Re-Voyages in English:

discussing Dara Wier’s «Selected Poems»

I spoke with Dara Wier at her home near Amherst, Massachusetts in March 2008 and continued the conversation with her via e-mail after Selected Poems was published.

CK: You have nine individual collections written over the last 32 years and it came time for you to put together a selected works. I get the impression it was frustrating for you at first to think about putting this volume together. Can you talk about the process?

DW: This is a terrible thing to confess but the more I’ve thought about a selected poems, the fewer ideas I’ve had about it. Ideas drift away. When I first started doing this work, I was excited about making choices. When I first did a pass through all the previous books, I was finding when I was standing by the Xerox machine that it was fairly exciting to be freeing a poem from a book, say oh, you no longer belong to this book, you are free.

CK: From the looks of the finished book, you tended toward your later work.

DW: I didn’t want a selected to be a repository of styles and interests or subjects. I didn’t want it to be a history. That made many choices easier. I don’t need a scrapbook.

CK: What sorts of ideas are your friends having about your poems?

DW: People aren’t being that specific. More yes, no, maybe. A taciturn bunch of people. They don’t really explain themselves. And I love them for this.

CK: You mentioned that when you were trying to see how the poems could fit together and thought the more you saw them fit together the more you had an idea. What were your early ideas of themes?

DW: I didn’t have any I pursued. One I might have shyly identified is love poetry. That could be my secret way of doing things. I don’t know. Maybe it is (laughs)! Another time I thought I could go back and forth from material, worldly, visceral, tactile, sensory language to abstract language because that’s another thing poems do, all poems, not mine particularly.

CK: What realizations about style have you come to over the years?

DW: In my first book, I had many fears about how to write and what to do, although I also had fearlessness in terms of passion about what I was doing. There comes a mix of caution and incaution.

And it’s funny because I’d studied Spanish and Latin and I loved the Latin word building that you did and I thought I wasn’t supposed to use those words, they were far away words then.

I never thought I shouldn’t use abstract, Latinate words, but people were telling me not to, so often. That was wrong of people. It wasn’t useful. I never tried to figure out why people did that. I don’t know why people were so against the Latinate word and so in favor of the Anglo-Saxon word. Why was this one word apparently a better word than that word? I hated that notion. I didn’t like the then all-too-pervasive alarm: Show, don’t tell. How stupid that really is.

CK: Why were restricting yourself formally at that time?

DW: I was talking to somebody yesterday about writing in conventional forms. And we were talking about how so many people have lately done as a project — a sonnet (smacks hand on table after each form), a villanelle, a sestina, a this, a that. And to me that’s not that useful because I feel like you’d have to write — I didn’t get exciting ideas about sonnets until I’d written about thirty or forty of them. I imagine you could luck into ideas about a particular form. But I don’t.

If the form has been around forever, you have to have absorbed something about what reasoning goes on within any form’s logic.

You might understand why repetition has an effect whether it’s in a villanelle or something that you make up. So I did all that stanza work and line attention, and so on; I had to.

CK: And the next book?

DW: So then the next book was all couplets, pretty much. And couplets felt right because this book, Blue for the Plough, was probably the most painfully volatile book. I wrote that book in the middle of a terrible romantic break-up, worrying about my kids, wondering about how broken life could be. I was emotionally fraught and torn up, so I wrote in couplets because they looked very calm.

Couplets look so reasonable. And then you can do all kinds of unreasonable things in them. It’s like trying not to look insane when you walk out of your house. I kind of got addicted to couplets.

Eventually I knew that I should stop writing in couplets (that was a sad day) so I did away with stanza breaks completely and wrote longer books for a while.

I can remember telling Jim (James Tate) one day, “Look at all these books that aren’t very long, we poets are sheep!” I meant, look how it really is true that we look at a bookshelf and see rows and rows of so-called slender books of poetry. We need to write bigger books.

