Helena Feder | November 2021

Dorianne Laux

Being shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize came as a complete surprise to Dorianne Laux, but it came as no surprise to her many admirers. Her verse has a rare clarity and directness; as Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond, it is both clear and deep, and her new book, Only as the Day Is Long, is immersive. Attuned to the softness and sharpness of the everyday, Laux approaches the magnitude of love and loss with an eye for the compelling detail—a stolen lighter, her mother’s colander, the last doorknob you reach for—that conveys everything.

Laux is the author of six volumes of poetry, and four chapbooks, including What We Carry (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Facts about the Moon (2005), winner of the Oregon Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Book of Men (2011), winner of the Paterson Prize; and, Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Along with Kim Addonizio, she wrote the useful and immensely popular The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Laux has received numerous fellowships, prizes, and awards, and she teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University and Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program, where she is part of the founding faculty.

Laux and her husband, the poet Joseph Millar, live in California. I’d just finished editing a volume of ekphrasis for the North Carolina Museum of Art, You Are the River (2021), in which both Laux and Millar have poems. We spoke over Zoom for a few hours in September 2020 about her early and recent work, the Pulitzer Prize, and the fires in California. We discussed the importance of sex and theft, and the salvation of writing during the pandemic.

Poetry is not, as you know, much admired or respected in the United States. I find that if you’re in Europe in a taxicab and the driver asks what you do and you say “I’m a poet,” you may be asked to recite a poem on the spot. And people expect that you will know their favorite poem and their country’s famous poets. They know our famous poets. You tell a cab driver here that you’re a poet, and she’d say, “Uh-huh. Where you wanna go?”

 

Feder: That sounds about right. I was corresponding with you about You Are the River around the time you found out. Do I remember correctly that you found out only when a student emailed you?

Laux: Yeah, I had no idea. I had been on a Zoom call with some friends that I write poetry with once a week. We get together on Zoom and trade some words back and forth, and maybe a phrase or two, and then we all go away and write for forty minutes. We then come back and share everything. We hadn’t checked our emails for hours, which is unusual in this house.

I got an email from a student who said, “Well, you’ve won the Pulitzer in my book.” His last name is Wimberley, and he said, “I’m going to award you the Wimberley Poetry Award!” I said, “Okay, thank you,” and then he wrote another email that was just as cryptic. And I said to Joe, “You know, I know Matt’s been out in the mountains in Boone, North Carolina, and he’s been gathering mushrooms. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

When I was waiting for him to respond, I checked my Facebook page, and there it was, all over my page: Congratulations! And I looked up at Joe and I said, “You know, I’m not sure, but I think I might be a finalist for the Pulitzer.” And he said, “Really? You’re not sure?” And I said, “well, they haven’t contacted me.” And so, he went online and confirmed it. But, no, they never contact you. They announce everybody, winner and finalists, all at once. I think that’s kind of cool; you get to hear it from your friends rather than from an anonymous little envelope that arrives in the mail or an email.

Feder: Only As the Day Is Long is such a great title and full of wonderful poems. Of the new work, “Evening” and “Error’s Refuge” are compelling, and seem to echo moments from your first book, Awake, particularly “The Garden.”

Laux: Well, I think that happens with most poets. They’re really only writing one poem, over and over, trying to get it right each time. And we never quite do, so that means we have to write another. My themes have pretty much been domestic life, family, and children. I’m fascinated by ordinary life; how extraordinary it is when you look at it closely.

Feder: Like your mother’s colander.

Laux: Yes, exactly. It’s funny because I didn’t want that poem to be in the book. But Joe kept saying, “I love that poem. You’ve got to put that in the book.” And I tell you, that is one of the poems that people love the most.

Those old metal colanders are just beautiful little things. [It might seem strange] but I remember it was one of our favorite toys. We had a lot of dirt in San Diego, but not much else flora and fauna-wise. As children, we really had very little to play with, so we used that colander for all kinds of things. My mother would always have to come looking for it. Is it in the yard? Is it in the bathtub? Under the couch? I wouldn’t have thought of that poem as a favorite in the book. This just goes to show that you are often not the best judge of your own work.

There are poems that you write, and you think yes, this gets close. I know this is a keeper. But there are others that you think are just kind of knockoffs. Nothing special. Years ago, I was talking to Jane Hirshfield on the phone, and I said, “Did you write today?” and she said, “Oh yeah, I wrote a little throwaway.” And I said, “Well, read it to me.” And she said, “No, really it’s nothing.” And I said, “No, I want to hear it.” She ended up reading me “The Groundfall Pear,” which is one of my very favorite poems. I said, “Well, if you don’t want it… can I have it for The Poet’s Companion?” You see, Kim and I needed to find poems that wouldn’t cost a lot. Jane said sure, and so we had a previously unpublished Jane Hirshfield poem, for free, in our book.

