AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID DANIEL

Part I

Gregory Donovan: We are interviewing today David Daniel, author of Seven-Star Bird, winner of the Seventh Annual Levis Reading Prize here at VCU. We are very glad to have him here as a visitor and as the winner of the prize. And he is being interviewed by myself, Gregory Donovan, and David Wojahn.

David, this is a book which focuses on some actual historical events and actual real-world places, although it does so, I suspect, after reading the book carefully, with a lot of imaginative flair and freedom as well. I kind of wanted to know a little bit about some of the backgrounds to the book. We have this book that is rooted in the story of Friendship, Texas, a Moravian town. Perhaps not anything many readers might ordinarily think about when they think about Texas, and I have a feeling that's kind of exactly your point.

David Daniel: It is. The place itself was just a small farming community, and it was filled with these Czech farmers. They spoke Czech, they drank Czech, they did everything Czech, except they had the big hats and they had the guns in the back of the pickups and the boots. So it was a very odd way to grow up. The church was Moravian there. So I was there during the summers, and they were just a spectacularly, sort of unified, culture in the midst of this enormous state, of course, comprising many other of these little cultures. Just down the street there was a German one. All over, and they're still there today. There's actually a town that's about ten miles away from Friendship that's one building, a post office, and there's a little general store. And then there's this enormous beer hall filled with these women in sort of the classic German barmaid outfits. And I don't know where the people come from, but it's obvious it would hold two hundred, three hundred people.

So there are these sort of odd things, and they are all, of course, immigrants who come in and just refuse to give it up, or try not to for as long as they can before they are taken over. In this case, in the late 60s, the state decided to flood it in order to protect the richer town south along the San Gabriel River. That's when my grandmother became very active in fighting the dam, and she ended up being the last person to sell, she and my grandfather. Because of that, of course, the property values had decreased by about 80 percent. So she got 20 percent of what her neighbors got five years before. So it was hard, just a very horrible thing to watch as a kid in a place that had been very special to me. We moved around a lot when I was a child, and so this was sort of my imaginative home, and you know, suddenly it was under water when I was about thirteen.

David Wojahn: At what point in the writing of the book did you realize you had to include the Friendship sequence? When did you know that you needed to include that sequence of Friendship poems in it?

DD: I think about ten years ago, I realized in all the poems, before I started writing these specific poems about Friendship, that most of them seemed to have been guided by this metaphor of flooding, or a sense of displacement, a sense of homelessness, the notion of immigrants leaving Moravia because of religious and economic persecution, coming to the U.S., and then being pushed around and then now dispersed across the country. It just seemed to be a part of the way that I was looking at the world, and then it seemed to me as I began writing the poems to become something that had to do with not just this particular group of Americans but with many of us, as we just have all just dispersed and lost any real sense of home. At least that's been my experience.

DW: It's a pretty funny irony that you have a community based on faith that gets knocked out by something that is almost the equivalent of a biblical flood.

DD: Absolutely. Yeah.

GD: You have linked that longing and sense of loss of a, as you put it, imaginative home, and clearly what for many people, and in some sense must have been for you, a spiritual home, and that motif links up with another kind of mourning that's going on in the book, a much more personal mourning. There's this speaker in these poems who is mourning a lost wife. How did that begin to interplay and how did that arise?

DD: I think that initial sense of loss—this is based on an actual woman, not my wife, but a woman I was in love with who died of leukemia very early—and I think that sense of loss was my first really clear one, you know. It seemed to be a bridge from sort of childhood to a sort of adulthood at that moment. And that loss . . . and I was always an elegiac kid, but that was something that really focused my images and focused my feelings. And then as that sense of loss became less personal and more countrywide, as I began to sort of spread out and see this everywhere. So it was the first significant personal loss that just sort of seemed to make sense with connecting the losses of my childhood with the losses that were coming ahead.

GD: There's quite a spiritual backdrop to all of this, particularly as relates to the Moravian church. That's what makes it kind of more obvious, but there's also a philosophical conduit going on here: the background of Heraclitus and the background of Kabbalah. Do you have a special interest in those?

