Thanks to poet GC Waldrep for inviting
me to participate in the writing process blog tour. You can read his own
response here.
I’m finishing up my fourth collection
of poetry and hope to submit it my editor this summer. I feel mischievous about
it: it has never-before-seen-in-Dana-Levin-poems qualities like humor! Poems
about my cat! Fruit as a recurring trope! There’s even a Cento about cyborgs
crafted almost entirely from snippets from articles in the New York Times and
Huffington Post. I’m calling the book Banana
Palace. It’s pre-apocalyptic Barnum.
I’m also about to gear up on some essay
assignments: one on Jim Morrison (lead singer for that ur-Late Sixties band, The
Doors), one on dreams, one that examines the idea of the Via Negativa in
post-modern poetries. I think my next big project will be a book of essays on
poetry.
2.
How does my work differ from
others of its genre?
Oh my. What *is* its genre? My work’s
been called confessional, my work’s been called experimental (that one always
flummoxes me, in terms of what we tend to deem “experimental poetry”) (is it
all the white space??)
Regarding Confessionalism: we seem to
have a very reductive idea of it these days, like how my students throw the
term around any time they encounter work that feels emotive, disclosive,
autobiographical. A couple of years ago I wrote a brief intro gloss to Anne
Carson’s great Confessional poem The Glass Essay, a poem (I’m going to quote myself;
sue me) “where
Confessionalism’s essential gift―self-analysis―was given free rein to get
beyond personality (Lady Lazarus! Henry!) and closer to what might be called a
sense of soul.” That transformation from self-centeredness to soul-centeredness
is how I’d like to think the Confessional has transformed in me.
In terms of
being an “experimental” poet: well, aren’t we all?
3.
Why do I write the way I do?
Terms like
“confessional” and “experimental” feel reductive to me; they create an easy,
but false, polarity. I don’t want to claim allegiance to any one mode – I don’t
view modes as beliefs; I view modes as tools. I want to have access to all the
tools in the toolbox. In my last book, Sky
Burial, and in this new manuscript, the poems seem to want to change up
forms all the time: Banana Palace
offers prose poems, long sectioned verse meditations, two-line poems that (I
hope) move with surprise like Haiku. I have a long poem in fourteen short prose
blocks and a long poem in really short, blippy verse sections, with a narrative
through-line like a (very odd) Book of Hours. I like to play around, and I’ve
become, apparently, increasingly, formally restless.
Perhaps
formal restlessness is a solution to the potential monotony of the “project”
book, another term I resist (for myself) and find reductive (see next question
for more on that). One aspect of my work that never changes is the engagement
with a lot of white space and em-dashes as dynamic actors. White space offers a
lot of dramatic potential (what makes us pause, what silences us, in relation
to all this poetry speaking?) as well as relief on the reading eye and
listening ear. Inclusion of pause and silence feels crucial to me.
Paradoxically, I often use the em-dash as a line-ending gesture that propels
the reader into that white space (like pushing you off a cliff) I suppose that
em-dash propulsion into silence and gap makes white space in my poems a
thrumming place---a way-station, rather than destination, even when a poem ends
on such a gesture. My poems don’t offer a lot of rest.
4.
How does your writing process
work?
Something
sparks my interest—in the world, in the self, in the soul―and percolates in
mind, barely conscious, for a very long time. Then I might write some notes
towards it, and then not pursue it in verse for a very long time. I avoid
versification for as long as I can (it’s so hard! It takes so much focus! Ugh!)
But such resistance brings the poem-to-be to a boil, and then I can’t avoid
making art. That moment comes like….an em-dash at the end of a line, throwing
me into the generative/frightening white space―
After
a while―five, ten, poems in to new writing―I may note that the poems seem to be
circling pretty tightly around a constellation of ideas/images. I say
“constellation” rather than “project” because I don’t go into writing new poems
with an over-arching project idea/impulse; I just start to notice how the new
poems are talking to each other, how they individually shine and shine
together, like stars in a constellation. The poems in Banana Palace constellate hunger, appetite, environmental ruin, End
Times, technology, the “real,” the “mutant,” post-apocalyptic survival.
Noticing this does effect revision and may also suggest tropes, poems, to add
to the mix, but I don’t start a manuscript with this in mind. I’m an obsessive
by temper, but also chafe against the rigid; thinking in terms of constellation
allows me to hold the subject(s) of obsession together while allowing them to
speak freely and in whatever tropes and forms they individually want.
---------
Dana Levin is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sky Burial, which was noted for 2011 year-end honors by The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, Coldfront, and Library Journal.
Levin’s work has received numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including, most recently, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry and The Arcadia Project.
A teacher of creative writing and literature for over twenty years, Levin has served as the Russo Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at University of New Mexico (2009-2011) and currently co-chairs the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
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