Saturday, April 15, 2006
Profiled
Diving and Returning:
An Interview with Denise Duhamel
Perhaps she found liberty in obscurity several years ago, as a recent MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence trudging New York’s Lower East Side, but these days, Duhamel suffers no shortage of loyal readers or high praise from her peers.
Widely anthologized, she is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and she just released her twelfth book, Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press 2005), which features free verse and poetry in form and gathers steam from literary as well as non-literary wells; product warning labels, Hong Kong action films, Mobius strips, news reports, and more. Sharply apparent are Duhamel’s fearlessness and innovation in tackling difficult subjects. She does so with her trademark wit and sharp insight. But with your cheeks still burning from her brassy irreverence, you will find her capable of emotional depth and subtlety.
In Two and Two, she is less confessional though Duhamel’s intensely personal poems never succumbed to the ploys that often mark other confessional poets. She has always articulated issues that dominate women’s lives; issues that even in today’s culture of shock and awe, remain sensitive at best, and more often forbidden topics of conversation. In Two and Two, she addresses topics that could be unbearably maudlin in lesser hands – 9-11, Alzheimer’s, incest, and death. But Duhamel continues to manage her unblinking gaze with a grace, imagination, and empathy the finest writers rarely achieve.
Ms. Duhamel currently teaches at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida with her husband, poet Nick Carbo.
You’ve said that you have a “hard hat” mentality regarding working and writing each day. I hear frequently, especially among new writers, that if they aren’t inspired, they don’t see the use in sitting down in front of a page. Can you comment on that experience for you -- "inspiration” versus “showing up”?
I don't believe the Muse is going to show up in any consistent way unless I meet her halfway. Yes, she often stands me up or is late, but I am at her mercy. I think she takes pity on me when she sees me hanging out at my computer with an expectant look on my face.
Do you hang onto lines or images for long if they don't immediately lend themselves to what you're working on?
I have held onto lines that don't quite make it into a poem I'm working on, for whatever reason, at the time. Sometimes they resurface in other poems or I use them as prompts for new poems. Sometimes the lines are ultimately discarded, but they serve as catalysts for new material.
Your most recent collection, Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), features free verse as well as a variety of forms. Does a particular form for what you're working on suggest itself to you before you begin, or does it emerge as you work?
I usually know ahead of time if the poem is going to be in traditional form--I usually have a concept for formal poems that I don't have when I free write to generate material.
In your faculty bio you say: "My teaching philosophy is this: In order to write contemporary poetry and fiction, you must read contemporary poetry and fiction. Budding filmmakers and visual artists are usually quick to name their influences, and I believe writers should be able to do the same.” Do you think this enables a new writer to find her voice, and how?
Yes! There is no way a writer can find her voice in any real way unless she reads her contemporaries. I believe there is such a thing as art brut (untrained visual artists), but I think it's highly unlikely that someone will just write wonderful poems never having read any. Poems are conversations with other poems--if a poet doesn't know any other poems, she's really at a disservice.
I like that - 'poems as conversations with other poems...' Like your own “The Difference between Pepsi and the Pope,” inspired by Lehman's, “The Difference between Pepsi and Coke.”
Well, there are many poems that directly speak to other poems. Kenneth Koch writes poems from William Carlos Williams. Harry Mathews and Harryette Mullen both riff on Shakespeare. Even when the conversation isn't direct, older poems infuse newer poems.
You began with and spent most of your life writing fiction. At what point did you begin to focus most on poetry?
I was always writing little poems or vignettes, but I didn't know what to call them since I had no contemporary models. My first poetry book was The Jane Poems, by Kathleen Spivack, and when I read the poems, I thought, "Wait, I am doing this too!" Of course, I was doing it very badly, but I did have the impulse to write poems. I just didn't know they were poems since I'd assumed all poems rhymed.
How for you is the process different?
Fiction requires a much longer commitment. It has been said that fiction is like a marriage where poetry is like an affair. You work long and hard at fiction to make it work, but poetry writing is brief and ecstatic.
Do you spend much time today on fiction?
I don't spend very much time these days writing fiction, though I hope at some point to go back to it.
You are a well-known alumnus of Nuyorican Café in New York. How did the performance aspect of that venue and its poet/performers affect your then-developing style?