DD: I do. I love all of that stuff. And it's been with me since I was a child, an interest in all of the sort of odd sects. Growing up in the south as I did, your plate's filled, of course, with churches and . . . I was next door to an African-American church which was filled with the singing all of the time. So it was just very much a part of my growing up and as I felt . . . I feel like since I was a kid I never really felt like I belonged where I was, and so I was always interested in these oddballs, whether it was Kabbalah or any of the various characters who've explored sort of nontraditional religious experiences. And it continues to be something I'm fascinated with. And Heraclitus seems to me someone who spoke to me very directly about this sense of loss, of placelessness, of a kind of longing. The early Greek tragedies, especially Oedipus, had, again, another sort of profound religious effect on me, in the sense of just sort of beginning to understand a force that was so great as to crush us all despite our greatness, as we think. And sensing . . . he didn't do anything really that wrong, except for maybe murdering his father, but everything else he did exactly what he should have done to avoid the destiny that was allotted him, and he still ends up, of course, wrecked and ruined. And when I first read that, it was a very funny play to me, and I think that when I first hooked up with that play I felt like that became, again, sort of the conduit through which I began to understand both the humor, and the loss became a less personal loss there as I began to see it as this sort of, if it can happen to Oedipus, God knows what's going to happen me or any of us.

DW: Like Greg, I guess it would be productive to give a label to your poems, but I think I'd have to call them, I guess, devotional poems and elegies. You have that epigraph in one of the sections from Celan, who seems to me like the premiere devotional poet of the century. But I remember being a little bit puzzled by this blurb on the back of the book where Harold Bloom compares your writing to [Hart] Crane, and I remember when I first read the book, your style seemed so much less ornate than Crane's. But in reading it again, it seemed that it was an apt connection, simply because you seek something, that "spindrift gaze toward paradise" that Crane always aspired to, the desire to make the terrestrial holy. And this desire, I guess, is most abundantly seen in the title poem. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the title poem because it seems almost an ars poetica, the key to reading everything else in the book.

DD: It is. It was a poem that originally I worked on for about a year and a half, and it was maybe 35 or 40 scattered pages of stuff, and I thought that I had just wasted two or three years. And I knew that it was important, but there was just no form to it. And as I began to finish up the rest of the manuscript, I began to realize that it was, in a sense . . . I began to be able to look at all that stuff, knowing that it was, in some ways, the key to how I understood the rest of the book as coming together. So I was able then to focus in and just piece it together. It was a purposeful edit, which was unusual for me. It wasn't really poetic so much as it was something that I understood in a larger scale because I had the book, something I had just never thought of, in terms of the architecture before. And then all the bits and pieces, the voice was there for the various bits and pieces of the book to come together. And I hadn't experienced that before, you know. It seemed that otherwise, the poems either started out as more straight lyric or they started out as a prose poem. And they more or less stayed within that diction and that syntax. And with this poem I felt like a door had opened where I could sort of throw it all together. It's also, to me, the door for the next book as well, sort of picks up more on that style.

GD: I think that's something a lot of people don't realize, especially like poets who are starting out, they understand, and eventually come to learn, their own compositional process, and they begin to learn where the sources of their poems are and what subject matter is going to attract them. And as they start to put that all together into a book, that emerges ever more clearly. But the thing that I discovered is the same thing you are narrating that you discovered, is that, at some point, the book itself can call out for a poem to be written that draws things together.

DD: I think so. I felt desperate. It was a way to make sense of a number of years of writing poems, and I think also combined with that, it was a number of years of teaching and being almost completely immersed in poems so that they began to speak and to sort of help me. It wasn't just me sort of trying to understand the poems, but it was what I had learned and all the other poets that were speaking to me that show up in the epigraphs or wherever. It was a sense of something being whole as opposed to just being these scattered moments, which I knew were related, but didn't know exactly how.

GD: You also talk about, in that title poem, you talk about Luria directly, and you talk about that Kabbalistic notion that at the beginning of the world . . . what's it called? Tzimtzum?

DD: Yes.

GD: That God concentrated himself, and it's a very interesting concept. And he sort of withdrew from the world and focused himself in sort of this piercing light. So it's another version of "Let there be light." But it's a way more mystical light.

DD: Yes. Yes.

GD: Is that something you were . . . That's what you were feeling like is . . . ?

DD: I think so. The sense of abandonment, also the sense that there is, although this world seems, to me, related to some world of significance, whatever god we have is clearly not too concerned about this particular place, although there seem to be elements of it sort of sparkling through. And so that withdrawal, which allows our world to be created with its flaws, with its beauties, is what was really important to me, which again seemed to me to correspond to the fact of these waters pouring in, taking over the city, this town, and forcing them, the positive side is forcing them out into the larger culture, which itself is beautiful. It's Oedipus wandering in the end; blind, but still wandering and moving on. So that was my sense of it. My interest really in the Gnostics, in Kabbalah, is really more aesthetic. I really love the images. I love the thing that I stole about the souls going up into the moon; it's straight out of Valentine. It's just the idea that the moon, as it gains light, as it waxes, it's just the souls, the lights, the pneuma, the spark that's going up there before it gets to drift up into the next place and empties out again. It's lovely stuff. And so that's why, when I'm reading that stuff, more than anything, I'm shopping for stuff that just sort of seems to fit into my views.