They change. Of course Reverse Rapture wasn’t shy about being long.

CK: How did you come up with the form you used in that Reverse Rapture of phrases in quotation marks and poems nine stanzas long with nine lines per stanza?

DW: If you look at a couple of poems in Remnants of Hannah, some of which I wrote before I wrote Reverse Rapture, about half were written before and half after. A few use a parenthetical timing device but not as formally or carefully. One day when I was working I thought I could use only parenthesis to time phrases and words and sentences and sense and do it in such a way so that the parentheses become a second and different kind of line breaking so one thought can go straight into another. It also allowed various moods and voices to react to one another, at one time, immediately, almost on top of one another. Why did I pick nine lines and stanzas? Nine is a nice good number. Nine looks better than ten. Odd numbers are really appealing. But I must be some kind of cranky numerologist because if nine times nine makes eighty-one, eight and one makes nine! And I love novenas! So I decided nine settled it.

CK: What did that form allow you to do that you couldn’t do in or with other poems?

DW: This length was going to keep me going, the length made for an exciting thing to go back to everyday.

As it turned out, everyday I didn’t know exactly where I’d start. I might have a title or a few leftover words from the day before. But at least I knew that every day I would be writing 81 lines. I knew I was going to start around one or two o’clock and I wouldn’t quit until 81 lines were done. As I went on, I tried to vary the sound, so, for instance, in one poem every word is separated to create a staccato effect. There are some pieces in which I understand that a conversation is starting. Some in which lists of associations are dominant. Some in which a dialogue or play happens. I knew I had to vary what I’d write because one would want to do this, vary sound, sense and particulars, — to make what I was doing readable — and thinkable. I had to vary what I was doing so I could think through form, words, sounds, characters (yes, at some point there were characters, people, voices, points of view) — or the poems to have the beauty of some kind of illusion of symmetry and continuity.

CK: Would it be fair to say that book was political?

DW: I think definitely.

CK: Can you talk about whether you ever intended to write political poetry?

DW: I think so. When I first early on was writing, I always thought poetry was a protest against boredom, mortality, death. Poetry gives us a chance to live where there isn’t (a life), sometimes, or at least doesn’t seem to be one. I thought that since I first fell in love with poetry.

I might not have called it explicitly political. But if your interest is in oppositions or conflicts of various kinds, you’ll end up writing about what we call politics. Whether politics are a family-oriented kind of politics, or a community-based version, or politics of a nation or world, the interest you have in poetry besides issues of psychology etc. is in language. So in Reverse Rapture, I think there are evident examples of me worrying about how language is being used. The book was written from right around the beginning of 2002, right after the Iraq war is starting. After Afghanistan has already been invaded. Talk of war is everywhere around us.

One might be concerned about one aspect of this, like oil, and why oil is paramount and another voice might come in, a voice more adamantly furious, being concerned about young men and women dying, and in the mix of these concerns, there is our complicity, our endlessly awful complicity.

Because, say, when you’re driving down the highway and you see all those cars that say Rapture on them, you know those bumper stickers, with all kinds of stuff about religious ideas on them. I thought it’d be good and sensible if we could take everyone back from the lame idea of Rapture. Let’s imagine everyone coming back to life. Why is the ultimate wonderful thing leaving this place instead of being here?

CK: It seems your poems have many registers beyond their literal subjects.

DW: Imagination is something that you’re supposedly able to own yourself. It’s your imagination. If anybody starts telling you what you should be imagining or what would be appropriate or good or just to imagine, or necessary or required to imagine, you better be suspicious of that.

CK: When you were first started writing who really influenced you?

DW: At first, it was Shakespeare, John Donne, and people in a classic English lit textbook. I read my father’s textbook when he was in college. Whatever the adults around were doing, you tend to have a certain amount of curiosity about that. I loved Shakespeare’s everything. I wanted to write like that. I was 7, 8, 9; I was a kid.