Feder: That’s quite a coup.

Only As the Day Is Long is dedicated to your sister, Mary-Ellen, and many of the new poems are elegies to people and the past, particularly your mother, whom you’ve described as your muse. I imagine some of these poems were very difficult to write. Can you discuss the evolution of one or two poems?

Laux: Often, the beginning of a poem gets lopped off, or the end, or some discursive middle. My final proofer, Al Poulin with BOA Editions, who published Awake, was very good at that. He’d say, “This is a great poem but you’ve gotta lose that ending. You’ve said enough. Let the reader finish it.” And I remember he did that with “The Tooth Fairy.” The last line is “We were as surprised as you.” I think I went on to say a couple of other things.

Feder: It ends perfectly now.

Laux: Al said, just end with “they were surprised.” And I thought, of course. How did I not see that? But in the midst of writing, and even in the midst of revising, you often get “married” to something. I’ve learned to divorce myself from my poems.

Feder: That’s a very good analogy. It’s a weird promiscuity; you want to be faithful to the poem by being a little faithless to that initial impulse or phrase or image.

Speaking of which, I noticed you left several poems I love out of your selection, for example, “What I Wouldn’t Do” from What We Carry is such a great poem. And “What’s Terrible” from Facts About the Moon, and “Over the Hedge” from The Book of Men. How did you select your poems for the New and Selected?

Laux: Well, luckily, I didn’t have to. I was so frustrated; I just couldn’t do it. I finally threw up my hands and said, “I can’t do this, Joe. You know, maybe we just need to scrap this whole idea. Because I can’t make decisions about it.” And he said, “Here, give it to me. I’ll do it.”

Somebody like Mark Doty would never do that; he knows where every single poem should go. And the process takes him years. But other poets just throw them up in the air and whatever falls on the rug goes in.

Feder: Whatever God wants she keeps?

Laux: Exactly. And you know, when Joe gave the selection to me it read well, and I didn’t miss anything in particular. He said a selection should be just a feel of each of those books, and, then, hopefully, people will want to read each full collection. There was only one poem that he left out. I remember looking for it one night at a reading and it wasn’t there.

Feder: Oh, which one?

Laux: It’s called “Lighter,” from The Book of Men. I love reading it, and especially to students.

Feder: Yes, the stolen lighter poem. I love this one too.

Laux: I thought, how could he leave that out? My gosh, I love that poem, and I think young women really like that poem because it encourages them to be risky, to take something that isn’t theirs. And, of course, hopefully they see it as a metaphor. I’ve only stolen lighters.

Feder: Well, I don’t represent the law.

Laux: I once stole some bowling shoes from the bowling alley.

Feder: I’ve stolen bowling shoes.

Laux: I wish I had a pair of those shoes. There’s something about them that’s just wonderful. But lighters, I often palm one and put it in my pocket. And whenever I do that, I think to myself, see, you’re no better than anyone else. You have a little bit of criminal inside you.

Feder: Well, yes, you and Prometheus. It’s a promethean gesture, a perfect poetic act.

Laux: Tell that to the judge! In fact, I had read that poem at a workshop and there was a Q&A during the reading. This woman raised her hand and said, “Oh my God, why would you write a poem about stealing? You could be arrested!” And I said, I don’t think the 7/11 cops are coming after me anytime soon.

Feder: It’s a dangerous thing being a poet. But in all seriousness, you have to run towards what scares you. Many poets have written about affairs and had marriages end, for example. So aside from the larger question with regard to anthologies and selections, in your own immediate work, what do you put in and what do you leave out? How much is too much information? How much are you willing to risk for a line?

Laux: I do have a rule for myself, and it’s held pretty well for me over the years, especially when I was writing my first book. I would ask myself, is this something that could hurt someone? As a writer, or any kind of artist, you have a power of expression others don’t possess.

And I thought, it’s okay for me to write poems about my mother, because no matter how old I become, she will always be older than me, and she will always have power over me. She is the powerful person in this relationship. I can write poems about Donald Trump or Cher; they all have more power than I do. They have more visibility, more ability to influence. But those “under” me—my sisters, my brother; they’re all younger. I have seniority, and so I always ask their permission. I would never publish a poem about my daughter, for example, that she did not want out there.