DW: You know it's funny, this is a sideline, but how much American poetry has been influenced by Gnostical thinking and Kabbalah in the last like 20 and 30 years. I think of, say, someone like Brenda Hillman, who you can't understand her work without reading the Nag Hammadi Library.

DD: Right.

DW: Or Charles Wright, very much someone else. I think you put your finger on it, where it's just the terrific aesthetic appeal of some of those writings and the fact that they're fragmented already. It's just been, I think, a real source of inspiration for a whole generation of American writers, and somebody should really do a lot more thinking about it.

DD: Yeah, I agree. Bloom has a book called The American Religion. Have you seen that?

DW: Yeah. Yeah.

DD: Which sort of talks about the real base of the Gnostic . . .

DW: Even connects that to Joseph Smith and people . . .

DD: Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with him, and I feel like it has been, especially with Southerners, and Charles, of course, has been in the thick of it, and Pickwick Dam. And certainly, I think if you were seeing any of that primitive stuff still there, he's tapping into it. And I feel like it's certainly part of my culture. But yeah, it has become very . . . and now of course we have Madonna.

DW: Right, well you know it taps into an American kind of paranoia, too, because the whole concept of Gnosticism is that false gods made the world, and it's been a complete whitewash. And during the time of the Bush administration, it makes perfect sense to think that the powers-that-be are ones that are completely delusional.

DD: Yes. Absolutely.

DW: That there are better powers-that-be beyond them.

DD: Yes.

DW: That they don't know about.

DD: Right.

GD: Well, that's interesting that you're obviously drawing the circle that draws other narrow sectarian interests. They draw, maybe, tight circles around themselves, but I think that's characteristic of American poets. And we're really kind of not saying anything new when I say we get that out of Emerson. It's a long-standing tradition in American poetry to be deeply religious without being sectarian. At the same time, and because of that, maybe is the way I should say this, this is a book which in some ways strikes me as a deeply Christian book. It's a book that also strikes me, and I hope this doesn't strike you as odd, as a very Jewish book because of the opening epigraph, which says, "Open the door of the book." And you take that metaphor quite literally in a number of poems. I mean, it can't be literal, but I mean you play with it as an extended metaphor that you work with and the "people of the book" idea that is playing around here, and also the idea of displacement, exile, loss.

DD: Very much so. I feel a great kinship with that story, with that destiny, with the illusion of Israel, to some degree, and now the reality of it, and the ironies, to some degree, of trying to make a place embody that imaginative place. I find these things very, very beautiful, and certainly, it seems to have always been a part of my thinking. I was also thinking, too, that there is a love . . . well, in every major world religion, there is a mystical aspect, in every one that we know of. Those people are always the freaks. They are the outsiders. They are the Rumis, sort of whirling around some corner in the very unofficial corners of the religion. The same with Kabbalah. But always, it seems, too, that the people in the mainstream are singing the songs, reading the poems, dancing the dances of those outsiders. So even if they are not officially acknowledged, they become really a part of things. And I think, again, sort of sensing the connection, too, with the writers writing about these things, it makes sense. We are the people on the outside, hoping to somehow penetrate from our unofficial position. Because I feel like the force is there, in everyone. But I think you talk about this being a Christian book. Yeah, no doubt those are my symbols in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is what I am most comfortable with, what I grew up with, and they come very, very naturally to me, even though I don't consider myself particularly a Christian poet, I'm not a Christian.

DW: Well that whole notion of elegy and diaspora, they're throughout the book, and I was thinking about that in light of another poem that seems to be a real linchpin in the collection is "Elegy in Two Storms," which seems to be, in almost the way that the title poem speaks for the spiritual longing of the book, that the "Elegy in Two Storms" speaks for that kind of elegiac temperament that kind of also commingles with the spiritual one. So I wonder if you could talk about that poem a little.

DD: Oh, sure. I have to think about that poem for a little bit. This is kind of an old one, and it was certainly one based on, very particularly, the woman I mentioned before. And this was written actually . . . I lived in a beautiful farm in Crozet, Virginia, overlooking the mountains. And there was a goldfinch, and the goldfinch would actually take a dandelion tuft and eat it from my hand. And somehow, it was just after this woman had died that I'm looking at the Blue Ridge, which is really another place that is really my home, the combination of those things seemed so poignant to me that I was able, I felt like, to sort of get her, not as the individual, but as the sort of spiritual representative. It was a hugely important poem . . . also there was weaving this sense of longing with a very real landscape, which, at the time, I was having difficulty doing. And the more supernatural stuff was beginning to come together in a way that seemed more convincing to me and a little bit less self-indulgent, maybe, than some of the other poems that have to do with her.

