| sara
pennington
Robert Dana
is the author of ten collections of poetry and two works of
literary nonfiction, and has recently completed his tenure
as Poet Laureate of Iowa. He is the winner of numerous literary
awards including a National Endowment for the Arts poetry
fellowship and was the founding editor of the revived North
American Review. Dana was Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College
for forty years and has been Distinguished Visiting Writer
at Stockholm University and at the University of Florida.
His most recent book of poems is Morning of the Red Admirals,
published by Anhinga Press.
At the 2007 AWP conference in Atlanta, Anhinga Press celebrated
Dana’s long poetic career with a panel made up of editors
from major literary journals throughout the U. S. The Chattahoochee
Review joined in the celebration by co-hosting, with Anhinga
Press, a reception in Dana’s honor. Dana’s poems
in this issue and the following interview are part of that
celebration.
Sara Pennington: In reviews and interviews,
much has been made of the drastic formal and stylistic change
that occurs in the final section of your most recent book,
The Morning of the Red Admirals. How did this change come
about?
Robert Dana: I think the truth is that, almost
from the beginning, no two of my books have been quite alike
formally. What happens in the last section of Admirals really
started back in 1980 with In A Fugitive Season where I was
experimenting with ideas of line based very loosely on some
old Chinese forms. What’s radical in the recent book
is its sharp break into the improvisational. To write as the
jazz musician plays. To risk chaos. To risk blowing a wrong
note. To make the process the poem. This is something I’ve
wanted to do from the start.
S P: “To make the process the poem”
implies that this change occurs not only in the form or the
content of your poems, but also in your entire writing process.
Has this process changed as much as the poems?
R D: In the little bridge essay “In
Panama” in The Morning of the Red Admirals, I attempt
to explain this when I say I’m trying to move away from
what I call compositional writing to improvisational writing.
In what I call composed poetry, the writer knows beforehand
what the poem’s theme is or its narrative line, and
sometimes even knows what its conclusion or resolution will
be.
In improvisational writing, the poet, like the jazz musician,
doesn’t know what structure he/she will erect on the
basis of the first few notes. The poet doesn’t know
what “subjects” will arise to make themselves
part of the process. There’s no preconceived plan. Moreover,
in all likelihood, the poem will finish in a way unforeseen
and unforeseeable by the writer. As Keith Jarrett said in
a recent interview, “I like to prepare by not preparing.”
Improvising, the jazz musician and the poet take their chances.
So I’m not talking simply about the form of the poem,
or the way the poem looks on the page. Content is harder to
talk about. But I think that changing the process by which
poems are made does change what we call content. It makes
it harder to paraphrase.
S P: In “Spindrift” from that
improvisational third section of Red Admirals, you write that
“perhaps” you “no longer love poetry”
and feel that “so much of it’s banal now, and
mannered and pretentious and stupid.”
R D: First, let me say that I still love
poetry—not so much what’s being written right
now because it’s too often a rehash of what’s
already been done, with little that’s fresh or exciting
about it. My yardsticks are still what they were—Yeats,
Eliot, parts of Pound, some of Stevens and William Carlos
Williams, Frost and Marianne Moore. John Berryman’s
late work is still a high-water mark in American poetry. For
me, he’s the true original of his generation; he has
no peer. In 77 Dream Songs, he reinvents the language.
S P: In “Spindrift” you also
acknowledged the market side of poetry. You call it “biz”
and write: “Better to go in rags.” Did you feel
it was “better to go in rags”—better to
violate the expectations of your readers and critics, better
to risk a drop in book sales—than to continue writing
in your “usual” style?
R D: Yes. It’s as easy as writing poetry
ever gets to go on writing in a manner which suits you and
pleases readers, editors, and critics alike. And I’m
not saying that such writing is without value. But isn’t
the highest art that which shows us the world in a new light
or freshens and adjusts what we thought we knew? The poet
has a responsibility to the language. Like Berryman, to reinvent
it, if he or she can. To keep it fresh, if nothing else. And
I’m not just talking about vocabulary here, but about
form. And if editors reject us, readers abandon us, and book
sales fall—so be it. If Picasso had stopped at his Blue
Period or with Cubism, he’d never have created all the
work he did. Joyce’s work was burned in Ireland and
banned in the U. S., but he carried his commitment as far
as it would go. Yes, “better to go in rags,” than
to go on endlessly and successfully repeating what one already
knows very well how to do.
S P: Though you have a variety in tone, and
structure, and subject matter throughout your books, this
leap does seem to me to be the most radical. Why now?
R D: I think my age and my body of work were the determining
factors. I remember thinking, “If not now, when?”
