsy, or perhaps a fancy crossword game for hobbyists?

[Dorine Jennette]

Dana,

Thank you for saying something nice about my titles! This is a rare experience for me. Friends who have workshopped with me generally agree that during the drafting stages, I write the *worst titles in the world*. Mark may be too kind to remember my more absurd title moments at UGA, but Judith Ortiz Cofer, my major professor for the PhD program, has said to me many times, “Dorine, I’m sending you back to remedial title school.” And that’s OK. I’m comfortable there. So, to address your question about process--titles come last! Way last! And with much struggle. I was at a workshop with friends recently where someone made a joke about what would be a really terrible title for my new poem draft. I said, “Yeah, that’s what I was calling it when I first wrote it.” My friend Lisa looked surprised and said, “Wow, it’s really cool of you to admit that.” So, that’s how bad my draft titles are!  I have no shame about them; I accept my lot. The exception is that every once in a while, I get a great title idea, and then I feel compelled to write some kind of poem to go with it--for me, no good title idea can be wasted! But I love your spinal cord image for the titles in *Urchin to Follow*. It’s more compelling than anything I’ve had to say about my titles, and it makes it sound like I have some kind of plan for them other than to not suck. Since the book came out, people have asked about those titles, finding them noteworthy in ways that aren’t apparent to me, and I haven’t known how to respond. So I’m borrowing your spinal cord image from now on, if that’s OK with you!

[Dorine Jennette]

Mark,

Does poetry matter? Whoooooee! This here is one o’ them Big Questions, isn’t it? That’s only fair--I’ve been doing the same to other people in my wacky online interviews for the *Georgia Review*.

OK, here I go: Does poetry matter? Yes. Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project (when he was Poet Laureate) showed that poetry matters to our lives as human beings. Pinsky’s invitation to share a favorite poem revealed just how many people would pull wrinkled scraps of paper out of wallets, back pockets, dresser drawers, wherever, to tell the story of how a poem had helped them grieve for a loved one or renew their marriage or whatever.
As William Carlos William says somewhere in *Spring and All* (I think): “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” (Someone will have to help me with the linebreaks--my books are in boxes for an impending move.) What is found in poetry is beauty, connection to other humans, reminders of interconnectedness, of the numinous, of the Great Cosmic Ya-Ya that is larger than ourselves. So what is found in poems matters, and is found also in painting, music, dance, movies, etc. (Here Frank O’Hara hollers at us from the sidelines, “Mothers of America, let your kids go to the movies!”) I like to get these beauty goodies from poems, but if someone else wants to get them from choreography or fiction, that’s OK by me. Art matters. Poetry is one of its matterings.

Poetry encourages acts of imagination that allow us to imagine other lives, and therefore poetry encourages compassion, the recognition of the selfhood of the other. Thus poetry is a form of peace activism just by being itself. Lucille Clifton joked somewhere in an interview that if violent folks were poetry readers, they’d be better able to imagine another’s experience, and maybe less likely to beat somebody up--or, as she joked, maybe they’d just beat somebody less severely.

So sure, in that art encourages imagination, which is essential to compassion, which is essential to our not blowing ourselves up or destroying the resources of the Earth, then yes, poetry, by being one kind of of art, matters.

But then the equation adds a variable, when we move from poetry on the page to poetry at a public event. Say we gather for a reading to benefit a favorite community organization, and we pass the hat while we’re there. The money we raise for the worthy organization matters in that it supports their work. If the reading itself renews our energies for fighting the good fight, that matters, too. It’s even better if the audience includes some folks who aren’t usually poetry readers, who discover that poetry may have more to offer them than they thought. I encountered this recently when I guest-MCed for a reading to benefit the UC Davis Mind Institute, which studies autism, and the Odyssey Learning Center, which works with autistic people. (Let me be clear that I did not organize or publicize, btw, I just showed up to introduce people, so I was sort of experiencing the event as an outside observer.) Everyone paid a little at the door to get in, and that money went to the two organizations. The key staff of the learning center were in attendance, and heard themselves celebrated by the poets. Some of the poems read were much better than others, in my opinion, but who cares? The event brought together people to materially support good work in the community, to celebrate the people doing the work, to connect to other humans with similar struggles, and to energize themselves for their own ongoing struggles. This event took place at the small, scrappy Sacramento Poetry Center, but for me it had all the elements of poetry mattering.

   On the other hand, when poets gather for a theme reading about a social issue, and the audience consists only of others in the organizers’ wee coterie, and no money is raised, and no volunteering occurs, yet the organizers are congratulating themselves for civic activism, I get upset. This looks to me like grandstanding, not activism. This makes me want to say, “Uh, guys? Next time should we maybe just walk dogs at the Humane Society for the day? Or write letters to the editor? Or something?” A reading that does nothing other than read poems may matter very much in the sense of raising awareness and firing up the troops and etc. Firing up the troops matters, and forming community matters. I just get upset when people doing work that raises awareness among their friends wish to be congratulated as though they have been enacting substantive material change.

   Having said all this, I should own that I have been known to write poems with social goals. A poem like “Notes on Logistics” in *Urchin to Follow* aims to draw attention, in its opening lines, to the rather blasé approach that our culture still sometimes takes to rampant, persistent violence against women. I’ve even published my token anti-war poem (it’s online in *Protest Poems* somewhere, and I rather like it, I admit). But I try not to delude myself about the impact of such poems. I think my mother has more of an impact in the world than these poems do when she delivers hot coffee and sandwiches to striking union workers who are picketing on a day of forty degrees and rain. Some of you who are participating in your state’s politics right now are having probably having an impact via mechanisms other than poetry, even if poetry is part of what gives you the brains to operate those mechanisms.

   For another scenario, I have more of an impact in the world than my poems do when I’m at a dinner party of all straight couples, and someone says something nasty about gay people, and I say, “Oy! That’s my family you’re talking about. Those are my friends you’re insulting. I suggest you rethink that.” I think any man reading this can make more impact on women’s safety than my poem is ever going to do by saying, next time you’re in a men-only conversation and someone says something horrifying: “Jesus, man, that could be my sister you’re talking about. Shut your piehole,” or however you prefer to say it. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “Silence is the voice of complicity.” And poetry is one way to speak, one way to be other than silent. So poetry matters. But poetry often isn’t loud enough. Sometimes simple conversation is louder. Poetry matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters--art isn’t the only thing that matters--and sometimes I think we are trying to accomplish tasks with poems that would be better served by other tools.

   I hope this makes some sense, and I thank you for the opportunity to share my rant of the day!

[Mark Bilbrey]

Brilliantly put. Thanks so much, Dorine--from all of us up here in the cold and politically-tender state of Wisconsin!

That was a marathon! Have a glass of water. You deserve a foot rub or chocolate or great health insurance or something!

Seriously--thank you.

[Dorine Jennette]

Thanks for having me on board, y'all, and keep fighting the good fight!