In terms of revealing myself, I have no compunction. I will write about intimate or embarrassing things. I’m not particularly proud about stealing lighters, but there you have it.

Feder: Has anyone ever really objected to one of your poems?

Laux: Yes, with my first book. I wrote about my family, and my family did not like it. Especially my mother. She was not happy with it. And the only thing I changed was the poem “Tooth Fairy.” It included the line, “She drinks a six-pack of beer and goes to bed.” She said, “How can you tell people I drink a six-pack of beer? I never drank a six-pack of beer.” In fact, she drank six-packs-and-a-half of beers. She was a stone alcoholic, and she really, really did not want that revealed. So, I changed it. I said, “She drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.” It didn’t hurt the poem, and it made her feel better. The irony was that she was so proud when that book came out; you could not slap the smile off her face.

Feder: Since we’re talking about Awake, “The Laundromat” is another one of my favorites—that phrase, “act of animal kindness.” I don’t teach MFA workshops, and so I wonder how this poem, or one like it, would seem to students now. Fortunately, people are more aware of sexual exploitation than they were thirty years ago. But sometimes there’s a conflation of healthy sexuality and coercive or predatory behavior, which are very different things. I ask because you recently taught an MFA workshop on sex and death.

Laux: Which I’m teaching again next semester, and that’s one of the reasons. I think there aren’t enough poems that deal with sex. Sharon Olds felt the same way.

Feder: She writes some of the best sex poems.

Laux: She recently wondered if there are other young women writing about sex well now. And I said, yes, Natalie Diaz writes these incredible, beautiful, ecstatic, visionary sex poems. But few have done what Sharon’s done; made this kind of exploration part of her work. And so, yeah, I think there aren’t enough poems about sex, and I don’t think there are enough that go deep enough and that are open enough. Because people themselves are not open and don’t think deeply about it. And so that’s why I love teaching the class. I taught it first to undergraduate students at the University of Oregon. We studied the history of sexuality and death, and the development of the idea of romance. We read Song of Songs, Sappho, Cavafy. With undergrads, sometimes I am the first adult they’ve been able to talk openly with about sexuality. And when you think about that, that’s frightening. But a level of comfort with the subject develops throughout the class, and their poems deepen. And then I ask, well, what, what is often the outcome of sexuality? Birth. And what’s the outcome of birth? Death. I want them to grasp that sex is more terrifying and awesome than they might have realized.

Feder: You’ve written that “Attention is a form of love.” I couldn’t agree more, and I find your work loving, even joyful, even when it is elegiac. Is it the sheer love of embodiment that animates your work, or the love of making something new?

Laux: I love making something, and that’s what all poets are doing. They’re making a chair from scratch. They’re baking a cake from scratch. All you have are some ingredients, which are words, and then you have a few more ingredients, feelings, and your ideas. It reminds me of my childhood, when we sat out in the dusty canyon, where there wasn’t a whole lot around. But we had twigs and stones and water from the creek, and we would make whole cities and towns out of what was at hand. I found delight in that. My mother was a pianist, which was a huge part of our lives; we heard everything from classical to pop tunes on the piano. And she sang in choirs and groups. I was never really talented musically, but I loved reading. The rest of my family could sing, dance, and play instruments, but I play language.

Feder: I was going to ask you about all the music in your work, both literally and figuratively. But, instead, I’ll ask, what have you been listening to during the pandemic?

Laux: I have my little CD player in my studio. I love the music from Inside Llewyn Davis, Aaron Neville, Nature Boy, I love that album, Continuum by John Meyer—beautiful; and one of my very favorites, Nina Simone. And then, every once in a while, Dire Straits. I put on my little boombox, and then open all the windows, and I sit outside and work on a puzzle and just listen to music. For a while, I will forget that there is a pandemic, that Trump was in office, that I’m getting old, that there are fires all over the Bay Area—

Feder: I was going to ask you about the fires.

Laux: I think those times that we’re able to forget are healthy. I think that the human mind, the human emotional vessel, can only endure horror and threat for short periods of time. And I think that’s a survival instinct. If you knew you were trapped, that you were at risk, that you were being attacked on all sides, you could not move forward. So, you have to forget and just act; immerse yourself in it, and act. I don’t meditate, but it’s my form of meditation, writing poems, listening to loud music, and working on a puzzle. The world’s falling apart, but here I am trying to put it back together. It gives you a sense of power.