And I think I knew my experiments with syllabics, and accentual
verse, and formal conceptions borrowed from other poets and
other cultural sources were at an end. I finally had all the
skills I needed to make it work. Or I didn’t and never
would have them.
S P: During your time as the editor of North American Review
which you resurrected in 1964, did you ever see any such radical
changes in contributors with an already established “signature”
that pleasantly surprised you or, on the other hand, came
as a disappointment?
R D: My North American Review years are really ancient history,
and I don’t want to second guess myself at this point.
But to the point of your question….We published early
work by Larry Levis. But later, as his books came out, I wanted
the poems to be more adventurous. I felt his work was standing
still. Then came The Widening Spell Of The Leaves. The poems
read like an electric shock. Gone were the little straitjackets
of his earlier line. The new lines were long, Whitmanesque,
and the poems had a new range and daring and inclusiveness.
The book was an absolute triumph. I was full of joy and excitement
for him and told him so.
His posthumous book Elegies takes this later style to its
limits. All cautions flung aside. Dark and heart-stopping
invention. Larry’s death was a huge loss for American
poetry.
S P: A sense of place is also very important to your work.
While many poets are often described as “poets of place”—Gary
Snyder and Pattiann Rogers come to mind—you, however,
could be characterized as a “poet of places.”
You give your poetic attention to both the Midwestern landscape
of Iowa and the maritime landscape of Florida. How did this
relationship develop?
R D: The answer to this question cuts a path probably as meandering
and discontinuous as the lines of my new poems. It’s
true that the two poles of place that anchor my poetry are
the Midwest and Florida. But my books also contain poems having
to do with London, Stockholm, and East Africa, as well other
locations I’ve probably forgotten about. Part of this
has its origins in my early life. As an orphan, I was sent
from place to place for one reason or another. It also stems
from WWII and after. I didn’t belong to anyone. There
was no place I called home. And no place claimed me. Not that
I wrote about any of that; my profession hadn’t found
me yet. I was still a very long way from it. After I did,
finally, take up poetry, it was nearly 40 years before I felt
sure enough in my knowledge of the Midwest to really write
about it in Starting Out For The Difficult World. Up until
then, I felt it was the legitimate subject of other writers,
people who had been born there and grew up there. I was merely
a sojourner.
Back in the mid-Seventies, Florida entered my life in the
form of an offer to teach as the Visiting Writer at The University
of Florida in Gainesville. Up until then, Florida was just
an imaginary place based on the taste of oranges and grapefruit,
travel posters, and certain Stevens’ poems. It’s
remarkable how, over the last thirty years or so, Florida
has claimed a place in my life and work. My wife and I now
own two weeks in a time-share in Ft. Myers Beach, and I seldom
fail to do a good piece of work while I’m there. Part
of it is Florida, of course, but part of it is an attraction
to beaches that dates back to my early childhood. My first
venture with Anhinga Press was a small book of poems entitled
Hello, Stranger: Beach Poems. Beaches are my true soul country,
places of transience and transcendence. But that’s another
whole subject.
S P: With this vacillation, however temporary, between two
places, you seem to have both a little bit of Thoreau in you,
writing about a place while still in that place, and a bit
of Hemingway, purposefully displacing yourself in order to
write in voluntary exile. Do you identify with either of these
two?
R D: I think I’m in both the Thoreau camp and the Hemingway
camp, but not exactly in the terms of your question. Yes,
I tend, mostly, to write about a place while I am in it, rather
than recollecting matters in tranquility as Wordsworth thought
best. But not always. The poems about Stockholm were written
while I lived there, but the poems that grew out of my experiences
in East Africa were written back in the Midwest. As to Hemingway,
he wrote he had faith that if he got the words for a scene
or an experience exactly right, the reader would understand
what was on the page, without authorial comment. I think he
was right, and I try to write that way most of the time.
S P: John Barr, in his much-discussed piece in the September
issue of Poetry, uses Hemingway as an example to encourage
poets to “live broadly, write boldly.” I’m
wondering what reactions you have to Barr’s comments.
He’s ruffled a lot of feathers by claiming that more
poets need to work outside of the academy—that the base
of experience from which poets’ draw to create their
poetry needs to be broader—in order for poetry as a
whole to gain a larger audience. Since graduating from the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop, have you ever questioned your
decision to work in the academy? Do you feel your life work
has inhibited your artistic work in any way, or helped it?
R D: I’ve often wondered whether I should have gone
to Paris instead. But the fact is I didn’t. Being in
those early, small poetry workshops with Lowell and Berryman
was the equivalent of going to Julliard or being taught the
basics by J. S. Bach or Beethoven. You practiced your craft
every day. And teaching for 40 years was a great privilege.