I have such fond memories of the Nuyorican Poets Café. I was a "regular" in the late 80s and early 90s. I went to Sarah Lawrence College for my MFA (1987), but the Café was like a crazy uncle who taught me the ropes. I really learned how to read my poetry aloud there and to appreciate many different kinds of poetry. By participating in open mics and slams, I really learned how to edit my work. I may have grumbled in workshop if a fellow or sister student suggested taking out a stanza, but if people seemed to lose interest or talk when I was reading a certain part, I knew I'd lost them and that the poem was going nowhere. The Café was like a living workshop.
You sent Kinky to 54 publishers before finding publication. Now it is your best selling book. How did you sustain hope and motivation during that period?
I just kept writing. I had a friend who was a novelist and she said that whenever she started sending out a book she started to write the next one so she would be busy with that instead of waiting for word on the finished one. It proved to be very good advice.
You have said that you believe that a writer should keep cover letters spare, lest she sound pretentious and ridiculous. Do you have other advice for young writers?
Well, never ever explain your poems, "My poems are about blah blah blah." Let the poems speak for themselves. This seems obvious, but many writers don't read the literary magazines they are submitting. You'll really up your chances of publication if you subscribe, or at least buy, a sample issue of the magazine in which you are trying to be published. I know many poets are poor, struggling, and so on, but in the long run it's actually cheaper to buy magazines and target them rather than spend money on postage if the poems are just going to come back to you because they aren't a good fit or the editors aren't reading during the period when you send.
How would you rate publishing opportunities for poets working in academia compared to those working independently of an academic community?
I think they are the same, more or less. You just send your work out and hope for the best. Academics may have an advantage over some other kind of workers in that many have summers off which give them more time to write.
Do you believe that structured workshops -- undergrad workshops and MFA programs, for example -- provide advantages to writers?
I believe there are many paths to becoming a poet! Each poet must choose for herself.
How important do you think it is for an emerging writer to live in a city with an especially vibrant literary community?
I think it depends on each writer's temperament. I lived in Boston, then New York through my twenties and thirties, and I really learned a lot from other young writers. I loved going to readings and being involved in little magazines and going to coffee shops and talking poetry into the wee hours of the morning. But not every poet needs this - and now with the Web, I think it's easier for poets to stay in touch and email poems to each other.
There is surprisingly a lot going on in Miami's literary scene [Duhamel’s home]. We have reading series through FIU, UM, and the community colleges, as well as an international book fair every November.
Which poets have been most influential to you? Which feminists have been most influential to you?
Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Ai, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath.
You’ve said that women must wear “facades of politeness and false behaviors just to survive.” How do you think this affects women who write and how can they avoid this pretense in their work?
I think those pretenses are stripped away when women write since they can tell it like it is! There is no one there to stop them but themselves. If women can write without censoring, they come up with amazing insights.
You appear to "tell it like it is" easily, yet that can be scary for some. Such constraints can be tenacious, and for women especially, deeply ingrained. What do you recommend to writers to avoid "stopping themselves"?
The minute a voice comes into your head saying, "What if my mother/father/priest/ (or substitute any other authority figure) reads this?" tell this voice not to worry just yet. Tell that voice you have to finish the poem at the moment and you'll worry about publishing it later.
In the acknowledgments section of Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), you thank your parents for allowing you to tell their story in the poem, “The Accident,” but you have admitted that writing about it at all “felt invasive.” For you, can using very personal experiences for material cross the line and become too intimate?
This is a great question and one that I and many writers I know struggle with constantly. For me, it's not a matter of being too intimate. I'm not really fearful of that. What makes me uncomfortable is being too exploitive. It's a matter of balance - how to write about something horrific without doing so just for shock effect. In the case of "The Accident," I wasn't sure it was my story to tell. I wasn't on the escalator with my parents, and the first time I saw them after the accident, they were already in the hospital. I knew I had to write the poem and other poems about the incident, but I wasn't sure if I should publish them. I could only do so with my parents' blessing.
Gregory Orr suggests that the “ordering power” of obsessive forms invites the poet to introduce a proportionate amount of thematic disorder. In “The Accident,” did the form of a canzone allow you to cognize this difficult event where free verse might have been too much?
Yes! Definitely. The canzone gave shape to what seemed like the most random chaotic event I could imagine. Since writing that canzone, I was able to write prose poems about the same subject.
You’ve said that you are drawn to Sexton and Plath for their willingness to go to great depths and darkness in their poetry, an act you say can be important for women writers. What in your opinion are the price and reward of such a tendency?
The rewards are immeasurable--people are still reading Sexton and Plath because of their bravery in going into the depths. There is very little price to be paid--going to the darkness and depths is very freeing. And the rewards are amazing. You've gone underwater and come back up, shooting water out of the snorkel.