Feder: There’s a tension between forgetting, which as you say is necessary for survival, and bearing witness, which is what poets do—whether it’s witnessing the way an insect happens to move or the direction of political mushroom clouds. You recently contributed a very startling poem to a volume of ekphrasis I’ve edited for the North Carolina Museum of Art. You chose to write about Guillermo Kuitca’s People on Fire, acrylic and graphite on canvas. The piece bears witness to other people’s suffering and the suffering they witnessed.

Laux: I chose that piece because it asks you to look closer, to see the individual names [that comprise it], which is so moving. And the title, People on Fire, is evocative. There’s something about the idea of people on fire—that they’re aflame and still living. And I saw them running, on fire, which is such an apt metaphor for what’s going on right now.

Feder: As we’re talking about fire, the wildfires in California are literal and suggest the reality of such metaphors. The wildfires are getting worse each year, as are many of the ecological problems California faces. How does the environment find its way into your work?

Laux: In California, you feel closer to the environment, especially where we live, which is right near the water. I grew up in San Diego, and we would travel every year to LA to see my cousins and drive up the coast; from a very early age, I was in love with the redwoods. To think of them burning is, for me, like thinking of people on fire. They weather fire better than any other tree, but even so, they can be destroyed, and with them a whole ecosystem. There’s a wonderful book called The Wild Trees by Richard Preston, about this group of kids who travel down the coast from Oregon. They pull off the road to go piss and see these big redwood trees; one of them decides to climb a tree next to one of the redwoods and jump to the first branch. He leaps over and starts climbing. He and his friends decide to keep coming back to explore these trees; eventually, when they get to the top of the redwood forest, in the crowns, they find they can walk across them because they are all interconnected. It is like another earth up there, solid ground, and other trees and wildlife are growing out of the dense crown of these trees. They find insects and little creatures up there that have never been discovered because they live hundreds of feet above us in this whole other ecosystem.

As for how the environment informs my work, I wrote a poem about the Gulf oil spill, and one called “The Life of Trees.” It’s not an “ecological” poem, but it gives these trees life in a way that is human-visioned, so that we don’t think of them as at our mercy. In California, Bob Haas and Brenda Hillman have been stalwarts, thinking and writing about climate change very early on.

Feder: I’ve noticed that nature does appear as a subject in several of your poems. In “The Garden,” it exemplifies all that will be lost, the background of human activity that’s taken for granted—and then, one day, you reach for the doorknob, and it’s all gone. While you write about ordinary life and how beautiful and ephemeral and terrifying it is, there is always a sense of human dailyness as connected to a larger whole.

We both work in North Carolina, and we are from California (I lived there seven years), but I hadn’t made that mental shift to thinking of you as a California writer, even though you now live there again.

Laux: North Carolina has wild beaches and beautiful bodies of swampy water, moss hanging from the trees. I love being able to have a foot on both coasts. I love that I’ve had the chance to live up and down the Pacific coast, from San Diego and LA to the Bay area and Oregon to Alaska. It’s my home base. It’s where all of my poetic impulses come from. It’s that light, which is a white light. And the smells and sounds and tastes and textures, you know, of being on the West Coast, where the ocean just overwhelms you with its awe-inspiring vastness. Every single day you’re put up against this void, and you realize that you’re not only living next to a void but in one, on the only habitable planet in our solar system.

Feder: During the pandemic, travel is dangerous and difficult; we’re all hunkered down, and it’s hard to see the broad expanse of things. The big picture. As a poet, can you speak to difficulty or importance of witnessing this complex moment in history?

Laux: I really believe what Carolyn Forché says about politics in poems, that if you yourself have knowledge and strong feelings and have taken action to try to change where you are and who you are, then that comes out in whatever poems you write. Your politics is endemic to your art. Think about Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of boots. That’s probably about as political as it gets: the worn leather of working boots, maybe the only pair of shoes that took a person from one place to another, from one fight to another.

I really think that trying to write about politics is a faulty premise for a poem. But I think it emerges as you’re writing; you invite it in just as you invite anything in. But I also think poems are political by nature. They are already asking you to do something that our culture is always telling you not to do, which is slow down. Feel. Think. Imagine. Inhabit someone else’s consciousness for a while and expand your ideas of what is right or good or beautiful.

Feder: What are you reading right now?

Laux: Well, right before you called me, I was re-reading The Little Prince. I’m also reading Paul Lisicky’s Later. I just finished Mark Doty’s long book about Whitman, What Is the Grass, and I read Carolyn Forché’s memoir about El Salvador, What You Have Heard Is True. I’m not reading a lot of poetry because I judge so many contests and I have so many students who are writing their own poems. I’m always delighted to find some new young poet who’s doing some fabulous work.