Then I read a lot of typical people you read. I went to Catholic school. I memorized; I was not very good at that. I didn’t like to be told to do that. And I loved children’s rhymed work. Then I probably wanted to get more conscious about technique. The people I probably was influenced by were fiction writers. I was crazy about Poe because his imagination was so great. And the stories were always about how badly we can think and about how we can think things that take us down the wrong trail. It was kind of great to understand that you can revise your thinking.

I remember when I first read his story called “The Imp of the Perverse” I thought “Oh! That’s what that is about.” You know, a sudden understanding that human nature is like that. People do this. And he was so extreme. And then somebody gave me Willa Cather’s short stories when I was in 7th grade and I had never read anything like it before. I was so smitten by her. I was transformed, so that made me become a more adventurous reader. But I was given books by teachers who knew I loved to read. And so at that time I’m sure there was Lawrence Ferlinghetti and e. e. cummings, and Michael Faraday. One thing led to another. Nothing too strange.

CK: Are there things that still influence you?

DW: I don’t think my poems sounds like anyone else’s particularly. And that’s not necessarily a compliment. That just means maybe I’m awkward. But Hart Crane is someone I fell in love with head over heels when I first encountered him. But reading him made me interested in that era. So I read all the people you’re supposed to — WCW, I love all of Stevens even more because he was maybe more flamboyant.

I didn’t read Elizabeth Bishop until later. I loved her. I got to see her read once: That was pretty lucky and exciting. She was shy and quiet but really great. I can’t believe that happened and I was lucky enough to be there, to hear her.

CK: Who else?

Merwin was the first living poet I ever saw read. I was pretty excited. A living poet is coming to my town! Amazing! He had just published The Lice. I remember being in a sandwich shop near where he was going to read. And he came in! I was so excited. And he sat right behind me so I could hear him and his hosts talking. It was great. And then the reading was in a big auditorium with the audience in the dark and light on the stage like it should always be.

It’s so interesting that for poetry readings people are willing for the circumstances to be crappy! Sound systems are lousy lots of times. The lighting is ridiculous. What’s wrong with us? I don’t think we need to go theatrical. But why can’t it just be good? Why do you have to have lights glaring in your eyes while you’re watching or listening? I’ve been amazed by this.

CK: Do you have another art that you do that takes you away from poetry?

DW: No all the rest of it’s vicarious. Movies, paintings. I’ve never tried to make things myself. Maybe slightly playful presents for people. But that’s pretty rare. I’m slightly envious of people that have something like that to do. I know someone who sketches. She’s not great at it, but she gets pleasure out of it and I guess you get better if you keep doing it.

CK: Some poets teach, some don’t. Talk about your teaching experiences and what teaching and your students have given to you and your writing over the years.

DW: Having the privilege of working with so many poets who believe and dare and have the courage to do what they do… that’s good. I’ve pretty much always taught poetry workshops or form and theory seminars or something I can make up with poets and their endlessly wide interests in mind, all of this has been for me seamlessly part of what I read and why I read and am so grateful to be the beneficiary of what other writers have done, over the years and now.

My first teaching was in graduate school, expository writing, composition, and undergraduate writing workshops. Then I started teaching graduate workshops at Hollins Unversity in Virginia, and American Literature surveys, big lecture classes, all with the help of R.H.W. Dillard who has been Hollins’ guiding light for a long time.

He challenged me to be open-minded about what I was teaching, so that for instance if I wanted to include Jorge Luis Borges in an American Literature survey, he’d say, all right, that’s fine, do that. I think Hollins is where I read and thought about and got to know American writers in a deeper way than before, if only because if one’s going to present a coherent lecture about how Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson and Flannery O’Connor intersect, you have to do some homework, thinking, writing and making sense of your speculations.