How do you reconcile your belief that women visiting taboos in their writing is "freeing" with Sexton's and Plath's decisions to end their lives? I read in another interview with you that you admire that Sexton, Plath, and Olds were successful in "writing what hasn't been written about, or that's been alluded to, and just saying it, which is harder than it looks … It takes a lot to build up the courage, or to even know what you want to say…"
That's a great question. First of all, there is just more help in terms of medication, awareness of 12-step programs, and advances in therapy available for poets writing today. I compare my grad students with myself and the students I went to school with and my students just seem so much more aware. That is not to say that poets (and people in general) don't slip through the cracks, but I think there is more help available these days for people suffering from addiction and mental illness. Also, there are more women poets writing and publishing now--there doesn't have to be "just one" woman who will make it. In that way, the climate is a bit more supportive. Women are able to help each other.
You have said: "going to the depths is very similar to being in a trance, to living in one's own personal nightmares or fairy tales. Certain rules don't apply in such dream-scape: inhibitions loosen, language and syntax break down. " This suggests to me that you believe that women somehow have to go outside society - that is, reevaluate and possibly refuse traditional roles of femininity - to find their most authentic voice. Is that accurate?
Yes! I agree. Or those who choose to stay in traditional roles must be hyper-aware of those roles and subvert them in some way.
Speaking of "writing what hasn't been written about," you seem fearless in taking risks with your work. You introduce fresh perspectives with each collection while maintaining your unique voice. How do you remain so prolific while not repeating yourself or becoming a caricature of yourself?
Well, thank you! I realized when I put together my selected poems that even though I had written a lot, I had very few themes--love, abandonment, body image come to mind, off hand. I'd just kept plugging away at these themes, but I constantly used different vehicles--the persona poem, the revisionist fairy tales, the Barbie poems, to get at these themes from different angles.
You have said: "…the urgency with which a poem is delivered - that nebulous something that says to a reader, 'please, this important,' - is crucial." Can you talk a bit about that elusive but imperative element of good poetry? Lorca said that all meaningful creativity possesses "duende," which literally is an Andalusian trickster figure, but Lorca used it to denote creative inspiration in the presence of death; a sort of possession by creative spirit.
It's hard to explain, that tingling in the palms, that loss of time, that being transported to another place, but I believe when a writer is writing well, her voice will be full of passion. Writers can arrive at poems through hard work, through tinkering and recasting, but sometimes a poem comes through like magic-the magic occurs because the writer has done the groundwork, shown up, waited and believed the magic would eventually come.
In "Carbo Frescoes," you poke fun and quote one of your past reviews. How do you deal with criticism? Does it affect how you write?
I am not so delicate that I can't read my reviews. In fact, I am grateful for any reviews - even the bad ones - because it's so hard to get poetry reviewed at all. But I have to say certain reviews really sting. When reviewers are trying to be clever at the expense of the writers they are reviewing, it's painful. What can I say?
I try not to let the good reviews go to my head or the bad reviews humiliate me too much. The reviews really don't affect how I write future poems-though sometimes when a wise reviewer axes a poem I do wish I could go back and change it.
You have said that your favorite poem is Jayne Cortez' extremely graphic and seething poem, "Rape," in which two women avenge the crimes by murdering their rapists. This initially surprised me, because your own work avoids graphic depictions of violence and is so humorous. But then I learned that you feel your own work is a way of coping with rage. Certainly humor does not preclude rage, not by a long shot. Can you speak about your own experience coping with anger and rage?
Many stand-up comics are intensely angry - and I suppose I feel more comfortable in the areas of comedy rather than the invective. Humor, for me, is a way to get people to listen. I find that most people/readers feel attacked when poets are raging away. I don't feel that way - and I think Jayne Cortez's poem "Rape" is stunning in every way. But I guess my own style developed through humor and a sideways venting rather than direct confrontation.
What pisses you off?
Dishonesty, violence, war, justification of war, hatred, ignorance, cruelty, sexism, racism, classism, all the "isms," snide behavior, arrogance...