Feder: Is there anyone in particular that you’d like to mention?

Laux: We judge this contest every year called The Raleigh Review Contest, and last year Caylin Capra-Thomas wrote a wonderful poem, titled “Iguana, Iguana.” It’s a poem I wish I’d written, might’ve written, if I’d grown up in Florida. One of my favorite books I judged for a contest was won by Connie Voisine, The Cathedral of the North. Geffrey Davis’s lovely book, Revising the Storm. Edith, by Meg Freitag, which is a love poem written to her dead pet bird. After Jubilee by Brionne Janae. And Red Clay Suite, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers are just a few.

Feder: A lot of people, I’ve noticed, are saying that they can’t write right now. What has your writing practice been like during the pandemic and do you have any advice?

Laux: My advice is to do what Joe and I are doing now. We get together with like-minded friends and poets and play the poetry game. Throw out words and phrases and seasons and colors, then try to write a poem in forty minutes that includes all these. It’s a challenge; it’s fun, you know, just being a kid again and seeing if you can make something out of nothing. And there’s no pressure on you because it’s only forty minutes. I mean, we don’t expect you to write a full-blown poem, we just expect you to have fun. We never state a theme or ask anybody to write anything in particular. Just let your mind lead you to wherever it is your mind wants to go right now. We quite surprisingly get poems out of it. All of us have written startlingly good full-blown poems!

Feder: Have any of yours come from the game?

Laux: I published a number of them that I’ve written specifically from these exercises. This is my advice: have an appointment, once a week, to write. It’s not an onerous amount of time when you’re in the middle of the pandemic and you can’t go anywhere anyway. You can get together once a week and write. Once you’ve done that as an artist of any kind, you feel like, alright, I’ve paid my way for the week. I’ve done my work as an artist. And that, again, takes the pressure off. Because if you’re walking around all the time thinking, “Oh, I’m not writing, I’m not writing,” what’s the antidote to that? Oh no, I am writing! On Mondays I am writing! And that gives you confidence as an artist, that you’re doing your work, and that you’re responsible to other people for doing your work, not just to yourself. Right now it is difficult because there’s so much to think about: is everybody at the store going to be wearing a mask? Is it okay if I touch this thing? Did I remember to wash my hands? I mean, should I let my kid go to school? Should I go to school? How am I going to vote? I mean, when the fires were at their peak, we couldn’t go outside. The air quality was 175. We were in a quarantine inside a quarantine!

But we’ve got to press against the walls closing in. I think of Miguel Hernandez who had tuberculosis, who was in jail, whose wife and child were starving, and all they had to eat were onions, and he wrote this beautiful poem called “The Onion.” Before he died, he reached up with a nail and scratched a poem in the wall. When you remember the conditions that so many poets have lived in, and still do, you feel pretty privileged and silly about saying I can’t write. Yes, you can. It may not be good, but that’s okay. Whoever said it had to be good? When you first set pen to paper you didn’t think, “gee, is this gonna be good?” No, you thought, “gee, I’d like to do this, I wonder what will happen.” That’s all you’re doing. Wondering.

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Helena Feder is Associate Professor of Literature and Environment at ECU. She has published one book, Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture, and essays and interviews in various venues. Feder is the editor of two new collections: You Are the River and Close Reading the Anthropocene. She is currently working on a book of public-facing environmental essays and a book of poems.

Excerpt

from from The Book of Men

LIGHTER

“Aim above morality.”
                 —Ruth Gordon, “Harold and Maude”

Steal something worthless, something small,
every once in a while. A lighter from the counter
at the 7-11. Hold that darkness in your hand.
Look straight into the eyes of the clerk
as you slip it in yo
bruised eyes. Don’t justify it. Just take
your change, your cigarettes, and walk
out the door into the snow or hard rain,
sunlight bearing down, like a truck, on your back.
Call it luck when you don’t get caught.
Breathe easy as you stand on the corner,
waiting, like everyone else, for the light to change,
following the cop car with your eyes
as it slowly rolls by, ignoring the babies
in their shaded strollers. Don’t you want
something for nothing? Haven’t you suffered?
Haven’t you been beaten down, condemned
like a tenement, gone to bed hungry, alone?
Sit on a stone bench and dig deep for it,
touch your thumb to the greased metal wheel.
Call it a gift from the gods of fire.
Call it your due.

Reprinted from The Book of Men. Copyright © 2011 by Dorianne Laux. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.