DW: I recently heard a bunch of young poets talking about how tired they were of the elegiac mode that they saw running through so much contemporary poetry. And they were very adamant in this desire to try to write poems of celebration, poems of joy, poems that try to extol the virtues of daily life. They talked about [Frank] O'Hara specifically, as their guide in this goal. I just found myself shaking my head, partly it's because I think O'Hara is very much a poet of heartbreak rather than a poet of celebration, and also because I kept wondering if there was any substance to that complaint. And I thought there wasn't, but, you know, I guess I just wondered why American poets are so preoccupied with melancholy, with mourning, why that's the part of the Romantic tradition that we seemed to have inherited.

DD: It's something I'm dealing with right now in this new book I'm working with. It's really trying to question the aesthetic upon which many of the poems in this book were based on, even sort of unconsciously. The things we've inherited, which are the persistence, in my view, of a Romantic aesthetic, really going back to Keats and Shelley. I think we adopt a diction, we adopt a tone, we adopt a lot of things that seem to be this is what poetry is. And I've been surprised looking back about how much, since those days, the poetry is about death, very specifically, or even a personal sense of loss. And wondering in the face of people like O'Hara, and I agree with you, he does seem like a poet of heartbreak, but there is celebration there. There is a freedom from that diction, from that aesthetic that I appreciate. And that we see, of course, in Ginsberg and some of those characters. And I've really begun to question, to raise the same question to myself that you've raised and tried to shift on something that really questions something like Stevens' "Death is the Mother of All Beauty," something I think that many of us have sort of just taken on faith.

I'm not convinced, and I'm trying in the new work to sort of go, "Okay, where do we go from here?" This is, to me, the book about the past. I'm looking forward to a book that is more about the present, that is more about what are the restorative aspects after a book of elegy that one can provide. And I'm not convinced. I mean, the book is almost finished and it still seems really elegiac. So I don't know. My sense of it was that there was this notion that this book ends with love as sort of the solution, and the sun being able to make out of the mess of stars some order and something that was outside of us, and not focused inward. But I'm just not convinced that I can do it, so I don't know.

GD: Woody Allen's a pretty funny guy, and he ended up deciding there were only two subjects: love and death. You know, it's inescapable.

DD: Yeah. And the thing is, the more I write about love, the more I write about death. I can't seem to do it, and they're all filled with dark jokes, too.

GD: I almost think, in a certain sense, if the situation is that we can never escape death, in some manner, then the question really becomes, "Okay, how do you deal with making that subject, the subject of death, large enough to encompass humor and graciousness and ridiculousness and absurdity?" You do that in a number of your poems here, I think. I think particularly in the prose poems. There's an entire section of your book that are prose poems, and you adopt, very seriously introduced with an epigraph from Paul Celan, but nevertheless, there's a great deal of humor and whimsy and absurdity in that, which seems, to me, to be a strategy you employ to get away with subject matter that might be seen by some people as really being quite sentimental.

DD: Oh, absolutely. No doubt. And I think that maybe the answer for me, for now, with dealing with this elegiac aesthetic is not having to change it so much as to sort of unhitch some of the baggage of diction, the baggage of imagery that just sort of came along with this package, again, unconsciously, so that the poems can be opened up to the more prosaic, the more hilarious, the stranger. Those prose poems seems to be a place where I was beginning to shake it up a little bit, although I don't feel like, until recently, aspects of those poems have been really melded well with the other aesthetic.

DW: I hear echoes of people who we associate with the prose poem in those poems, people like Tate, a lot of the neosurrealist writers . . .

DD: And symbolists.

DW: But then, it also seems to me that if I could think of anybody whose voice I hear more than anyone else's in the book, it is James Wright's, and Wright, too, was a writer who had to deal with the whole issue of having created, almost encapsulized, the whole Romantic aesthetic of the last 200 years in miniature, with the image. But then he very much worked towards rejecting and refining and changing that aesthetic towards the end of his career, towards a more celebratory poem, I think.

DD: Yes.

DW: And convincingly so.

DD: My earliest memories of being more an adult poet was carrying around The Branch Will Not Break for months through New York City, in my special summer out of Tennessee, and sitting on Riverside Park just weeping. And I memorized most of that book. It was an incredibly important book to me, and still I admire tremendously a lot of those early poems. I never thought of it having influence, but of course it would. I mean, they were some of the first . . . you know, at the time he was still a living poet, one of the first ones I really latched onto and just sort of thought . . . and it is, to me, a true American voice that he's beginning to look for. And I think that that's something, although I certainly didn't understand at the time, it's what I'm working towards now. And I think it's, to some degree, also what Crane is doing: the larger myth-making type poets.