I was able to make a living reading the literature of the
world and thinking it through over and over in the company
of fresh, young minds, as well as with my peers. It was a
constant education in what constitutes really great writing.
What are now called “creative writing” courses
actually made up a very small part of my teaching load.
I only vaguely recall Mr. Barr’s piece, but it seems
partly based on the mistaken notion that academe is not ‘the
world.’ But business is business and sometimes nasty
business even in the academy, isn’t it? The same joys
and tragic errors, the same envies and happy collaborations,
are found there. And as for literature, no subjects are excluded
from it, are they? Look at Whitman. Look into a Saul Bellow
novel. Inhibited? No way! Set free is more like it. My only
regret is that I’m such a slow learner. Would I have
written more? The real question is whether I would have written
better.
S P: Do you think you would still be a poet if you were a
steel worker or CEO?
R D: I don’t think one’s workaday job would, necessarily,
prevent one from writing poetry. If you’re hell-bent
on writing poetry, you will. What the poetry might be like
is another matter. Certainly, the exigencies of one’s
life provide one’s subjects and shape one’s attitudes,
concerns, and points of view. From Emily Dickinson to Wallace
Stevens and Richard Hugo, I think that’s readily demonstrable.
S P: You’ve just recently completed an interesting “job”:
two years as Poet Laureate of Iowa. Could you speak about
that experience? What were your goals, your accomplishments,
your most significant moment?
R D: I did hope that I could energize an effort to help high
school teachers to better teach poetry to students, but that
idea never got off the ground. It would have needed NEA money
to succeed. As far as I know, the NEA was never sounded out
about it, or, if it was, it was apparently not interested.
My “most significant moment” was perhaps reading
poems before the opening sessions of both houses of the Iowa
Legislature in 2006. That had never happened before as far
as I know. I may actually have kept one or two legislators
awake for a few minutes.
S P: The private Poetry Foundation is working
to increase the public profile of poetry and its appreciation,
but I wonder—since, in a way, you’ve been an ambassador
of poetry chosen by the state of Iowa—what more you
think government might do.
R D: Government’s role in the arts is always problematical,
I think. There’s a side of every artist that doesn’t
really want the government involved in the arts. Or private
foundations. Or any other kind of do-gooding. It wants art
to remain the solitary endeavor that it is in the last analysis.
But the fact remains that the arts have always had patrons—the
government, the church, the Medicis, the Guggenheims, etcetera,
etc. Art thrives on surplus. My own work, like that of many
others, was helped enormously by two National Endowment grants
that bought me time away from the responsibilities of my everyday
job. Alas, the NEA lost its nerve in the face of attacks by
right-wing conservative elements in the government, grants
were sharply cut back, and certain kinds of art were deemed
“unacceptable.” This points up just one of the
problems with government support for the arts. In any case,
government support of art doesn’t always go to the best
and most adventurous artists. All selection systems are flawed.
But, in the end, I think that support is better than no support,
as long as the funds are significant enough to make a real
difference.
S P: I’d like to return for just a moment to
the subject of academe and writers’ workshops. You’ve
spoken and written elsewhere about your teachers at The Iowa
Writers’ Workshop: Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
It seems to me that this “real world” of poetry
is very important to you in the form of community. How has
the community of poets shaped you and how has it changed throughout
your career?
R D: When we talk about “the real world of poetry,”
aren’t we in fact talking about two worlds: that of
the living and that of the immortal dead? Hemingway was fond
of saying that once you decide to become a writer you were
stepping into the ring with Shakespeare. I think that’s
true. The great dead are our real and vast and indestructible
community. They are the compatriots we carry on a life-long
dialogue with—about life, about our art, about the craft.
Then, of course, there’s the world of our contemporaries—what
you call a “flesh and blood community.” As far
as my relationship with Lowell and Berryman are concerned,
I can put it simply. Lowell gave me hope and a certain model
in terms of the kind of effect I wanted my language to achieve
at that time. Berryman taught me that writing poetry is hard
work, and that good just isn’t good enough. And I’m
still learning from John, all these years after his death,
what poetry is capable of. From Stephen Spender, with whom
I taught at the University of Florida, I learned what decency
and humility were. As for people closer to my own age, after
our first years together in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
and brief periods of correspondence, we went our separate
ways—W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Robert Bly, Philip
Levine, Jane Cooper, and others. I now seem to have the attention
and support of a number of much younger poets and editors,
and I’m grateful to them for their comradeship and encouragement
over the years.
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