Recently published by Duhamel: Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, January 2006) Edited with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad
Diving and Returning:
An Interview with Denise Duhamel
Interview by Cesca Janece Waterfield
- Editor's Note: Before her acceptance into the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and a subsequent move to Richmond, Cesca found time to track down and interview Denise Duhamel, who visited Norfolk briefly last spring. Despite long-distance moves, lost files and my own crap, I finally found the proper time and place to publish this fine interview. Hope you enjoy it. - DM -"going to the depths is very similar to being in a trance, to living in one's own personal nightmares or fairy tales. Certain rules don't apply in such dream-scape: inhibitions loosen, language and syntax break down."Denise Duhamel goes to uncharted places to explore the mechanisms and course of pop culture, gender politics, and social taboo. While she finds an “inherent sadness” in poetry’s limited audience, ultimately she celebrates what she sees as the great freedom of creating something that isn’t subject to the schemes and vicissitudes of the marketplace. One of poetry’s joys, she says half joking, is that “no one wants it, so you can write whatever you want.”--dd
Perhaps she found liberty in obscurity several years ago, as a recent MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence trudging New York’s Lower East Side, but these days, Duhamel suffers no shortage of loyal readers or high praise from her peers.
Widely anthologized, she is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and she just released her twelfth book, Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press 2005), which features free verse and poetry in form and gathers steam from literary as well as non-literary wells; product warning labels, Hong Kong action films, Mobius strips, news reports, and more. Sharply apparent are Duhamel’s fearlessness and innovation in tackling difficult subjects. She does so with her trademark wit and sharp insight. But with your cheeks still burning from her brassy irreverence, you will find her capable of emotional depth and subtlety.
In Two and Two, she is less confessional though Duhamel’s intensely personal poems never succumbed to the ploys that often mark other confessional poets. She has always articulated issues that dominate women’s lives; issues that even in today’s culture of shock and awe, remain sensitive at best, and more often forbidden topics of conversation. In Two and Two, she addresses topics that could be unbearably maudlin in lesser hands – 9-11, Alzheimer’s, incest, and death. But Duhamel continues to manage her unblinking gaze with a grace, imagination, and empathy the finest writers rarely achieve.
Ms. Duhamel currently teaches at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida with her husband, poet Nick Carbo.
You’ve said that you have a “hard hat” mentality regarding working and writing each day. I hear frequently, especially among new writers, that if they aren’t inspired, they don’t see the use in sitting down in front of a page. Can you comment on that experience for you -- "inspiration” versus “showing up”?
I don't believe the Muse is going to show up in any consistent way unless I meet her halfway. Yes, she often stands me up or is late, but I am at her mercy. I think she takes pity on me when she sees me hanging out at my computer with an expectant look on my face.
Do you hang onto lines or images for long if they don't immediately lend themselves to what you're working on?
I have held onto lines that don't quite make it into a poem I'm working on, for whatever reason, at the time. Sometimes they resurface in other poems or I use them as prompts for new poems. Sometimes the lines are ultimately discarded, but they serve as catalysts for new material.
Your most recent collection, Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), features free verse as well as a variety of forms. Does a particular form for what you're working on suggest itself to you before you begin, or does it emerge as you work?
I usually know ahead of time if the poem is going to be in traditional form--I usually have a concept for formal poems that I don't have when I free write to generate material.
In your faculty bio you say: "My teaching philosophy is this: In order to write contemporary poetry and fiction, you must read contemporary poetry and fiction. Budding filmmakers and visual artists are usually quick to name their influences, and I believe writers should be able to do the same.” Do you think this enables a new writer to find her voice, and how?
Yes! There is no way a writer can find her voice in any real way unless she reads her contemporaries. I believe there is such a thing as art brut (untrained visual artists), but I think it's highly unlikely that someone will just write wonderful poems never having read any. Poems are conversations with other poems--if a poet doesn't know any other poems, she's really at a disservice.
I like that - 'poems as conversations with other poems...' Like your own “The Difference between Pepsi and the Pope,” inspired by Lehman's, “The Difference between Pepsi and Coke.”
Well, there are many poems that directly speak to other poems. Kenneth Koch writes poems from William Carlos Williams. Harry Mathews and Harryette Mullen both riff on Shakespeare. Even when the conversation isn't direct, older poems infuse newer poems.
You began with and spent most of your life writing fiction. At what point did you begin to focus most on poetry?
I was always writing little poems or vignettes, but I didn't know what to call them since I had no contemporary models. My first poetry book was The Jane Poems, by Kathleen Spivack, and when I read the poems, I thought, "Wait, I am doing this too!" Of course, I was doing it very badly, but I did have the impulse to write poems. I just didn't know they were poems since I'd assumed all poems rhymed.
How for you is the process different?
Fiction requires a much longer commitment. It has been said that fiction is like a marriage where poetry is like an affair. You work long and hard at fiction to make it work, but poetry writing is brief and ecstatic.
Do you spend much time today on fiction?
I don't spend very much time these days writing fiction, though I hope at some point to go back to it.