GD: Sometimes I think Americans find their most American voice by allowing themselves to be influenced by, say, South American influences or French influences, but particularly maybe heading over towards the surrealism side of things, or absurdity or something like that. In the poem "Paint," for example, in your book, the way that that poem enacts these two people discussing something that's impossible to discuss, the eternal grievance of the dead against the living, which is that we're living, and how we carry that around with us, and how we have these dialogues with ourselves, representing the dead with ourselves, as we speak for them. So yeah, it's a conversation between oneself and oneself, but not entirely, because you're still struggling to be fair to the other person and maybe even let them accuse you of things. And then in this poem, the thing that takes over that I really like so much is how in the end, they end up erasing each other. And so you seem to take on the idea of the danger of not only writing about the dead, but the danger, the human emotional danger of just thinking about them at all, and carrying them around with you all the time. I really like the combination of humor and sadness. It's a nice balance.

DD: Thanks.

GD: It's done with great energy and humor, and I like the self-referential nature of it, too, throughout, where it's canceling itself out as it's making itself.

DD: Yeah, right.

GD: I really enjoyed that.

DD: These are certainly fun to write, and I began . . . I'm sort of a quill-type person. I have special things, I'm very precious about all that, and at some point I started writing these poems. I had an old Smith Corona typewriter that was like me riding a lawnmower, and I would go and I would make these mistakes, and I would actually write into a typewriter, which was like a sacrilege. And yet, somehow it opened up, for me, a different world, a much less precious way of dealing with the same topics.

DW: You think it's something having to do with the form of the prose poem that allows for those different tonalities, the shifts of diction that free people up in that respect?

DD: It certainly has been the case for me, there's no question. And I think along with the influence of people like Russell Edson or Simic and Tate, the sense of freedom, just the sense of like, "Okay, I can relieve myself of the pressures of thinking about this as being a poem," and like you say, just be able to stretch out, put more conversational things in, which I now feel like I'm comfortable taking . . . I don't have to write a prose poem in order to get that into my poems anymore. And it is surprising. It can't just be the influence of these handful of people, but how many people writing prose poems seem to have that same experience? The poems do take on this quality that is quite different from the other poems. It remains sort of mysterious to me, and I think of that typewriter a lot because there was something about engaging the mechanical world, this sense of something that was a little, not particularly modern, but a little bit more modern than the pad and the pen, and that that somehow shook me out of, again, more of the sort of inherited forms.

GD: You don't always reserve that surrealistic bent, though, for the prose poems. I mean, in a poem like "Uncle Emmet, Wiser Than God," which, that's a funny title. It's just like Emmet is bigger than God, and you better watch out, God. It reminds me one time of meeting a woman who was a Holocaust survivor, and I was having dinner with she and her sister. Both of them were Holocaust survivors. They were Hungarian Jewish women who had been through Dachau and several other camps, and it was the Day of Atonement. And while I was standing in the kitchen while this woman was making dinner and I looked over at her, when the television announcer came on and said, "Today is the Day of Atonement." Jewish announcer. And she threw her head back and she laughed, and she shook her fist at the sky. And you could see the tattoo on her arm. And she said, "Day of Atonement? God should atone to me!" And I thought she had a right to say that. And maybe these people from Friendship, Texas . . .

DD: Maybe so. Maybe so.

GD: That poem has the sense that there were these lovely eccentrics, and this beautiful possibility, all of which was destroyed because God gave up.

DD: Right.

GD: But they didn't.

DD: Right, that's right. I love that thought of these people who didn't have children, this was actually a real couple, and sort of sensing that maybe that's why: because they knew that there was no future. And somehow these people who were aware of their destiny and, in that sense, not allowing them to incur the loss, and, in that way, sort of outsmarting God. That's my sense of it. It was a place, at least in my memory, full of characters.

Part II

GD: You've spent a decade, right, working for Ploughshares?

DD: More. Almost fifteen years.

GD: More than a decade, certainly editing one of the most important literary journals in the United States and therefore playing this very important role in the life of American letters. Are there things you felt like you learned as an editor that helped you with your book and were there things that you experienced as an editor that just got in your way?