At Hollins I learned how to teach a variety of texts in combination, so, this was in 1976 or so, I’d teach a seminar including Stein, and Jack Spicer, and Sylvia Plath, and Frank O’Hara, and Evan S. Connell, and James Tate (yes, this is before I knew Jim), Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, A.R. Ammons and Hart Crane, and whatever new poetry books I’d find to include; I’d be reading these things as much to educate myself as anyone else.

Teaching has always granted me direct access to good conversation about books. I’ve never really liked to read criticism but I did and I’d fight with it tooth and nail, or to put it otherwise, I understood that a critic’s interest in generalizing about books was not second nature to me, much less first nature!

I’m not a scholar or a critic. I may have felt some responsibility to read books about books so I could talk to a class or a student about what’s commonly being considered at one time or another, but they mostly annoyed the hell out of me. I was so relieved when I finally met writers who talked about writing and books from a writer’s point of view.

Another thing about being at Hollins was getting to sit in on Richard’s (R.H.W. Dillard) film classes, previewing the movies with him, talking about them; analogous ways of talking about art have always appealed to me, and talking and thinking about film with someone who saw and thought and knew much more than I did revealed ardently careful thoughtful ways of observation and articulation I appreciated enormously.

After Hollins, I worked at the University of Alabama, during the early 80s, and it was then weirdly one of the epicenters of literary theory, deconstruction, structuralism, all that was going on in critical circles at that time. Like a glutton for punishment, as we like to say, I read all that (Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, and others who were popular in the 80s) so I could understand what someone wanted to taunt the writers with.

So silly, really; I can remember one time listening to a poet and a critic scream at one another, call one another dire names and grandstand like mad over the arguments their taking sides conjured up, I was so glad I didn’t have to be in on those discussions, all I had to do is be quiet about it all, stay out of it. Whew.

But I did read the books and I did find the vocabulary’s rigorous redundancies pretty funny. David Lehman wrote a good book summarizing what this time was like in literary studies, it’s called Signs of the Times. One time one of their big shots came to Tuscaloosa and I was asked to help welcome him and I said, well, okay, I’ll cook for him but please don’t introduce me to him as anything other than the cook. (I’m pretty sure this was Stanley Fish, I seem to recall he gave me his card.) I didn’t want to be part of those battles.

I moved to University of Massachusetts where I’ve been since 1985. And strangely, very strangely, that’s where I always wanted to go once I knew about places for writers to teach. I know people joke about getting what you wish, well, here I am. The poets I’ve met because of working here — astonishing, one couldn’t ask for anything better.

CK: Do you make conscious writing or teaching or life choices based on any kind of feminism?

DW: I hope I’ve made decisions based on taking responsibility for what I do. If we had all the time in the world it’d be a good thing to do to name all the kinds of feminism that may or may not exist in the world.

CK: Seventeen months have passed since the first part of the interview. Looking back on the process of creating the selected, any surprises?

DW: Having just gotten a preview copy of Selected from Wave, I’m surprised at how excited I really am just to have it all done and to read from it (which I did the day after I got it, in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, at a tiny little venue that was really sweet). One thing I’ve thought is how arbitrary a selected can finally be; I’m sure I could have turned myself into some other kind of poet by selecting differently. I hope I selected (with the help of some very kind and thoughtful readers) something that reflects what I’ve been working on. Poetry’s very forgiving.

CK: What now?

DW: Another collection of poems, a book of short stories, a long prose piece that’s in the form of a daybook or collection of comments and concerns, meditations precipitated by run-ins with everyday incidents, a book of prose essays collected over the years. These are all close to done. Writing new poems will always be where the adventures are. Editing a book is fine, decent work, but it’s not the same as writing something new.

Dara Wier’s Selected Poems is out from Wave Books. She lives in North Amherst. New work can be found in Open City, notnostrums, Maggy, Scythe and The Nation.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her book People are Tiny in Paintings of China is forthcoming from Octopus Books in 2010. New poems will appear this year in Boston Review, Harp and Altar and Forklift, Ohio. This interview was made possible by a grant from the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.