You are a well-known alumnus of Nuyorican Café in New York. How did the performance aspect of that venue and its poet/performers affect your then-developing style?
I have such fond memories of the Nuyorican Poets Café. I was a "regular" in the late 80s and early 90s. I went to Sarah Lawrence College for my MFA (1987), but the Café was like a crazy uncle who taught me the ropes. I really learned how to read my poetry aloud there and to appreciate many different kinds of poetry. By participating in open mics and slams, I really learned how to edit my work. I may have grumbled in workshop if a fellow or sister student suggested taking out a stanza, but if people seemed to lose interest or talk when I was reading a certain part, I knew I'd lost them and that the poem was going nowhere. The Café was like a living workshop.
You sent Kinky to 54 publishers before finding publication. Now it is your best selling book. How did you sustain hope and motivation during that period?
I just kept writing. I had a friend who was a novelist and she said that whenever she started sending out a book she started to write the next one so she would be busy with that instead of waiting for word on the finished one. It proved to be very good advice.
You have said that you believe that a writer should keep cover letters spare, lest she sound pretentious and ridiculous. Do you have other advice for young writers?
Well, never ever explain your poems, "My poems are about blah blah blah." Let the poems speak for themselves. This seems obvious, but many writers don't read the literary magazines they are submitting. You'll really up your chances of publication if you subscribe, or at least buy, a sample issue of the magazine in which you are trying to be published. I know many poets are poor, struggling, and so on, but in the long run it's actually cheaper to buy magazines and target them rather than spend money on postage if the poems are just going to come back to you because they aren't a good fit or the editors aren't reading during the period when you send.
How would you rate publishing opportunities for poets working in academia compared to those working independently of an academic community?
I think they are the same, more or less. You just send your work out and hope for the best. Academics may have an advantage over some other kind of workers in that many have summers off which give them more time to write.
Do you believe that structured workshops -- undergrad workshops and MFA programs, for example -- provide advantages to writers?
I believe there are many paths to becoming a poet! Each poet must choose for herself.
How important do you think it is for an emerging writer to live in a city with an especially vibrant literary community?
I think it depends on each writer's temperament. I lived in Boston, then New York through my twenties and thirties, and I really learned a lot from other young writers. I loved going to readings and being involved in little magazines and going to coffee shops and talking poetry into the wee hours of the morning. But not every poet needs this - and now with the Web, I think it's easier for poets to stay in touch and email poems to each other.
There is surprisingly a lot going on in Miami's literary scene [Duhamel’s home]. We have reading series through FIU, UM, and the community colleges, as well as an international book fair every November.
Which poets have been most influential to you? Which feminists have been most influential to you?
Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Ai, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath.
You’ve said that women must wear “facades of politeness and false behaviors just to survive.” How do you think this affects women who write and how can they avoid this pretense in their work?
I think those pretenses are stripped away when women write since they can tell it like it is! There is no one there to stop them but themselves. If women can write without censoring, they come up with amazing insights.
You appear to "tell it like it is" easily, yet that can be scary for some. Such constraints can be tenacious, and for women especially, deeply ingrained. What do you recommend to writers to avoid "stopping themselves"?
The minute a voice comes into your head saying, "What if my mother/father/priest/ (or substitute any other authority figure) reads this?" tell this voice not to worry just yet. Tell that voice you have to finish the poem at the moment and you'll worry about publishing it later.
In the acknowledgments section of Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), you thank your parents for allowing you to tell their story in the poem, “The Accident,” but you have admitted that writing about it at all “felt invasive.” For you, can using very personal experiences for material cross the line and become too intimate?
This is a great question and one that I and many writers I know struggle with constantly. For me, it's not a matter of being too intimate. I'm not really fearful of that. What makes me uncomfortable is being too exploitive. It's a matter of balance - how to write about something horrific without doing so just for shock effect. In the case of "The Accident," I wasn't sure it was my story to tell. I wasn't on the escalator with my parents, and the first time I saw them after the accident, they were already in the hospital. I knew I had to write the poem and other poems about the incident, but I wasn't sure if I should publish them. I could only do so with my parents' blessing.
Gregory Orr suggests that the “ordering power” of obsessive forms invites the poet to introduce a proportionate amount of thematic disorder. In “The Accident,” did the form of a canzone allow you to cognize this difficult event where free verse might have been too much?
Yes! Definitely. The canzone gave shape to what seemed like the most random chaotic event I could imagine. Since writing that canzone, I was able to write prose poems about the same subject.