DD: I think both. I should point out, because I'm the poetry editor, but because we have a series of guest editors, my influence is more trivial than the title makes it seem. I just try to sort of guide things and help out with choosing the guest editors and passing things on to them. So I don't want to make too much of that position because it's not that grand. But certainly, reading tens of thousands of poems a year has made me very aware that I don't want to be boring. I think a huge percentage of poems that come across my desk, I keep thinking, "Why? Why were these written?" and I can't figure it out. And of course, I could look at a lot of my poems and assume that people would say the same things, and I think over the past few years I've really devoted myself to saying, "At least I'm not going to make that mistake in my poems if I can possibly help it," to try to write poems that are interesting and seem to have some reason to exist beyond the promotion of some career, which is sadly what I often suspect is the case of motivation behind a number of poems.

And it is also, I think, on a more positive side, I have been aware, even if I'm not personally in contact, of a very large community of people writing poems and admiring them, and it's kept me from being bitter in ways that a lot of people who aren't as involved become, seeing themselves as an outsider. Not that I was a real insider, but there is a sense of a larger community of people who I know, and by knowing other editors, I know they’re . . . All the ones I know are nice people, you know. They're not out to reject; they're doing it as a labor of love, whereas I think on the outside of that world oftentimes it can seem otherwise. And so it's been very useful for me just to be a part of things at some level. And I've also felt just, I feel like it's public service, that I want to give something back. It's such a self-indulgent life, I feel, the writing of poems, and even teaching, to some degree. I like the notion of doing something that you hope helps out folks. Of course, as you know as editors, it's probably the least-appreciated thing in the world, but it's still something I feel like I ought to do. So it's been good for me that way, I think, sort of spiritually, just to keep me balanced a little bit.

GD: Is there a kind a poem that you think you've seen altogether too many of?

DD: Yeah. I hate to describe them, because they start looking like my poems. But I'm pretty exhausted by the personal narrative about a relative leaping towards some epiphany. It's not that there are not great ones, I just simply . . . there are so many not-great ones that are just filled with nostalgia and I don't like . . .

GD: Whose reason for existing, I think, is simply the bald fact that"This happened to me. My mother died and, therefore, you should pay attention." It's like, well, yeah. And then?

DD: Yeah. That's it exactly. And missing any irony. And that just baffles me how anyone could be writing a poem these days that didn't have some sense of irony in it. And yet, many don't. So those things . . . and, again, God bless them. I don't want to judge them. But it's just I see so many of those things I get tired of it. As an editor, too, it sometimes can be difficult, if you get hammered by certain types of poems, to still remain open to the good ones that seem to be charting that same territory. It's just easy to dismiss them.

GD: Well, I know I've had some conversations with the very person after whom your prize is named, Larry Levis. I remember talking with him about this that, on the one hand, there's that fact that people so often . . . and as you say, God bless them. Why would you have any negative feeling towards them? It's just their reason for writing is to create a kind of slightly elaborated diary, and it seems like, "Well, okay, that's fine, but is it poetry?" Then, on the other hand, you have these folks who are creating elaborate intellectual enterprises that don't seem to have any connection to life as one actually lives it, either. So at the other end of the spectrum, it's kind of preciousness or esoterica.

DD: Absolutely. Again, it's another thing that baffles me. I think that this is such a . . . it's not fame, obviously, because even somebody really famous in our world is not really famous by world standards, or even by city standards, really. And there's no money. There's really not much prestige. But again, I . . . it's still a beautiful thing that these people are still writing these things that are called poems, that poetry at least draws them, remains something that seems to even the person that might not be a true poet, something that's important enough that they're going to . . . they're not going to call it a journal, they're not going to call it a philosophical essay. They're going to call it a poem. So I think that that’s the positive side. It's amazing. It's amazing how many people are out there writing poems and sending them to magazines.

GD: And not reading any.

DD: Of course.

DW: Well, you know, it brings me to another question. Partly it's because my graduate students often find the process of putting a thesis together, a collection of poems that will eventually be a first book manuscript, to be an agonizing process. Not so much because they have doubts about their poems, but they're confused about how those poems go together. They're confused about how they go about structuring the collections, and like a lot of my students you write in a number of modes. We talked about the absurdist, surrealist poems, the prose poems in the third section, and then those more earnest lyrics that are there in some of the others, and you also find ways to give the collection an unusual degree of structural integrity through, let's say, the God poems, the Heraclitus epigraphs, the Aeneid poems, and I guess I just want you to talk a little bit about how the book was formed, and how it came together from miscellany of poems to a book.

DD: Yes. Like a lot of folks, I'll go through a period of writing a certain type of poem, and I think at that moment I've broken through, and all of a sudden, I'm into this new world. Everything else I've done is obsolete. I'm a new poet, I'm in totally new territory. Then you realize, of course, or your friends will tell you, "This really isn't that different at all." And then I'll go on to the next thing. So I've had a series of those phases, thinking that everything before was obsolete, and then ultimately sort of sensing, "Wait a minute." And I think this happened around the time that I started thinking of the Friendship poems, where I began to sense what was the connection between these things that seemed to be more important than the style, whether they're prose poems or straight lyric or narrative. And once I began to realize that, it gave me a way to begin to manipulate the manuscript.

Now, as far as ordering goes, there was tons of concern . . . I spent a lot of time thinking about if I should mix all the different types of poems up, or how I should do it. And ultimately, I decided to keep the poems in sections and then to use the epigraphs. And some of the poems that have repetitive things just to build bridges between them. So that hopefully there will be some echoes, even from the prose poems to some of the others. And there was a sense, or at least maybe a post-book justification, that the prose poems in particular . . . the same sense of loss, of alienation, only placed in a somewhat more, I think almost contemporary feeling, contemporary setting, and a more contemporary diction. And so once I began to recognize those things, I actually would sometimes go back and weave things into the poems that would sort of try to pick up on some of other poems in the other parts of the collection, to give it some sense of narrative. I knew where the book needed to end. I had no idea where it should begin, really, with the collection. It was, in a sense, persistence. That's all I can say. I wish . . . Now I'm writing a book that seems like a book. I started writing it and it just seems to come as a collection. It did just come out just like a first book, only it was gestating for twenty years, fifteen years. That time, at least, gave me a chance to really see, and to fiddle with them in a way that try to make it . . . create the illusion of something, at least, that was whole.

GD: That's really quite funny that you're saying that, because many of the students, both undergraduate and graduate, with whom I've talked about this book, one of the things they've pondered is how it's so clearly a book that's made to be a book, that were individual poems to be judged with suspicion or negatively because they wouldn't have survived as well on their own outside of the book as they did in the structure of the book. Did you write any poems that were written to fill spots in the book?

DD: Yes. Yes. There were a couple. There's one called "Father" in the prose poem section, and there's one called "A Confederacy" that's in the Friendship section. Both of those poems, I knew that there were things I hadn't addressed in those sections, and even though I wasn't writing in that style anymore, I went back and was able . . . there are a couple of other poems that are like that, but those are the two that stand out for me. Where I did go back, I felt like the sections needed to be beefed up a little bit to seem more like a suite than like an interlude. I like the poem "A Confederacy." I'm not so sure about the other. But certainly there are poems in there that, if I were to choose the best poems, I would take them out for exactly those reasons. I don't think that they stand up as poems on their own, but they work, in a sense, I hope, to give a little bit of flesh to some of, especially in the Friendship section, to give a little bit more flesh to the book.

In my experience with this, it is a lot illusion. It was really a conscious, artistic manipulation of the material in order to create the effect of a book. And the second side of it, which is maybe the more esoteric side of it, is that I discovered that the poems are my poems for a reason. I wrote them honestly, and they're real from my experience. There's nothing in there that was an exercise. It's all just what I did. I think because of that there was, surprisingly, over the course of a lot of changes in my life, a consistency there that is evident. And so it's sort of given me a sense, just in putting this together, the process, a sense of real faith that what I do is mine, for better or for worse.

DW: I want to pick up both on the issue of first books, and also some of the things you were saying about your experience as an editor of Ploughshares, and maybe just comment on this very strange situation of poets trying to publish first books today. I mean, tens of thousands of manuscripts are making the rounds, and the contests themselves have proliferated, but that isn't always necessarily a good thing, I don’t think. And clearly, there are many commendable manuscripts that aren't getting published and substandard books that are.

DD: Yeah.

DW: And well, we know that situation. How do you think the situation of this burgeoning number of first books has affected the quality of American poetry, the state of American poetry? Because it does seem so strange, so puzzling.

DD: I'm not sure how to answer that directly, but something that has really occurred to me as an editor, over the past fifteen years of seeing . . . with the proliferation of MFA programs, there's been a much, much more professional poem coming my way. When I first started editing, I would get these sort of beautiful, gnarly, typed-up things. And I still get them from older generations of poets. But now, everything is perfect. For the most part, everything is just right. The cover letter's right. The poems look right on the page. They're perfectly done. And I felt as if there's, now, such a sense of a career path, that actually being a poet is a career, which is something, only in the wildest fantasies, when I was going through school, did you ever consider. But people really seem to deal with it as they do a job. And therefore, they're producing these books because they . . . maybe they didn’t need to be written except for that reason, perhaps.

So that's my explanation for it, and also for the sameness. And again, what's happened in my experience has been, it used to be that there would be a certain percentage of very good poems that I would get in Ploughshares, and then there would be a second layer, and then a third layer, and then there would be a huge percentage of just really bad stuff. Now, I get almost no bad stuff. It's all really in the middle. I get very little good stuff, too, so it's strange. It's very difficult to sort out my taste and to distinguish between one and another because they are so similar. So anyway, I think that the production of these book, and even these contests, seem to me a response to a need to justify all the MFA programs.

GD: I think the generation of writers who taught me, definitely taught resentfully. They taught and comported themselves with at least a public face of being loyal to American anti-intellectualism. They were very eager for to you know, "I'm not an academic, and I don't live in the academic world. And I don't operate that way. And I'm not like that. And I've refused more degrees than those other guys have accepted." And kind of things like that. And here we are faulting ourselves for doing our job, and we are producing competent writers out of these programs; they're competent. But maybe it shouldn't surprise us that, even with that situation and overall improvement of raising of all the boats, there still are only these few magical people who're running up to the top of the masthead and shouting out, doing something extraordinary that we all think, "Well, I couldn't live without that."

DD: Right. But it was ever thus, I assume. The first book contest, of course, is a disaster for all but a handful of people a year. I don't know what a better system would be. But it's not a good system. I think that the second books, because there are so many first book contests . . . and that’s one of the things that I love about the Levis Prize is you opened a door. I know more people who have published first books, who can't get their second book published, even after having a reputable publisher and getting reasonable reviews or what have you. Most of us are going to write better second books than first books, but it doesn’t matter because the gate has closed. It's a confusing situation. Again, it's one of those things where I feel like it's great that there are all these MFA students, it's great that there's all that. If they only bought books. But on the other hand, I think it has produced a sense of . . . well, now with the creative writing PhD that's popping up everywhere, which seems is only, in my view, a cynical response to the fact that so many institutions require the PhD to get a job, not because it has anything to do with the quality of writing or anything else. It's simply to get through the hoops. Back in the days you’re talking about, a lot of the people who were teaching us didn't have Master's degrees. They would get into these institutions. And still you see it at the upper level institutions, the Harvards; they don't care. But in most of the other jobs around, you have to have the credential, which just sort of saddens me. Although again, who knows, it's not the worst life either.

DW: Could you talk about how you're envisioning the second book? Tell me a little bit about that. I know the cliché always is that the first book is about self-discovery and the second book is about self-acceptance, but it sounds like you've got some very specific plans for how the book is going to develop.

DD: It's almost done. I think I'll be finished with a draft of it next week, I think. Again, it's one of those things. It seems really, really different to me. This is a book [Seven-Star Bird] that represents almost fifteen years of my life, and this new book is something that represents about a year, and is filled with, I think, a sense of freedom. This book is filled with a lot of responsibilities that I didn't really understand, but responsibilities to my teachers, like Donald Davie, who was hugely influential to me. I was pleasing a lot of fathers in this book, whether they were literal or the ambition to be a poet like Keats or whatever. All those things that are sort of wanting to prove something to someone, most of them long dead.

I finished this book, I was like, "What the hell was I doing with that?" I can finally just write my poems, and I think that the last poem, "Seven-Star Bird" in here, was I was beginning to sort of sense that I was pulling away from the other poems. So this book is a lot looser. It's much more contemporary feeling. I mean, I'm wearing this Led Zeppelin shirt because there's just tons of sort of contemporary rock-n-roll allusions, a lot of characters who inhabit the world. But then there's Dantes in it, too. It just feels a lot freer, and I think a lot funnier, and a lot less about me. Very little of it has to do with . . . even my family doesn't seem to be a part of it in quite the same way that here in this book they figure; my sons figure very largely for me. So we'll see. It's crazy. I mean, I think I let the whole insane part of me go wild and, well, I'll read some poems tonight. We'll see what you think. It may be a total disaster, but at least it's fun in ways that this book was not fun, often. It was painful. And the way I'm writing now, again it feels like just the freedom of having this book out has been tremendously exciting for me.

DW: Well, you know, I think that's one of the terrible dangers of this professionalization of writing that you're talking about is that people attain a certain level of competence, and then once you attain that, it's years, decades, before you get the pleasure back of writing.

DD: Yeah.

DW: If the situation is, as it exists today, that the pleasure of writing has to be its principle reward, well you're in big trouble.

DD: Yes, really big trouble. That's right. It's really difficult to have lived in this community, the poetry community, for all those years and not have a book come out. It's punishing. And it's not just me. It's so many people that I know. And it's awful to have that weight on you, when it shouldn't make any difference. But of course, it does. But I'm glad to be free of it. I hope I can find a publisher.  

   Contributor's notes
   Part I 
   Part II  
   Levis Remembered
   Interviews

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