You’ve said that you are drawn to Sexton and Plath for their willingness to go to great depths and darkness in their poetry, an act you say can be important for women writers. What in your opinion are the price and reward of such a tendency?
The rewards are immeasurable--people are still reading Sexton and Plath because of their bravery in going into the depths. There is very little price to be paid--going to the darkness and depths is very freeing. And the rewards are amazing. You've gone underwater and come back up, shooting water out of the snorkel.
How do you reconcile your belief that women visiting taboos in their writing is "freeing" with Sexton's and Plath's decisions to end their lives? I read in another interview with you that you admire that Sexton, Plath, and Olds were successful in "writing what hasn't been written about, or that's been alluded to, and just saying it, which is harder than it looks … It takes a lot to build up the courage, or to even know what you want to say…"
That's a great question. First of all, there is just more help in terms of medication, awareness of 12-step programs, and advances in therapy available for poets writing today. I compare my grad students with myself and the students I went to school with and my students just seem so much more aware. That is not to say that poets (and people in general) don't slip through the cracks, but I think there is more help available these days for people suffering from addiction and mental illness. Also, there are more women poets writing and publishing now--there doesn't have to be "just one" woman who will make it. In that way, the climate is a bit more supportive. Women are able to help each other.
You have said: "going to the depths is very similar to being in a trance, to living in one's own personal nightmares or fairy tales. Certain rules don't apply in such dream-scape: inhibitions loosen, language and syntax break down. " This suggests to me that you believe that women somehow have to go outside society - that is, reevaluate and possibly refuse traditional roles of femininity - to find their most authentic voice. Is that accurate?
Yes! I agree. Or those who choose to stay in traditional roles must be hyper-aware of those roles and subvert them in some way.
Speaking of "writing what hasn't been written about," you seem fearless in taking risks with your work. You introduce fresh perspectives with each collection while maintaining your unique voice. How do you remain so prolific while not repeating yourself or becoming a caricature of yourself?
Well, thank you! I realized when I put together my selected poems that even though I had written a lot, I had very few themes--love, abandonment, body image come to mind, off hand. I'd just kept plugging away at these themes, but I constantly used different vehicles--the persona poem, the revisionist fairy tales, the Barbie poems, to get at these themes from different angles.
You have said: "…the urgency with which a poem is delivered - that nebulous something that says to a reader, 'please, this important,' - is crucial." Can you talk a bit about that elusive but imperative element of good poetry? Lorca said that all meaningful creativity possesses "duende," which literally is an Andalusian trickster figure, but Lorca used it to denote creative inspiration in the presence of death; a sort of possession by creative spirit.
It's hard to explain, that tingling in the palms, that loss of time, that being transported to another place, but I believe when a writer is writing well, her voice will be full of passion. Writers can arrive at poems through hard work, through tinkering and recasting, but sometimes a poem comes through like magic-the magic occurs because the writer has done the groundwork, shown up, waited and believed the magic would eventually come.
In "Carbo Frescoes," you poke fun and quote one of your past reviews. How do you deal with criticism? Does it affect how you write?
I am not so delicate that I can't read my reviews. In fact, I am grateful for any reviews - even the bad ones - because it's so hard to get poetry reviewed at all. But I have to say certain reviews really sting. When reviewers are trying to be clever at the expense of the writers they are reviewing, it's painful. What can I say?
I try not to let the good reviews go to my head or the bad reviews humiliate me too much. The reviews really don't affect how I write future poems-though sometimes when a wise reviewer axes a poem I do wish I could go back and change it.
You have said that your favorite poem is Jayne Cortez' extremely graphic and seething poem, "Rape," in which two women avenge the crimes by murdering their rapists. This initially surprised me, because your own work avoids graphic depictions of violence and is so humorous. But then I learned that you feel your own work is a way of coping with rage. Certainly humor does not preclude rage, not by a long shot. Can you speak about your own experience coping with anger and rage?
Many stand-up comics are intensely angry - and I suppose I feel more comfortable in the areas of comedy rather than the invective. Humor, for me, is a way to get people to listen. I find that most people/readers feel attacked when poets are raging away. I don't feel that way - and I think Jayne Cortez's poem "Rape" is stunning in every way. But I guess my own style developed through humor and a sideways venting rather than direct confrontation.
What pisses you off?
Dishonesty, violence, war, justification of war, hatred, ignorance, cruelty, sexism, racism, classism, all the "isms," snide behavior, arrogance...
Recently published by Duhamel: Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, January 2006) Edited with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad
